What's New
and not so new
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Vispo.com History
Year
April 2025
April 7: I've upgraded this, the Vispo.com history page, to HTML5. I've maintained this page since 1998, so the HTML was really old. Have also added a timeline slider to quickly navigate vispo.com history.
March 2025
February 2025
December 2024
November 2024
October 2024
Oct 14: 17:56 an AI-generated podcast that discusses Enigma n2022. I talk about the production and editing of the video itself at the beginning of the video.
August 2024
Aug 7: Computer Art and the Theory of Computation. This major essay is one of the only knowlegeable things out there about the relations between computer art and the theory of computation. It used to be on netartery, which is down for the foreseeable future--but which might be back. In any case, it's good to have a pdf version of this. I have slightly edited it, so the pdf is the most recent, final version of this essay.
June 2024
June 1: JIM ANDREWS: Sea of Po - animisms and a 'different sort of poetry and magazine'. Writing by Sarah Tremlett about Sea of Po and my work more generally.
May 2024
May 4: Enigma n in Arabic is a translation by Egypt's Rehab Omer of a 1998 interactive poem.
May 1: Morphs is a collection of morphs I made from 1997 to 2007, plus writing about them.
April 2024
March 2024
January 2024
December 2023
Dec 29: Digital Poetry in Digital Literacy. An essay (2000 words) published in issue 2 of Computers and Culture from University College Cork, Ireland (Dec 2023), edited by James O'Sullivan.
Dec 27: A Philosophy of Computer Art by Dominic Lopes. Re-released from 2009.
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
August 23: Click repeatedly to elevate. Also published in Taper 11.
July 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
November 2022
August 2022
July 2022
May 2022
March 2022
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
Sept 8: City on the Other Side of Time, a slideshow of 500 images. The images are made of images from Alchemical Cosmography--but a special subset. These images evoke a city and its books. An essay is included about the underlying images, mainly.
July 2021
June 2021
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
Feb 13: Front door to Karl Kempton in Aleph Null. He has been writing lexical poetry, composing visual poetry and visual text art since the early 1970s.
January 2021
December 2020
Dec 26: Questions About Creativity is a book that contains an interview of me by Piotr Szreniawski.
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
Aug 27: A new homepage for Arteroids. Includes a book about Arteroids that I wrote, a free 32-bit downloadable executable of the game itself, and several videos.
Aug 26: Slideshow of 100 images of Aleph Null chewing on bill bissett. The images are mostly 3840x2160. It's in the new version of Slidvid. There's an accompanying video of Aleph Null in action chewing on bill bissett.
Aug 25: A Brit by the name of Gareth Hopkins created a project in which he asked participants to take a page from his abstract graphic novel, do something with/to it, and send him the results. Gareth's page involved the text 'There are no new ideas'; the project is called No New Ideas. Gareth then posted them all online and may do other things with the collection. With Gareth's help, I took the graphics people sent him and fed them all to Aleph Null. Plus an exchange I had with Jim Leftwich about the idea that there are no new ideas. Here's a Slidvid of 176 selected 1920x1080 images of Aleph Null chewing on No New Ideas. Here's a Slidvid of 69 images (3840x2160) of Aleph Null chewing on No New Ideas. Here's a new Aleph Null nib of No New Ideas. Here's 3 videos (video1, video2, video3) of Aleph Null in action chewing on No New Ideas. Participants include Alfredo Santos, Amy Hopkins, Bill Hopkins, Chloe Starlig, Chris Joseph, Cindy Lou, Daniel Bristow Bailey, Gareth A Hopkins, Hazel R Web, Jenny Robins, Jeremy Bushnell, Kele Web, Ladenia Jones, Martha Hopkins, Michæl Orzechowski, Nick Bryan, Piotr Szreniawski, Rosaire Appel, Sarah Daniels, Steve Thompson and Tony Edwards.
Aug 24: An update to the Nio project of 2001. Here is a free downloadable executable version of Nio (Windows only).
Aug 23: Here is a new 210-image slidvid of ALCHEMICAL COSMOGRAPHY from the 9th to the 18th centuries. It displays 210 different images and then repeats the slideshow. Some of these images build on previous ones. Most of the images are 3840x2160 so they zoom nicely.
** Use the space key to toggle pause/play (or pause/play button)
** Point mouse and turn mouse wheel to zoom.
** On mobile, touch and hold to zoom in.
** On mobile, double touch and hold to zoom out.
Aug 22: Two videos (video 1, video 2) of Aleph Null chewing on the visual poetry of Karl Kempton. Music by Eric Satie.
