This is not for lyricists, I swear it's not the sentiments Fuck a double entendre, I want y'all to feel this shit kendrick - wacced out murals full of double meanings and obscure references -pedantic, the whole of it- I think for me, I've always been drawn to mysteries, puzzles, i like knowing there is a full story behind it all. it is one of the reasons i keep going back to certain songs or poems, i know for a fact i didn’t understand it all, there is still to decode, easter eggs to find, references to link. i makes me engage with a piece so much more - knowing i didn't get all at my first read Mon mémoire explore la double posture de graphiste et de poète : deux rôles qui coexistent et s’influencent mutuellement. Je me questionne sur la manière dont le design graphique peut redéfinir les formes d’expression et d’expérimentation poétiques numériques. L’objectif est d’analyser de quelle manière les possibilités techniques offertes par le numérique – sons, mouvements, interactions – transforment non seulement la lecture, mais aussi les modes de création et de diffusion. ed sanders investigative poetry “The Content of History Will be Poetry There is no end to Gnosis: The hunger for DATA The Goal: an era of investigative poesy wherein one can be controversial, radical, and not have the civilization rise up to smite down the bard. To establish and to maintain it. POETS MAY REMAIN IN THE RADIX, UNCOMPROMISING, REVOLUTIONARY, SEDITIOUS, ABSOLUTE. POET as Investigator Interpreter of Sky Froth Researcher of the Abyss Human Universer Prophet Prophet without death as a consequence. My statement is this: that poetry, to go forward, in my view, has to begin a voyage into the description of historical reality.” “Presenting Data on the Page the page is the history the poem on the page chant-modes, anapestic/dactylic/choriambic/beowulfian-motorized-alliterative narratives should be as diverse, in their specific techniques, as the gene pool o'er which they sing and the same is true of the poetic adornments of the page that is, a page is not a four-sided white void in which to practice zeroness. It seems obvious that the language of poetry may well evolve into a 1000 color hieroglyphics utilizing a near infinity of typographies.The availability of colors § photographic images and the 100's of type faces, even in a good art supply store, foretell the birth of an international hieroglyphics. The upcoming laser hologram revolution-- that is, of 3-dimensional words §& images, speaks and shrieks of a future where poetry and collage and perspective join to thrill the eye-brain with glowing, animated ("poetry in motion," the rock-and-roll song so prophetically sang), multi-color, 3-d "memory gardens" or verse-grids. This new hieroglyphic language may well use letterless symbols, emotionglyphs say, 3-d soundless glyphs or tiny photographs depicting complex emotional states, inserted in the hieroglyphic grids, to augment the poet's inherited word-horde.” “Beginning in 1988, Dickey used the HyperCard software on his Macintosh SE to compose what would become fourteen "HyperPoems."” crawlspace “What use are websites during a genocide? This has been on our minds as editors through the life cycle of this issue: we opened for submissions a month after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which continued apace as we corresponded with artists via the global network of undersea data cables that ferried our revisions back and forth. We are grateful to be able to publish the incredible work you see in this issue, one that took some time as the pressures of the offline world took precedence. It’s a sustaining joy to be able to commune with talented minds who share our passion for a playful, creative web. But it feels at times like a fragile, small joy, preoccupied with pixels and kilobytes, dissonant from the raw pain endured by those in Gaza and the scale of coordinated policies and efforts of Israel and zionists to obfuscate a genocide in real-time. How do we continue nurturing that small joy when the very technologies we centre our work around are simultaneously complicit in real-world violence and erasure? Mara Cavallaro writes that online structures and social media do not operate "outside the purview of geopolitics” but instead deliver “the latest reconstitution of this apartheid landscape. One cannot, and should not, be understood without the other."We have attempted to acknowledge this inextricable link between the online and offline since the beginning of Crawlspace, recognising the deep-rooted origins of online and networked systems in colonialism, military activity and environmental destruction.This link goes both ways; embedded power structures offline affect and direct the management of online spaces, but the internet remains an important vector of power and visibility, should it be wielded well. Une interrogation particulière sur les notions d’accessibilité et d’archives. Comment concevoir des objets graphiques qui soient à la fois intéressants sur le plan visuel et facilement accessibles, sans tomber dans une recherche de « beauté » extravagante ? Je m’intéresse à des solutions d’édition et de présentation qui dépassent les formats traditionnels, tout en permettant une diffusion large et inclusive de la poésie. Enfin, un questionnement des espaces numériques actuels d’archivage et de curation : comment recentrer l’expérience du lecteur tout en valorisant l’esthétique des interfaces ? Il ne s’agit pas seulement de rendre le texte accessible, mais aussi d’imaginer des interfaces qui mêlent fonctionnalité et intention graphique. Quel renouvellement graphique de la poésie numérique, car graphiste/poète double fonction, deux rôles simultanées, comment l’un informe l’autre?et objets graphique poésie, accessibilité, archives, libre de droits - pas extravagants/intéressant ou “beaux” mais accessible, Ré-imaginer ce que la lecture peut être, grâce aux multiples possibilités d’éditions et réfléchir à des modes alternatifs de présentation. Qu’est-ce qu’apporte le numérique à la poésie, en termes de sons, de mouvement, d’interactions avec le lecteur. Mon corpus est structuré autour de trois grandes catégories d’objets graphiques : Sites de poèmes (graphistes/poètes) qui mettent en avant la forme graphique autant que le contenu textuel (peut-être même plus). Chaque projet examine comment l’esthétique/interaction d’une interface peut enrichir ou transformer la perception d’un poème. Publications en ligne/plateformes de curation et de diffusion, regroupant des poèmes sous une même “direction artistique”. Ces projets interrogent les nouvelles manières de composer des “recueils”, en exploitant les potentialités d’internet. Sites d’archives et d’accessibilité qui offrent un accès centralisé à des textes poétiques sans porter une attention particulière à leur mise en forme graphique, qui n’est pas leur objectif. Un exemple intéressant, The Poetry Project, centralisation des poèmes et forme graphique travaillée. Comment le design graphique renouvelle-t-il la poésie numérique ? Comment le design graphique contribue-t-il au renouvellement de la poésie numérique en termes d'archivage, tout en questionnant les notions d'ouverture et d'appropriation des contenus ? Quel renouvellement graphique de la poésie numérique, car graphiste/poète et objets graphique poésie, accessibilité, archives, libre de droits - pas extravagants/intéressant graphiquement ou “beaux” mais accessible, Le rôle du graphiste-poète :Comment le statut hybride de graphiste et poète influence-t-il la création de nouveaux objets poétiques numériques ? En quoi cette double casquette permet-elle de concevoir des œuvres qui ne sont pas seulement fonctionnelles mais aussi expressives et significatives ? Accessibilité et archivage : Comment le design graphique peut-il démocratiser l'accès à la poésie numérique en proposant des interfaces simples, inclusives, et intuitives ? Quelles solutions graphiques et techniques permettent de préserver et de diffuser ces œuvres dans le temps, notamment grâce aux licences libres ? Comment allier accessibilité et pérennité sans sacrifier la richesse poétique ou graphique des œuvres ? Le renouvellement par les moyens numériques : Quels nouveaux outils, formats et techniques numériques permettent d'inventer des formes poétiques inédites ? En quoi le design graphique, en tant que discipline, enrichit-il la pratique de la poésie numérique, au-delà de l’aspect technologique ? what is poetry La poésie est une imitation qui opère des représentations générales plus ou moins belles des choses (→ mimêsis). Les divers genres ne sont que des manières diverses d'imiter. Cette imitation vient de l'instinct. Tous les arts commencent par l'instinct et se perfectionnent par l'habitude et l'étude technique. Aristote (Ce terme d'origine grecque désigne dans son acception générale l'imitation de la nature et, par extension, les modes et les moyens de l'imitation dans les arts. Dans son acception spécifique, il concerne l'ensemble des ressources poétiques et esthétiques employées à la représentation du réel en littérature.) Oulipo (French pronunciation: [ulipo], short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature", stylized OuLiPo) is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud. The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy". Queneau described Oulipians as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape." Metaphysical poetry generally refers to the works of a relatively small group of seventeenth century English poets. They are uniquely different in comparison to other types of poetry as they were written in a specific style, peculiar to the nature of metaphysics. Although there are different kinds of characteristics defining the essence of metaphysical poetry, this study focuses on four prominent ones namely; intellectuality, imageries and conceits, expression of ideas and feelings, and the development of logical arguments. This study explores the selected characteristics in terms of how they are connected with each other in two metaphysical poems, John Donne’s The Good-Morrow and Andrew Marvell’s The Definition of Love. From the discussion, it is evident that all four characteristics under study are served throughout the two poems. The analysis shows that the poets use their intellectual abilities to construct elaborated metaphysical imageries and conceits, which they then use as a platform to convey their ideas and feelings. The ideas and feeling are reasoned through logical arguments, which requires high degree of intellectual abilities not only to construct but also to comprehend them. Such connection between the characteristics serve to support the essence and uniqueness of what is known as metaphysical poetry. -Yasir Azam ambient litterature / Tan LinLin's style as an artist comes from the principle of "ambient" literature. A commentary by Katherine Elaine Sanders described the style by saying, "Lin leads his audiences in exploring the temporary ephemera that fills our daily interactions: emails, Twitter feeds, Facebook messages, blogs, movies, magazines, and advertisements, indexes, photographs, and recipes."[12] Tan Anthony Lin is an American poet, author, filmmaker, and professor. He defines his work as "ambient" literature, which draws on and samples source material from the Internet and popular culture to address issues involving plagiarism, copyright, boredom, distracted modes of reading, paratext, and technology.[1] Reading is a kind of integrated software. Some of its functions are textual, some paratextual, some visual, although the line between these does not really exist in my mind. SCV is fundamentally an examination of that blurring. Some of the reading is clearly authored by me, some is machine algorithms or library systems, some is by others, as with the Barthes index or the Laura Riding foreword. KES How does this fit into the idea of montage or collage? Of juxtaposing beautiful with ugly, interesting with boring? Aren’t the logical leaps caused by these pairings anti-boring? TL Montage meant something different to Adorno than it did to Benjamin, and it means something different in contemporary practice. BlipSoak01 is all montage or sampling, putting Laura Riding right next to George Oppen, but I wanted those transitions to be seamless, not shocking, so the models were disco, sampling, remixing. The orientations of SCV are utterly away from live music, phoneme, polyphony, spoken voice, and into another register involving the seamlessness of language/reading systems, the generation of imagery via text, the parsing of all language as statistical/cybernetic systems, and the time-stamping of bodies with the technological systems of reading. So in this sense, one could say that SCV is about historical avant-garde and neo–avant-garde practices as they integrate with postwar information science and contemporary textual practices. Guy Debord remarked that the image is the final form of commodity reification, but I feel like today, text or code activates how we are dominated by languages and reading/writing practices cued not to the deconstruction of signifiers but to technological shifts involving scripting languages: SMS texting, RSS feeds, page-ranking systems, and Markov chains. digital poetry is not text poetry simply distributed on the web or put into electronic form: it uses the properties of the digital medium in a meaningfully distinct manner. Norbert Bachleitner offers a somewhat spare definition of digital poetry, as ‘innovative works with specific qualities that cannot be displayed on paper’ (303); a better basic definition might be a literary work which depends integrally for its form on the operation of digital processes on an electronic device, and which has poetic qualities of semantic richness and meaningful form.-Nicky Stewart a poem is just a little machine for remembering itself. Whatever other function a rhyme, a metre, an image, a rhetorical trope, a brilliant qualifier or stanza-break might perform, half of it is simply mnemonic. A poem makes a fetish of its memorability. It does this, because the one unique thing about our art is that it can be carried in your head in its original state, intact and perfect. We merely recall a string quartet or a film or a painting, actually, at a neurological level we’re only remembering a memory of it; but our memory of the poem is the poem. -don patterson “let the text/works” talk by itself - NO Ambient poetics (and ambient aesthetics writ large) critically appropriates such techniques—widespread in contemporary culture—for the purposes of affective mapping and re-mapping. It provocatively poeticizes the consumer atmospherics and ambient technologies of control, confronting us with the spaces and durations of the present, and allowing us to imagine what spaces and durations “we might not have inhabited,” to quote Lin. Or might inhabit otherwise. Reading Machines, quoting Tan Lin DICKINSON She wrote in 1879: To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie — True Poems flee — “The Lost Digital Poems (and Erotica) of William H. Dickey Matthew Kirschenbaum on Recovering Artifacts of Another Time By Matthew Kirschenbaum November 16, 2020 In 1987, William H. Dickey, a San Francisco poet who had won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award to launch his career and published nearly a dozen well-received books and chapbooks since, was given the responsibility of editing the 10th anniversary issue of the establishment literary journal New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly. The theme of the issue seemed improbable at first: “The Writer and the Computer.” Yet, as Dickey remarked in his introduction, RAM and ROM were by then an inescapable part of writers’ shop talk. Personal computers had come on the market at the beginning of the decade, and authors from Amy Tan to Stephen King enthused about being able to insert and delete at will, even as others bemoaned the impersonality of the new machines—their plastic and glass facades a far cry from a well-loved typewriter or worn-down pencil. But Dickey, who also taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, sensed there was something more at stake: the medium really was the message. “Do we think differently about what we are writing if we are writing it with a reed pen or a pen delicately whittled from the pinion of a goose, or a steel pen manufactured in exact and unalterable replication in Manchester,” he mused. “Do we feel differently, is the stance and poise of our physical relationship to our work changed, and if it is, does that change also affect the nature and forms of our ideas?” These were not idle questions for Dickey. Computers had already changed his poetry and poetics, the radiant pixels on the screen suggesting ways words could move and flow with a freedom a fountain pen could not match. A year later, he bought his first Macintosh. It came with a powerful program called HyperCard, which anticipated many of the features and behaviors that are second nature to us today on the web. With HyperCard, a user could create “stacks” of “cards” that could be linked and networked through unique patterns and pathways. Images, animations, and even sound could coexist with text on the screen, and the Mac’s full array of fonts and typography could be brought to bear. Over the next few years, William H. Dickey would use this software to produce a total of fourteen “HyperPoems” (as he dubbed them). This heretofore lost digital work addresses themes characteristic of his oeuvre—history and mythology, as well as memory, sexuality, the wasteland of the modern world, and (over and under all of it) love and death.It was a peak creative moment, but it came in the midst of an unprecedented dark time. As a gay man living in San Francisco, Dickey found himself at the center of the AIDS epidemic. Watching helplessly as friends fell sick, he turned to the new-found freedom of the digital form to produce HyperPoems that were unique documents of gay life in San Francisco during this calamitous period. Dickey’s HyperPoems are artifacts of another time—made new and fresh again with current technology. His proficiency was obviously growing with each new work. He learned how to turn a “stack” of cards into a labyrinth—or else a mandala, a looping pattern that had fascinated him throughout his life. All of these features changed Dickey’s thinking about the possibilities of poetry, moving him away from his earlier musings over fountain pens toward what we would nowadays think of as immersive media. The poem became a compositional score, a framework for experience. He compared his new medium to Walt Disney animations as well as illuminated manuscripts, but notes that unlike these rarefied forms anyone with a computer could be thus empowered. Several of the HyperPoems can be described as lyrically and graphically explicit erotica. Here too, Dickey exploited his medium: to progress further in a poem called “Accomplished Night,” for example, one clicks on the head of a penis. Thus to read, the reader must also touch. We can now see that these are some of the very earliest (and most explicit) digital creative works by an established LGBTQ+ author. In 1994, complications from HIV tragically took Dickey’s life. The Education of Desire, a posthumous collection that appeared from Wesleyan University Press in 1996, is widely recognized as capturing some of his finest work. But the fourteen HyperPoems that were composed at the same time remained inert on his hard drive after his death. Issuing them would have meant packaging the digital files on a floppy disk—not something many publishers were willing to take a chance on. Apple then retired HyperCard in 2004, and the format became obsolete. The HyperPoems were forgotten by all but a handful of dedicated students of digital writing, who learned of them by rumor and reputation. One of those devotees was myself. I knew that a laptop with copies of the HyperPoems had made its way to the University of Maryland (where I teach) as part of a fellow writer’s literary papers (nowadays, an author’s “papers” increasingly take the form of disks and hard drives and even whole computers). From there I was able to extricate copies of the original files from the antiquated operating system, and, working with Dickey’s literary executor Susan Tracz and technical experts, add them to the Internet Archive.The Internet Archive got its start collecting web pages. Nowadays it might be best known (or most notorious) for its controversial ebook library; but, intriguingly, the Internet Archive also now archives software meant to run on obsolete systems. Using a form of technology known as an emulator, anyone can point their browser at the Internet Archive and play a game that was originally meant for an Apple II, or relive a spreadsheet program that was originally meant for the Commodore 64. HyperCard is among the software it supports. This gave us the perfect platform for publishing the HyperPoems, some 25 years after Dickey’s death (and fittingly with the help of an institution in his own home city of San Francisco).Dickey’s HyperPoems are artifacts of another time—made new and fresh again with current technology. Anyone with a web browser can read and explore them in their original format with no special software or setup. (They are organized into Volume 1 and Volume 2 at the Internet Archive, in keeping with their original organizational scheme; Volume 2 contains the erotica—NSFW!) But they are also a reminder that writers have treasures tucked away in digital shoeboxes and drawers. Floppy disks, or for that matter USB sticks and Google Docs, now keep the secrets of the creative process.” hyperpoetry “This genre is also called cyber-poetry that refers to works of verse which could not be presented without a computer since it contains links to sub-poems or footnotes, poetry “generators,” poetry with movement or images. Hyper-poetry is usually highly steeped in the visual and involves parts that are read in varying orders. (Kirkwood)” Besides poetry-as-we-know-it, by which we mean, metric textuality in printed verse (books, journals) and Concrete and Visual Poetry, as well as other neo avant-garde forms of poetry-making tied to the printed medium, which take into account also the spatial syntax and destabilise the traditional medium of the verse, e-poetry also co-exists today, which is tied to the development of the new media and its advances, especially the computer. This type of creativity (at th poet and scholar Loss Pequeño Glazier, otherwise also director of Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY in Buffalo, has accepted the challenge of this emerging new field and has tried, in his Digital Poetics, to define the specificities of e-poetry from the poet's, as well as scholar's viewpoint. In this book, Glazier discusses three principal forms of electronic textuality: hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and e-poetry pieces in programmable media. He considers avant-garde poetics and its relationship to the on-line age, the relationship between Web "pages" and book technology, and the way in which certain kinds of Web constructions are in and of themselves a type of writing. The first question in e-poetry, which in its kinetic, animated and ergodic poetry, hyperpoetry, code poetry and poetry generators variations, falls into the expanded concept of textuality and new media, is the question connected with the nature of the medium itself, which is something that the author of this book (that was not actually written in one go but predominantly links essays and papers which were previously published in various e-zines and journals) was aware of himself. Certainly this is why already his opening definitions and illuminations dealing with the code of e-poetry and its perception as well as with the spaces of e-writing in general, are of importance to this field. "Writing in electronic media, whether simple Web pages, text generated by an algorithm, or pages that display kinetically, is writing that exists within specific conditions of textuality. Such writing has different properties than the writing to which we are accustomed" (2).Amongst these properties, it is important that the word does not take on the function of physical object but rather is displayed and programmed. Electronic poetry expands the space of poetry and also that of its perception. It is here that the eye is clearly active for, in this type of reading-looking-decoding, more effort and attention is required than in turning pages during the reading of a book or magazine. An important quality of etexts is also their malleability and this malleability's related characteristics, which arise due to the flickering and fragile signifier. We are meeting a text that functions as a body, which can be manipulated with a series of programme commands. This is why the chapters in Digital Poetics devoted to the programming of e-poetry and e-textuality in general, are undoubtedly important, for example, in chapter Hypertext/Hyperpoesis/Hyperpoetics in which he discusses also the alphabet of coding and largely looks into applications in the HTML language in the field of epoetry. In this, he is discovering the richness of poetic language on the basis of including signs that do not have the characteristics of the alphabet but function as visual tropes and also have rhythmical qualities. Here we should also mention a special chapter of this book in which Grazier talks of the importance of the "grep" command in e-poetry; otherwise he has expressed his affinity for meaningful code in writing poetry, by saying that also "writing a 'href' is writing "(3). about- Loss Pequeño Glazier: Digital Poetics. The Making of E-Poetries Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press. 