ARRAS..::new media poetry and poetics::..

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sites with legs |

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free space comix: the blog

gallery of digital poetry (off-site)

Blonk-Organ

About the closest many of you will get to this great Dutch sound poets' live performances -- a Flash app that lets you compose your own works with Blonk's incredible vocal range and distinctive sound vocabulary. The faces are great, too.

flash required
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2002: A Palindrome Story

A story that reads the same way forwards and back -- and it's much longer than Guy Debord's movie titles. Gives you links to sites that let you do it yourself (with a little help from big blue).

Tom Raworth's Doodles

What do you get when one of the great living English poets tries his hand at Photoshop and proceeds to take the piss out of everything...

The Alphabet Synthesis Machine

Make your own alphabets that no one can read, using an interface that's impossible to master -- sounds like net art to me. But you get to take the font home in a doggie bag and implant it on a friend's computer.

l[inguistic] systems

"A l[inguistic] system map applies the recursive morphological growth algorithm of the Lindemayer system (l-system) to the linguistic structure of written narratives as a mechanism for visualizing the often fractaline structure of descriptive prose." Finally!

Floating Sushi

An original game of letters and words that takes you on a non-linear stroll through the street poetry of San Francisco's distinctive typefaces, color palette and consumer needs. Rather than imitate the idea of a "game," this is actually something you could get good at.

flash
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The Impermanence Agent

I haven't actually gotten this to run, but the concept is great: a running narrative created by the texts that appear on the pages you are browsing, illustrated by collages constructed from those same pages. Mac only folks.

The Pornolizer

Not sure if this is for the "wish I'd thought of that" category, but this site -- which exposes a Sadean sublife of cataclysmic, if unsatisfying, sexual exchange beneath any text -- seems the natural use for word replacement algorithms.

Series Poems

I have some misgivings about Jason Nelson's aesthetic sense, but there's something to be said for a rotating poetry device that emits secondary text clusters based on the user's clicks and rollovers. Nelson is a prolific web poet whose other work appears here.

flash
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text.ure.org

This site "inspired by the textural white on white paintings of Kasimir Malevich" is a highly intricate, beautiful application that allows you to contribute to a language structure that can be recombined by later users and also viewed in different diagrammatic fashions.

flash
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The Gates of Paradise

David Daniels is kind of like a Blake with a word processor, or an Apollinaire with a mystical bent creating caligrammes as fast as the laser printer will allow -- or neither, but an original, if strange, artist whose primary fan base seems to be on the web.

flash
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Geoff Ryman's 253

Geoff Ryman is the author of several innovative novels -- part Oulipian, part English satirical realism -- and designed this web version of his multi-perspectived view of a metro line destined for no good ends.

flash
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Floraspirae

An intriguing Flash "glyphabet of plant-breath" based on the writings of Armand Schwerner by prolific concrete/multimedia poet mIEKAL aND, whose other recent works include SEEDSIGNS for Philadelpho Menezes.

flash
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The Narrative You Anticipate You May Produce

Thomas Swiss's most recent Flash piece, done in collaboration with Seb Chevrel, uses randomization elements for the visual, sound and textual elements in an elegant, somewhat "Throw of the Dice" fashion, one of the more successful uses of randomization in a web poem.

flash
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Fidget

The incredible java setting by Clem Paulsen of Kenny Goldsmith's book Fidget, which recounts all of the author's actions, from lifting a cup to wiping his nose, on Bloomsday (June 16) 1997. Interact with the words and find out what kg was doing at 7:25 pm instead of washing the dishes.

java applet w/ sound
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Nicholodeon

A beautiful web-setting of Darren Wershler-Henry's "book of lowerglyphs," his concrete and procedural homage to the poetics of bpNichol which also targets some very contemporary iconography.

