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[Here's my forthcoming web column for the Poetry Project Newsletter. Some of it is a report on the Mini-Digi Fest that I organized for the Segue series in November.]
Oct/Nov were very busy, the final event of my two month stint curating, with Gary Sullivan, the Segue reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club being (while the G-man was away in Nashville) the “Mini-Festival of Digital Poetry,” a 7-act roster of poets and poet groups who use computers in the creation andor presentation of work.
Angela Rawlings gave a suave and bountiful reading from her sequences wide slumber for lepidopterists and LOGYoLOGY, the former written from the perspective of a scientist of butterflies and moths, the latter a 'pataphysical investigation of the sciences of the body -- a poem as "Body of Knowledge" (or "BoK") that is growing online at her website (commutiny.net/). The recently unconcussed Loss Pequeño Glazier (epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier), perhaps representing the "old school" vibe of the digital aleatoric (a la Jim Rosenberg and John Cayley) and looking rather Kaiser Sose-ish, rendered a comical Dada jig out of Java cribs, regalling the audience with his polylingual splashes and disarming asides.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (impermanenceagent.com) was both professional in his short intro to the concept of "electronic literature" -- the dos and donts of a digi-critic appearing on illuminated placards behind him -- and mischievous in his algorithmically-created web texts which made hyper-referential narratives out of a browser's daily meanderings. We couldn't get the vocoder working for Patrick Herron (proximate.org), but he gave a strong reading with VJ co-hort Giles Hendrix, who usually presents video work in Subtonic and other dance/lounge places in NYC; a cameo by the Sims ladies added a political bite to the ambient graphics.
Paul Chan (nationalphilistine.com/alternumerics) was the “Take On Me” rock-star of Fouriest fonts; his "self portrait in a font," in which the lower-case letters are phrases from casual conversation and numbers are the names of ex-lovers etc. brought down the house. He's probably back from Iraq by now, where he went in December to do more font-studies and deliver clothes and supplies. Aya Karpinska (technekai.com/aya/) brought back memories of the last half hour of the first Star Trek movie ("I could have had a V'ger!") with her cool navigation of her 3-dimensional Shockwave poem “Contract;” she then took us on a tour of the communal mind of a multi-authored text space (wisely avoiding my own contributions to that hypertextual cerebellum).
The Prize Budget for Boys (prizebudgetforboys.com/) were a cross between SCTV, the TRG, and the fabled anarchrists of EMI, which is to say funny, semiotic, and rude. My favorite bits were the faux-naif translations from American sign language -- "deaf small world is!" -- and the goofy grin on Jason (aka Percival Peabody's) face when reading the AltaVista translations of Osama Bin Laden's poems. A series of hellishly blurry pictures of the festival along with my hideously spelled poster are still online.
In November, I was also handed a nice email from the New York Times demanding I take down my Vaneigem series of nytimes.com detournements from public view, to which I complied because I am not interested in cat-and-mouse games with the authorities. Perhaps I fancy myself a regular Han Solo and likes to fight head-on, but more likely the Vaneigem works are not worth burning the purse for (I don't know any lawyers). But the world hasn’t heard the last of Raoul Vaneigem, or of the New York Times, or… or… You can read all about it at Tom Matrullo’s Commonplaces (tom.weblogs.com/), a blog in the Swiftian spirit that is chock-full of immodest proposals . A great website devoted to illegal art is illegal-art.org/print.
My general tendency, with “digital poetry,” is to shy away from the Flash/Director works because they usually resemble illustrated poetry books (how many successful ones of those can you name?) rather than the conceptual (“interactive,” “hypertextual,” “rhizomic”) art works they claim to be. But a few that I like quite a bit are Thomas Swiss’s “The Narrative You Anticipate You May Yet Produce,” (bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/narrative), Claire Dinsmore’s “The Dazzle as Question” (studiocleo.com/projects/dazzle) and the work of William Poundstone, who has a new thang, “The White Poem,” at ubu.com. (My interview with Poundstone can be found at the Iowa Review Website, which will also be posting my interview with John Cayley some time in January.)
All of these works share a basic quality, which is that the effort it appears to have taken to create them is equal to the effect they create – in a word, not overproduced (the age-old Johnny Mnemonic vs. Alphaville question). The folks at bannerart.org get it right (for me) by stipulating that all submissions conform to the standards – width & height, file size, etc. – published by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (iab.net/standards), thus making a monastic discipline out of corporate coercion (well, it’s better than it sounds), and figuring the artworks, of which many are poems, as parasites in the healthy colon of the transnational polis. Their recent Buy Nothing Day contest, with a grand prize of $0 (USD), shows their heartlessness is in the right cyberspace.
But once again silliness gets the best of me, and my eye candy of the year award goes to the wonderful Bembo’s Zoo (bemboszoo.com), a Flash bestiary made entirely of letterforms (demonstrating, among other things, that photography may have a ways to go before it proves useful to web poets). Oubapo (newhatstories.com/oubapo/), the site of the Oulipo of comix artists, is a nice place to spend a toked up afternoon, but even better are the bits of Atari prose at the Prize Budgies website, most recently “Pac-Mondrian,” a video game in which you are chased by goblins in a loyal reproduction of the Dutch artist’s canonical “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” The propaganda states: “Each play of the game is an act of devotion. Mondrian's geometric spirituality fuses with his ecstatic physicality when Pac-Mondrian dances around the screen while the Trinity of Boogie Woogie jazz play 'Boogie Woogie Prayer'.” It’s as good as it sounds!
Posted by Brian Stefans at January 18, 2003 10:36 AMBut some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.
Posted by: Wilfred at January 18, 2004 06:10 PMThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Cornelius at January 18, 2004 06:11 PMThe most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.
Posted by: Edwin at January 18, 2004 06:11 PMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: James at January 18, 2004 06:12 PMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Dolora at January 18, 2004 06:12 PM