DIGITAL POETRY: TEXT-BASED WORKS FROM THE TURBULENCE.ORG * AND NETESCOPIO ** ARCHIVES
Digital poetry has an aesthetic affiliation with the historical avant-gardes and with the avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century such as Lettrism, Concrete poetry or Conceptual poetry. The Lettrism, founded by Isodore Isou in Paris, understood that poetry should depart from the constitutive elements of language such as letters and sounds, going beyond meaning or semantics and used in a new way underlining its materiality instead of its representative capacity. In the context of Lettrism, also appeared the notion of détournemet (which latter will be a key concept for the Situationist poetics), in which social messages were appropriate, altered, intervened, subverted or "hacked". Concretism, emerged in São Paulo (Brazil). The concrete poets recognized themselves as heirs of Stéphane Mallarmé, James E.E. Cummings, Apollinaire or Oswald de Andrade. Their pieces were conceived as ideograms and their words were articulated as constellations on the space of the page. From Concretism arised several tendencies such as the semiotic poem, the visual poem, the poem process, in a zeitgeist conditioned by the theories of the communication, the theories of the information, the linguistic turn and semiotics. In the 60s, Conceptualism used language as a strategic tool to highlight the mechanisms used by hegemonic powers that are hidden in our everyday linguistic exchanges. Conceptual poetics had important antecedents at the beginning of the 20th century with Marcel Duchamp or Gertrude Stein, for example. As the century progressed it was cultivated by creators such as John Cage, Lawrence Weiner or the Art & Language group. It helped to address the limits of the representation of the world by words often with self-reflective, tautological or metatextual strategies. The Conceptual poetry that appeared in the 50s and 60s often expanded the textual to the visual, the cartographic, and to sound, performance and media (radios, telephones, recorders) as well.
Regarding the digital era, it is generally understood as the first digitally generated poetic composition the Stochastic Poem, by Theo Lutz. The Stochastic Texts of Lutz were published in 1959, in Augenblick, the famous literature magazine edited by Max Bense. Since then and until today we will find an increasing profusion of digital poetry, existing an enormous variety of aesthetic proposals processual, generative, performative, textualities in progress, détournements of institutional formats, random procedures, collages and textual cut ups, found poetry. Many of these strategies, as we will see, can be traced in the Turbulence and NETescopio archives.
*Since March 2018, the works of the Turbulence.org archive are hosted on the MEIAC server (Museo Extremadura and Iberoamerican Contemporary Art, Badajoz, Spain)
**NETescopio is an online archive in continuous development since 2008. Its purpose is to preserve artistic generated works for the network. This project of the MEIAC, framed within the concept of Intangible Museum, aims to safeguard, disseminate and catalogue these works, enabling their growth and constant updating.
THE TURBULENCE.ORG ARCHIVE
Zannah Marsh - Invisible Liens - Alan Bigelow - Belen Gache - Martine Neddam - Jim Andrews - Helen Thorington - Jason Nelson - Miranda July - Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries - Olga Goriunova
Turbulence.org was a legendary net.art archive founded in 1996 in New York by the artists Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green. It was meant to commission pieces of art that used the Internet as a medium and could not have an existence outside of it and encouraged artists to explore networks as a means of creating innovative pieces. The works commissioned by Turbulence, which today remain in its archive, reflect the enormous changes that the new online media had in cultural productions, in key years for the appearance of new technologies and network processes. For twenty years, Turbulence.org was one of the few artists' initiatives commissioning new pieces from emerging or established artists. The archive has more than 200 pieces and today it is housed in the MEIAC (Extremaduran and Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art). Many of the pieces are text-based. Here we will mention the presence of digital poetry in Turbulence.