2002 ISBN 0-8173-1075-4 We need to ask ourselves what is the actual advance of the new medium, in order to define writing that will put that medium to task. The basic defining feature of hypertext, its ability to link, is operationally identical to the codex with its footnotes, index, table of contents, see also's, lists of prior publications, parenthetical asides, and numerous other devices of multilinearity" (4). The author of Digital Poetics is therefore closer to a textual experience that is "less about telling a story and more like a plunge into pure textual possibility" By Janez Strehovec No. 27 – 2003 what does it add?- mouvement, sound, interaction, video -performer le web- Chia Amisola -point and click -the window reprend l’interface d’un fenêtre -narrative fiction - choose your own adventure/book/video game structures -nostalgia and memory, une génération qui a connue les débuts d’internet, enfance (everest pimpkin) — exemple nostalgie wikipedia/school computers/pop ups -like a dream -seeking connections through the web, PLAN? v.Francais Narratif et interface Comment les interfaces numériques et les structures basées sur la forme internet (fenêtres/les pop-ups /point and click) façonnent les possibilités narratives de la poésie numérique ? De quelle façon l’utilisation des mécanismes "choose your own adventure" dans la poésie numérique redéfinit-elle le lecteur et le récit? Nostalgie/mémoire Comment la poésie numérique s’engage-t-elle avec la nostalgie et la mémoire collective dans une génération façonnée par l’internet ? Quel rôle jouent les “artefacts” numériques (ordi scolaires, wikipédia) dans la construction d’un espace narratif de rêve dans la poésie numérique? Identitée? Comment la poésie numérique reflète-t-elle et interroge-t-elle la recherche de connexion et d’identité dans le contexte de la culture basée sur le web ? De quelle manière la poésie numérique évoque-t-elle l’expérience fragmentée de la navigation sur internet pour explorer l’identité personnelle et collective ? performance comment la performance de la poésie numérique, comme on peut le voir avec Chia Amisola, transforme l’interaction du lecteur avec la poésie sur internet ? Quelles nouvelles possibilités esthétiques et émotionnelles émergent lorsque la poésie adopte les interfaces et les structures du numériques 1. Esthétique nostalgique / atmosphère poétique La nostalgie dans le design devient une métaphore visuelle comme l’imagerie poétique. Les premiers aspects esthétiques de l’internet, le lo-fi, évoquent des tons émotionnels, comme un poème qui utilise le langage sensoriel pour déclencher la mémoire/donc émotion?.fenêtres pixellisées de Chia Amisola/des strophes, des unités distinctes de sens/souvenirs fragmentés d’une enfance numérique. Designs “rétro” (à définir) d’Everest Pipkin servent de champs poétiques, où chaque élément d’interface est un mot ou une phrase dans un plus grand poème visuel. Les interfaces surréalistes de Tiger Dingsun/symbolisme en couches de la poésie. 2. Les structures interactives comme forme poétiqueL’interactivité est parallèle aux formes poétiques comme le sonnet/vers. La façon dont on navigue dans un texte reflète la manière dont le lecteur interagit avec la structure d’un poème/décide où faire une pause/interpréter/relire. pointage and clic de Chia Amisola reflètent l’enjambement d’un poème, conduisant l’utilisateur à des lignes ou fenêtres nouvelles.Les œuvres “cartographiques” d’Everest Pipkin sont des poèmes, mouvement à travers l’espace /progression du sens dans une “séquence poétique” dans Tiger Dingsun, semblable à celle d’un jeu, transforme les “choix” en actes poétiques, invitant à l’exploration et à l’interprétation. (=> point and click, choose your own adventure) 3. Interfaces comme poésie visuelle et spatiale Les interfaces fonctionnent comme un poème, avec des fenêtres, des pop-ups et des écrans/superposition comme lignes/strophes. “naviguer” dans une interface reflète l’acte de lire la poésie/découvrir le sens à travers la progression spatiale et/ou temporelle. (voir site que accessible quand le soleil est levé) -Chia at Temporary Performance Assembly bureaux “encombrés” de Chia Amisola comme poèmes concrets, agencement visuel d’éléments crée des couches supplémentaires de sens/plusieurs lectures/easter eggs ect. répertoires fragmentés d’Everest Pipkin ressemblent à de la poésie retrouvée, rassemblant des éléments disparates en un tout cohérent. interfaces surréalistes de Tiger Dingsun agissent comme une poésie d’effacement, où le sens est révélé par la mise au point et la navigation sélectives. =>similaire à des collages/(mouvement surréaliste?) 4. La fragmentation comme dispositif poétique reflète la syntaxe fragmentée/la poésie moderne et postmoderne. invite à faire des liens entre des éléments diff, l’engagement/l’interprétation. éléments épars de Chia Amisola évoquent le langage fragmenté poètes numériques contemporains, les sites Everest Pipkin suggèrent un patchwork de souvenirs, comme le récit fragmenté (lien narration?) Les interfaces surréalistes de Tiger Dingsun rappellent les sauts associatifs/poésie surréaliste/éléments disparates CHIA AMISOLA Concretes forms, website questions/surveys/steps to access the website Performing the web - live performance/different experience On apocalypses, archipelagos, and websites UX+ Talk"I am making an internet where I can gather all the people I love in one place… a dream of shaping our infrastructures for intimacy & solidarity.".-form analysis digital collage interaction Performance view of Chia Amisola, My computer never asks me how many computers I had before, 2024. Gray Area, San Francisco. Courtesy of Kaloyan Kolev. A Bedroom in Las Piñas Preview of A Bedroom in Las Piñas A series of vignettes in an 'escapist room'; & an almost memory—played entirely with verb-objects. -point and click, flash game -On Domain Naming- Websites have always functioned to me as translations and fragmentations of myself, ways to give form to myself through constantly re-situating and re-contextualizing across the internet. The act of construction is a practice of making the self (rather than just a re-presentation): filling a domain is assembling a new body for the self, with the site as an extension of the body, or a distillation and compression of it… When I wanted to find myself, I made websites. I lean towards websites (more than newsletters or physical artifacts) precisely because they are immaterial and impermanent, but instantaneous and immanent. Critical and poetic reimaginings of the internet require the authoring of entirely new logics. (...) We live in sites that we have yet to find the language and write the poetry for. One of the first steps you take when creating a website is choosing a domain name. The domain name becomes your presence, a point of access; you are a site that people may recognize, are welcome to visit, one that is real. I took as many names as I did selves: destinyzbond.webs.com, cirrumilus.sky-song.org, belovedhearts.webs.com, each a name to my stories, a place to fill, a becoming. A website is a site of potential. A domain isn't only a name, it is an invitation to start something new. Websites have always functioned to me as translations and fragmentations of myself, ways to give form to myself through constantly re-situating and re-contextualizing across the internet. A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web,[1] is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI),[2][3] although many people use the two terms interchangeably.[4][a] URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages (HTTP/HTTPS) but are also used for file transfer (FTP), email (mailto), database access (JDBC), and many other applications. Most web browsers display the URL of a web page above the page in an address bar. A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a protocol (http), a hostname (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html). wiki -Url poetry club The Early Gardens of Hypertext Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens appears to be the first recorded mention of the term. Mark was part of the early hypertext crowd – the developers figuring out how to arrange and present this new medium. While the essay is a beautiful ode to free-wheeling internet exploration, it’s less about building personal internet spaces, and more of a manifesto on user experience flows and content organisation. A browser frame with a small garden growing in front of it. My small collection highlighted a number of sites that are taking a new approach to the way we publish personal knowledge on the web. They’re not following the conventions of the “personal blog,” as we’ve come to know it. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis. A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing. It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites “should be.” It’s an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined. Systems of Hypertextual Knowledge Transfer on a Way Towards a World Brain. A Trail of Thoughts. M.F.A. Thesis by Miriam Humm Master of Fine Arts, Klasse Digitale Grafik Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, Oktober 2022 https://linking-nodes.net/ Ted Nelson - Literary Machines schemas But what if we imagine the document only as a container, holding a collection of chunks of information that can be extracted and used in other contexts? What if we only could pull up the information that is relevant to us at that time? And what if that information could even exist outside of its home document structure and be shared? In 1945, right after the end of World War II, Vannevar Bush published an article contemplating these questions in The Atlantic called ‘As We May Think’, which would influence many to come and cause ripples which are still relevant today. And just like that he had predicted what would later become ‘personal computers’ and delivered the probably first description of what we now call ‘hypertext’. Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important. (Bush, 1945) The common intellectual heritage shared by each of Otlet, Wells and Bush is their persistent use of the analogy of the human brain in relation to the free and unrestricted flow of information within society, and how their predictions would result in an external information infrastructure which complemented the internal workings of the mind. (Allington-Smith, 2017) Two decades later Ted Nelson, who had been inspired by Bush’s Memex and who thought a lot about these connections, coined the term ‘hypertext’ in his conference paper ‘Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate’. Let me introduce the word "hypertext"***** to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it.[...]​​***** The sense of "hyper-" used here connotes extension and generality; cf. "hyperspace." The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects to be comprised sensibly into linear media, like the text string, or even media of somewhat higher complexity. (Nelson, 1965: 96) Later he specified it a little further, as non-linear text. What sets it apart is its networked structure and with that the dissolving of the linearity of text. It is easy to imagine those as divisions within the text but a text itself being built of multiple text chunks. When interacting with Hypertext readers become active, they select their own path through the provided information just like in “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, but with possibly far more complex outcomes and trails. Nelson even took the idea a step further by incorporating connected audio, video, and other media in addition to text. He named this extension of Hypertext "Hypermedia." In order to keep this thesis within a defined framework, I solely focus on hypertext. While some of the systems discussed are in line with the definition of hypermedia, this concept includes much more that would go beyond the scope. Many people consider [hypertext] to be new and drastic and threatening. However, I would like to take the position that hypertext is fundamentally traditional and in the mainstream of literature. Customary writing chooses one expository sequence from among the possible myriad; hypertext allows many, all available to the reader. In fact, however, we constantly depart from sequence, citing things ahead and behind in the text. Phrases like “as we have already said” and “as we will see” are really implicit pointers to contents elsewhere in the sequence. (Rosenberg, 2004) Ted had coined the word hypertext in 1963 to mean “non-sequential writing”, and in 1966, had proposed a system called Xanadu in which he wanted to include features such as linking, conditional branching, windows, indexing, undo, versioning, and comparison of related texts on an interactive graphics screen. (Brown CS: A Half-Century Of Hypertext, n.d.) His vision encompassed bidirectional links that went into both directions and were granular about which exact part they reference. He defined different types of hypertext, depending on the level of referentiality. Basic or chunk style hypertext offers choices, either as footnote-markers (like asterisks) or labels at the end of a chunk. Whatever you point at then comes to the screen. Collateral hypertext means compound annotations or parallel text. Stretchtext changes continuously. This requires very unusual techniques, but exemplifies how "continuous" hypertext might work. An anthological hypertext, however, would consist of materials brought together from all over, like an anthological book. A grand hypertext, then, folks, would be a hypertext consisting of "everything" written about a subject, or vaguely relevant to it, tied together by editors The real dream is for "everything" to tie in the hypertext. (T. H. Nelson, 1974) The Hypertext Editing System was developed by Andries van Dam and his students at Brown University, with a lot of input from Ted Nelson. It ran on the campus mainframe computer, which at the time was a very valuable resource, worth several million dollars and filling up a whole room. Van Dam’s Team was able to use the machine as a “personal computer” between midnight and 4 AM. (Brown CS: A Half-Century Of Hypertext, n.d.) It was the first hypertext system ready to use for novices and pioneered the ‘back’ button. Later NASA used it for the documentation of the Apollo space program. Links were conceptual bridges, shown on screen as asterisks: one at the point of departure, one at the arrival point somewhere else. (Brown CS: A Half-Century Of Hypertext, n.d.) The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nm47PFALc8&t=11s https://mith.umd.edu/research/computer-science-and-the-humanities/ video documentaire MITHUniversity of Maryland program punch card poetry FRESS, 1968 FRESS or the File Retrieval and Editing System was a hypertext system that was built on the previous HES system, also developed by Andries van Dam and students at Brown University. It aimed to incorporate some of Douglas Engelbart’s best ideas from NLS. FRESS, which first took its name from the Yiddish verb for a gluttonous eater (it used 128 of the mainframe’s 512 kilobytes to run as a time-shared service) (Brown CS: A Half-Century Of Hypertext, n.d.) It could use multiple tiled windows, displayed in a WYSIWYG editing environment and implemented one of the first virtual terminal interfaces, that allowed users to log into the system from independent devices. Interactions would be controlled with a Light Pen and corresponding foot pedal. From the beginning we wanted FRESS users to be both readers and writers, consumers and authors (Stacey, 2016) FRESS word processing already made use of Autosave and pioneered the soon-to-be-essential ‘undo’ feature (Barnet, 2010). It’s critical because it takes the fear of experimentation away. You can always just undo it. (Stacey, 2016) There were two types of bidirectional links, one used to tag/structure, displayed as “%keyword%”, and the other to jump “%%J” between documents. Links as well as text blocks could be marked with keywords, which in return could operate as a content filter. A table of contents and an index of keywords would be generated automatically. Additionally, it featured an editable structure space visualisation, that would auto update the edited links. Links were displayed as ‘markers’ that could be listed next to the text, including a little teaser that would summarise the reference. Opening one of the links would then open the referenced content next to the ‘original’ text. Some of Ted Nelson’s ideas were incorporated into FRESS, but he distanced himself from the project, as he was disappointed by technological limitations holding back his full vision and van Dam’s pragmatic approach. Ted was a philosopher, and he wanted to keep hypertext pure. (Brown CS: A Half-Century Of Hypertext, n.d.) The team’s focus on word processing (FRESS even was used to format and typeset quite a few books) went strictly against Ted’s belief that hypertext shouldn’t be printed. (Brown CS: A Half-Century Of Hypertext, n.d.) An edge-notched card documenting the grant for Van Dam’s educational experiment We learned that students gain a tremendous amount of insight from having vast amounts of information at their fingertips. (Stacey, 2016) FRESS was used as an educational system at Brown, most notably tested as such in the course “Introduction to Poetry” in 1975 and 1976, which was accompanied by a documentary crew and even tested with a comparison group that didn’t use the system. compared to a control group that took the course in a traditional setting, the FRESS users attained a deeper understanding of the material and higher satisfaction with the course. On average, students using hypertext wrote three times as much as their computerless counterparts. (Brown CS: A Half-Century Of Hypertext, n.d.) Using the valuable campus mainframe computer for the humanities was thought to be improper use by many. Still, Van Dams’ team implemented the course material into the system, the poems in question and additional content that place the poem in context. Students could use the Light Pen and keyboard to add comments or questions directly to the text and with that form a discussion within FRESS with their classmates and professors. There was no fancy typeface to give the appearance of professional heft. As a result, students weren’t intimidated by or overly reverent of the professional critics. (Stacey, 2016) “I really believe that we built the world’s first online scholarly community,” van Dam said in an interview. “It foreshadowed wikis, blogs and communal documents of all kinds.” (Stacey, 2016) Well, by "hypertext" I mean nonsequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. (T. H. Nelson, 1987) Hypertext surpasses ‘traditional’ text. It can do more than just contain its own information because it provides connections to other nodes. Those links allow readers to jump from an anchor to the reference and follow that path that might as well lead away from the ‘main’ text they started at, or jump them between paragraphs within said starting point. Through that, they can explore the context or relationships between the content. Since hyper- generally means "above, beyond", hypertext is something that’s gone beyond the limitations of ordinary text. Thus, unlike the text in a book, hypertext permits you, by clicking with a mouse, to immediately access text in one of millions of different electronic sources. (Merriam-Webster) Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperlinks-blue-revisited/ WIKI “The most complete realisation of the universal world encyclopaedia concept expounded by both Otlet and Wells is the Web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which is universal in scope, far larger and complete than its predecessors, and freely licensed. However, although there are a myriad of rules and guidelines in place, it is operated entirely differently: by (usually anonymous) volunteers, and it exists as a registered charity, independent of any direct governmental or existing international association support and influence. In short, it is based on trust rather than expert authority, and can be considered a perfect demonstration of how the larger Internet as a whole differs from the predictions of Otlet and Wells. (Allington-Smith, 2017) Relationally Encoded Links and the Rhetoric of Hypertext George P. landow Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access.