Writings

Essays and Books

• Sea of P_o (2024, manifesto + manual + magazine => pdf)
  This document is part of the Sea of P_o project. The PDF is a manifesto+manual+magazine. The manifesto is about the appZine. The manual is how to use Sea of Po as a tool to create texual animations. The magazine contains stills from the work of each of the 52 poets in the Sea of P_o poetry magazine, along with writing about the animated poetry, in some cases. There's also writing in the magazine section about the multi-language poem; Sea of P_o contains 16 multi-language poems. Clicking a magazine page opens Sea of P_o itself, displaying work by the clicked author. You can also read writing about Sea of P_o by Sarah Tremlett.
• Digital Poetry in Digital Literacy (2023, essay)
  "Just as poetry, for hundreds of years, has been the apogee of literacy, so too with digital poetry in the matter of digital literacy." Published also in issue 2 of Computers and Culture from University College Cork, Ireland (Dec 2023), edited by James O'Sullivan.
• Adeena Karasick/Jim Andrews collab (2023, HTML5)
  An intro to Checking In 1/2 and Lorem Ipsum, plus links at the bottom to lots of other collab material.
• Enigma n²⁰²² (2022, HTML5)
  A philosophical music and poetry toy for poets, musicians and philosophers from the age of 7 up.
• Chris Joseph on Vispo.com (2021, HTML)
  An introduction to 21 selected works on vispo.com by the digital poet Chris Joseph.
• Aleph Null Workshop 1 (2021, PDF)
  This is for attendees of the Saturday, November 13, 2021, 5-7 pm (PST, Vancouver time) workshop on Aleph Null. Aleph Null is the online animation engine and graphic synthesizer I have been writing since 2011. If you want to attend, send me an email or go to the Facebook event page link that's in the linked PDF and indicate you're attending.
• City on the Other Side of Time (2021, slideshow)
  I wrote an introduction to this poem that opens at a random one of 500 images.
• NeoNio (2021, essay)
  NeoNio is a 2021 HTML5 upgrade of the 2000 Director interactive music piece mentioned by Matthew Mirapaul in the New York Times in his column on the best net art of 2001. The artistic aspiration of Nio is toward a new interactive, visual and combinatory form of music: the heap. A heap is a collection of sound icons. Each icon has a sound and an animation/video. The player can hook them together so that they play either simultaneously or one after another. In other words, the player interactively layers and sequences the sounds and animations.
• No New Ideas (2021, essay)
  This is an experimental comic about the idea that there are no new ideas. It's never the same twice. Gareth Hopkins invited artists to do something with a page of his abstract graphic novel Petrichor (which included the text "There are no new ideas") and send it back to him. He posted the resulting two dozen or so pages and titled the project "No New Ideas"; I felt it might be interesting to feed them all to Aleph Null...
• Time Machine (2021, essay)
  Time Machine is one of the funkiest clocks on the planet—along with Chris Joseph's Dada Clock and Ted Warnell's Strange Time. Karl Jirgens said "It's kind of scary, watching the clock." Kirill Azernyy said he's "Hypnotized, totally..". So there you have it. It's scarily hypnotizing. You too will be hypnotized like a deer in the headlights of time itself. In the countdown to...NOW!
• AMERICAN HITLER (2020, essay)
  There's an introductory essay I wrote to AMERICAN HITLER, a graphical/generative art project using Aleph Null. The project involves remixing images of Trump, his cabinet, advisors, 'allies', family, and several Republicans.
• Alchemical Cosmography (2021, essay)
  It's an ongoing learning experience for me. What do these images mean? Some of the most enlightening material I've encountered on that question looks at the work of Carl Jung.
• Jim Leftwich in Aleph Null (2020, essay)
  The collaboration between Jim Leftwich and myself centers around an online, never-the-same-twice recombinatory/generative poem/animation that randomly composits about 240 of Jim's visual poems. The software doing the compositing is Aleph Null, a graphic synthesizer I wrote in JavaScript/HTML/CSS.
• Checking In With Adeena Karasick (2020, essay)
  Checking In is a long poem by Adeena Karasick; it's in her book Checking In (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 2018). In Aleph Null, my vispoetical, online, generative, interactive animator, Checking In is rendered as a video poem, an interactive, animated visual poem word by word; each word, rendered huge, is filled with a random one of 208 images Adeena Karasick chose for the image remix, and the background is a random collage of parts of the 208 images.
• bill bissett in Aleph Null (2020, essay)
  bill bissett is, yes, a living legend. He's a poet, painter and performer. In Aleph Null, we see photos of some of his paintings, a unique and wide collection of his personal photos, seven bissett poemy poems, and 450+ Mb of bill's astounding concrete poetry, from the 60s to the present, chewed on with religious fervor by Aleph Null.
• It's Art If Someone Says So (2020, essay)
  
