Viewing Axolotls
Regina Celia Pinto, a Brazilian artist and writer, is the creator of The Library of Marvels. This online library is a collection of “artist’s e.books” on the web. The library began in 1999, and now contains six volumes: White and Black, Reflections on Fog (1999), the Book of Sand (2001), The Psychiatrist, Net.art / Web.art and other stories (2002), The Newest Song of Exile: Sabiá Virtuality (2003), Viewing Axolotls (2004) and Tales from my balcony / Alice in the “wonderbalcony.” Viewing Axolotls is a multiple investigation into a Cortazar short story updated in gender and media. Please see the directory entry for more about this author.
In Jim Rosenberg’s diagram poems a graphical notation acts as an external syntax — thereby, as Rosenberg puts it, “allowing word objects to carry interactivity deep inside the sentence.” This interactivity allows each element of the syntax to be occupied by complex clusters of words: layered, multiply embedded, and yet legible. Rosenberg’s earliest experiments with diagrammatic poems date back to 1968, and he has been creating interactive works since 1988, using a variety of platforms. Diagrams Series 6 was developed in Squeak, an environment that allows for reading on a wide variety of operating systems and also enabled Rosenberg to move (for the first time) to composing each poem in the series within the interactive reading environment. See the 
Text Rain is an interactive installation in which viewers play with the falling text of a poem. The text responds to motion and can be caught, lifted and released to fall again. If participants accumulate enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can read words and phrases formed by the falling letters. With active participation the text of the poem “Talk, You” by Evan Zimroth can be gradually reconstructed. As Utterback and Achituv put it, “Zimroth’s poem creates metaphorical bridges between the physical and the linguistic. It employs images of the body moving through space to speak of interpersonal relationships, illustrating how ‘meanings’ come together and fall apart through transient ’syntactical’ spatial relationships.”