[1] Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web,[2] where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet. (wiki) All forms of digital poetry comprise a singular genre that contains multiple subcategories such as kinetic, visual, hypertext, hypermedia and generative poetry. Generative poetry, produced by computer algorithms, is arranged as a sequence of words, or signs and symbols, according to a program. Some of the experimental features and structural principles of generative poetry were invented and practically applied long before the computing era and the World Wide Web. On Generative Poetry: Structural, Stylistic and Lexical Features Svetlana Anatolevna Kuchina Generative poetry is the oldest e-poetry genre, but it remains relevant today through the new e-literary genres like bots (small autonomous programs that post to Twitter or other social media). Most Twitter bots are based on permutational schemes (recombining elements into new words or variations). Poem.exe by Liam Cooke is a micropoetry bot that generates three or fourline haiku-like poems (Cooke, 2016). The Poem.exe relates to the tradition of permutational poetry. The Poem.exe verbal data is based on haiku poems written by Koboyashi Issa (Japanese poet, 1763-1828). The program selects random lines from Issa’s database keeping the basic syntax and lineation intact and tweets the resulting poem every two hours. The essential element of this work is its automatic interface, which needs no interaction with the reader and displays automatically generated poems. The most frequent type of permutation procedures of algorithmically generated poems is the combinatory algorithm. The method was suggested by Raymond Queneau in his A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems where the fourteen lines from ten sonnets with the same sets of rhymes can be exchanged to produce one hundred thousand billion unique sonnets. In the poetry generator Frequency written by Scott Rettberg this principle is used along with the different constraints based on rhyme schemes, syllable and character count (Rettberg, 2016). According to Christopher T. Funkhouser the permutation procedures of algorithmically generated poems can be divided into three categories (Funkhouser, 2008). The first type of these categories is a permutational scheme which is based on the algorithms recombining elements into new words (Book of all words by Piwkowski) or new poem lines (Poem.exe by Cooke). The second type of poem generators is based on combinatory patterns using limited, pre-set word lists in controlled or random combinations (Frequency generator by Rettberg). And the third type, which is very close to the combinatory technique, is based on syntactic templates and grammatical frames to create an image of “sense” (Dizains by Benabou, Triolets by Braffort). Dada and Oulipo postulate totally different philosophies concerning the creation of literary works. Denying any certainty, Dada tried to find freedom everywhere (language meaning, cultural independence, poetry). According to Dada such techniques as open-form poetry, the use of collage principles (mixture of sound, image, and graphic components) and irrationality free and update art. On the contrary, Oulipo uses strict constraints to investigate the potentiality of language. Both visions (Dada and Oulipo) reincarnate, in some sense, in the age of information technology and Internet. The digital environment makes it possible to implement both strategies in a form of generative poem, transforming absolute freedom into random choice of preselected elements made by the strict constraint of computer algorithm. Digital poetics encompasses a wider range of techniques than those described here. They include hypertext poetry, kinetic poetry, chatbots as art, interactive fiction [6], multimedia poetry, and even poetry that presents itself as a game [8]. However, for the purposes of this paper, we are interested only in English poems represented as ASCII text, in which the computer has a meaningful role in determining what the text will be. This is our working definition of “generative poetry”. We are not the first to attempt a taxonomy of generative poetry. Roque [28] classifies poems according to the goals of their creators, while Funkhouser [9] uses the categories of permutational, combinatorial, and template-based generation. Gervas [11] classified four types of artificial intelligence techniques used for poetry. These taxonomies are useful. However, our taxonomy serves needs that others do not. It includes generative poetry from a variety of sources, whether scientific, hobbyist, or artistic, and focuses not on technical processes but on the purposes for which these processes are used. Further, our taxonomy illustrates how generative poetry can move forward both computationally and artistically A Taxonomy of Generative Poetry Techniques Carolyn Lamb, Daniel G. Brown, Charles L.A. Clarke Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided to by clicking or tapping.[1] A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. The text that is linked from is known as anchor text. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext system, and to create a hyperlink is to hyperlink (or simply to link). A user following hyperlinks is said to navigate or browse the hypertext. wiki BECOMING HYPERTEXT CHIA AMISOLA Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction. The term can also be used to describe traditionally published books in which a nonlinear narrative and interactive narrative is achieved through internal references. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Enrique Jardiel Poncela's La Tournée de Dios (1932), Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963; translated as Hopscotch), and Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) are early examples predating the word "hypertext", while a common pop-culture example is the Choose Your Own Adventure series in young adult fiction and other similar gamebooks, or Jason Shiga's Meanwhile, a graphic novel that allows readers to choose from a total of 3,856 possible linear narratives.[1] In 1969, IBM and Ted Nelson from Brown University gained permission from Nabokov's publisher to use Pale Fire as a demonstration of an early hypertext system and, in general, hypertext's potential. The unconventional form of the demonstration was dismissed in favour of a more technically oriented variant.[2] There is little consensus on the definition of hypertext literature.[3] The similar term cybertext is often used interchangeably with hypertext.[4] In hypertext fiction, the reader assumes a significant role in the creation of the narrative. Each user obtains a different outcome based on the choices they make. Cybertexts may be equated to the transition between a linear piece of literature, such as a novel, and a game. In a novel, the reader has no choice, the plot and the characters are all chosen by the author; there is no 'user', just a 'reader'. This is important because it entails that the person working their way through the novel is not an active participant. In a game, the person makes decisions and decides what actions to take, what punches to punch, or when to jump. To Espen Aarseth, cybertext is not a genre in itself; in order to classify traditions, literary genres and aesthetic value, texts should be examined at a more local level.[5] To Aarseth, hypertext fiction is a kind of ergodic literature: In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.[6] To Aarseth, the process of reading immersive narrative, in contrast, involves "trivial" effort, that is, merely moving one's eyes along lines of text and turning pages; the text does not resist the reader. Twine fictions have often been cited as being a direct descendant of hypertext fiction.[15][16] “The move from document-centered hypertext systems to map-based hypertext systems had some unforeseen but far-reaching implications: relationships between nodes could be expressed in more than one way. Maps showed interconnectedness explicitly, usually in the form of a directed graph. But also node proximity came into play; relationships among different nodes or documents could be indicated simply on the basis of their relative location. The use of these map-based hypertext systems to author new information spaces uncovered an interesting phenomenon. Users avoided the explicit linking mechanisms in favor of the more implicit expression of relationships through spatial proximity and visual attributes…” Spatial Hypertext: An Alternative to Navigational and Semantic Links, Frank M. Shipman, III and Catherine C. Marshall, ACM Computing Surveys 31(4), 1999. Patchwork Girl or a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelly and Herself is a work of electronic literature by American author Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1995. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story as an important work of hypertext fiction. "Shelley Jackson's brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl is an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors."[1] (wiki) “ afternoon, a story, is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce Close reading Patchwork Girl is a complicated undertaking. The overarching story is relatively straightforward—as Jaya Sarkar explains it, In Patchwork Girl, Victor Frankenstein’s aborted second creation, the female monster, whom he violently tears up mid-construction, is sewn up by the author Mary Shelley herself and then she engages in a love affair with her creation, before the monster sets out for America to start her own life. However, the hypertext format allows a reader to move through a text in a non-linear fashion, and the ramifications of choosing your own adventure are many. Even a hypertext that does not contain a huge number of branching narratives gives at least some control of its narrative to the reader. This fragments the hypertext into any number of stories or bits of stories, which requires the reader to (1) move through the hypertext multiple times in order to piece together a greater (though possibly still incomplete) sense if its whole and/or (2) to put it colloquially, skip stuff. Rather than leaving this close reading to chance, I am going to cheat a little to alleviate the fragmentation that there is not time for now. I am going to explicitly and intentionally skip most of Patchwork Girl and resurrect a narrow set of lexia near the end of a single narrative branch (Jackson’s title page splits the work into five major branches [see Figure 2]). I have chosen the journal branch for three reasons: (1) it intersects strongly with Shelley’s Frankenstein in terms of theme and characterisation, (2) it is one of the first branches listed on the title page and therefore likely to be encountered by readers new to or perfunctorily familiar with the text; and (3) the interplay between the three possible Patchwork Girl authors is prominent in its passages. Additionally, rather than moving through the hypertext multiple times, I have made use of the built-in Storyspace Map in order to see and pre-emptively navigate (or not navigate) the various loops of “lexia” in the journal branch. Lexia is “a term used by Roland Barthes (1974) to define blocks of text, or ‘units of reading’ [that was] later expanded by George P. Landow to include other forms of media: ‘blocks of words, moving or static images, or sounds’” (King, Citation2009, p. 2). Lexia iscommonly used when discussing hypertext fiction to describe a discrete block of text. In Patchwork Girl, each lexia [appears on] the screen, like a page, and is replaced by a new lexia when the reader clicks on certain words or phrases or, in many cases, anywhere on the lexia. Patchwork Girl and Patchwork Girl are inseparable from the hypertext medium in ways that render a close reading of the text both intriguing and intricate. As Natalie King so eloquently put it:Together, the link and the lexia – the ‘skin and bones’ of a hypertext system – provide a story for the reader to explore. One can travel through this system, reading the lexias and clicking on links, to piece together the monster's story as well as her body. The relationship between the body and the written word is emphasized in this approach to story-telling …  With lexias representing the monster's body parts, and hyperlinks the seams of their connections, the network operates as a pluralistic group of systems: a body. Form and content become inseparable. In Christopher Keep’s pithy summation, “Patchwork Girl, then, is not simply a character in a novel, she is the novel” My slightly-cheated close reading here is a representation of what I call an interactive close reading, which mirrors King’s notion of form-and-content inseparability by weaving together three separate close readings: (1) a visual reading, (2) an experiential reading, and (3) a literary reading. Hypertext and its afterlives: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and/as undead electronic literature Calvin Olsen afternoon, a story, écrit avec un « a » minuscule, est une œuvre de Littérature numérique écrite en 1987 par l'auteur Américain Michael Joyce. Elle a été publiée par Eastgate Systems en 1990, et est considéré comme l'un des premiers travaux de fiction hypertextuelle. afternoon a initialement proposé au public comme une démonstration des capacités du système de création hypertexte Storyspace, annoncé en 1987 lors de la première conférence à l'hypertexte de l'Association for Computing Machinery dans un article de Michael Joyce et Jay David Bolter1. En 1990, le texte a été publié sur disquette et distribué sous le même format par Eastgate Systems. Il a été suivi par une série d'autres fictions hypertextuelles écrites avec Storyspace, notamment Victory Garden de Stuart Moulthrop, Patchwork Girl de Shelley Jackson et Marble Springs par Deena Larsen. Eastgate a continué de publier afternoon, a story dans les années 2010, le distribuant sur un lecteur flash USB2. Stitch Bitch: the patchwork girl by Shelley Jackson posted: november 4, 1997 [The text below is a complete transcript of Jackson's presentation at the Transformations of the BookConference held at MIT on October 24-25, 1998.] “EVERYTHING AT ONCE You're not where you think you are. In hypertext, everything is there at once and equally weighted. It is a body whose brain is dispersed throughout the cells, fraught with potential, fragile with indecision, or rather strong in foregoing decisions, the way a vine will bend but a tree can fall down. It is always at its end and always at its beginning, the birth and the death are simultaneous and reflect each other harmoniously, it is like living in the cemetary and the hospital at once, it is easy to see the white rectangles of hospital beds and the white rectangles of gravestones and the white rectangles of pages as being essentially synonymous. Every page-moment is both expectant and memorializing, which is certainly one reason why I have buried the patchwork girl's body parts in separate plots in a zone called the cemetary, while in the story zone they are bumptious and ambulatory. Hypertext doesn't know where it's going. "Those things which occur to me, occur to me not from the root up but rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let someone then attempt to seize them, let someone attempt to seize a blade of grass and hold fast to it when it begins to grow only from the middle," said Kafka. It's got no through-line. Like the body, it has no point to make, only clusters of intensities, and one cluster is as central as another, which is to say, not at all. What sometimes substitutes for a center is just a switchpoint, a place from which everything diverges, a Cheshire aftercat. A hypertext never seems quite finished, it isn't clear just where it ends, it's fuzzy at the edges, you can't figure out what matters and what doesn't, what's matter and what's void, what's the bone and what's the flesh, it's all decoration or it's all substance. Normally when you read you can orient yourself by a few important facts and let the details fall where they may. The noun trumps the adjective, person trumps place, idea trumps example. In hypertext, you can't find out what's important so you have to pay attention to everything, which is exhausting like being in a foreign country, you are not native.” Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star by Nick Montfort 12-30-2000 the hypertext murder case "Hypertext is dead - " declared Markku Eskelinen at Digital Arts and Culture '99 in Atlanta. "Cybertext killed it."1 No doubt, interesting hypertext poetry and fiction remains to be written, but - if we consider hypertext as a category that defines a special, valid space for authorship and criticism of computerized works of writing - Eskelinen is clearly right. The hypertext corpus has been produced; if it is to be resurrected, it will only be as part of a patchwork that includes other types of literary machines. One viable category today, perhaps the most interesting one to consider, is that of "cybertext." The word was first used in the critical discourse by Espen Aarseth in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. The term denotes not all possible networks of lexia, but the more general set of text machines. These machines are operated by readers, and depending upon how they are operated they present different outputs, different texts for reading. The cybertext category therefore contains hypertext, which is operated by means of clicking and traversing links, but it is much broader. Notably absent from Aarseth's definition of cybertext is mention of the link, and this missing link - or, more specifically, this replacement of the link with a more interesting feature of computational literary interaction - frees the new category from the chains of a critical-theory-influenced and essentially non-computational perspective. [...]Oddly, the idea that hypertexts can appear in print has been a contentious point for some critics, many of whom either see the electronic digital computer as an essential element in defining a category of interactive texts or consider all texts (which one can, after all, skip around in) as hypertexts. Aarseth deftly disposes of this issue by simply making his definition independent of the medium in which the work is presented. Note that the possible paths through a static Web site with five pages, each offering at most two sorts of link, can be conceptualized with a very similar diagram - with the same diagram, in fact, appropriately labeled. Hypertexts of the sort that typify the category - whether crafted in HTML or various proprietary environments such as the Microsoft Help Workshop or Eastgate's Storyspace - present lexia (pages) as nodes, and links as transition rules. Such hypertexts are text machines of the first class, finite automata. Adding random effects, revealing or concealing links based on the history of interaction, or allowing the reader to jump to a node by name, will of course move the hypertext beyond this simplest level of computational complexity. But the essential definition of the form, a set of lexia connected by links, most clearly relates to the lowest and simplest level of the Chomsky hierarchy. The cybertext, according to Aarseth, is a machine for the production of expression. It may model a world underneath the textual surface (as is done in MUDs and text adventures), it may select conversational responses based on the reader's textual input (as Eliza and Racter do), or it may (as in hypertext) offer additional lexia based on the links that the reader follows. The defining characteristic of these text machines - what distinguishes them from Ulysses, for instance, however allusive and open to sampling that text might be - is that they calculate. They do not, essentially, have links. They essentially have computational ability. The paradigm of the hypertext is the least powerful computational machine, the finite automaton. The prototypical cybertext is of the fourth and most powerful computational class - a Turing machine. [...] ADA LOVELACE britannica Ada Lovelace (born December 10, 1815, Piccadilly Terrace, Middlesex [now in London], England—died November 27, 1852, Marylebone, London) was an English mathematician, an associate of Charles Babbage, for whose prototype of a digital computer she created a program. She has been called the first computer programmer. Lovelace was the daughter of famed poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke Byron, who legally separated two months after her birth. Her father then left Britain forever, and his daughter never knew him personally. She was educated privately by tutors and then self-educated but was helped in her advanced studies by mathematician-logician Augustus De Morgan, the first professor of mathematics at the University of London. On July 8, 1835, she married William King, 8th Baron King, and, when he was created an earl in 1838, she became countess of Lovelace. Tan, Czander. 2020. “The Poetics of Computer Code: Tracing Digital Inscription in Ada Lovelace’s England.” Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 10(1): 3, pp. 1–30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.355 When we think about the digital, that is, in “digital technology” or “digital humanities,” what often come to mind are computers, speed and efficiency, and the electronic ethereality of such entities as the Internet and the Cloud. However, at its root, what “digital” refers to is how we handle information. To be digital is to handle information digitally, that is, in digits; specifically for us, those are ones and zeros. Calling our century the “Information Age” hints at this attention to information, though the label points more to our economic basis rather than our digital paradigm. After all, we have always handled information and attempted to make meaning from it; we have language and we have poetry. But what does the digital paradigm entail? What meaning do we make from ones and zeros? And how might it have developed? In 1804, the textile industry was revolutionized by the Jacquard loom, a machine capable of interpreting holes punched on paper cards. These holes articulated patterns that were then visualized on woven textiles. Besides speeding up manufacturing processes, automation by the Jacquard loom also expressed a digital paradigm: the information of textile patterns was inscribed into a series of values based on whether or not a punched hole was present in a certain read order. An inscription based on “whether or not” is the foundation of the binary language. Paradigmatically speaking, information was encoded into a logical series of presences/absences and true/false. Our algorithms, and subsequently computer code, thus developed from this paradigm for handling information. The Jacquard loom influenced the work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace to design what is now recognized as the first computer and first computational algorithm, respectively. Lovelace’s Notes, which contain this algorithm, explicitly discusses the mechanism of the Jacquard loom and its punched cards (See Appendix A for an image of Lovelace’s algorithms, in which she writes specifiable steps for the Analytical Engine to calculate the Bernoulli numbers). But is the punched card, or its informational paradigm, the only thread linking the loom and the computer? Or does that historic tie evoke a more complex and culturally nuanced relationship that speaks through the punches on the card? In order to answer these questions, we would have to look at the discourses that place machines and their algorithms In her book Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing, Annette Vee urges us to develop basic literacy of coding languages. She considers code “a socially situated, symbolic system that enables new kinds of expressions as well as the scaling up of preexisting forms of communication” (Vee 2017, 3) As Lovelace herself has often been quoted writing, “[w]e may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves” (Toole 1991, 248). We could trace the connotations of weaving from mythologies such as Zhinü, a heavenly maiden from Chinese folklore who wove robes out of clouds for her father, the Jade Emperor, to when Penelope wove and unwove the burial shroud to delay suitors in the Odyssey. If we connected these connotations to the basis of automated weaving, we could similarly think of computer coding as a kind of weaving and unweaving. Just as woven images and poetry can be read and interpreted, so can the punched cards, Lovelace’s mathematics, and our resultant computer code. Thus, the expressions of code through, say, a smartphone application, can also be read and interpreted within their material contexts. If we follow Coleridge’s theory that poetry attempts to use language to render reality (not just represent it), then poetry can also be said to inscribe memory. Thus, the activity of inscription denotes a double duty: something is carved into existence (that is, created or made), and because of its symbolic form, it is also representational and readable. In contemporary academic terms, Susan Stewart (2002) writes: “Poetry is both the repetition of an ontological moment and the ongoing process or work of enunciation by which that moment is recursively known and carried forward” (15). The repetition of moment refers to the representation and reading of poetry, where the reader enacts an experience by reading inscription, while the “ongoing process” refers to the act of inscription (or “enunciation”) in the now, by which the enactment is inscribed. To explain one way poetry does this, Stewart uses the rhetorical concept of deixis, which refers to linguistic shifters whose meanings only emerge in a given context. Deictic terms, or indices—such as “I,” “here,” or “now”—are not just context-dependent for signification, but they also set the bounds for the contexts themselves, “[e]mphasizing the bringing forth of forms over notions of imitation and representation” (150). The word “now,” for example, refers to the temporal moment of its inscription. As an indexical reference, however, the same “now” read in the future would both refer to a past moment (the moment of inscription) as well as the Before we examine specific instances of how Lovelace’s mathematical notation employs this poetics of writing memory, it is important to understand the machine for which these notations were written. The Analytical Engine, known as the first designed digital computer, was designed by Charles Babbage in 1837. Its main body was a “mill” which contained complex arrangements of gears and a number of mechanical columns, or arms, on which the numerical values to be calculated would be inscribed (See Appendix B for an image of Babbage’s trial model of the Analytical Engine). The operator would provide instructions to the Engine by means of hole-punched cards, inspired by the Jacquard loom, which contained the binary information of the elements of mathematical expressions. The difference between the format of these expressions and that found in conventional mathematics is that the former had to directly affect the material movements of the Engine; equations had to be performed by the machine, rather than remaining in the abstract. The first attempts at computational expressions that considered the materiality of the Engine are found in L. F. Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented,” written in French and translated by Lovelace in 1843. I am not suggesting that we impose conventional poetic forms on computer code, though there might be generative possibilities in comparing, say, the structure of a sonnet with that of defining a computational function. Rather, I propose that computer code is already structured in poetic forms. Computational processes, such as iteration, recursion, or while-loops, for example, are symbolic inscriptions that produce material effects; they stage a construction of meaning and memory based on their material contexts. Coding languages underlie the entirety of our digital technologies; and since most of our everyday lives intertwine with the digital, the forms its languages take produce immediate ramifications. Besides using these technologies for computational research, it would be productive for the humanities to be literate in the paradigms that underlie their encodings. Ones and zeros and specifiable algorithmic steps do not just produce new forms of information but, perhaps more importantly to the humanities, transform the ways we handle information and make meaning from it. After all, computer codes are human languages: they are woven with wefts we warp, themselves weaving and unweaving clouds of thought into the electric shawls of our screens. 7 “I shall in due time be a poet”: Ada Lovelace’s Poetical Science in Its Literary Context Imogen Forbes-Macphail 1 t she wrote that she did “not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician),”29 which implies a certain comparability between the two pursuits. Indeed, for Lovelace, one could lead to the other—as she wrote after one particularly “mathematical week,” the effect of such study was in fact an “immense development of imagination; so much so, that I feel not doubt if I continue my studies I shall in due time be a Poet.”30 30. Lovelace, Letter to Lady Byron, January 11, [1841] Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, 138. Lovelace belongs to this tradition of perceiving beauty and poetry in mathematics. Sophia De Morgan writes that when the young Ada Byron first encountered the Difference Engine, she “saw the great beauty of the invention.”36 Lovelace herself declares mathematical science to be marked with “intrinsic beauty, symmetry and logical completeness,”37 and denotes certain mathematical processes 36. Sophia De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882), 89. 37. Lovelace, “Translator’s Notes,” 696. as “beautiful”;38 she describes the table and diagrams in her notes and translation as full of “beauty & symmetry.”39 There are ways, indeed, in which science and mathematics can be beautiful, and, in their own way, poetical. 38. Lovelace, Letter to Annabella Acheson, [postmarked January 6, 1835], Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, 69. 39. Lovelace, Letter to Charles Babbage, July 2, [1843], Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, 200 The desire to read the universe like a book, a poem, or an equation is shared by both poets and mathematicians, even if the languages they use to approach it are different. In conceiving of mathematics as a language which allows humans to decipher the world-text, Lovelace is thus able to simultaneously participate in two traditions: mathematical and poetic. Lovelace perceives, in the Analytical Engine, some of the incarnational or materializing possibilities that Coleridge and Byron yearned for in literature. The Engine, she writes, establishes a “uniting link [...] between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science,” bringing the “mental and the material [...] into more intimate and effective connexion with each other.”54 As Walter Isaacson observes, Lovelace has subsequently become associated with the question, “Can man-made machines ever truly think?”80 Perhaps, however, a question better related to her own interests is whether they can produce artworks. The two questions have, in some cases, been collapsed into one. In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing cites as one of the possible “objections” to machine intelligence Professor Jefferson’s Lister Oration from 1949, in which he maintained: Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it, but know that it had written it.81 Turing terms this the “Argument from Consciousness.” Poetry is especially important for this argument, because although we can never really understand what is going on in another’s mind, encountering a poem (a “spontaneous overflow of powerful 80. Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 12. 81. Jefferson, cited in Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life, plus The Secrets of Enigma, ed. B. Jack Copeland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 451. . In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron refers to his poem as “words [...] woven into song.”114 According to Lovelace, the Analytical Engine can “weave” algebraic patterns, and theoretically compose music of any complexity. Could it not, by acting upon words instead of numbers, likewise weave these into song? This would assume, as Lovelace stipulates, that one could find some way of expressing the “mutual fundamental relations” between words “by those of the abstract science In an 1846 cartoon, Punch suggests that by harnessing a “Verse-grinding Machine, exhibited last year” (presumably the Eureka) to a “Euphonia,” or “Speaking machine,” one could produce an “extemporaneous poet” who might be “taught to recite with advantage in the houses of the nobility and gentry,” so that even the performance, as well as the production of poetry, might be mechanized.128 T As Lovelace’s letters demonstrate, she vacillated frequently between literary, mathematical, and musical ambitions. In her theorizing of the Engine, and her suggestions for its application, Lovelace’s poetic leanings are evident. Her descriptions of mathematics emphasize its capacity for the kinds of beauty and power that are often associated with poetry, especially by her Romantic precursors, and in one way, at least, her conception of the Engine as capable of materializing symbolic operations in its physical machinery actualizes and surpasses some of the ambitions of the Romantic poets. Her suggestion that the Engine might be capable of operating on “things besides number,” along with her desire to find a “calculus of the nervous system,” and her description of herself as an “instrument” for forces beyond her control, situates her work against the backdrop of Romantic models of the poetic mind, and renders the Analytical Engine a provocative thought experiment in the context of a long-standing discussion surrounding imagination, creativity, and originality, which had preoccupied poets and literary scholars alike. “It is a mix between concrete and found poetry. It is a play on naming, meaning and discovery. It is a collection of five poems I wrote using domain names of websites. The site is online at www.urlpoetry.club.” In interactive fiction, this subversive typing is an interesting way to interact, and has been recognized as such since early in the life of the form. Zork creators David Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson mention this mode as one of two interesting ones (the other being the problem-solving mode of interaction) in their 1979 article in IEEE Computer: "a great deal of the enjoyment of such games is derived by probing their responses in a sort of informal Turing test: 'I wonder what it will say if I do this?' The players (and designers) delight in clever (or unexpected) responses to otherwise useless actions." The operator using the text/machine in this way is engaged, and enjoys the text responses that are provided, but seems to be ignoring the overriding interactive and narrative purposes for which the interactive fiction was purportedly created. [...] Cybertexts long ago demonstrated their potential to be provocative, affecting, and powerful. Thanks to Aarseth's book, a larger literary category has been declared worthy of critical attention - a category which includes Eliza, MUDs, poetry that involves text morphing and motion in response to input, interactive fiction, and other sorts of non-hypertextual works. Additionally, thanks to Cybertext, authors who create works in these forms are more likely to find their efforts acknowledged as valid from a literary standpoint. Critics may still prefer to examine hypertexts, if their tastes in text/machine operation lead them to dwell on that set of cybertexts, but they will find it increasingly difficult to consider other cybertexts - with their more powerful computational abilities and their demonstrated ability to affect the consciousness and unconsciousness of the operator - as categorically less serious and worthwhile. love /generated poem Strachey love letter algorithm From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In 1952, Christopher Strachey wrote a combinatory algorithm for the Manchester Mark 1 computer which could create love letters. The poems it generated have been seen as the first work of electronic literature[1] and a queer critique of heteronormative expressions of love.[2][3][4] Alan Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges dates the creation of the love letter generator, also known as M.U.C., to the summer of 1952, when Strachey was working with Turing, although Gaboury dates its creation to 1953.[2] Hodges writes that while many of their colleagues thought M.U.C. silly, “it greatly amused Alan and Christopher Strachey – whose love lives, as it happened, were rather similar too”.[5] Strachey was known to be gay.[2] Although this appears to be the first work of computer-generated literature, the structure is similar to the nineteenth-century parlour game Consequences, and the early twentieth-century surrealist game exquisite corpse. The Mad Libs books were conceived around the same time as Strachey wrote the love letter generator.[3] “Strachey described the operations of this program in a 1954 essay in the art journal Enounter (immediately following texts by William Faulkner and P. G. Wodehouse): Apart from the beginning and the ending of the letters, there are only two basic types of sentence. The first is “My — (adj.) — (noun) — (adv.) — (verb) your — (adj.) — (noun).” There are lists of appropriate adjectives, nouns, adverbs, and verbs from which the blanks are filled in at random. There is also a further random choice as to whether or not the adjectives and adverb are included at all. I would like to suggest, however, that examination of individual outputs will not reveal what is interesting about Strachey’s project. As he wrote in Encounter: “The chief point of interest, however, is not the obvious crudity of the scheme, nor even in the ways in which it might be improved, but in the remarkable simplicity of the plan when compared with the diversity of the letters it produces.” That is to say, Strachey had discovered, and created an example of, the basic principles of combinatory literature (10 years before Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) — which still lie at the heart of much digital literature today.” HOW TO WRITE POEMS WITH A COMPUTER By JOHN MORRIS McMahon, Robin S. “Hocus Pocus With Hexameters Or Latin By Numbers.” The Classical Outlook, vol. 97, no. 3, 2022, pp. 99–110. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27186319. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025. Some Victorian observers were discomfited by the notion of a machine writing poetry, a challenge to human creativity if ever there was one. The controversy over artificial intelligence has only intensified since then. Maybe that’s why a device so seemingly esoteric still captures people’s interest. "There are many obvious imperfections in this scheme (indeed very little thought went into its devising), and the fact that the vocabulary was largely based on Roget’s Thesaurus lends a very peculiar flavor to the results." For Strachey, though, the interesting thing was how a simple setup, using only about seventy base words, could produce a combinatorial explosion of results—on the order of three hundred billion different letters. “My dear Norman, I don’t think I really do know much about jobs, except the one I had during the war, and that certainly did not involve any travelling. I think they do take on conscripts. It certainly involved a good deal of hard thinking, but whether you’d be interested I don’t know. Philip Hall was in the same racket and on the whole, I should say, he didn’t care for it. However I am not at present in a state in which I am able to concentrate well, for reasons explained in the next paragraph. I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven’t the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out. Glad you enjoyed broadcast. Jefferson certainly was rather disappointing though. I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future. Turing believes machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think Yours in distress, Alan” https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/ uman and artificial intelligence might be. Examining Turing’s provocation, it is striking how directly it maps onto the work that he was undertaking at precisely this moment alongside Christopher Strachey. Known as “the man who wrote perfect programs” at a time when programming was an exceedingly difficult and error-prone process, Strachey’s had a far from conventional road to computation. As nephew to the critic and biographer Lytton Strachey, Christopher was raised at 51 Gordon Square in proximity to Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, and the other members of the Bloomsbury Group of writers, intellectuals, and philosophers. Despite this privileged background, Strachey did not meet with academic success as a young child, and he suffered a breakdown in his second year at university while coming to terms with his homosexuality. While Strachey had hoped for a career in academia, he had neither the grades nor the disposition for a prominent fellowship, and so following graduation he spent over a decade as a teacher and later schoolmaster of young children at a number of lower-ranking institutions. Beginning in the late 1940s, Strachey learned of several computing machines being developed by Turing and others at the University of Manchester. Strachey had met Turing socially several years prior at King’s College when Turing was a junior research fellow there and so reached out to Turing directly and was granted access to the Manchester Mark 1—one of the first stored-program digital computers. While the majority of research applications using the Mark 1 were purely mathematical, Strachey developed a number of surprising creative applications that remain the most noteworthy uses of the computer’s comparatively limited capabilities. These include some of the earliest computer music, one of the earliest computer games, and arguably the first work of computational art: a love letter–generating algorithm developed alongside Turing. Strachey is a fascinating figure in the history of computing, not only for his field-defining work within computer science but also for how he exemplifies the complexity of this early moment in computational research, when much of what would become the field of computer science was still unfixed. As an outsider, Strachey did not necessarily share the investments of other researchers working alongside him at the time; for instance, he believed in a clear distinction between the role of computational design and the engineering of computational systems.9 IThe love letter generator is most exemplary in this regard. Taking advantage of the random number generator built into the Mark 1, the program runs through a database of terms to generate formulaic yet evocative purple prose. In an article published the same year as Turing’s death (1954), Strachey describes the love letter generator’s function and gives one of the few surviving examples of the machine’s original output: Darling Sweetheart, You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking year Yours beautifully M. U. C.10 Titled “The ‘Thinking’ Machine,” the article explicitly addresses the ways these early experiments served as provocations for Turing’s own work on artificial intelligence. Strachey notes that “[o]ne of the most interesting facts brought out by the attempts to make computers imitate human methods of thought is that a great deal of what is usually known as thinking can in fact be reduced to a relatively simple set of rules of the type which can be incorporated into a program.”11 "we can see the generator as a parody, though its operations, of one of the activities seen as most sincere by the mainstream culture: the declaration of love through words. That is, [Wardrip-Fruin sees] the love generator, not as a process for producing parodies, but as itself a parody of process." Alan Turing, an English mathematician who is considered by many to be the father of computer science. In his relatively short career Turing formalized such concepts as "algorithm" and "computation," he helped crack the Nazi Enigma Machine during the Second World War, was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, and developed early research on such concepts as neural nets, morphogenesis, and mathematical biology. Turing was also an openly gay man who, in January of 1952 was convicted of Gross Indecency by the British government under the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, made to undergo chemical castration, and ultimately committed suicide in June of 1954. Instead I hope to suggest that queerness is itself inherent within computational logic, and that this queerness becomes visible when we investigate those cleavages that partition the lives of these men into distinct technical and sexual spheres of existence. Ultimately I hope to show that there exists a structuring logic to computational systems that, while nearly totalizing, does not account for all forms of knowledge, and which excludes certain acts, behaviors, and modes of being. The insistence on not only the importance but broad relevance of an affective sexual archive is fundamental to this history.