• Aleph Null, Graphic Synthesizer (2019, essay)
  My artist statement from my show Aleph Null, Graphic Synthesizer, at Massy Books in Vancouver, Oct 25 - Nov 20, 2019. The statement links to a catalog of the prints for sale. If you'd like one, email me, please. The statement also links to a video of my talk at the opening on Oct 25, 2019.
• Me and Kinetic Poetry (2019, essay)
  Looks at the idea of kinetic poetry in my work.
• Me and the Random (2019, essay)
  This essay looks at how I tend to use the random in my art. It also looks at how some other artists have used the random, attitudes toward the random, in art, and the mathematical idea of randomness.
• Introduction to Aleph Null 3.0 (2019, essay)
  An essay, minifesto, and tutorial about Aleph Null 3.0, the graphic syntheizer and instrument of colour music I wrote in JavaScript/HTML/CSS.
• Godel and Philosophy (2019, essay)
  "It’s inspiring when math/logic leaps from the empyrean to the inner life. We see such a leap in Godel’s work: he actually showed that there exist truths that are not provable, truths that are true for no reason, thereby bringing the quotidian in more fruitful relation with the empyrean."
• How Does Poetry Change? (2019, essay)
  How does poetry change? It follows language.
• The Role of Programming in Computer Art (2018, essay)
  This essay considers the importance of programming to the new art form of computer art. "Programmability in computer art is like the peanuts in peanut butter or the cream in whipped cream."
• Oppen Do Down–first Web Audio API piece (2018, essay)
  Oppen Do Down is an online interactive audio piece written in JavaScript.
• Event Scheduling in the Web Audio API (2018, technical essay)
  Synchronization of layers of sounds in JavaScript. I wrote this afer I created Oppen Do Down.
• Arteroids--the poetry sploder (2017, Book)
  Arteroids is a shoot-em-up poetry videogame I wrote in Director. Arteroids has shot-em-up from North to South America, from Europe to Hong Kong, from Australia to India. It is one of the most well-known works of digital poetry on the planet. This book contains most of the hundreds of texts that the game can display after the player completes a level or is killed by marauding texts. These texts address the player and explore the relations between poetry, games, and play. The book also contains some of the texts that can appear during game-play, and new and old writings by me about Arteroids. There's also an ebook version. More info on the Arteroids site.
• How to Pleasurably Stop Smoking (2017, Book)
  While you read, we're going to get rid of your urge to smoke. It wouldn't be hard to stop if you had no urge to smoke. You're going to get to that point by the time you finish the book. And you will learn how to maintain your disinterest in smoking. So that it's permanent. That's the program in a nutshell. There's also an ebook version.
• "Sprinkled Speech" by Chris Joseph (2017, essay)
  An essay about Chris Joseph's interactive poem. Also published in Hyperrhiz 19.
• globalCompositeOperation in Net Art (2017, essay)
  An essay, in collaboration with Ted Warnell, about JavaScript compositing in the HTML 5 canvas.
• Introduction to Globebop (2016, essay)
  An introduction to Globebop, an app I wrote in JavaScript/HTML/CSS for couch potatoe tourists, mainly.
• Introduction to Aleph Null 2.0 (2016, essay)
  An essay and tutorial about Aleph Null 2.0, an instrument of colour music I wrote in JavaScript/HTML/CSS.
• Computer Art and the Theory of Computation (2012, essay)
  Toward a philosophy of computer art.
• Why I Am a Net Artist (2011, essay)
  An attempt to explain my folly. There's a more recent version at netartery.
• Wikileaks, Napster & the Ayatollah Flanagan (2010, blog entry)
  An article describing 1) a parallel between Wikileaks and Napster 2) the value of Wikileaks 3) the revolting Canadian Ayatollah Flanagan and his fatwa against the founder of Wikileaks.
• Auntie Georgie (2010, Memorium)
  A personal recollection of the life and achievement of my Auntie Georgie, ballsy banker with soul. Plus 170 images of Georgie.
• Lucy Milne (2010, Portrait)
  About my aunt Lucy Milne, my dad's sister.
• Dick Andrews (2010, essay)
  About my father, and 136 photos of him.
• For Millie Niss (2010, essay and photos)
  An appreciation of the late Millie Niss and 111 photos of her with notes by Martha Deed, Millie's mother.
• Net Art and the Fireflies of Eternity (2010, essay)
  "What we lose with there not being as prominent an art of the net as there is of print and moving image is related to what we would lose were there not a prominent art of print or art of the moving image. That's what I want to convince you of by the end of this essay....Net art must succeed for the internet to be as significant a human venture as print or cinema. For if it fails, that means we cannot really feel it and think in it in the ways we associate with art. And these are important to the ways we understand ourselves and the world, and come to be articulate and expressive and formulate what worlds we want to make now and for the future. The failure of net art would be a massive failure of imagination that would give unto the forces of dullness an unbearable lightness of media, too complete a capacity for forgetting, and a medium without an inner world."
• Art, Games, and Play (2009, essay)
  An essay commissioned by the Centre for International Contemporary Art in Montreal.
• GUESS THE HALLUCINATION (2009, essay)
  Toward a bit of quantitative analysis of the semantics of cutup/collage/dbCinema.
• About dbCinema Flash Brushes (2009, essay)
  This has quite a bit about dbCinema in general and Flash brushes in particular. dbCinema is a graphic synthesizer and langu(im)age processor I wrote in Adobe Director.
• Reviewed: A Philosophy of Computer Art by Dominic Lopes (2009, review)