Zannah Marsh, text_ocean (2015)
Zannah Marsh (Brooklyn, NY, USA) presents
text_ocean (2015), a random text and visualization experiment that uses the
novel Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, as source material. The selections of the
text are converted into a dynamic sea of words, animated according to their
grammatical function. The user "reads" the text "hooking"
the words with mouse clicks and then releases them in different spaces. In this
way, it disconnects them from its original lines and rewrites Moby Dick in a
slow and random way word by word, as the process of reading it proceeds.
http://meiac.es/turbulence/turbulence/commissions/text_ocean/text_ocean.html
Les Liens Invisibles, Tweet 4 Action (2011)
Les Liens Invisibles is an Italian art
group formed by artists Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini that seeks to
infiltrate and subvert global communication networks. Tweet 4 Action (2011) is
a tool for "armchair activism". The user can organize radical street
demonstrations and participate in them without any annoying risks. Created in
the cultural context of the "Twitter Revolutions", this project
addresses the combination of Twitter, augmented reality and big data, proposing
the users to decide, with a few clicks, where they want to "place their
disturbance", choose a rebel (#) hashtag and disseminate it all over the
web.
http://meiac.es/turbulence/archive/Works/tweet4action/
Alan Bigelow, Turbulence Artist's Studio (2007)
Alan Bigelow (Buffalo, NY, USA) creates
stories and poems for the web using images, text, audio and video. His works
become statements about contemporary life, culture and politics. His Turbulence
Artist's Studio page (2007) includes eight works. Some of them are presented as
comic strips; others, provide complex comments on politics, family and religion
and others, are structured around the entries of a database generated by users,
for example, Love Is ..., which proposes a tentative definition of love.
http://turbulence.org/studios/bigelow/bigelow.html
Belen Gache, Word Market (2012)
Belen Gache (Madrid, Spain) presents her
Word Market (2012), an Internet portal dedicated to buying and selling words,
using a unique coin: the 'Wollar'. Gache´s work is a détournement of the
institution "stock market" that, in addition, puts in evidence the
vain neoliberal will to become owners of everything, including the meanings of
words. In times of increasing privatization of public spaces and the profusion
of copyright laws, WordMarket allows the user to own, trade and capitalize on
words as their value fluctuates. The idea here is to be able to become the
owner of the words that one uses and specially, to prevent others from using
them. Gache has used the strategy of détournement in other of her pieces such
as Radikal Karaoke or The Sutra of the Celestial Turtle.
http://meiac.es/turbulence/archive/Works/word-market/
XianQiao (Martine Neddam), The essence of a nation: chinese virtual persons on the net (2006)
The essence of a nation: chinese virtual
persons on the net (2006) is a project that deals with virtual characters
developed by XianQian. Actually, XianQiao is herself a virtual character
created by Martine Neddam (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Neddam works with
virtual Internet characters that lead an autonomous artistic existence
(Mouchette, David Still, XiaoQian or the shared interface virtualperson.net.)
And through them she explores the concept of online identity. With her alter
ego XiaoQian, she introduces herself as an artist who, in turn, creates 6
virtual Chinese people: Mu Yuming, a painter; Shaxpir, a hip-hop singer; Wang
Shy, a ghost in a traditional garden; He Zhengjun, a carpenter working with
wood and text; Yi Zhe, a wedding guest and XiaoQian. In times of the decline of
classical narrative, Neddam also explores postmodern experimental narrative
forms here, just as, for example, in the otaku Asian culture, the characters
will be more important than the author, the narrative or the message of the
play.
http://meiac.es/turbulence/archive/Works/XiaoQian/
Jim Andrews, Arteroids (2002)
Jim Andrews (Vancouver, Canada) presents
his work Arteroids (2002), a computer game of 216 levels that refers to the
well-known model of arcade games like Asteroids or Space Invaders, at the same
time that it constitutes a rereading of the possibilities of digital poetry. In
the "game" mode, poetry fights against the forces of dullness and its
fate depends on the user's interaction. He can execute texts through his weapon
or exploit the rest of the vociferous texts that appear in green or blue.
http://turbulence.org/project/arteroids-2-02/
Helen Thorington, Solitaire (1998)
Helen Thorington (Boston, MA, USA), who was
co-director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. and founder and producer of
Turbulence.org, presents her work Solitare (1998), an experiment that explores
the relationship between game and narrative. Reminding many experiences of the
Oulipo, the novel El Castillo de los crusades, by Italo Calvino, or the book in
the form of a deck of cards by Max Aub, each card in Thorington’s online deck
contains an illustration and a short text. The user selects the texts that he
likes and clicks on "Add this line". The selected text moves
automatically to the right side of the screen, where it can be seen along with
other selected texts forming a random narrative.
