About These Works
hese are
links to works on vispo.com done by the below artists
or, in some cases, in collaboration with Jim Andrews.
These works write strongly through their media. Many
thanks to the artists and scholars. I feel privileged to publish your work.
Kirill Azernyy — Russia/Israel
Kirill Azernyy is a writer, literary scholar, and translator engaged in
digital literature. He hosts a panel devoted to the phenomenology of digital
arts. He was a participant in the International Writing Program (Iowa, 2015).
He writes in English and Russian. His work on vispo.com includes
Drafts, in Sea of Po,
End of Recognition in Aleph Null 4.0,
and Amateur.
Kedrick James is a poet by calling but has worked in many different
media as an artist, director and producer. He is an avid audio composer
and experimenter, and has worked with a wide variety of musical
ensembles. He has a wide variety of publications in scholarly books and
journals, books of poetry, and works in his specialization of teacher
education in English Language Arts. His work on vispo.com includes a
stir fry text, an essay,
two sets of
images, and work in Sea of Po.
Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of twelve books of poetry and poetics. She teaches at Pratt Institute in New York, teaching Poetry Poetics and Performance for the Dept. of Humanities and Media Studies. Adeena and Jim Andrews have collaborated on a large number of works.
Chris Joseph is a London-based Canadian/British digital poet whose chrisjoseph.org is an outstanding interactive
net art and digital poetry site. Vispo.com features a major net exhibit of Chris's art: 20 selected works from
2015-2021 plus one recovered Flash piece from 2007.
Ted Warnell lives and works on the western edge
of a great Canadian prairie. He is one of the original net artists and his site
warnell.com has been the active center of his work since the mid 90's.
For the last several years he's been producing hand-coded visual poetry animations using the HTML5 canvas.
These images were made mostly with the help of several apps used for creating AI-assisted art. This technology
came as a revelation to me... It allows one to create an almost endless parade of strange images, and the element
of uncertainty, of never quite knowing what these programs will generate in response to your input, is fascinating.
Hopefully, these small experiments in art, or something very similar, of mine will help shadow forth a time when
the over-used dualities of "Natural/Artificial", "Created/Evolved", "Born/Built",
and so forth are finally put to rest.
Roberto Ncar was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico on November 23rd, 1954. He has published four books:
Al Borde de un Silencio, from Corsario Editions; y Arte en Vivo y en todo Color (visual poetry) from
Colección Maravilla; Libro Ncarista, from Luna Bisonte, and Cuaderno Sonori I saw, from Babilonia Editions.
His poems have been published in several anthologies and magazines.
"I started making visual poetry in my early twenties. While my efforts were at first
laughable, in a relatively short amount of time I was able understand and adjust
my ugly inability into the suggestion of meaning. I have been repeating this card
trick ever since. These poems,
erogenous zones,
started as a way to use up old
Letraset sheets I had left over from the early 1990's. I worked on the poems in
the morning, after I have made the coffee, but before I start waking the various
family members. It felt good working on these in the early morning, I found,
because if nothing else was done that day, at least I got some work done on the
poems." See also: Bradley in Aleph Null
and 250 pics or so.
Lanny Quarles
is one of the founding members of the Post-Dogmatist group formed in the late 1980's
with Cecil Touchon. Gus Van Sant once used Lanny's writing from a homemade zine
as the 'screen-play' for one of Van Sant's characters in his only novel _Pink_. Lanny's blog
Jellybean Weirdo with Electric Snake Fang is the latest of a series of blogs going back to 2002.
He lives with his partner and two dogs in Dallas, Texas.
Endemic Battle Collage and other 1987 Apple Basic Poems is
a suite of programmed, animated poems. This work is early enough that it's in Chris Funkhouser's landmark book Prehistoric Digital Poetry (as is bpNichol's below work). You can view the work as video or download an emulator and view the poems through the emulator. Also included are writings by Geof Huth about these works and digital poetry more generally. 2009.
F8MW9 is
a collaboration with Seattle/Oregon poet margareta waterman.
