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 P
o 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.
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
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
March 7:
A slideshow of the complete issue of Earth's Daughters #2, 1971, featuring
Judith Kerman, Judith Treible, Mindy Aloff, Kate Swanka, Suan Fantl, Joseph Kelly,
Janet Goldenberg, Anne Petrone, and Kastle Brill. Thanks to Judith Kerman for
permission to publish this on vispo.com.
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 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
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.
June 16:
I recently started up a group blog called Netartery. The group, so far, consists of 13 writers/media artists/scholars including Gregory Whitehead, Andy Campbell, Jhave Johnston, Chris Funkhouser, Christine Wilks, Regina Celia Pinto, Chris Joseph, Leonardo Flores, Marcus Bastos, and others. Netartery is primarily a place to post about one's new work and new work of interest to the group and its readership, and about related issues. New work, interesting ideas, events, and so on. The people posting to Netartery are media writers and scholars of media writing. They are 'writers gone wrong' in this sense. They might write books, but they are also involved in other forms of artistic writing. These can be vispoetic or performative, programmerly, audio-oriented, and what not.
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
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
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
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 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).
September 2004
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
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
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.
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.