May 2020
May 1: Aleph Null itself chewing on the Time Machine itself. A never-the-same-twice animation. Only possible to view it once.. Here's a couple of videos (video1, video2) of Aleph Null in action chewing on Time Machine.
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
November 2019
October 2019
Oct 25: I have a show of prints opening at Massy Books, Friday Oct 25, 6-8pm. Here's my artist statement: vispo.com/massy. Here's a catalog of the available prints. I'm excited about this show. The prints are of high-res images created in Aleph Null. And Nat put together a Raspberry Pi app that boots a Pi and starts playing a slideshow of Aleph Null images. So the show is visual poetry meets visual art meets computer art meets net art. And the prints look great. Hope to see you there.
September 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
Apr 17: Slideshow of Jim Leftwich's "asemic"--or "pansemic"--visual poems used in Aleph Null 4.0. This is a slideshow of about 260 images. These are Jim's poems, not Aleph Null's chewings on them.
Apr 16: New Aleph Null nib featuring the work of the artist Yael Gilks aka Fau Ferdinand. Click to configure the nib.
Apr 13: New Text-Image nib in Aleph Null. Click to configure the Text-Image nib. You can use your own text, font, and fill the font with your own images. You can also specify how many words accumulate before the screen is erased.
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
November 2018
Nov 17: Slidvid of 45 images of dbCinema gnoshing on the concrete poetry of bill bissett..
Nov 16: Quite a spectacular slidvid of 500 images of Aleph Null gnoshing on the concrete poetry of bill bissett; it's called th eye is th wind.
Nov 10: Slidvid of 100 images of dbCinema gnoshing on the concrete poetry of bill bissett.
October 2018
Oct 2: New Text-Image brush in Aleph Null images. There's a slidvid of images of it here.
Oct 3: Also, some Alchemical Cosmography + bill bissett videos here and here.
September 2018
Sept 13: New slidvid of Alchemical Cosmography images. There are new versions of the Alchemical Cosmography images: png images that have transparent sections.
August 2018
July 2018
July 6: Have been continuing the collaboration with bill bissett. Lots of new stuff at the collab home page. The new material is from the section labeled "dirtee konkreet (oldest to newest)", such as the series of 100 screenshots and the series of 140 screenshots.
June 2018
May 2018
May 18: There's a new bill bissett brush in Aleph Null along with lots of videos of it in action and screenshots of it in action. When you start the bill bissett brush, one of 7 poems by this legendary poet/painter is started up. This page contains links not only to the bissett brush in Aleph Null, but to the videos and screenshots of it in action.
May 4: Screenshots from Aleph Null with two brushes: Dan Waber and Trump. And here is a video of a similar session. This slidvid also has a new feature: fullscreen. Look for the fullscreen button top left.
May 1: Alchemical Cosmography + Tangents + Parables is a video I made of Aleph Null 3.0 in action with four brushes. This links to my video channel on youtube which has a lot of videos I've made of my interactive work in action.
April 2018
Apr 11: Oppen Do Down is a JavaScript version of a 2000 work of interactive audio I originally created in Director.
Apr 10: Checking In is a collaboration with Adeena Karasick. This appears inside Aleph Null 3.0. The text is Karasick's from her 2018 book Checking In from Talonbooks. She also chose the 300+ images in the mix. I wrote about the collaboration. And here are some screenshots from Checking In.
March 2018
February 2018
Feb 18: The Role of Programming in Computer Art considers the role of programming in the new art form of computer art.
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
Nov 20: The <Body> of Net Art is a 2006 essay originally published in the Capilano Review
Nov 2: The Moral Deformity of Team Trump A slideshow of 429 screenshots from Aleph Null 3.0 with the Trump nib.
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
May 2016
March 2016
January 2016
July 2015
May 2015
April 2015
February 2015
January 2015
Jan 1: Computer Art and the Theory of Computation is an essay I wrote about the relations of those two things.
May 2014
May 13: Teleporter is a new online work. It teleports you to a random spot on the planet each time you press the "Teleport" button. There's also a map-view and you can share your travels. There's a web version, an iPhone/iPad version (app) and an Android app. And an essay I wrote about the project.
July 2013
July 13: Got married to Natalie Funk!
June 2012
January 2012
Jan 11: Webcast of a talk on my work I gave at SFU Surrey to grad students and faculty of the Interactive Arts and Technology program. It's kind of annoying in that I'm the only person you can hear and the image of the screen doesn't keep up, sometimes, but still a better setup than most webcasts, I suspect.