[14] Thus, this is not a reinterpretation of history, or a queering of computation. Rather it is an insistence on the queer as it exists and has always existed within them. DIGRESSION QUEER (heteronormativity, indecency, elizabeth shame on you, suicide and what is there to forgive?) et une critique queer des expressions hétéronormatives de l’amour. [2][3][4] [2] Hodges écrit que, alors que beaucoup de ses collègues pensaient que M.U.C. était ridicule, « cela a beaucoup amusé Alan et Christopher Strachey – dont les vies amoureuses étaient aussi assez similaires ». [5] Strachey était connu pour être gay. [2] En 1952, il a été accusé de “grossière indécence” après avoir admis une relation sexuelle avec un autre homme et on lui a dit de choisir soit l’emprisonnement soit la castration chimique comme punition. Il a choisi la seconde. Alan Turing a été retrouvé mort le 8 juin 1954, un jour après s’être suicidé. Il n’avait que 41 ans. Turing a écrit la lettre suivante en 1952 à son ami et collègue mathématicien, Norman Routledge, peu de temps avant de plaider coupable. “Turing believes machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think Yours in distress, Alan” « Turing croit que les machines pensent Turing couche avec des hommes Les machines ne pensent donc pas Amicalement, Alan” https://elmcip.net/creative-work/muc-love-letter-generator It was also preceded by John Clark's Latin Verse Machine (1830-1843), the first automated text generator. Between 1830 and 1843 Clark constructed a machine that could generate a new line of Latin hexameter verse every minute. He exhibited the machine at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, during the spring of 1845. The Latin Verse Machine is the first automated text generator, and a pioneering work of generative art and generative literature.[5][6] It is a remarkable precursor of the genre of electronic literature, although it is of course mechanical rather than electronic. Clark's machine predates the first electronic text generator (Christopher Strachey's love letter generator) by more than a century. Clark's comparison of his text generator to the contemporary kaleidoscope is evidence of a theoretical interest in generative art and literature.[7]John Clark (1785-1853) était un imprimeur et inventeur britannique qui a créé le premier générateur de texte automatisé, la Latin Verse Machine. Clark described his machine as an illustration of a theory of “kaleidoscopic evolution” whereby the Latin verse is “conceived in the mind of the machine” then mechanically produced and displayed.[3] Clark can be regarded as a pioneer of cognitive science and computational creativity. “One of the earliest known poetry generators was born from the Victorian enthusiasm for automata. In 1845, inventor John Clark debuted his Eureka machine at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London. For the price of 1 shilling, visitors to the exhibition space could wind up the wooden, bureau-like contraption and watch the mechanized spectacle of wooden staves, metal wires, and revolving drums grinding out a line of Latin verse that would appear in the machine’s front window. More specifically, a grammatically- and rhythmically-correct line of dactylic hexameter, the kind used by Virgil and Ovid. The meter-making machine relied on producing just six words that never varied in scansion or syntax (always adjective-noun-adverb-verb-noun-adjective, as in ‘martia castra foris prænarrant proelia multa’ or ‘martial encampments foreshow many battles abroad’). Despite its constraints, the system was capable of churning out an estimated 26 million permutations.” Why aren’t there more websites about love? A conversation with Chia Amisola Elan Ullendorff “Love is a theme that comes up time and time again in your work. Is that an intentional choice? Is there something about the web that makes it ripe for exploring or expressing love? I didn't really realize that until a few months ago, when I noticed that a lot of what I was driven to make were websites that serve as love letters to my friends. I would sit down one day missing people from home or feeling overwhelmed with emotions. I wanted to capture that somehow, to send a message about how I was feeling at a specific moment in time. Making is definitely a love language of mine, not necessarily because 'material' is necessary to prove love, but because I read love as a condition and practice of stewarding in each other something that might outlast us both. A lot of those messages tend to be about love: love for where I am, love for others, love for moments, love that is in the form of longing especially. It feels weird to everyone around me that URLs I send are meant to be received as love letters. The common notion of a website is so distant from that of a handwritten note, because most people are used to large platforms that aren't working in their best interests. But from my end, I know the labor and effort that goes into maintaining websites, and also the intimacy that comes when you deliver them in a specific way. A website is an act of demanding space for yourself and the people you love and constantly tending that space. It's a way of naming: to take on a URL and courageously ask to be witnessed, visited. I understand certain sites that I frequent as continuous labors of love, whether they're directed to a specific person or something broader. I see making websites and making in general as nothing more than a way of asking to be loved. Can you tell me about a website that you made for just one person? Towards the end of 2021 I made I love it when you love me too. It’s a simple website that cycles through phrases beginning with “I love it when you—.” A lot of them are specific scenarios I’d collected in my Notes app inspired by my current partner. I was afraid to deliver it to them directly, so I posted it publicly. It was nice to see that even though it was made for one person, it resonated with a lot of other people, some of whom repurposed the open-source code and made gifts for their loved ones. I later began using the whole site as a template to teach about the 'poetic web' to others. It feels like the love I originally directed to my partner and a small group of friends has now multiplied and shapeshifted for others to build on themselves. A lot of websites don't feel like gifts; scale is a challenge for that. I also have struggled with needing to justify a utility in my sites, especially coming from my background in the Philippines where I was always so honed in on finding a greater purpose and problem to solve. It took a while to realize that there's nothing truer than poetic expression or more simply, expression. It sounds like in giving that website to your partner, you struggled with something that I struggle with too: with a physical gift, there are all sorts of rituals we have developed to add meaning to the packaging and the ceremony of giving the gift. But with digital gifts there’s less to draw on. I'm kind of jealous of printed material as a form because there's a designated act of publishing and it becomes a solid checkpoint that everyone can gather and celebrate around. Whereas for a website, it's so malleable and never really finished and it's hard to define the moment in which it’s ready to find an audience. But maybe that quality of softness and ambiguity is what makes websites feel human. So what if the ritual of human gathering and celebration around the website happens not when you hit publish but every single time someone enters it? How can we see websites as sites for an ever-infinite moment that feels entirely special and momentous? When I think about many or even most other forms of art, film, books, poetry, music, the theme of love is so prolific that it's almost inescapable. It’s difficult to think of songs or movies that aren’t about love, in some sense. It makes me wonder: why aren't there more websites about love? The internet as a whole has moved on from creating websites by hand to producing materials on other platforms, where people don’t have as much say about what they make and how it’s distributed. Websites are templated, heavy, constrained, seen as a place for performance rather than sincerity. They aren't seen as places where we can put our whole selves into. So we put all these gifty artifacts on other platforms, but then their purpose and their intention towards love gets appropriated by the profit-oriented goals of large corporations. We're always performing in some way, but it's hard to say it's a performance you control when you're unfamiliar with the stage you're on. The fact that many people think this is the only medium of communication available to us makes it clear that we’re all continuously trying to express love, but not really getting at it. With a website that you own, you’re really able to take up space and dictate the environment in which you want to give and be received. I think so much of love is also that, right? And the very thing that you were saying makes it hard to express love online is what could make the internet really ripe for expressions of love: the precarity and the upkeep that's required. A physical love letter might represent a discrete expression of love, but it doesn't allow the opportunity of continuous expression through maintenance. It’s not that you need a personal website to express love. But it's sad that when everyone is on the internet for community, the platforms that promise connection often just serve us detachment, or a love that is compromised by concern for metrics or other externalities. It's a hard balance learning how to dwell within these platforms while trying to reinvent them. Because not everyone has the privilege or luxury, of course, of stewarding their own environment. So bettering the internet is about navigating the existing platforms that the majority of the world is on and evolving our ways of communication so that they’re better receptive to the intent that people are trying to express in spite of platform constraints. We could wield the tools and platforms we have differently. It almost feels like a trap. Even if you’re just trying to express a feeling, the second you post it to Instagram or Twitter, you’re instantly receiving growth-coded feedback that alters the meaning of that expression. Yeah, it's hard. My interest in making things for the browser is primarily because it's easiest for me to produce things that are accessible to people back home in the Philippines, where I spent 18 years of my life. Even if I now have the resources to make things in tangible mediums for more traditional art spaces, I still lean towards the internet and always will, because of what it has afforded me, and because it will continue to be the space that lets me communicate with people I love. Plenty of people in the Philippines have no choice but to dwell on corporate-owned platforms. There's not much compromise when your work and school is conducted on Facebook or when you’re stuck on a walled internet plan. I recognize all the hostilities, but I still have to be there because that's where the people I love are. How do I look at these platforms and my sites both as portals to a core intent? Because that’s what they really are: doorways to what I'm truly trying to express. There’s so many acts of translation that occur from space to space, because each website already has its own environment, language for communication, practices, and standards. That can be kind of nice, even if it’s working against a system. You’ve said that you're interested in gathering all the people that you love in one place, and that you think the internet might be that place. Is that primarily about physical distance, or is there some other reason you feel like the internet is that place? Physical distance is a huge part. Temporal distance is too — getting all people together at one point in time. One of the magical things about the web that it has rendered these boundaries less obvious or less constraining. The internet lets me construct a meeting point in which the people I love can gather. You can make a website that respects what’s happening in one locality, but I think it's kind of a waste of the medium to do that rather than blurring these boundaries. I don't necessarily want to replicate the experience of meeting in a physical place; the internet has its own wonderful navigational structure, in which everyone can visit the same link and experience it differently, which lets you communicate and love in a more directed way. Imposing the same limits of physical space onto the digital encourages the replication of power structures and dynamics that don't need to exist, like artificial scarcity instead of abundance. Making on the internet should be an act of reinvention. cloudy.country. "hellow! by subscribing to cloudy country, you will receive a cloud in your inbox every 3 or so days" with ascii clouds in the background and an email subscribe box cloudy.country, a cloud photo newsletter There’s love in context or keeping contexts separate, and giving different people different parts of yourself that are more attuned to what they need. But then there's also love in collapsing context and bringing together people that you love from different places and smashing their contexts together and seeing what happens. It’s interesting to hear how you think about the internet’s place in that false binary. Any meeting point in real life is also so fragmented and so imprecise — you present different selves to different people. The internet just makes controlling the fragmentation easier. I wish I could do that in real life too. Digital space intensifies the bad and good of physical space: it’s important to recognize both its transgressions and unique qualities. Tell me about The Sound of Love, your web project that presents the comments that appear underneath songs on Youtube. What drew you to repackage these comments in this way? a screenshot of a website with a cassette tape cut into a record-like circle, and a youtube comment that begins "I cry every time I listen to this" The Sound of Love It started as an impulse that I would feel when I would listen to a song on YouTube and feel moved. I'd scroll down, and see if it resonated in the same way for others. And I stumbled upon this trove of people sharing deeply intimate encounters and experiences. I wanted to repackage them in a site in which the human messages left under often bot-recorded uploads or dead channels would become the central focus instead of the songs. It’s an example of the act of witnessing a space where most of the world gathers and seeing this super, intimate human behavior just like tucked under the hood of a cold platform. I wanted to give it the space it deserved. We always say “never read the YouTube comments.” But I think there's something very romantic about them. If someone posted one of those same comments to Twitter or Instagram, it would have had a different meaning. There’s not really a clear way to growth-hack a YouTube comment, which gives it the space to be a more innocent form of expression. “I just needed to express this to other people listening to this song.” Or even, “I needed to get this out of my system even if nobody can hear me.” Exactly. So many of the comments I collected don't have any likes, or were posted a decade ago. Maybe we put these messages in the sea of comments in an attempt to be heard, but the act is only done if you have the intention to share. You don’t leave comments under YouTube videos with the same expectation of virality you might have when broadcasting on other social platforms. And in that lack of expectation for attention lives a provocation: I can't help but do anything right now but share what I’ve just felt or remembered, even if no one else sees it. It’s so sad how even outside of the internet, if you are not thought of as “significant” then your outputs are deemed not worthy of saving. I’ve been thinking about preservation, in which there’s a politics of optics and power that determines whether someone is worthy of saving — and thus, being known. Who doesn't want to be a part of history? Who wants to, simply, be known? Don't we all, in some way? That’s the idea behind my personal archival practice as well. I'm capturing websites that I made when I was literally a child because I thought that it was worthy of saving, that I was worthy of saving. So in a way it's an act of self preservation as well: if I didn’t save me, if I didn’t love me, I didn’t know if anyone would.” Poetry Project “Since 1966, The Poetry Project has expanded access to literature, education, and opportunities for sharing one’s creative work in a counter-hierarchical, radically open space and community. Premised on the vision that cultural action at the local level can inspire broader shifts in public consciousness, The Project is committed to developing and collaborating on replicable program models that challenge persistent social narratives, especially through the verbal reframing made possible in poetry. We do this work through a combination of live readings, performances, lectures, events, and workshops, in addition to literary and critical publications and emerging writers and curatorial fellowship programs. The Poetry Project is based at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, a vibrant artistic and community space which includes the St. Mark’s Church congregation, Danspace Project, and New York Theatre Ballet.” Queering the map A Brief History of Digital Gardens Let’s go on a short journey to the origin of this word. The notion of a digital garden is not a 20205ya invention. It’s been floating around for over two decades. However, it’s passed through a couple of semantic shifts in that time, meaning different things to different people across the years. As words tend to do. Tracing back how Neologisms are born helps us understand why anyone needed this word in the first place. Language is always a response to the evolving world around us – we expand it when our current vocabulary fails to capture what we’re observing, or have a particular desire for how we’d like the future to unfold. Naming is a political act as much as a poetic one. The Early Gardens of Hypertext Mark Bernstein’s 199827ya essay Hypertext Gardens appears to be the first recorded mention of the term. Mark was part of the early hypertext crowd – the developers figuring out how to arrange and present this new medium. While the essay is a beautiful ode to free-wheeling internet exploration, it’s less about building personal internet spaces, and more of a manifesto on user experience flows and content organisation.To put this in its historical context, Mark’s writing was part of a larger conversation happening throughout the nineties around hypertext and its metaphorical framing. The early web-adopters were caught up in the idea of The Web as a labyrinth-esque community landscape tended by WikiGardeners and WikiGnomes. The caretaking roles given to people who cleaned up broken links, attributions, and awkward white space on shared wiki websites.These creators wanted to enable pick-your-own-path experiences, while also providing enough signposts that people didn’t feel lost in their new, strange medium.The early web debates around this became known as The Navigation Problem – the issue of how to give web users just enough guidance to freely explore the web, without forcing them into pre-defined browsing experiences. The eternal struggle to find the right balance of chaos and structure. Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas Mark Bernstein In learning to hold the reader's attention, we may seek guidance from the literary arts, from narrative theory and criticism. Like creators in any new field, however, hypertext authors should look to many disciplines for forms, techniques, and insights. Lessons from literature are found in "Patterns of Hypertext" and "Chasing our Tales"; here, I explore how architecture and landscape design might guide us in crafting hypertexts. Years ago, hypertext writers and researchers were concerned that hypertexts would enmesh readers in a confusing tangle of links. Early research called this the Navigation Problem. People sought to solve it in many ways: by providing many navigational tools; by keeping links simple; by using fewer links; and by organizing the links very rigidly. In time, experience with actual hypertexts and the development of the Web suggested that the Navigation Problem was less forbidding than it had seemed. Hypertext writers and researchers alike discovered that readers weren't getting lost, that occasional disorientation was common in all kinds of serious writing, and that muddled writing was more likely to be the source of confusion than hypertextual complexity. Today, concern with navigational clarity and efficiency often dominates discussion of Web design. The same concerns once dominated hypertext research, and many systems builders once feared that readers would find hypertexts unwieldy and unmanageable. In time, the research consensus shifted. As designers and writers gained experience, their hypertexts gained fluidity and fluency. My own early work concentrated on new tools for orienting readers: bookmarks, compasses, and bread crumbs (the ancestor of links that change color when you visit their destinations) all helped readers stay oriented. In time, however, I observed that fiction writers often adopted very elaborate gambits in order to disorient readers; if hypertext disorientation was an ever-present hazard, I asked, why was it so difficult to achieve? At the same time, George Landow began to argue that scholars and teachers often need to induce a measure of disorientation in order to make readers receptive to new arguments and difficult ideas. Navigation is not a problem. All writers need to hone transitions, to craft arguments, and to discover fresh ways to present difficult ideas. Links need not be treated as dangerous hazards; links are new opportunities for expression. -A Website Can Be A Poem w/ Chia Amisola- usurpator mag I want a lot more shitty websites that are just made for one purpose, that are just made for smaller communities, that are not made to scale, that are made to not even have a purpose. Because why does a website need a utility, or why does a website even need a purpose? These all just reflect ways of being that we want on the internet. Everyone just wants to be on the internet because they want to occupy space, because they want to understand the space where others are. I think that the solution is to have people make more websites. I think a website can just be. When I think about my relationship with objects, physical or virtual, I think the most interesting objects to me are just plain ones that don't necessarily have a prescriptive function, because in that, your imagination is most activated. That's where websites really become environments and containers, when they do not dictate protocols or rules, but instead they invite you to ascribe meaning to them, ascribe what can be done with them, what they can be, what they can be read as, how they can be performed and consumed. I think websites that are the most imaginative and creatively generative in that sense are ones that are perhaps the most ambiguous or loosely defined. Maybe that's why I like very simple objects and rocks and clouds and abstract annoying films that aren't in your face. I like websites that function like that as well. But I want to make things that are in your face and that obstruct those routines, that don't cleanly fit into browser conventions and demand more attention without being sly and exploitative about it. That's an example of one technology that I've tried to like appropriate. But, also I have an interest in revealing ambient qualities. I guess Window Open() is less ambient, because it's more in your face. A website can be alive even if it's only visited every few years, even if it only serves as a time capsule. I think one of the most important things about making work in a digital space is realizing that it is useless to be stuck to comparisons of real objects or real spaces in making them. Yeah. It's such a human thing, right? To see something beautiful and moving and to want to save it. Even though, sometimes you might do all this saving and really, you're never going to revisit it. I think a lot of this practice around archiving—and I'm coming at this with a very broad definition of archival and saving— it's just thinking about how this art of self-preservation could become an art of communal preservation, that's interested in technology in general. A lot of my archiving practice comes from inspiration from like, folk archives. I think about my upbringing in the Philippines and how we literally don't have libraries. A lot of formal institutions safeguard national knowledge and community knowledge. But the web and the internet has enabled or provided us tools to change that and to become better stewards of ourselves.A lot of this is also just rooted in this selfish desire where I was a kid online and I just wanted to make myself important. So, I wanted to deem myself as worthy of saving and worthy of being someone to be witnessed and presented either now or later on. EVEREST PIMPKIN Stemming from the concept of Wikipedia races (and a childhood spent playing invented hyperlink games), Everest Pipkin led a collective walk and lecture through Wikipedia articles. Focusing on ideas of memorials, the networked image as marker, and the function of memory and remembrance on a collectively edited internet, this lecture context-drifted through Wikipedia itself, forming a web of lateral connectivity between topics-- just like every 3 am rabbit hole that leaves you, blinking, the next morning at a window full of tabs and a browser history dense with searching. TIGER DINGSUN I was also really interested in this idea of taking something really boring and structural, and injecting it with a sense of poetry or an interesting narrative, “I have a lot of respect for poets — poetry feels paradoxically accessible yet difficult to articulate. The best poems, to me, are ones which open up a broad field of interpretation,” Tiger says. “I try to do that with my work as well. It strikes me that both poets and graphic designers are working with linguistic material in aesthetic ways — typography and phonoaesthetics are basically analogous, just working in different domains," Tiger says, with phonoaesthetics meaning the study of speech sound through aesthetic properties. “I’m most compelled by work that attempts to reproduce inarticulable feelings, where the author’s interiority is interpreted and refracted through other people’s interiority.” “Because this project engages more directly with the idea of using the web as a medium for publishing, I really wanted the websites to have certain characteristics that felt suggested by the structure and language of CSS itself,” Tiger tells It’s Nice That. “For example, I really like using only named CSS colours, like cornflower blue, cornsilk, thistle, dark slate grey or khaki. And I also really liked the way that div elements naturally flow from top to bottom, left to right and the actual formal qualities that arise from using things like float-left and float-right CSS properties.” - reading machines The effect that reading poetry has on the reader is somewhat inarticulable; somehow the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I’d love to recreate that effect with websites with a bit more intentionality so that the aesthetic quality and the functionality of the site combine to produce effects that go beyond code and linguistics. But working based on instincts is also useful sometimes and definitely should not be discounted.” -its nice that I thought I was on to something when at one point I had the though, “a website is just a book that turns its pages for you!” But then I realized that statement could apply to any time-based media. A movie is a book that turns the pages for you, so is a song, so is a play. so is a gif. But still. These websites occupy a strange, somewhat undefined space, a space that I’ve began to describe as somewhere between a game, a movie, a poem, and a painting. thesis project “Graphic design is often associated with pure functionalism, as a means to legibility. But there is great potential in developing a sense of poetics within one’s practice. Poetics – defined as how a text’s different elements come together and produce certain effects onto the reader – sounds a lot like what graphic designers already do. Poetry seeks to make new meaning through novel configurations of elements (words) from an already established system (language). Graphic design, being related to the organization and presentation of information, can also be seen as making meaning through novel configuration of various elements, which are not just limited to language and text, but also might include images, symbolic meaning, and visual culture writ large. Poetry, more so than other literatures, is concerned not only with the denotative meaning of words, but also the meaning that arises from the aesthetic quality of words (things like phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, rhyme, meter). In dealing with typography, graphic designers are also interested in both the denotative meaning and aesthetic qualities of a text they are working with. Both have a playful relationship to structure, sometimes adhering to, and sometimes breaking, form.” However, one difference between a graphic designer’s and a poet’s oeuvre is that with each poem, insight is gained into the poet’s symbolic world (semiosphere). Each poem provides additional context for the greater body of work by adding to the mythos of the interiority of the poet. In contrast, it’s not so often that each poster that a graphic designer creates relates to some larger world or story. Often the graphic designer’s interiority is purposefully veiled in order to not distract from the ‘actual’ content of the poster. =>But it’s extremely worthwhile for graphic designers to approach worldbuilding, because worldbuilding allows for the potential for narratives to sprawl out nonlinearly. It invites a non-teleological reading (reading without a prescribed goal) of the text, (or image, or whatever the object of graphic design is). Designing for multiple layers of meaning offers a point of resistance against graphic design’s primary function as lubricant for the smooth flow of capital (be it economic, social, or otherwise), which relies on a singular, totalizing interpretation of the work/world. Chimeric worlding Graphic designers can develop their own visual language in the same way that a poet might develop poetic frameworks through which to interpret reality, by fitting together multiple external and internal systems of meaning. Graphic designers are already adept at invoking widely shared, conventional systems of meaning in order to make our work function on the basis of clarity. But it is also possible for clarity to exist simultaneously with another, murkier kind of effect that comes from fortifying conventional logics of hierarchy, scale, and alignment with a graphic designer’s own internal logic and systems of meaning. I might call this methodology 'chimeric worlding', to emphasize the fact that these worlds, which graphic designers and their audience cohabitate through their work, are cobbled together from the DNA of various other worlds, and are richer because of this multiplicity. And I choose this word 'chimeric' not only for its meaning in the biological sense, i.e., Ted Nelson. Well, by "hypertext" I mean nonsequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. folder poetry “Not only does the graphical user interface have a tendency toward transparency but also proposes objectivity: “navigating through the Finder, it seems like I am accessing my computer from an omniscient seat of all-seeing capacity.”(195) In “situated knowledge” – a reflection on folder poetry, Adina Glickstein proposes folder poetry(196) as a possibility to think about our computers with situated knowledge and partial perspective. Navigating through the command-line makes clear that we can only be in one place at the time and that showing our folder poetry unveils to other users what is otherwise hidden. Sharing our setup and habits is an affirmation of situatedness, a way of inviting others into our homes, taking accountability for the partiality of our perspectives, sharing poetry, and volunteering vulnerably.(197)” Poietic is a doublet of the wider known word poetic. A doublet is one of two (or more) words in a language that have the same etymological root but have come to the modern language through different routes, often they sound similar but slightly differ in their meaning. In this case both words derived from the ancient Greek poiētikós. In semiotics, “poiesis” is “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.”(23) Resulting from that, the adjective “poietic” means as much as “creative” or “formative”. Despite a similar etymological background, “poetic” is either used as “relating to poetry” or to describe “characteristic of poets”. WIKI- ctrlvpoetry - insta- wiki poetry Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage[1]) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the poem.und poetry - pieces of wikipedia articles composition collage On the Wor(l)d as Collage, or Intertextuality by Terry Nguyen https://syllabusproject.org/on-the-world-as-collage-or-intertextuality/#2df6f050-4ad7-4062-9bf0-a360911994b0 “Dragon,” poem assembled using quotations from Wikipedia articles FROM TUMBLR raphael bastide fungal Fungal 2022 https://fungal.page 16 pages riso zine, 3 stickers, web page This project is a tribute to Wikipedia, one of the greatest websites of the World Wide Web. This collaborative encyclopedia is now 21 years old, and I am still fascinated by the way it has changed our relationship to knowledge. It also represents a comforting example of what humanity can do: collaborating voluntarily on the largest knowledge-sharing project in our history. I consider Wikipedia being the descendant of Enlightenment’s encyclopedists and free software movement. Such project made by the people, for the people, is one of the beautiful remains of the early Web’s utopia. Wikipedia is not perfect (lack of diversity, moderation…) and it remains a fragile system. Still, I wanted to picture it as a post-human vestige, an artifact invaded by biomorphic figures and spreading typography. My work quickly focused on how to create organic ornaments, affecting the encyclopedia’s interface, its typography, the figures and the Wikipedia logo itself. Link- Nick Carr “The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.” “Default styles. The example below illustrates what a link will look and behave like by default; though the CSS is enlarging and centering the text to make it stand out more. You can compare the look and behavior of the default stylings in the example with the look and behavior of other links on this page which have more CSS styles applied. Default links have the following properties: Links are underlined. Unvisited links are blue. Visited links are purple. Hovering a link makes the mouse pointer change to a little hand icon.”MDN Web Docs - Mozilla Presque même bleu font “This is because Wikipedia has never set an explicit font in its default skin. The base font for these skins are simply defined as font-family: sans-serif. Under Windows, the default fonts in browsers are normally defined as Arial at 16px for sans-serif, Times New Roman at 16px for serif and Courier New at 13px for monospace. 0.875 × 16 equals 14px exactly. However, all fonts shown here are 16px, the browser's default.” wiki Evrest PIMPKIN WIKI -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzixlNXft9w Wikiracing is a game in which players compete to navigate from one Wikipedia page to another using only internal links.[1][2][3][4][5][excessive citations] It has many different variations and names, including The Wikipedia Game, Wikipedia Maze, Wikispeedia, Wikiwars, Wikipedia Ball, Wikipedia Racing, and Wikipedia Speedrunning.[6] External websites have been created to facilitate the game.[7] Wikiracing requires speed, accuracy, and luck. Players must start on a random or chosen page (for example, The French and Indian War) and navigate to another page (for example, Quantum mechanics) using only internal links.The Seattle Times has recommended it as a good educational pastime for children[8] and the Larchmont Gazette has said, "While I don't know any teenagers who would curl up with an encyclopedia for a good read, I hear that a lot are reading it in the process of playing the Wikipedia Game".[9] The Amazing Wiki Race has been an event at the TechOlympics.[10] The average number of links separating any English-language Wikipedia page from the United Kingdom page is 3.67. Thus, it has been occasionally banned in the game. Other common rules such as not using the United States page increase the game's difficulty.[11]The rules of Wikiracing can be used as a method for studying aspects of Wikipedia.[12] Magna Carta (An Embroidery)Documentary film on the making of Magna Carta (An Embroidery) Magna Carta (An Embroidery) is a 2015 work by English installation artist Cornelia Parker.[1] It is an embroidered representation of the complete text and images of an online encyclopedia article for Magna Carta, as it appeared on the English Wikipedia on 15 June 2014, the 799th anniversary of the document.[1] The wiki rabbit hole (or wiki black hole)[1] is the learning pathway which a reader travels by navigating from topic to topic while browsing Wikipedia (through hyperlinks in articles) and other wikis. The metaphor of a rabbit hole comes from Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice begins an adventure by following the White Rabbit into his burrow. The black hole metaphor comes from the idea that the reader is powerfully sucked into a hole from which they cannot escape. After learning or studying outside of Wikipedia, many people go to the online encyclopedia to learn more about the same topic, and then proceed to topics progressively further removed from where they started.[2] Films based on historical people or events often spur viewers to explore Wikipedia rabbit holes.[3] Data visualizations showing the relationships between Wikipedia articles demonstrate pathways that readers can take to navigate from topic to topic.[4] The Wikimedia Foundation publishes research on how readers enter rabbit holes.[5] Rabbit hole browsing behavior happens in various languages of Wikipedias.[6] Wikipedia users have shared their rabbit hole experiences as part of Wikipedia celebrations as well as on social media.[7][8] Some people go to Wikipedia for the fun of seeking a rabbit hole.[9][10] Exploring the rabbit hole can be part of wikiracing.[11] Depths of wikipedia Annie Rauwerda Why is Cleopatra constantly trending on Wikipedia? 3/3/2022 Remember when WIkipedia killed the ‘you can help by expanding it’ meme? 7/11/2022 To delete or not to delete? The fate of the most contentious Wikipedia articles. 12/31/2021 The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos. 2/14/2022 “Depths of Wikipedia is a group of social media accounts dedicated to highlighting facts from Wikipedia. Created on Instagram by Annie Rauwerda in 2020, the account shares excerpts from various Wikipedia articles on a number of topics. “What would you tell a younger person today learning about using Wikipedia for the first time? What was the attitude toward Wikipedia like when you were in school? I used Wikipedia all the time starting in middle school, either for reading up on random topics or for Wikiracing my friends. I’m only a few months older than Wikipedia so the site and I have grown up together in some ways, and I remember the early days when attitudes toward Wikipedia weren’t quite as positive. I had a few grade school teachers who seemed to have a personal vendetta against Wikipedia— and a belief that it was depreciating knowledge.” -From the Depths of Wikipedia: an interview with Wikimedian and influencer Annie Rauwerda 7 December 2021 by Chris Koerner, Communications, Wikimedia Foundation Rauwerda in 2023 at Wikimania Annie Rauwerda, then a student in neuroscience at the University of Michigan,[1][2][3] created the Depths of Wikipedia Instagram account in April 2020 as a personal project at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic,[4] intending to share various facts from the English Wikipedia[1] among friends.[4] According to Rauwerda, the project was inspired by a collage of excerpts from Wikipedia she had made for a friend's zine,[2] and by a photograph from the Wikipedia article on cow tipping.[2] She had been interested in Wikipedia before beginning the project, having spent time reading it as a child[1] and Wikiracing with friends through middle and high school.[5] External videos video icon The Joy of Learning Random Things on Wikipedia, Annie Rauwerda, TED Talk, October 19, 2023 Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway brought Depths of Wikipedia its first wave of followers, by boosting the page's posts on her Instagram story. Calloway had previously criticized the account for a post featuring an older version of her Wikipedia page, which listed her occupation as "nothing." Calloway's promotion of the Depths of Wikipedia account came following an apology by Rauwerda.[4][5] After her Instagram account gained followers, Rauwerda created TikTok and Twitter accounts of the same name,[4] and launched a newsletter covering unusual Wikipedia pages in greater detail.[5] Activity An image of a cow on Wikipedia, with the caption "A healthy cow lying on her side is not immobilized; she can rise whenever she chooses." Rauwerda has cited this image and caption, taken from the article on cow tipping, as an inspiration for Depths of Wikipedia.[2] Depths of Wikipedia has highlighted articles on topics including exploding trousers, Nuclear Gandhi,[1] chess on a really big board, and sexually active popes.[6] According to Rauwerda, she often receives submissions of Wikipedia articles to feature, but is selective in choosing which to post.[4] In October 2021, she said she was getting "probably 30 to 50 user submissions per day."[5] Mimicking his photo on the Wikipedia page for shrug, "Shrug Guy" re-creates his 2006 shrug photo at Depths of Wikipedia's Boston show in 2022. A Wikipedia editor herself,[1] Rauwerda has hosted an edit-a-thon, welcoming new contributions to the encyclopedia,[2] and enjoys taking photos to add to the Wikimedia Commons.[7] She also hosts live comedy shows based on trivia from Wikipedia.