http://meiac.es/turbulence/archive/Works/solitaire/index.html
Jason Nelson, Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise (2013)
Jason Nelson (Brisbane, Australia) presents
Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise (2013), a digital poetry that mimics
a videogame platform where the user must walk, jump, fall in a Mario Bros
style. Through lines of text, shapes of reading and combinations of random
phrases, Nelson highlights the importance of being praised or rewarded in our
lives, often in a superfluous or unnecessary way. Nothing You Have Done
Deserves Such Praise is part of a series of poetic games developed by Nelson in
which we can find other titles such as Game, Game, Game And Again Game, possibly
one of his best known pieces.
http://meiac.es/turbulence/archive/Works/nothing/
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Samsung means to Come (2003)
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Seoul,
Korea) is a Seoul-based web art group formed by the artists Young-hae Chang and
Marc Voge. His work is characterized by presenting animations based on texts
synchronized with musical scores. The piece Samsung means to Come, curated for
Turbulence by Ryan Griffis (subRational eRuptions, 2003) takes as a motive the
relations between the Intelligent Internet and everyday life in the neoliberal
South Korea. Reminding the sensuality of household product advertising and continuing
from previous work with products from the Samsung brand (intelligent
refrigerators), this piece presents a storyteller who imagines herself having
sex with a fictional character that symbolizes the company, which knows how to
satisfy her demands. The works of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries have been
presented in different countries and have been translated into more than 20
languages.
http://turbulence.org/project/subrational-eruptions-2/
Olga Goriunova, Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word (2003)
Olga Goriunova (Warwick, United Kingdom)
also appears here curated by Griffis (subRational eRuptions, 2003) and presents
her piece Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word, originally conceived for
the Transmediale in Berlin. Why should text editors provide only help for office
work and not existential challenges? It is a piece of software art that gives
the user the opportunity to create a personalized suicide letter customized for
their needs and tastes. Instead of wasting time thinking about how to express
oneself about the miseries of the world in the last moments of her life, the
user must follow eight simple steps to perfect his suicide note. With a turn at
the same time dismal and ironic, the piece refers to the absurd processes of
standardization of our daily life promoted by tools such as Word.
http://turbulence.org/project/subrational-eruptions-2/
In the Turbulence.org archive there are also many other text-based works: Shakespeare random sonnets (iLib Shakespeare (a perturbed sonnet project), by Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Tim Perkis, 2014), games that depart from the concept of "Translation" (Ethan Ham and Benjamin Rosenbaum with Les Belles Infideles, 2011), exquisite corpses and collective narratives (Francis Hwang, 2006), works formed by remixes and recycling of texts (Re_Cycled_Views, by Eduardo Navas, 2004), and so on.
DIGITAL POETRY IN THE NETESCOPIO ARCHIVE
Jon Thomson / Alison Craighead - Alexei Shulgin - Übermorgen / Paolo Cirio / Alessandro Ludovico - The Electronic Disturbance Theater - Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries - Luther Blissett - Eugenio Tisselli - Belen Gache - Olia Lialina - Eduardo Navas - Scott Kildall / Nathaniel Stern
Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, Attributed Text (1997)
Jon Thomson (London, UK) and Alison
Craighead (Scotland, UK), present in Attributed Text (1997) a page in which we
only see a typical copyright warning text. If we look more closely, we will
realize that each of the words that make up the phrase has a link to sites that
do not belong to these artists. When clicking on any of them we will see two
frames appear with additional information: one, with the copyright data of the
page from where that word has been "stolen" and the other, with the
text in question. The choice of these other sites is not accidental and they
all revolve around different visions about topics such as copyright, the
circulation of information on the Internet, etc.