Jan 21: Chris Funkhouser's book New Directions in Digital Poetry was recently published. I'm happy and proud to say that my work is quite prominent in this book; Funkhouser discusses Arteroids, the Stir Fry Texts, and dbCinema. There's a pdf of the book online for a limited time. Funkhouser is also the author of the first book-length history of digital poetry.
November 2011
Nov 18: Why I Am a Net Artist. An essay published on Netartery and in the Journal of Electronic Publishing in their special issue on digital poetry.
September 2011
August 2011
May 2011
December 2010
Dec 5: Wikileaks, Napster, and the Ayatollah Flanagan is an article I wrote about things concerning Wikileaks
October 2010
September 2010
Sept 12: My aunt Georgie Irvine passed away in 1997. I've put up some photos of her and wrote something about her.
June 2010
June 29: My dad, Dick Andrews, passed away in 2000. I've put some pictures up of dad, and wrote something about him. I still miss him.
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
Mar 4: This is quite a good article on digital poetry: "Digital Duende: Reading the Rasp in E-Poetry" by Amanda G. Michaels. She explains Lorca's use of the term duende, concerning art, in his lecture "Play and Theory of the Duende".  And moves on to look at work by Ken Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Simon Biggs, Mez, and myself in relation to duende. And she discusses critical writing by Chris Funkhouser, Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Davidson, and Landow.
February 2010
Feb 7: Vancouver
Feb 4: New York
January 2010
Jan 8: London Hypotrochoid: A city of the mind—your mind. Requires the Shockwave plugin. Mac users need to use Firefox. Click it when it seems to be finished. dbCinema will then paint the town in a different way. Usually clicking changes the nib and path of the brush (randomly). Sometimes it adds another brush or deletes a brush, if there are two. Occassionally the mouse controls the brush. Usually it clears the screen when you click; sometimes it changes brush type. All the best for the new year. 2010 past a space odyssey. But still not down to earth.
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
February 2009
Feb 19: Streaming Flash video of a Feb 12/09 talk I gave about dbCinema and Jig-Sound. dbCinema is a graphic synthesizer and Jig-Sound is an interactive audio app I'm writing. The talk was given in Vancouver at The Centre for Digital Media.
January 2009
Jan 18: A piece of mine, "The Idea of Order at Key West Re-ordered" is in an exhibit in Tennessee curated by Alan Bigelow.
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
Oct 18: Kandinsky7. I made these images with dbCinema, a graphic synthesizer I'm writing in Adobe Director. This series, as with Kandinsky6, show more of what dbCinema looks like when it is running.
Oct 17: Kandinsky6. I made these images with dbCinema, a graphic synthesizer I'm writing in Adobe Director.
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 20: Brazil's Jorge Luiz Antonio has put together a CD on digital poetry with a piece by me on the CD.
June 2008
June 22: Lots of my work uses HTML tables centered vertically. Info on vertical centering.
June 1 : Each of the dbCinema image series now has a slideshow option. Choose a series and then click the button with the "s" on it.
May 2008
May 27 : "Graphic loven ". I typed "comics" into dbCinema and came up with these images.
May 19 : "Kandinsky 5 ". This uses the same brush as does the "Color & Brush 2" series, but "Kandinsky 5" paints with image, not color.
May 17 : "Color & Brush 2 ". Continuing to explore dbCinema's possibilities via painting without image.
May 13 : "Color & Brush". dbCinema image series. Normally dbCinema images use other images. The brushes in these images just use color, not images, as 'paint'.
May 5 : "Kandinsky 4". dbCinema image series.
April 2008
April 5 : "Kandinsky 3" and writing about this series of images generated with my app dbCinema that I'm writing. There are two earlier series of images based mainly on Kandinsky paintings: "Kandinsky 2" and "Kandinsky".
January 2008
Jan 2 : Here are the graphics I've produced so far with dbCinema: dbCinema Binary Meditations. These include binary meditations on "Kandinsky", "Sunset", "Jim Leftwich", "Geof Huth", "Silvia Saint", and "Abstract Art". The executable of the current version of dbCinema is not online. There is a little video, though, that's meant as a tutorial for those kind enough to test dbCinema.
July 2007
July 12: The Pen
June 2007
May 2007
May 10: Here is a link to the below piece from the E-Poetry conference.
April 2007
Apparently Arteroids is discussed in a book from MIT press; I haven't seen the book yet.
March 2007
Mar 7 : An essay of mine called "Videogames as Literary Devices" is published in a book called Videogames and Art. The book is published by the University of Chicago Press and is edited by Grethe Mitchell and Andy Clarke. My essay looks at degrees of subordination of videogame to art in art/games by Regina Célia Pinto, Natalie Bookchin, Neil Hennessey, and myself.