  Dominic McIver Lopes is a Philosophy professor in Vancouver. He's written a fascinating book on 'computer art'. There's a link in the piece, also, to a video interview I did with the author.
• Spiritual Materialism (2009, essay)
  It sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it isn't.
• First Screening by bpNichol (2007, essay)
  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.
• Videogames as Literary Devices (2007, essay)
  Looks at degrees of subordination of videogame to art in art/games by Regina Célia Pinto, Natalie Bookchin, Neil Hennessey, and Jim Andrews. Published in 2007 by the University of Chicago Press in a book edited by Grethe Mitchell and Andy Clarke called Videogames and Art
• The <Body> of Net Art (2006, essay)
  Looks at a work of net art as a computer architecture. Originally published in The Capilano Review (Vancouver).
• Interactive Audio for the Web (2006, essay)
  Looks at interactive audio for the Web as an art form. Along with the essay, there's a good list of links to works on the Web.
• Doom 3: Immersion Beyond the Cinematic (2005, Game review)
  A review of the computer game.
• Explosion: Poetry and Entertainment in Arteroids (2005, essay)
  This essay is in a book on art and video games edited by Shanna Compton and published by Soft Skull press in Brooklyn.
• On Lionel Kearns (2004, Shockwave binary meditation)
  On Lionel Kearns is a look back at a forward-looking poet. It explores the sixties-through-eighties pioneering work of Vancouver poet Lionel Kearns. On Lionel Kearns is an introduction to the work of a poet who presents a larger vision of what it means to write and be a poet than was widely accepted or understood when the work was originally published. Kearns practiced and wrote about the sort of poly-artistic, variously-mediated poetics we see developing in the digital domain, and he wrote about computers and poetry in parables of insight. He looks forward from the sixties into the present and, past the present, into the future.
• Digital Writing Circa 2004 (2004, essay)
  Thoughts on digital writing within the 2004 political and social mess. Written as a talk for my visit to England in the summer of 2004. I ended up presenting some new hypermedia work (War Pigs) instead, but made photocopies of the essay that people picked up to read at their leisure.
• Dynamic Sprite Creation/Destruction in Windows For Shockwave (2004, Instructional)
  A technical article for Director developers interested in being able to create/destroy sprites on the fly.
• Arteroids, Poetry, and the Flaw (2003, essay)
  About the shoot-em-up poetry videogame I wrote called Arteroids.
• Interactive Audio for the Web (2003, essay)
  This essay looks at a few works created on or before 2003, discusses elements such as interface, composition, instrumentality and music, and then provides lots of links to work that highlights interactive audio; there's also links to offline interactive audio projects, and links to news sources about the art. Published on trAce from Britain, edited by the late Randy Adams. trAce disappeared years ago; the above link accesses a copy on archive.org.
• Poetry and Programming (2003, email dialogue)
  I was the featured guest on Empyre May 1-14, 2003. I wrote thoughts on 'Poetry and Programming' and discussed these and other ideas with Simon Biggs, Christina McPhee, Melinda Rackham, geniwate, Helen Thorington, Mez, jhave, and others.
• Overview of Windows for Shockwave 3.0 (2003, instructional)
  I wrote a sutie of behaviors for Director developers called Windows for Shockwave, and sold the software online. This is an overview of those behaviors. It's published on the Director Online Users' Group (DOUG) site, which is the main non-Macromedia site for articles on development with Director.
• Paris Connection (2003, essays/interviews)
  I wrote a sutie of behaviors for Director developers called Windows for Shockwave, and sold the software online. This is an overview of those behaviors. It's published on the Director Online Users' Group (DOUG) site, which is the main non-Macromedia site for articles on development with Director.
• Games, Po, Play, Art, and Arteroids (2002, essay/game)
  A rather large 'essay' weighing in at about 700kb--because it has a copy of Arteroids embedded in it. The essay is also published on turbulence.org and on arteonline.arq.br (Brazil) in English and Portuguese.
• Material Combinatorium Supremum (2002, essay)
  An essay about a poem with more permutations than the number of atoms in the universe. And how to make it. About the stir fry texts.
• Three European Web/Net Artists (2002, Profiles/interviews)
  Turbulence.org published these profile/interviews I did with Michiel Knaven (Holland), Reiner Strasser (Germany), and Stanza (England). All three are using English as the language of their sites, have produced impressive bodies of multimedia, interactive work available on the Web, and synthesize arts and media with an engaging command of tools ranging from DHTML to Flash and Shockwave.
• Becoming a Full-Time Web.artist (2002, Interview)
  Roberto Simanowski published an interview with me and an article on my work in his dichtung-digital.de out of Berlin.
• Nio and the Art of Interactive Audio for the Web (2001, essay)
  Nio is a work of Shockwave interactive sound/visual/music poetry for the Web. Note that at the bottom of the essay there are links to the rest of the Nio project and Nio itself, which requires Shockwave and speakers. Nio is a commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence web site with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. This essay has also been published on soundtoys.net.
• Technotes on Nio and Audio Programming with Director 8 (2001, Technical)