This ironic strategy shows us the absurdity
of taking the practices of copyright control to the extreme, especially in an
environment such as the Internet, where it is almost impossible for the
navigator to detect the borders between the supposed owners of said information
since almost always on the same page we can find materials from different
authors.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0218/www.attributed-text.net/index.htm
Alexei Shulgin, ABC (1997)
Alexei Shulgin (Moscow, Russia) presents
his work ABC (1997) a minimalist mix between an encyclopedia of random content
and a portal designed with careful secrecy. In this work, one of his first
pieces for the Internet, Shulgin draws attention to one of the topics of art
for the web, the domain name or URL. Once he manages to take control of the
pages that seem to have their own will, the user accesses a series of links
that, at first glance, we could confuse with a visual poetry exercise: aaa,
vvv, zzz. It is about triads that conduce us to their respective www.aaa.com,
www.vvv.com or www.zzz.com and so on. From the website of the American
Automobile Association, we will go to the Better Business Bureau, Central
Christian Church, Dynamic Digital Depth and much later we will reach famous
triads like WWW or XXX. In this way, the experience that Shulgin proposes will
be like that of a walker whose itinerary is determined by external rules as
arbitrary as following the alphabetical order of a street guide and at the same
time, it is a metaphor of Internet browsing.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0038/
Übermorgen (Lizvlx, Hans Bernhard), Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, Amazon Noir (2006)
Übermorgen (the artistic duo formed by
Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard and based in Vienna) together with Paolo Cirio
(theorist and editor) and Alessandro Ludovico (writer and cultural critic)
create the now classic work Amazon Noir (2006) whose goal was the well-known
book store on-line. These artists subtractes books with protected copyright by Amazon.com,
using a sophisticated technology coded by Paolo Cirio. They managed to access
all the pages of the online sales books, which allowed them to download entire
publications and offer them free on their website as objects in the public
domain and based on a shared ownership economy. The consequence has been a
legal contest with Amazon.com that was followed by large online discussions
about the limits of intellectual property rights.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0222/
The Electronic Disturbance Theatre, DDK (Disturbance Developer Kit) (1998)
The Electronic Disturbance Theatre
(Mexico-USA) is formed by a group of cyber-activists and artists focused on the
development of the theory and practice of electronic civil disobedience. Here,
they present their work DDK (Disturbance Developer Kit, 1998). On April 10,
1998, on a new anniversary of Emiliano Zapata's death, they began a campaign to
stop the Mexican government's war against Zapatismo in a new theatre of
operations: the Word Wide Web. Through the distribution of an “attack toolkit”
against the official websites, and following a tactical operations calendar
published on the Thing website, this was one of the first synchronous
multitudinous operations that was developed on the internet. The DDK consisted
of a Java application that sent a refresh order, several times per minute, to
the Zedillo website, thus preventing queries. The reports indicated that in
this first action of FloodNet more than 8 thousand people distributed in
several countries of the world participated. Beyond the discussions that
emerged later about this type of strategy, we must highlight the context in
which this action was carried out and the precedent that left us the use of the
Internet as an element of joint action. This, of course grew exponentially with
the arrival of social networks, which was as we know decisive, for example, in
the so-called Arab Spring. The action of the EDT was the first virtual sitting
and the first public attention call.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0353/www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/floodnet.html
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Artist's Stament No. 45.730.944 (2002)
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (South Korea)
offers us a deep reflection on art, Internet and culture within the
dictatorship of North Korea. The work Artist's
Stament No. 45.730.944 (2002), consists in a succession of words
that "strike" the viewer in the style of other previous works, such
as Cunnilingus in North Korea or Rain on the sea. In the case of Artist's Stament, speed increases our sense of paranoia about a conspiracy.
It promotes a situation close to hypnosis through which we end up agreeing with
the flow of statements that the work triggers in us. Assertions about art,
morals, censorship, leisure, social commitment, the market, accompanied with a
narcotic jazz melody prevents us from opposing any resistance.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0005/DECLARACION_DE_ARTISTA.html
Luther Blissett (1994-1999)
Luther Blissett is a multipurpose name, an open reputation informally adopted and
shared by hundreds of artists and social activists throughout Europe since the
summer of 1994. In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the Luther Blissett Project became an extremely popular phenomenon, with a reputation as a popular hero.
Blissett also had activity in other countries, especially in Spain and Germany.
This "Robin Hood" of the information age waged a guerrilla war in the
cultural industry, carried out unorthodox solidarity campaigns for the victims
of censorship and repression and, above all, played complex media jokes as a
form of art, always vindicating responsibility and explaining what bugs they
had used to plant false stories. Some of the "deceptions" made by Blissett were the creation of fake artists, for example, Harry Kipper, a British
conceptual artist who disappears on the Italo-Yugoeslavian border while doing a
bicycle tour in Europe in search of the ART word on the continent map; Loota, a
chimpanzee whose paintings would be exhibited at the Venice Art Biennial; or
Darko Maver, a controversial Serbian sculptor and performer. Blissett has carried out actions injecting false news in the media. He has also
published the novel Q, set in the sixteenth century, during the peasant
riots and popular revolts that almost prevented the Reformation, before
suffering a bloody repression with the enthusiastic approval of Luther.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0231/
Eugenio Tisselli, MIDIPoet (1999)
MIDIPoet (1999) is a project by the Mexican artist Eugenio Tisselli that consists of two
programs: Composer and Interpreter, with which you can,
respectively, compose and interpret pieces of text and / or manipulee images.