[5][4][8][9] Reception Followers of the Depths of Wikipedia account include Neil Gaiman, John Mayer, Troye Sivan, Olivia Wilde and Lex Fridman.[10][6][11] According to Heather Woods, a professor of rhetoric and technology at Kansas State University, Depths of Wikipedia "makes the internet feel smaller" by "offering attractive—or sometimes hilariously unattractive—entry points to internet culture".[4] Zachary McCune, the brand director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds and hosts Wikipedia, called the account "a place where Wikipedia comes to life, like an after-hours tour of the best of Wikipedia".[4] In his book All the Knowledge in the World, author Simon Garfield called it "a great Twitter feed. It may suck up all your spare time."[12] Rauwerda was named the 2022 Media Contributor of the Year at the annual Wikimedian of the Year awards.[13]” Notabilia Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia A website is a performance, John West January 15th, 2025 Browsers don’t really load websites; they perform them. The code for a website, like sheet music for a Bach cantata, instructs the browser on which notes to play, but the website doesn’t appear until a browser has displayed it to a user, has interpreted those instructions in all its complex harmonies and rhythms. Different user settings make for different performances. Now, more and more, servers yield different data for different audiences. The website, unfixed, remakes itself uniquely for each user who sees it. This idea—the website as performance—comes in part from the technologist Ashley Blewer’s digital performance, Throttled (2020). In it, she forces the browser, painfully slowly, to load animated GIFs from the early web. “[I]f your browser has taken it upon itself to cache the content (this is likely), it means that the piece is not repeatable,” Blewer writes. “you can’t go back in time.” This is the heart of ephemeral media: you can’t go back in time. Much like a word—”a word is dead / when it is said,” Emily Dickinson writes—websites only last as long as the tab is open. Then they change, rot away. But Dickinson also writes that a word “just / begins to live / that day.” January 15, 2025 johnwest Uncategorized ashley blewer, bodies are also ephemeral Guess word by May-Li khoe - wordle easthetic, interface preconceived notions/symbols reconnaissables “Folder Poetry: The practice of using the structure of computer folder organization as a new kind of poetic form like the haiku or iambic pentameter. By naming and nesting folders and files, we can create unfolding narratives, rhythmic prose, and choose-your-own-adventure poetry. “Melanie Hoff interactive poetry: https://blairjohnsonpoetry.com/spoilia/hedidntleave.html stone hypertext narrative poetry and ake also available only when the sun is down - restrictions poetry like when the sun is out, or 7 minutes in heaven when another peron is connected http://www.thebibleasahyperlink.com/ Jan Robert Leegte, 2013 - HTML, CSS, Bible King James version Meg Miller I sometimes struggle to articulate your work because descriptors like “interactive poetry” or “browser-based performance” just don’t do it justice. At one performance I attended, you described what you were doing as “reading the browser,” which resonated with me. Could you explain what you meant by that and just generally how you like to describe your work? Chia Amisola My websites take form as environments, simulations, games, and poems. In the past year, I started performing them: reading, clicking, sounding, looping, and lagging. I like to think that the browser as a subject is dual in that I embody the browser as an interface to the web and the audience treats me as the interface. When I perform, my screen, terminal, and operating system are all exposed, so my personal computer becomes a public stage. If Ursula K. Le Guin described technology as the “active human interface with the material world,” I also attempt to become a technology myself. MM I do feel like the best way to understand your work and the dense digital environments that you create is to experience them, either as a website or a performance. CA Even when someone is experiencing my work alone online and at home, I demand visibility. It fills your screen with windows, overwhelming the desktop. Oftentimes secondary metadata like title attributes and tab names reveal narratives, asking the reader to attend to the screen. I call these works “internet ambient,” where I’m interested in reconfiguring our attention to the web: What is visible, invisible, foregrounded? How does poetry emerge from the landscape of the browser? The computer doesn’t disappear; the gap between our body and the computer does. Performance allows these sites a chance to be inhabited. My intimate, sprawling words and nonlinear narratives are given duration and consequence, and lived in for a moment. One of my latest performances, at Gray Area in San Francisco, was a survey of a dozen pieces I’ve made since 2023. I’d loop between sites, finding new paths and relations, blurring each one’s beginning, and end in a very involved, intertextual process that almost feels machinic in practice. Performance is inherently a hypertextual practice. When the performer is interpreter, hyperlinks and screens are not the only nodes; their whole body becomes one as well: every gesture, movement, citation, memory, stutter. The performer is the machine, as nature and agency are sculpted to reassemble protocol. The reader becomes the author. MM I love that. There’s definitely a sense of it all being intermeshed: poetry and programming, reader and author, viewer and performer. That makes me wonder where you begin when you start working on a piece. Word or code? CA I always write within code and contain my words in data structures. I arrange text into arrays, and I find that the very arbitrary sizing of my editor and its word wrapping affect my enjambment. Sometimes I write into a spreadsheet before flattening the grids into my editor. Code constructs the world’s form. After text, I love to manually rearrange hundreds of windows, meticulously forming a landscape for my poetry. Before completing the text, I’m considering how everything will be algorithmically presented: reversed, shuffled, patternized, sequenced, bound to time or clicks, waiting, or decaying as the browser changes. MM I know you’ve been making websites since you were seven years old. Have you also been writing for that long? CA Now that you ask that, making websites was writing to me. It filled the same hole. Before I discovered HTML, I remember filling notebooks with fantasy stories that I’d recite to my family, performing them. When I started making websites, I wrote in the forms I saw, including blogs, tutorials, fan fiction. Then influences like Notpron, Homestuck, and Twine games made my thinking and text more hypertextual and fragmented. I guess it took a couple decades to return to that public form of performance, even if I have been publishing for as long as I can remember. Chia Amisola by Meg Miller Embodying the browser. October 16, 2024 Ashley Blewer, Throttled Summary What to say about this? First, what is this? This piece is technically a website but I see this as a performance — it should be treated accordingly. Most webpages are increasingly about interaction, and historically the web was built upon the concept of the hyperlink, but this webpage is for watching and reflecting and getting lost in your own thoughts. It runs for a little over 13 minutes. The performance is theoretically repeatable, but if your browser has taken it upon itself to cache the content (this is likely), it means that the piece is not repeatable — you can’t go back in time. This is an encouragement to sit still and enjoy it, something I personally have a hard time doing with any media, especially one delivered alongside my other primary source of notifications and attention-detractors. Consider it a challenge to go back in time, where pages loaded slowly and one at a time. Think of it like this: tabs in browsers were not a common feature until 2003.Next, what is this all about? The subject of the performance is based around telling the story of how the web and I grew up together. We were both born in the late 1980s, then went through essential steps of development like learning how to read and write in the early '90s. Then we went through puberty at the same time, starting in the late 1990s. For me, it involved bouncing around pages of links and free website hosting, using every chat program I could find, and using the computer as much as possible when I wasn’t watching MTV or riding a bike or other things that preteens do. The web, meanwhile, had just taken off its training wheels and exploded into mass North American culture, suddenly everywhere all the time, blossoming so prolific that we colloquially refer to the entire internet as this portion of it. This project is about that. It’s an homage to myself and the other people out there (preteens or not) cobbling together little homes on the web, experimenting and trying new things, while the internet was going through this massive period of growth and transformation, too.But it's not all flowers and butterflies. We have this viewpoint of the internet as it was, and we look at it with rose-colored glasses, so-to-speak, as if it were an idyllic, wonderful time. But the same internet with quaint homepages lovingly hand-coded with guestbooks and off-the-cuff status updates also hosted rampant advertising, weird scams, malicious behavior, and honestly just a lot of junk. I spend a lot of time wearing those nostalgia glasses; it’s a lot of what I do in my career and also as hobby projects (e.g Internet Girlfriend Club), but the web is so much deeper than that. It's not good or bad. It just is. In this sense, it's an anti-homage to both the media cliche of boys frothing over slowly-loading boobs and the onslaught of advertisement and corporate interest eating up any promise of the web.Making this piece was difficult at a certain point in building up the performance. It was really hard to say goodbye. I was surprised at how many emotions it conjured up for me. But that feeling I had fighting against it and being so disappointed after I started, that feeling meant I absolutely had to do it. Art is about conveying emotion, and I hope people get the same feelings from the piece. I want them to feel angry and annoyed, and to wish things could go back to how they were. But you can’t go back. And we can’t go back, in general, to this ethereal beautiful web experience not only because we don’t have time-machines but because it never really existed in the first place, not in such a pure way.I hope you enjoy this work, or have recently come back to this page after enjoying it. I hope it gives you space to meditate on this thing we use every day, and the role it has played it your life. KatherineYang Hello, visitor! I’m Katherine. I’m interested in making poetic tools — tools for poetry and text directly, but also tools that are small and intentional and interesting, like a poem. WEB AESTHETIC -form filling -hyperlink -interface, pop-ups -hyperlinks online forms and its horror/repetition https://t-h-e-s-p-a-c-e.com/lorem-ipsum/ Kazuma Sasajima and chia amisola teh one that never ends SARAH CHEKFA “Establishing secure connection...” is a website composed of fragments of posts filed under the “missed connections” section of Craigslist. missed connections is a place where the shy, lonely, and atomized go to plead with the universe to grant them just one more chance at connecting with the beautiful stranger they cannot bear to imagine a life without. These desperate, melancholic voices presume that union with the other will make everything okay again. When they post, they’re feeling lucky, to borrow from Google. I’ve mined particularly poetic fragments from missed connections, sourced from the Craigslist branches of random cities. They flood the screen upon page load, as if typed by their authors, each at a randomly generated speed, inevitably overlapping. Yearning is cacophony. If you’re feeling lucky, you can click the button and three fragments will self-select at random to — in the words of the Internet — establish a secure connection in the form of a poem. If you don’t e-mail it to yourself, you lose it forever (think of posterity, don’t make the mistake the authors did). If you don’t like how things turned out, you can always start over. ♡ Unsubscribe From All by Agustin Rosa Please explore the piece in fullscreen by clicking on this link. A web-based unsubscription form unfolds into an interactive horror story about the paranoia and dysmorphia of modern digital life in the corporate platform complex, narrative paths unfolding differently depending on your choices. FORMS AESTHETICS//chia amisola absurdism Haunted Machine by Isabel Li Haunted Machine is a multimedia artificial desktop fiction exploring the perspective of Siren, a writer grieving the death of her lover and conflicted about her changing gender identity, political standing, creative style, and cultural belonging amidst a near-future crisis of government surveillance and technological weaponisation. interface/narration RORY GREEN publications/curators THE HTML REVIEW the html review is an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web. It is edited by Maxwell Neely-Cohen and Shelby Wilson. Our efforts have been covered by Frieze Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Longreads, and the German radio program Netzkultur. There have been public performances and displays of work we have published at CultureHub, Rhizome, the de Young Museum, and The Net Gala. READING MACHINES WELCOME TO MY HOMEPAGE CRAWLSPACE Crawlspace is an ongoing project to cultivate and platform artistic and poetic applications of technology. We currently publish interactive and multimedia writing and art that experiments with the expansive freedom the web offers. PLAN? v.anglais Narrative and Interface -How do digital interfaces and web-based structures (such as windows, pop-ups, and point-and-click systems) shape the narrative possibilities of digital poetry? -In what ways does the use of "choose-your-own-adventure" mechanics in digital poetry redefine reader agency and storytelling? Nostalgia and Memory -How does digital poetry engage with nostalgia and collective memory in a generation shaped by the early internet? -What role do digital artifacts (school computers, Wikipedia, pop-ups) play in constructing a dream-like narrative space in digital poetry? Connections and Identity -How does digital poetry reflect and interrogate the search for connection and identity in the context of web-based culture? -In what ways does digital poetry evoke the fragmented experience of navigating the internet to explore personal and collective identity? Multimodality and Performance -How does the performance of digital poetry, as seen in works like Chia Amisola's, transform the reader’s interaction with web-based literature? -What new aesthetic and emotional possibilities emerge when poetry adopts the interfaces and structures of digital platforms? - How does digital poetry evoke nostalgia and memory through the use of early internet artifacts and interactive structures, reflecting the experiences of a generation shaped by the rise of the web? 1. Nostalgic Aesthetics and Early Web Design Chia Amisola: Utilizes low-resolution graphics, pixelated imagery, and minimalistic web layouts reminiscent of early internet design. The aesthetic often mimics school computer interfaces or rudimentary websites. Everest Pipkin: Creates lo-fi visual styles that reference the textures and interfaces of older computing systems, evoking nostalgia for the web's early days. Tiger Dingsun: Tends toward retro, dreamlike interfaces that resemble vintage gaming systems or early multimedia experiments. Commonality: All three evoke nostalgia through deliberate use of dated design choices, including glitch effects, basic shapes, and flat colors, creating a sense of memory and place in the digital world. 2. Interactive Structures as Narrative Devices Chia Amisola: Employs point-and-click mechanics and clickable windows to guide the reader through nonlinear, exploratory narratives. Everest Pipkin: Works like The Ground Itself use map-like structures and point-and-click exploration to unfold poetic or narrative elements. Tiger Dingsun: Often uses game-like interaction mechanics where the audience’s choices alter the experience of the piece. Commonality: Interaction is central to storytelling. The visual design integrates clickable areas, cursors, and "hidden" elements, creating a sense of agency while drawing attention to the act of navigating the work. 3. Interfaces as Storytelling Tools Chia Amisola: Designs windows and pop-ups that imitate familiar web interactions, blending functionality with narrative (e.g., mimicking the feeling of a cluttered desktop). Everest Pipkin: Interfaces often mimic maps, directories, or fragmented documents, suggesting ways in which memory and narrative are organized digitally. Tiger Dingsun: Builds interfaces that resemble surreal operating systems or layered windows, creating dreamlike spaces that play with user expectations. Commonality: All three transform standard digital interfaces into poetic or narrative tools. They blur the line between the functional and the expressive, inviting users to navigate the interface as both a practical tool and a narrative space. 4. Themes of Fragmentation and Connection Chia Amisola: Explores the fragmented nature of the web as a metaphor for searching, longing, and connection. Everest Pipkin: Uses scattered, seemingly disconnected pieces (text, images, clickable paths) to mirror the patchwork of memory and identity. Tiger Dingsun: Builds fragmented, surreal landscapes that suggest a piecing together of meaning through exploration. Commonality: The fragmented, non-linear structures of their designs reflect both the chaos and the beauty of seeking connections—whether through memory, identity, or the web itself. 5. Playfulness and Dreamlike Qualities Chia Amisola: Introduces whimsy and playfulness into her works, encouraging exploration through a sense of curiosity. Everest Pipkin: Creates works that feel meditative and dreamlike, often engaging with the idea of landscapes or imagined spaces. Tiger Dingsun: Employs surreal and fantastical elements in design, emphasizing a dreamlike quality that encourages interpretation rather than direct understanding. Commonality: All three lean into playful, imaginative visuals that invite readers to wander and interpret, aligning the dreamlike experience with the nature of the web itself. 1. Nostalgic Aesthetics as Poetic Atmosphere Connection to Poetry: Nostalgia in design becomes a form of visual metaphor, akin to poetic imagery. The lo-fi, early internet aesthetics evoke emotional tones—similar to how a poem might use sensory language to trigger memory or longing. Example in Works: Chia Amisola's pixelated windows can be seen as stanzas—discrete units of meaning that collectively evoke the fragmented memories of a digital childhood. Everest Pipkin’s retro designs serve as poetic "fields," where each interface element is a word or phrase in a larger visual poem. Tiger Dingsun’s surreal interfaces mirror the associative leaps and layered symbolism of poetry. 2. Interactive Structures as Poetic Form Connection to Poetry: Interactivity parallels poetic forms like the sonnet or free verse. The way users navigate a piece mirrors how a reader interacts with a poem’s structure—deciding where to pause, interpret, or reread. Example in Works: Chia Amisola’s point-and-click mechanics reflect the enjoyment of a poem, leading the user unexpectedly into new “lines” or windows. Everest Pipkin’s map-like works are cartographic poems, where movement through space echoes the progression of meaning in a poetic sequence. Tiger Dingsun’s game-like interactivity transforms user choices into poetic acts, inviting exploration and interpretation. 3. Interfaces as Visual and Spatial Poetry Connection to Poetry: Interfaces function as the visual layout of a poem, with windows, pop-ups, and layered screens serving as lines and stanzas. The act of navigating an interface mirrors the act of reading poetry: uncovering meaning through spatial and temporal progression. Example in Works: Chia Amisola’s cluttered desktops are concrete poems, where the visual arrangement of elements creates additional layers of meaning. Everest Pipkin’s fragmented directories resemble found poetry, piecing together disparate elements into a cohesive whole. Tiger Dingsun’s surreal interfaces act as erasure poetry, where meaning is revealed through selective focus and navigation. 4. Fragmentation as Poetic Device Connection to Poetry: Fragmentation mirrors the fragmented syntax and imagery often found in modern and postmodern poetry. It invites readers to make connections between disparate elements, fostering engagement and interpretation. Chia Amisola’s scattered elements evoke the fragmented language of e.e. cummings or contemporary digital poets, requiring the reader to synthesize meaning. Everest Pipkin’s works suggest a patchwork of memories, like the fragmented narrative of a prose poem. Tiger Dingsun’s surreal interfaces recall the associative leaps of surrealist poetry, where disparate elements create dreamlike cohesion. 