  This explains how Nio synchronizes dynamically interactive sequences and layers of sound files. It was also published on the macromedia.com site as part of the audio documentation for Director.
• Architecture and the Literary (1999, essay)
  The architectural dimension of Web art.
• Stir Frys and Cut Ups (1999, essay)
  Relation of the stir fry texts to cut ups. Forthcoming in the 2001 print/CD ROM/Web site issue of France's DOC(K)S.
• Infoanimism (1999, essay)
  The word as object in process. Reviewed by William Marsh in Xenia #2.
• Webartery Email Correspondence (1999-2002, Email)
  This is the Webartery.com email correspondence. I did a lot of writing on this list. The archive is private for members.
• Digital Langu(im)age—language and image as objects in a field (1998, essay)
  An exploration of digital language. Published on Web del Sol's Perihelion site, in the 2000 print/CD ROM/Web issue of France's DOC(K)S, and in Cauldron & Net.
• What's a Web Artist? (part one, 1997, essay)
  A non-prescriptive exploration of some of the elements and challenges involved. Published in Zine n.
• What's a Web Artist? (part two, 1997, HTML, essay)
  A few questions about the medium and a review of Diane Fenster's and razorfish's sites. Published in Zine n.
• Poetry and the Electric Word (1996, essay)
  Sat down and wondered hrrm what am I doing with Vispo?
• War of the Language Worms (1996, Game Spec)
  Not an essay but a spec for a logic game/puzzle done in collaboration with Dr. Michael Fellows.
• Big Meanies of Corner Town (1996, Game Spec)
  Another spec for a logic game/puzzle done in collaboration with Dr. Michael Fellows.
• McLuhan Reconsidered (Part I, 1995, essay)
  An examination of some of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, the seminal media/technology analyst of the sixties and seventies. The same text but a different layout is published in Talan Memmott's BeeHive.
• McLuhan Reconsidered (Part II, 1995, essay)
  The rest. It's broken up into two parts because my HTML editor way back then couldn't handle files larger than 32k.
• Libraries and Publishing (1995, essay)
  I wrote this in 1995 before I started composing web pages. It's a speculation on the possibilities for the writer and publisher posed by the web. The infra structure of literary dissemination is changing. In what ways?
• A Review of Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word (1994, Review)
  A noted professor of the Humanities argues that "the real change we must confront and understand is not a new selection of canonical great books but, as our expressive radical moves from print to screen, a new conception of human reason and how Western culture creates and transmits it.... If we fail to understand the expressive environment of our time, we will have failed in our duty as transmitters of culture, whether we think the culture to be preserved consists of Dead White Males or Live Female Revolutionaries of Color."
• The Frame, Nominalism, and Platonism in Literary Judgement (1993, Letter)
  A letter to Steven Heighton, then editor of Quarry magazine in Kingston Ontario. "After reading your letter I got to thinking about how I arrive (or not) at decisions about the merit of a piece of writing and whether or not or to what extent I am influenced by sheer name and reputation and other factors that deflect me from really attending to what is being said whether it's in a poem or a political speech or elsewhere. And of whether or not such factors should be thought of as irrelevant to the meaning of the work."
• A Review of Quarry Magazine (1993, Review)
  A review of the Kingston Ontario literary magazine when it was edited by Steven Heighton. The particular issue reviewed is Number 2 from Volume 42, 1993. It features fiction by Shusako Endo, Elisabeth Harvor, and Barbara Mailloux, poetry by Don Coles, Lynn Crosbie, Carl Grindley, Clive Thompson, and Jan Conn, letters between Erin Mouré and Bronwen Wallace, a photo essay by Jack Chiang, a review by Colin Morton, and a critical essay by Michael Mirolla.
• To margareta waterman (1993, Letter)
  A letter to margareta about Canadian politics in 1993.
• To Matt Fair and Joseph Keppler (1993, Letter)
  Still pre Web. A long but well edited and worked letter to two buddies and thinkers on poetry, language, the electric word, and the politics of abundance.
• A Tribute to William S. Burroughs (1992, essay)
  A few thoughts on Burroughs's and Cronenberg's Naked Lunch and the work of William S. Burroughs. And here's a second version in PDF format (109Kb, part of Several Numbers Through the Lyric, a book of mine).
• To Matt Fair and Joseph Keppler (1992, Letter)
  An essay/letter to two good friends about artificial intelligence, ELIZA, Racter, and Turing. I was beginning to become digital.
• Toward the Page (1992, essay)
  About poetry and the the page.
• Notes Toward an essay on the Unspeakable (1991, essay)
  "That which we cannot or have not or will not or may not speak; what can be said of it?"
• Word Vices: Two Data Compression Algorithms (1990, essay)
  An essay on information theory, data compression, memory, language, and minimalism. It looks carefully at a couple of elegant data compression algorithms (Lempel-Ziv and the Huffman algorithms) and explores the aesthetic of concentration, compression. The pleasure of this essay is for those who can enjoy a fine math proof and a discussion of the poetics of such a type of knowing. Challenging but, I hope, also rewarding. Pythagorean.
• Reading McLuhan (1988, essay)
  Pre Web (for me anyway). An intense reading of McLuhan in a time of deep transition for me between radio and print/computer and writerly awakening, deep discovery time.
• Politics and the English Language by George Orwell (1946)
  Still an excellent and relevant essay though published in 1946. George Orwell is also the author of the novel 1984 and the novella Animal Farm.