New Digital Emblems

A quasi-didactic site that outlines how the web and the ancient form of the heroic emblem -- which employed a motto, iconic image and commentary -- intersect. Some pretty strange and original creations here.

shockwave
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desvirtual.com

The site of Brazilian artist/theorist Giselle Beiguelman that plays with your head, your mouse, and all of your preconceptions on what the "book" and the "screen" mean, with her own careful homage to the varieties of errorful experience one gets on the web.

Moulipo

Ever wanted to write like George Perec and make friends in Sydney, Australia at the same time, all the while disguised as a cavelier avatar? Katherine Parrish's moo-environment runs oulipian algorithms on your text as you write, though it's a bit hard to figure out how to get in (more later on that).

Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries

Excellent Flash word movies with musical soundtracks, quick downloads that take over your mind with their classic agit-prop style, Situationist philosophy and kinetic MTV energy. In several languages, and by a Korean to boot!

flash
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Bembo's Zoo

The feel-good lettristic Flash bestiary of the year -- a simple concept executed with care, skill and starry-eyed inventiveness. You'll never look at ears, e's or elephants the same way again. If Apollinaire could do it...

flash
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Vispo

A quirky set of projects by long-time visual poet Jim Andrews, some of which may appear a bit liberal in their idea of "poetry" at first but which nonetheless forces a lot of issues. Contains downloadable shockwave scripts and files, and a fair amount of Andrews' writing on web art.

shockwave
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shadoof.net

I'm not quite sure what "shadoof" means, but this is the site run by John Cayley, another cyberpoetry veteran, which doesn't contain much web poetry but describes many of his innovative pieces for hypercard. Cayley is a trained sinologist, and mates an interest in programmatic and digital translation with cultural "feedback."

Epos der Maschine

This is really just some nutty thing I came across and cannot quite get to work. Normally I'm turned off by these heavy-handed projects, but the screen captures from this essay make me think there is something great happening here.

shockwave
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turux.org

Reveals the beauties of programming itself, which is to say the images that appear here seem to be a musical, "expressive," interpretation of script and seem beholden to an invisible syntax, leading the viewer into what I call "readerly activity." a la the postsemiotic poem.

shockwave
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oooxxxooo

One of my favorite early pieces of hypertext poetry, created by Juliet Ann-Martin, a designer and writer in New York. This link goes to her home page, from which you can see her other projects, many of which would better be characterized as "net art" (if you must categorize).

A Mosaic for a Convergence

An essay by Charles Bernstein and programmed by Dante Piombino that really exhausts many of the methods of digital kitch -- bad wallpapers, loopy fonts, etc. -- with the added benefit of illustrations by Bernstein's then-pre-adolescent kids (see left). A really pioneering work that still looks fresh today.

Machine Visions: Towards a Poetics of Artificial Intelligence

Another beautiful essay from the folks at the Electronic Book Review, this one by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an excellent critic of information arts. Clicking within the essay brings up several shockwave files.

Basho's Frogger & Jabber

Two works by the young poet/programmer Neil Hennessy, the first probably the second-best haiku in the English language after "In a Station of the Metro," and the second a unique mating of generative liguistic theory, practical application and aesthetics.

java
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Ted Warnell

The site of the guy who created the "Poems by Nari" sequences that used to be everywhere. An early explorer of the aesthetics of information from within the frame of poetry, Warnell continues to update his methods while keeping close to a pleasing, identifiable graphic style.

sensory deprivation/dream poetics

Like Nicholodeon, another beautiful setting of a print book on the Coach House website. Conveniently, the book's author, damian lopes, is Coach House's web guru. Each little section of this web book offers new cerebral surprises -- sound, motion, action.

proximate.org

A strange site created by Patrick Herron that investigates the web as a place not of "coming together" but of alienation. One of the few "art sites" by a poet (desvirtual, above, is another) in which the site itself is considered a developing work.

Cedars Estate

Though intended for print, this sequence of graphic poems -- text by Robert Fitterman, design by Dirk Rowntree -- employs typefaces that can only have been invented in (and for) the digital age, not to mention colors that make your screen burst.

designed and edited by
brian kim stefans

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