These pieces may or may not respond to external impulses, such as MIDI messages
or the computer keyboard, and generate visual manifestations that involve the
manipulation of the different text attributes (content, font, position, size,
etc.), the image (content, position, etc.) and other elements and visual
effects. With a simple interface MIDIPoet is designed to put words into
action, rescuing the temporality and the performatic aspect of poetry.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0008/midipoet/index.htm
Olia Lialina, My boyfriend came back from the war (1996)
My boyfriend came back from the war (1996), by Olia Lialina (Moscow, Russia), is considered today one
of the first narrative works developed for the Internet and is perhaps one of
the most cited within the European context. Implemented with simple forms of
HTML, frames, images and "default" sources, it constitutes a
communication strategy that would characterize the later works of this artist.
This interactive story could be defined as "a story about love and
loneliness." The links lead to pictures of images or texts that are
interactively giving rise to a non-linear narrative about a couple that meets
after an unspecified war conflict. The story unfolds until the screen becomes a
mosaic of small black squares.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0033/war2.htm
Belen Gache, Wordtoys (1996-2006)
The Wordtoys (1996-2006), created by
Belen Gache (Madrid, Spain) propose us the exercise of reading as a deciphering
task as well as a narrative toy. This piece brings together a series of
works of hypertext, and audiovisual pieces with roots in the historical
avant-gardes, emphasizing the materiality of the signs and constructed from
strategies of randomness, permutability, process, game and rewriting.
This kind of digital anthology is a toy book that allows us to access pieces
like the Rimbaudean Word Processor, Write your own Quixote (in
which no matter how much we try, we would notbe able to write more than the original
Cervantes´ text) or The language of the birds (which presents a series
of automaton birds reciting with synthetic voices poems by famous authors about
birds.) These birds, converted into machine-poets, remind us that words are never
ours; they are always the words of others.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0006/
Eduardo Navas, The Quixote (2000)
The web project The Quixote (2000),
by Eduardo Navas (USA) is based mainly on the story by Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre
Menard: author of Don Quixote. Taking advantage of this essay of fiction,
in which Borges proposes not only the validity of the rewriting but the
impossibility of the existence of a true original, Navas establishes a
comparison between the possibilities of the hypertext and the narrative
mechanisms of Borges, involving the reader-user in the task of reinterpreting
the texts. Navas also seems to put the reader-user in the task of reconsidering
the traditional format of the book, whose pages are fragmented and unstable.
This is achieved both by the use of the formal and visual characteristics of HTML,
as well as the superposition of layers, texts on images, the appearance of pop
ups where English and Spanish versions are mixed, as well as the incorporation
of external links which require an active and re-constructive reading.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0007/systemStory2.html
Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, Wikipedia Art (2009)
On February 14, 2009, Scott Kildall (USA)
and Nathaniel Stern (USA / South Africa) placed a new entry in the English
version of the Wikipedia with the name of Wikipedia Art (2009). This
entry, which everyone could edit, became an art space in itself, a point of
collective intervention, a space for theoretical reflection on the notions of
work, of artist, but also that of validation and legitimation, two concepts
about which is built not only the Wikipedia, but the own system of encyclopaedic
knowledge and art.
Due, mainly, to the paradoxical or logical loop that supposes to define a
concept that is being created in the precise moment in which it is enunciated,
it is discussed and modified and, at the same time, to the need to have to
demonstrate the statements with external references of "reliable
sources" the validity of this concept, the intervention reached a point of
contradiction that led the administrators of the Wikipedia to permanently close
the entry.
The discussion anyway only begun at the
same moment it was cancelled and along with the documentation of that action, moved
from the territory of the Wikipedia to numerous forums or discussion spaces,
media and even museums and festivals. The main discussion is to determine, as
in any other collective cultural system, who chooses those who choose, who and
why she validates those who validate.
http://netescopio.meiac.es/proyecto/0317/wikipediaart.org/index.htm