Poemy Poems and Stories

• The Riddler (1997)
  About Heraclitus.
• The Material (1996)
  Jennifer Ley's site.
• Kasparov (1996)
  
• Second and Third Snow (1995)
  
• First Snow (1995)
  I was there.
• Customs (1994)
  Customs at the border between Canada and the USA. Originally published in Quarry.
• My Friend's Friend (1993)
  
• Eyes (1992)
  The beginning of a suite of four short poems. Another version: Sequence
• Song For Sun and Moon (1992)
  Second in the suite.
• Border Crossing (1992)
  Third in the suite.
• An institutionalized avant garde is: (1992)
  Fourth in the suite.
• LIFE ART (1992)
  The opening poem of the manuscript Several Numbers  Through the Lyric.
• Lifer (1992)
  A poem for Luella Kerr.
• Trust (1991)
  In a word.
• The Meeting Place II (1991)
  
• Alice In Flatland (1991)
  A fifteen page poem on the edge of knowledge and other boundaries.
• The Secret Life of Trees (1991)
  
• Breakpoint Enabled (story, 1990)
  
• Safe Cracking (1989)
  Originally published in Quarry magazine.
• La La (1989)
  Originally published in And Yet.
• Hands (1984)
• The Meeting Place (1984)
  Originally published on The Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks.
• Walk in Streetlight (1983)
• Lower Yates at Midnight (1983)