When I visited her in 2007, she gave me some sound and visual
work she'd done. I read best by mucking around with the read
material in Director; F8MW9 presents margareta's audio and
visuals as interactive. 2008.
The
First Remainder Series is a 2007 series of visual poems
by Seattle's Joseph F. Keppler from his magazine Poets.Painters.Composers.Critics.
Sculptors.Slaves.There is additional work by Joe on vispo.com:
he and I collaborated on this
image, and I produced a
radio show in the 80's on his work. 2008.
First
Screening — Computer Poems (1984) .
The Canadian experimental poet bpNichol wrote First Screening,
a suite of programmed, kinetic poems, in 1983-84. This links
to a project that presents First
Screening on the Web in various formats, including a JavaScript
version by Marko J. Niemi and myself; the project also includes
essays by me, Dan Waber, Geof Huth, and Lionel Kearns about First
Screening and bpNichol. 2007.
Concrete
Stir Fry Poems. These pieces deal with cutups also, but
in a lettristic manner. Rather than cutting up relatively large
text(s), the Concrete Stir Fry Poems cut up the letters of
words in a visual poetic. These poems are published as part
of the Stir Fry Texts project that has been ongoing since 1999.
Marko reprogrammed the form and composed the content of the
Concrete Stir Fry Poems. He also helped me update the code
of the earlier stir fry poems so that they now run cross-platform
and cross-browser. Marko J. Niemi is a poet-programmer, editor,
and translator of digital poetry into Finnish and code. 2006.
Typoems
and Anipoems. Ana Maria Uribe (1944-2004) is a visual poet
and a poet of motion and sound. Her Typoems were mostly created
prior to the web; they are graphics, visual poems that she
originally published in print. In 1997 she moved to creating
her Anipoems, animated and audio poems for the Web, until her
death in 2004. Vispo.com has been a 'home away from home' to
all her digitally published work since she passed away. Her
original site is at amuribe.tripod.com.
2004.
On
Lionel Kearns is a binary meditation on the work of a poet
who, in the sixties-through-eighties, produced visual poems,
video poems, and books of poetry that were prescient concerning
our contemporary digital mileau. On Lionel Kearns is a contemporary
wreading of Kearns's work and presents much of his intermedial
poetry. Available in English and Portuguese. Translated into
Portuguese by Marcus Bastos. Martin Kloss wrote the
Lingo+PHP for the "Participatory Poem". On Lionel
Kearns is also published on turbulence.org, wordforword.info, computerfinearts.com and eliterature.org.
2004.
Martin Kloss — Germany
Martin
Kloss is a programmer and actor who wrote Lingo+PHP code
that I use to read/write data from/to the server from
Director. Martin's code is used in Arteroids and On
Lionel Kearns, among others.
Martin has written a book on Director and is the developer of
lingopark.de,
a site for Director developers.
Paris Connection — International
Paris
Connection is a project in critical media about the work
of six Parisian net artists: Jean-Jacques Birgé, Antoine
Schmitt, Frédéric Durieu, Nicolas Clauss, servovalve,
and Jean-Luc Lamarque. I co-produced this with Regina Célia
Pinto from Brazil, Helen Thorington from the USA, Roberto Simanowski
from Germany, and Nancy Paterson from Canada. The project includes
writing about the work of the French net artists by the above
producers and Carrie Noland. Paris Connection was translated
into French, Spanish, and Portuguese by Ana Maria Uribe, Regina,
Jorge Luiz Antonio, Alexandre Venera, and a host of French
translators including Philippe Castellin and Patrick Burgaud.
Published on turbulence.org, arteonline.arq.br,
and dichtung-digital.org.
2003.
Blue
Hyacinth consists of four prose vignettes; each includes
association with the figure of the blue hyacinth. This piece
works with fiction in a way that the other stir frys don't,
and Pauline designed the interface while using the stir fry
programming. Move the mouse over the text to combine the texts;
click on the geometric figure to summon the original texts.
The publication includes an interview with
Pauline. Blue Hyacinth is published as part of the Stir Fry
Texts project. Also published on eliterature.org. Pauline is "a fiction writer,
primarily of short, episodic and fragmented forms." 2003.