January 2007
December 2006
Dec 13: "From Concrete to Digital: The Reconceptualisation of Poetic Space" (192 Kb PDF), by Anna Katharina Schaffner. This paper discusses some of my work and that of Ana Maria Uribe, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber.
November 2006
Nov 6: Redesigned the vispo.com/audio page and got rid of the Real Audio files. It just serves mp3's now (streaming or savable). The Real Audio files were more compressed, lower quality. That era seems to be over (whew).
Nov 5: Am in the midst of changing to a new hosting service.
Nov 1: On Lionel Kearns, Nio, and Stir Fry Texts in Vol 1 of the Electronic Literature Collection.
October 2006
Oct 26-30: Am off to Banff New Media Institute Oct 26-30.
Oct 22: Regina Célia Pinto translated Spastext and Seattle Drift into Portuguese.
Oct 15: Marko Niemi translated Spastext into Finnish and did a second translation of Seattle Drift.
Oct 1: Continuing to work on Jig-Sound. Some not-so-obvious Jig-Sound features: you can select multiple sound icons by dragging a rectangle around a bunch; or shift+click to add icons from a selection; alt+click already-selected ones among a group to de-select; you can ctrl+drag and drop to swap icons.
September 2006
Sept 5: Arteroids 3.1. Scores in 'game mode' are now uploaded to the Net. And the texts you read when you 'win' or 'lose' have been re-written and expanded.
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
June 10: e-motive: Visual Poetry in the Digital Age is an exhibition at the U of Essex that includes Nio and work by Ana Maria Uribe.
May 2006
March 2006
Mar 11: Manuel Portela on Enigma n.
Mar 10: On Lionel Kearns published in volume 9 of WordForWord.com
January 2006
November 2005
September 2005
August 2005
June 2005
November 2004
Nov 12: On Lionel Kearns launched at turbulence.org (New York) and vispo. Reviewed by Geof Huth (New York) and Karen Wagner (Denmark).
October 2004
Oct 1: Translations into Finnish of Seattle Drift, Enigma n, Millenium Lyric, and Time Piece. These are four DHTML pieces from 1997-2000. The translations were written by Marko Niemi for the fall 2004 issue of Lumooja magazine from Helsinki/Turku. Marko updated the code, also, so that now these pieces run on Netscape and Firefox as well as IE (PC only).
Oct 1: Song Shapes and ound pome. Additions to the Nio project.
September 2004
Sept 29: ound poem and na na ound poem.
August 2004
July 2004
July 30: "Digital Writing Circa 2004" (essay). Written for my visit to England in July 2004.
May 2004
March 2004
January 2004
Did a collaborative offline piece with Steve Gibson and Randy Adams called the Blitbopper. It reacts visually to a MIDI feed. It was in the new media section of the Victoria International Film and Video Festival
December 2003
December 22: David Daniels wrote "Jim Andrews" as part of his "Humans" project.
November 2003
October 2003
October 5: "Arteroids, Poetry, and the Flaw", thoughts on Arteroids.
September 2003
September 20: "Interactive Audio for the Web", an essay/review of several works on the Web, and lots of links. Published on trAce from Britain, edited by Randy Adams.
August 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
January 4: This is an experiment in audio programming. It uses "Black Coffee" and "Stardust" by Sarah Vaughn. There are 25 sounds from "Stardust", ie, all of the song. There are 13 sounds from "Black Coffee" and you hear it less frequently.
December 2002
October 2002
August 2002
August 21: Enigma n2. Turn up the sound. 130 kb download. This is related to a 1998 piece I did called Enigma n
August 9: "Games, Po, Play, Art, and Arteroids 2.02". This essay attempts to condense my thoughts on these subjects from the last year and a half. It's a 650 kb download; it has a copy of Arteroids embedded in it.
July 2002
July 16: Internet Art (2002): Matt Mirapaul of the NY Times on WBEZ in Chicago (Real Audio) interviewed by Victoria Lautman concerning Nio, Mark Napier's work, and the 'road to acceptance'. Except that 'acceptance' is not really the goal. Instead, the idea is to blow your mind out of its socket. It isn't so much that the work comes to be 'accepted' over time as understood over time. If the work is good, then it will bleed future. An enhanced literacy of the sensorium. And if that literacy is useful, as it may be, then the work will play and be understood, and carried to some other level somewhere, some time else. Toward an expanded multi-sensorial literacy. I make human language machines that sing and textualize voco-graphically at length. I attempt to make them resonate through the sensorium and various dimensions of language. I presume computer communications will continue to proliferate throughout society. This is toward literacy and vision using the computer. And a re-write of digital literature.
