Electronic Literature Organization

In “Recycled,” Giselle Beiguelman has taken an “artifact” of electronic technology, the object-follow-cursor feature, and transposed it into a moving metaphor. Across a field of bright yellow, the letters RECYCLED enter the screen, track the cursor, disappear if gathered, and finally clump together and vanish, only to begin migrating, again, from the margins. The letters, then, are constantly being “recycled” — and the reader is the agent in effecting the transformation. Beiguelman’s piece is an example of the way in which minimal text can join with technological trope in a “reading” of e-lit.

Judy Malloy’s “Interlude” is part of a longer work entitled Dorothy and Sid. This story focuses on the lives of contemporary artists in the San Francisco Bay area; it unfolds in four parts: “Dorothy Abrona McCrae”; “Interlude — Dorothy and Sid”; “A Party at Silver Beach”; and “Afterwards.” Each of these narratives is characterized by multilinear story segments that can be accessed by the reader in varying order. “Dorothy Abrona McCrae” was begun as an online serial in April 2000. A new installment was added each month. The final installment was posted in December 2000. In “Interlude — Dorothy and Sid,” in a series of trips and intimate moments, Dorothy and Sid change their long-term but occasional relationship into a more serious commitment.

“Terror Nullus” was commissioned for the Venue/AFTRS Short Cuts online narrative exhibition in 1997. This 1 to 3 minute docudrama examines the hunt for an Australian identity — from prosaic places like Jenny’s place or Oscar’s office to unwieldy places like the unseen. This is a byte-sized piece of entertainment, with astonishingly intricate graphics and nuances.

The interactive whodunit doesn’t get any harder-boiled than in Dangerous Curves, a rare and effective follow-up to the style of detective interactive fiction seen in Stu Galley’s The Witness. A classic cast of characters and effective geography, with helpful compass direction information provided in the status line, make this piece more approachable than some others of similar depth and complexity. A Z-Machine interpreter (such as Windows Frotz 2000 or Zoom for Mac) is needed to run Dangerous Curves.

This short piece offers a simple but very effective interface. “Cruising” is a compelling example of the Flash-based work that has been presented over the past several years at Ankerson & Sapnar’s online magazine Poems that Go. The text is by Ankerson; the design was done collaboratively.

This curious interactive fiction “Aisle” provides the player with only one turn in which to do something, offering the slimmest possible bit of choice. But by playing repeatedly, a set of possible worlds - with some consistencies and some contradictions - can be seen from a supermarket shopper’s re-lived instant. A Z-Machine interpreter (such as Windows Frotz 2000 or Zoom for Mac) is needed to run “Aisle.”

“The Dazzle as Question,” first published in frAme, traces the conflict between the left and right brain inclinations of an erstwhile “old school” artist as experienced via an encounter with the digital realm. The Dazzle is a lyrical one; its marks and varied rhythmic emphases are indicative of the questions and confusion underlying the relationship between old and new identities and images. Claire Allan Dinsmore is a writer, artist, and the editor and designer of Cauldron & Net: a journal of the arts & new media. She has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Parsons School of Design/The New School for Social Research. Dinsmore has exhibited worldwide and been published as an artist, critic, essayist, and poet. See this work’s Directory entry for links to more works by this author.

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 Directory entry on Rosenberg for more information.

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.”

Christy Sheffield Sanford’s “Moving Toward the Light: A Meditation for the Solstice” is one of the remarkable pieces created by this unusual artist and poet. Known for her use of color and light, Sanford’s work often broke new ground in Web practice. This piece, created in 1997, uses sound, Java Applets, layers, motion, highlighted backgrounds, and mouseovers to explore the many moods of the Winter Solstice. Sanford is well known for her work as a trAce Writer in Residence, for her collaborative Madame de Lafayette’s Book of Hours, and for works such as “Water~Water~Water” (with Reiner Strasser), “Rockgarden of Love,” “Moon Swimming,” and “Bodies of Water: Fountain Albertas.”

“Beautiful Portrait” is featured in a recent issue of Born Magazine. In keeping with the mission of the magazine to combine designers and writers, the poem itself is written by Thom Swiss and the Flash animation is the creation of Motomichi Nakamura. Although there is no written text, the Flash sequence is accompanied by a synthetic voice that delivers the poem as the reader explores a grid pattern of accented silhouettes. The action of the reader escalates the tone and imagery of the piece, bringing about a surprising finish. Thom Swiss, well known in critical and scholarly literature, has written new media poetry for several years — his works include “The Dream Life,” “Hey Now” (also with Motomichi Nakamura), “Shy Boy,” and “City of Bits.”