Arteroids is
the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness.
A literary shoot-em-up. This is one of my projects but I've had
considerable involvement and help from others along the way.
Regina Célia Pinto translated it into Portuguese. Martin
Kloss wrote the Lingo+PHP for the uploading/downloading of scores
in 'game mode'. Arteroids contains texts by Christina McPhee
and Helen Thorington. Also published on turbulence.org, arteonline.arq.br, quadgames.com,
machinepoetics.com,
and poemsthatgo.com.
2002.
PRIME is
the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East headed by Sami
Adwan, a Palestinian, and Dan Bar-On, an Israeli. PRIME is devoted
to peace-building projects between Israelis and Palestinians.
Fascinating and tremendously worthwhile projects! Sid Tafler
and I maintain the PRIME Web site from Canada. Sid is the editor;
I do the HTML. 2001.
Shuen-shing Lee translated
three of my works into Chinese: Enigma
n, Seattle Drift and Spas
Text. Shuen-shing did his doctorate in the USA in Comparative
Literature and teaches in his native Taiwan. 2001.
Log.
Brian wrote Log as a stir fry text. Log is quite different from
the other stir frys in the way that Brian has composed it of
short phrases/sentences ready made for the stirring and association.
Also published on ubu.com and eliterature.org. Brian
has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English and Comparative
Literature and teaches English at Penn State University. 2000.
Brazilian
Digital Art and Poetry on the Web. Jorge maintains a collection
of links on vispo.com to Brazilian digital poetry works/sites.
Jorge is a poet and scholar in Sao Paulo, Brazil, who studied
with Philadelpho Menezes. He holds a doctorate in Semiotics
and Literature. 2000.
Strings is
a playful series of Flash pieces about relationships. It also
raises questions about the presence/absence of the hand in this
medium. Visual artists often criticise the lack of presence of
the hand in digital art. In Strings, the hand is and is not present,
is transformed, is transforming, is writing, is written, coded.
Dan Waber is widely known for his work as an inventive, intrepid
poet of adventures in language and media.1999.
Defib is
a project produced by Dan Waber and myself. In 1999-2000, we
conducted sixteen online chat interviews with writers trying
to acclimatize to producing art on the Web. All of them were
involved with Webartery. Interviews with Talan Memmott, Claire
Dinsmore, Bill Marsh, Miekal And, Thomas Bell, Reiner Strasser,
Komninos Zervos, Jennifer Ley, Carolyn Guertin, Ted Warnell,
David Knoebel, Loss Glazier, Martha Cinader, Steve Duffy, Mez,
and Jack Kimball.
Ted
Warnell is a visual poet with a background in visual art
whose primary material on the Net consists of HTML, code, and
image. He puts these together—and I do mean together—in
strong ways. His networking approach, generosity of spirit,
collaborative energy, and the net-based nature of his work
have made him a strong influence on many attempting writing
for the Web. 1999.
Selections
from Visual Poems 1967-70 is a sequence of visual
poems. The
Options of Mail Art is an essay by Clemente about mail
art (that I wrote about), which has important relations with
net art. Clement is a mail artist and visual poet who has made
an interesting transition from mail art to an international
presence on the Net—and is still doing mail art as well.
1998.
Wake
Up and Smell the Bus Depot. A stand-up travelogue featuring
burning bridges, racial tension, road food, bad luck, strange
sex, and the ghost of Jack Kerouac. Recorded 2/16/96 at Mocambopo
in Victoria, BC, a live poetry venue I organized and hosted.
Written and performed by Paul McKinnon. Music performed by
David Heckenberger. Sound and recording by David Heckenberger
and Nora Floritto.
Laughing Boot Quintet — Canada
The
music of the Laughing Boot Quintet was recorded in my apartment
on Cook St in Victoria Canada in 1990. I was the sound engineer.
LBQ was Keith McMaster and Steven Lewty on guitar, Cliff Syringe
on bass guitar, and me on drums.