June 2002
June 9: Full Screen Templates. This is a tool for Web developers who want to launch projects full screen. An example use of this template is how Arteroids can launch fullscreen..
May 2002
April 2002
April 7: An article on my piece called Nio: Jeder Nutzer ein Komponist - die audio-visuelle Poesie des Jim Andrews by Berlin's Roberto Simanowski. This article appears in the main newspaper of Frankfurt, Germany. Click "Suche" at top right and search for 'Jim Andrews'.
March 2002
March 26: Shuen-shing Lee has written an article called "The Interlaced Poetics of Representation and Simulation" that discusses Arteroids, my literary computer game for the Web, and work by other artists.
February 2002
January 2002
December 2001
Dec 4: arteroids 1.0 has launched in issue 11 of theremediproject.com. arteroids is a literary computer game for the Web.
September 2001
August 2001
July 2001
July 13: Hey, I got a $20,000 grant from the Canada Council to pursue the interactive audio!
July 4: Shuen-shing Lee has done some amazing 'translations' of my work into Chinese. He's done some wonderful work with Enigma n and Spas Text, one of the stir fry texts. Shuen-shing also translated Seattle Drift some time ago. He's had his translations published online at The Literary Cafe, a website co-sponsored by The United News's Literary Supplementary and the Taiwan government's Council for Cultural Affairs. Shuen-shing posted an interesting introduction to the translations on webartery, and there's a thread of discussion on webartery primarily concerning his translation of Enigma n, so far.
May 2001
April 2001
April 29: "No Ideas But In Products" published on Bill Marsh's factoryschool.org. Wow, was the e-poetry festival ever a blast.
March 2001
November 2000
October 2000
September 2000
September 5: Defib: Steve Duffy (England)
August 2000
July 2000
June 2000
April 2000
March 2000
February 2000
January 2000
December 1999
November 1999
Nov 21: Two new visual poems: W and Zzzzzzzzzz in Ã.
October 1999
September 1999
August 1999
Aug 21: Two new essays: Stir Frys and Cut Ups and Architecture and the Literary among the stir fry project on cut ups.
Aug 7: Correspondence, a Stir Fry text in collaboration with Talan Memmott, Mary Phillips, and Lee Worden.
Aug 5: Webartery.com exists but is not launched yet in its first manifestotion. Lots of work ahead of us.
July 1999
July 26: Strings, a Flash project by Dan Waber in the Guests section.
July 14: The Stir Fry Texts are in development, currently, but here are a couple of finished ones.
July 10: Several essays in PDF format from my manuscript Several Numbers Through the Lyric have been added to the writings section.
July 9: B Bopping
June 1999
June 6: I finished a manuscript for a book in 1996 called Several Numbers Through the Lyric that's wide-ranging over essays, poems, stories, letters, and visual poems. I've started to publish it here in PDF files. Please see Writings for more information. All the PDF's in Writings are from this manuscript.
May 1999
Bought vispo.com. Bought a word. Bought a domain. Working on Vispo 2.0 which I launched this month. Have been working on this redesign of speakeasy.org/~jandrews for a couple of months. Basic idea is each piece gets its own page, no more gallery motif, and use simpler (not frame-based) navigation to claim more space for composition. Also, trying to design for the future: less on each page, more focussed, but also will accomodate any size of screen (mostly) except 640.
April 1999
March 1999
ABC Architecture at Vispo and Weak Blood. Visualanguage completed. Infoanimism completed.
November 1998
Visual poetry show in Victoria.
Visual show at The Globe in Seattle came down this month.
Enigma n completed, mentioned at Zine n and featured in Macromedia's Nov 1998 DHTML Zone Spotlight.
Digital Langu(im)age up at Web del Sol's Perihelion site or here on vispo.com.
Some pieces were published in a very strong "volume" of writing called Poetries of Canada. It's perhaps the first such Web volume of the Canadian wired writers.
I published work by Uruguay's Clemente Padín.
August 1997
January 1996
I started my site as islandnet.com/~jandrews in 1996. When I moved to Seattle in 1997, I moved it to speakeasy.org/~jandrews. And then I bought the vispo.com domain in May 1999. The site started as a page I used to publicize the poetry reading series I ran in Victoria called Mocambopo. It soon turned into a site for my own work as I began to get a feel for the web.