5. Playfulness and Dreamlike Qualities as Poetic Tone Connection to Poetry: The whimsy and dreamlike nature of these works echo poetic tones of wonder, longing, and imagination. Playfulness becomes a poetic tool, inviting exploration and reflection. Example in Works: Chia Amisola’s playful interfaces align with a lyrical tone, evoking joy and curiosity. Everest Pipkin’s meditative landscapes echo pastoral poetry, where the act of observation becomes poetic. Tiger Dingsun’s surreal dreams invite interpretative freedom, akin to the symbolic depth of a riddle-like poem. Key Takeaway: Poetry as the Lens By emphasizing how these graphic elements parallel or contribute to poetic principles—imagery, structure, form, tone, and metaphor—you can anchor your analysis firmly in the prism of poetry. This approach highlights how digital poetry is not just written but designed, using its medium to extend the poetic experience. Today, we saw A travel log that documents a day's trip across the image-filled web. The log's contents were generated using a custom Chrome extension that looks for alt text - short descriptions that accompany many of the web's images. While alt text typically lives "behind the scenes", the log flips the concept inside-out: it brings the text to the surface, and reveals alt images only on inspection. This is the first part of our ongoing extension-based experiment, playing with forms and materials of the web. by Anna Garbier & Lan Zhang Phases and the In-Betweens is a collaborative digital artwork by Brothers Sick (Ezra and Noah Benus), Yo-Yo Lin, and danilo machado that disrupts the usual vertical, linear flow of The Shed’s website. The combination of an animated frame, a video at its center, and accompanying texts that appear both in the animation and as accessible alt-text proposes new hierarchies, ways of reading, and reflections on the notions and networks of collective care during the COVID-19 pandemic from a disability-artistry perspective. Starting with the new moon on January 13, the work will transform throughout the month according to the phases of the lunar cycle as a way to reflect on (and criticize) the “phases of reopening” as set up by governmental agencies as part of the so-called “return to normal.” The piece’s video is composed of photos and footage from the Benus’s personal archive documenting their medical files, facilities where ongoing medical treatments take place, and moments from their rare outings in Brooklyn and the Bronx during the pandemic. These images are layered with indexed maps and data correlated to the pandemic’s impact on the city. Poetic image descriptions written by machado and animations created by Lin—which draw inspiration from elemental and celestial charts for navigating time and cycles of pain, along with guidance from the Tao Te Ching—frame the video on the web page. Critically engaging with New York State’s reopening plan of arbitrary, constructed phases set in contrast to cycles found in nature, the artists aim to showcase the heightened anxiety of experiencing the “outside” world in a predominantly medicalized way during the pandemic as the public world has shifted radically between shutdowns and Black Lives Matter protests. Through the frameworks of disabled/crip time, sick time, and pandemic time, the piece takes a look at the disablement further imposed on communities who identify as sick/ill/disabled during a pandemic and how we might better account collectively for the well-being of one another. INSTAPOETRY-UGLY GRAPHICS BUT SNOBBISM? Instapoetry is a style of written poetry that emerged after the advent of social media, especially on Instagram. The term has been used to describe poems written specifically for being shared online, most commonly on Instagram, but also other platforms including Twitter, Tumblr, and TikTok. The style usually consists of short, direct lines in aesthetically pleasing fonts that are sometimes accompanied by an image or drawing, often without rhyme schemes or meter, and dealing with commonplace themes.[1][2] Literary critics, poets, and writers have contended with Instapoetry's focus on brevity and plainness compared to traditional poetry,[3] criticizing it for reproducing rather than subverting normative ideas on social media platforms that favor popularity and accessibility over craft and depth. History Instapoetry developed as a result of young, amateur poets sharing their output to expand their readership, who began using social media as their preferred method of distribution rather than traditional publishing methods. The term "instapoetry" was created by other writers trying to define and understand the new extension of instant poetry shared via social media, most prominently Instagram.[4] In its most basic form, Instapoetry usually consists of bite-sized verses that consider political and social subjects such as immigration, domestic violence, sexual assault, love, culture, feminism, gun violence, war, racism, LGBTQ rights, and other social justice topics.[2][5] All of these elements are usually made to fit social media feeds that are easily accessible through applications on smartphones.[4][6] Scholarship Despite the diversity of poetry on Instagram, the Brazilian linguist Bruna Osaki Fazano found that shared "aspects of the compositional form, theme and style" mean that it can be understood as a specific genre.[7] Writing in Poetics Today, JuEunhae Knox combined quantitative and qualitative analysis to show that Instapoetry is a cohesive genre, in part because "the sheer volume and rapidity of content production in turn encourages posts that are not only visually appealing but also immediately recognizable as Instapoems".[8] Instapoetry has been seen as a practice that serves as a form of self-staging for poets[3] and "[crafts] authenticity".[9] Eirik Vassenden [no] describes the work of Norwegian poet Trygve Skaug [no] as appearing to offer a "simple, almost direct access to the inner self".[10] Vassenden writes that poems such as Rupi Kaur's "if you are not enough for yourself / you will never be enough / for someone else"[11] are "authentic" to such an extent that they are not literary.[10] The Legitimacy of Instapoetry: Why We Need It to Save Poetry Publishing Tags: canada, instagram, instapoet, instapoetry, MPub, poetry, publishing, SFU | Essays, Essays - Fall 2018, Publishing | Posted October 1, 2018 by cna33 The moment I came across Milk and Honey was a definitive moment in my life; I realized how fascinated I was about the publishing industry. I read poetry in high school, analyzing form and meaning in Emily Dickinson poems or Shakespeare’s sonnets, but it was always so confusing to me. I often wondered why poets couldn’t just get to the point or describe their thoughts in metaphors that make some sort of sense within the first read. To my surprise, Rupi Kaur and this poetry book happened, the poetic phenomenon that changed the poetry community. The feeling was instant, ironic to what this new age in poetry publication is called: Instapoetry. Instapoetry is an adaptation of traditional poetic ideals into a transformative Internet subgenre. Poets have turned to Instagram, a popular social media platform, to share excerpts of their work in hopes of publication. Instapoetry refutes traditional poetic forms, and instead, polarizes a new style that entwines art with literature. Molly McElwee, in an article for Gibraltar Magazine, shares that Instapoetry is the use of this “photo-sharing platform [giving] poetry a much-welcomed fresh feel… the poems are bite-size, they fit within the square Instagram frame; their font is carefully selected, an aesthetic extension of their work. And, when well done, the platform has skyrocketed amateur writers to the literary mainstream.” [1] Since Kaur’s arrival, it was as if poetry was culturally relevant again. According to Booknet Canada, Kaur continues to dominate all book sales across the world, where “for the second year in a row, unit sales in the poetry category increased significantly. [2] In 2016, poetry sales increases by 79% over 2015, and between 2016 and 2017 the units sold increased by another 154%.” [2] Andrews McMeel Publishing announced that Milk and Honey “sold more than one million copies in print after just over a year… and are currently in their 16th printing.” [3] In this age of new media revitalizing poetry, shaping the poetry publishing industry, what is the legitimacy of Instapoetry? Thus, in the scope of this essay, I strive to explore what Instapoetry means in publishing, and defend the relevancy of Instapoetry, analyzing how it saves the poetry community by counteracting conventional poetic norms. Michael Warner, in his scholarly paper, “Publics and Counterpublics” foregrounds a crucial theory that helps explain how Instapoetry has been so successful and unstoppable. Warner explains that a public is self-organized, a “space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” and “the circularity is essential to the phenomenon.” [4] In order to create this circularity, there must be participants that contribute to the discourse, which in this case are the poets and the readers. Warner considers that “a public is never just a congeries of people… it must first of all have some way of organizing itself as a body, and of being addressed in discourse.” [4] To organize itself, the public is “a social place created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.” It is constantly interactive and linking social interpretation together because social networks are a collective effort and exists in relationships between all participants. Instapoets produce Instapoetry solely for the intention of the poems being read. Without the Instareader, the poems would mean nothing and would not be circulated. This has become an important criterion for the public sphere to function coherently. Moreover, Warner explains that “a public is poetic world-making.” The contributions to a public are often performative acts, that the engagement itself can transform and shape the public. A unique correlation exists between the public and the text. An example is the form in Instapoems that can be adapted and used in other discourses, like Kaur’s iconic line breaks inspiring the works of several new Instapoets: Atticus, Nikita Gill, Amanda Lovelace. Ultimately, it’s quite intriguing and comforting for Instapoets to put their work on 800 million and counting content- creator generated social network service as if a guarantee that there will be a certain readership if the right amount of tags and hashtags are used. Instapoetry will always be a public between the intersection of Instagram and the Poetry Community, and in order to have an “on-going life”, it must have the supporters that continue to produce and contribute to the discourse. In midst of this digital technology storm, it is uncanny to believe that technology has no effect on books, reading, and publishing. Technology is a blessing and a curse. It strives to simplify our lives, making basic human tasks almost disappear by the robotic programming of completing a task within the touch of a button (i.e. meeting someone face to face versus a quick text). The introduction of eBooks led many people in the industry to believe that print publication would be dead; however, studies show that specifically in poetry, Canada had the greatest sales yet in 2016. [6] Accordingly, Andrews McNeel Publishing proves to be the most successful publishing house that understands the market of Instapoetry and uses it to their advantage, publishing “eleven of the top twenty best-selling poets last year.” [6]. Kirsty Melville, president of Andrews McNeel, explains that “as a publisher, we go with where the culture goes.” [6] She continues with stating that “the digital age has facilitated a connection between writers and readers. In addition, although these poets share their work online, publication in book form is also cherished. The book is one of the oldest, most successful, and most valued inventions for sharing ideas.” [6] It is as if Instapoetry acts as a complementary tool that revitalizes poetry genre in the publishing industry, where readers are compelled by these strong desires and interests after reading Instapoetry to do something about these feelings, to physically purchase the poetry book and contribute to the monetizing of poetry. Evidently, Instapoetry becomes a gateway drug that revives the public’s cultural interest in poetry, and by this inherent interest in poetry book sales, the poetry community lives on. So why is wrong with Instapoetry, in the eyes of academia? Why is it hated on or seen as “a pop phenomenon with little connection to the literary world”? [7] Vinu Casper shares this fair and common critique on Instapoetry: “Poets who spend years honing their craft, carefully writing and rewriting every line, practicing their performance over and over before they take to stage, are being beaten to the punch by influencers with a steady social media presence and masses of followers. These so-called Instapoets get away with blanket statements and empty metaphors under the guise of poetry.” [5] She questions if these simple posts are more “for sake of engagement” as if a marketing ploy that schemes for likes or comment responses from Instagrammers instead of the poetry itself. Similarly, Tham Young, an English teacher critiques Instapoetry, calling it “fidget spinner poetry”, as if it demonstrates a millennial flaw. He suggests that millennials uphold short attention spans that make it harder to critically comprehend and analyze traditional works of poetry. [8] Instapoetry is then seen as laziness, that the incompetency to create a similar product of poetry based off of ancient standards is deemed as illegitimate or unworthy of the same value and praise. This furthers the generation gap within the poetic community, that the older traditionalist poets refuse to accept or learn to understand new styles of poetry. Instead, they turn this misunderstanding into hatred and exclusivity, a poetic culture war. As a fellow Instapoet, I like to think that there are many reasons why Instapoetry is so favourable; an important one being that “they pack so much meaning into so little language.” [3]. They entwine “the internet’s love of an inspirational quote with artful typography and immediate share-ability.” [3]. One Instagram account called @Poets follow Kaur’s outburst of simplistic aesthetically pleasing visual/ phrases. It features many poets that write one-liners/ one stanzas that sound like every day phrases or thoughts. An example is (insert image): “I aspire to be/ an old man/ with an old wife/ laughing at old jokes/ from a wild youth.” written by Atticus, a current popular Instapoet following the steps of Kaur. [9] Or another that is simply: “you are in/ everything/ I see/” titled “six word poem – poets”. [10] As much as it sounds like everyday dialogue or thoughts, they are very relatable, shareable, “screenshot-able”, and “easy to recall if one is in need of an inspirational quote or late in the day mantra or an impulsive Saturday night tattoo.” [11]. They can be instantly felt and emoted, and if it is so easy to relate to them, it sparks the heavy desire to read more or read on; both that contribute to supporting poetry publishing. As well, Instapoetry becomes more accessible to the everyday reader as more contemporary themes are addressed: love, culture, feminism, gun violence, domestic violence, war, racism, LGBTQ, and other social justice topics. Perhaps it isn’t about replacing traditional works or forms, but using the current medium to foster the appropriate cultural relevance or representation to the era in which the new media poetry is produced in. It’s an “innovative progression” [11], one that lures new readers into the inherent simple language in Instapoetry and understands deeper meanings about the life around them, all while using flowery language and poignant metaphors. Whether it’s continuing to buy print poetry books in the store or read online content, I like to believe that in the end, poetry is poetry; art is art. Who has the power to constitute what is right and what is wrong if arts and literature are subjective to the reader? In a world that becomes more and more complicated, isn’t it nice to come across poetry that can be simple yet make the reader feel an intense array of emotions? It’s not really different from older poets like Keats, Shakespeare, and Byron; Instapoets continue to “examine their present moment and turning that moment into art.” [11]. They lead a cultural revolution of introducing new, raw, emotional storytellers, while utilizing a simpler writing style, into the community. Sometimes I also find a hard time understanding how posts like “you are in/ everything/ I see.” can be seen as poetry, but perhaps there’s a poetic aesthetic to finding meaning in something so simple. It’s these wonders that continues our curiosities with poetry and makes us continue reading, scrolling. - des références visuelles Poem.exe – Chia Amisola Digital Seeds – Everest Pipkin Tiger Dingsun’s Interactive Poems Sites d’archives poétiques comme The Poetry Project - une bibliographie Amisola, Chia. Poem.exe: A Digital Manifesto. 2022 Amisola, Chia, A Website Can Be A Poem w/ Chia Amisola, A conversation on the art of websites, virtual preservation, and creating space, 2023 Pipkin, Everest. Digital Seeds: Growing Poems in Code. 2023 Dingsun, Tiger. Interactive Poetry and Design. 2021 Tiger Dingsun, How poetry and graphic design reproduces inarticulable feelings, It’s Nice That, 2021 Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis : Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, 2014 Yasir, Azam, An Analysis Of Selected Characteristics In Metaphysical Poetry, 2020 Everest Pipkin, A Long History of Generated Poetics: cutups from Dickinson to Melitzah, 2016 “The thing that excites me most about the web as a medium is that distribution and publishing is built in. The web is the primary medium of contemporary life. So many aspects of our lives have moved online.” “The way that I encounter text and literature nowadays is all online, through blogs, Twitter, fanfiction, forum posts and I’m sure that’s true for a lot of people. I feel a creeping sense of dread, then, around the increased regulation and monetisation of online platforms.” Chia Amisola (b. 2000, Manila) is an artist and technologist devoted to the internet’s ambiences and its loss, love, labor, and liberation. Their games, performances, and websites take interest in the intimacies of infrastructures, the labor of tools, and the poetics of machines from the domestic to the divine. With practice dating back to 2006, including writing & software , digital intimacy (whenwe.love), placemaking & territories, religion & ritual, folk archival, teaching & organizing, artifacts & performances, amongst others. “( Simply, I dream of gathering all the people I love in one place, and build an internet that might be that place. )” Tiger Dingsun, originally from Portland, OR, triangulates his creative practice somewhere between graphic design, web development and editorial work. He sees these disciplines as interconnected in the way that they allow him to manipulate and play with text to draw out various levels of meaning. Language, for him, is affective, as words produce meaning not only from their semiotic function but also in the way that they engage the senses. They create what he calls “weak synaesthetic relationships” between different colours, smells, tastes and textures. Present in the visuality of a word – not just the typefaces chosen to represent it but the shape of words and the base of the letterforms – are objects that carry aesthetic value within its own right. Rory Green is a writer, coder and scaredy-cat living on unceded Wangal land. Their generative poetry has been published in Cordite Poetry Review, Running Dog, Taper, and The Lifted Brow among others, and has been a finalist for the Goolugatup Heathcote Digital Art Prize. “My poetry generator forecast assemblage was a finalist in the 2022 Goolugatup Heathcote Digital Art Prize, and my collaborative generative poem Trace Garden was presented at the 2022 Cementa Art Festival.” “My main creative practice revolves around interactive and generative digital poetry.” “Establishing secure connection...” is a website composed of fragments of posts filed under the “missed connections” section of Craigslist. missed connections is a place where the shy, lonely, and atomized go to plead with the universe to grant them just one more chance at connecting with the beautiful stranger they cannot bear to imagine a life without. These desperate, melancholic voices presume that union with the other will make everything okay again. When they post, they’re feeling lucky, to borrow from Google. I’ve mined particularly poetic fragments from missed connections, sourced from the Craigslist branches of random cities. They flood the screen upon page load, as if typed by their authors, each at a randomly generated speed, inevitably overlapping. Yearning is cacophony. “If you’re feeling lucky, you can click the button and three fragments will self-select at random to — in the words of the Internet — establish a secure connection in the form of a poem. If you don’t e-mail it to yourself, you lose it forever (think of posterity, don’t make the mistake the authors did). If you don’t like how things turned out, you can always start over. ♡”

ed sanders investigative poetry “The Content of History Will be Poetry There is no end to Gnosis: The hunger for DATA The Goal: an era of investigative poesy wherein one can be controversial, radical, and not have the civilization rise up to smite down the bard. To establish and to maintain it. POETS MAY REMAIN IN THE RADIX, UNCOMPROMISING, REVOLUTIONARY, SEDITIOUS, ABSOLUTE. POET as Investigator Interpreter of Sky Froth Researcher of the Abyss Human Universer Prophet Prophet without death as a consequence. My statement is this: that poetry, to go forward, in my view, has to begin a voyage into the description of historical reality.” “Presenting Data on the Page the page is the history the poem on the page chant-modes, anapestic/dactylic/choriambic/beowulfian-motorized-alliterative narratives should be as diverse, in their specific techniques, as the gene pool o'er which they sing and the same is true of the poetic adornments of the page that is, a page is not a four-sided white void in which to practice zeroness. It seems obvious that the language of poetry may well evolve into a 1000 color hieroglyphics utilizing a near infinity of typographies.The availability of colors § photographic images and the 100's of type faces, even in a good art supply store, foretell the birth of an international hieroglyphics. The upcoming laser hologram revolution-- that is, of 3-dimensional words §& images, speaks and shrieks of a future where poetry and collage and perspective join to thrill the eye-brain with glowing, animated ("poetry in motion," the rock-and-roll song so prophetically sang), multi-color, 3-d "memory gardens" or verse-grids. This new hieroglyphic language may well use letterless symbols, emotionglyphs say, 3-d soundless glyphs or tiny photographs depicting complex emotional states, inserted in the hieroglyphic grids, to augment the poet's inherited word-horde.” “Beginning in 1988, Dickey used the HyperCard software on his Macintosh SE to compose what would become fourteen "HyperPoems."”