Home page

This is my personal website. Please also visit my other site, The Hyperliterature Exchange. Please also note that although a lot of the material on this site is child-friendly (and a good deal of it was created with my daughter Rachel in mind), certain items contain strong language, gruesome murders etc. I've labelled these items "Adult Content" to avoid giving offence.

If you like what you see here, or just find it interesting, or just want to make a comment, then get in touch! I like to hear from people. The e-mail is edward at edwardpicot.com . Or you can just send me an empty e-mail with "subscribe" in the subject-line, and I'll add you to my list of subscribers.

My Recent Stuff

First experiences of reading (launched, February 2015) - An online project to which anyone is welcome to contribute, exploring people's memories of how they first started to read and the effect it had on them.

Dr Hairy, Series 2 DVD (December 2014) - Just in time for Christmas, which I might actually be able to afford if everyone buys a copy, it's the ribtickletastic second series of Dr Hairy on DVD, plus Gilgamesh on a bonus disc, all for only £15.00! Includes the following episodes:

  • Mental Health (previously unpublished)
  • COPD (Clinic in the Sky)
  • The Cold Foot
  • Big.Data (Part 1)
  • Big.Data (Part 2)
  • Big.Data (Part 3)
  • Big.Data (Part 4)
  • Mince Pies
  • Parents' Evening (not yet published)
  • Dr Hairy's Christmas Carol

To order a copy, click here.

Dementia (August 2014) A text-animation (with sound) on the subject of dementia.

The Norty Boy (March 2014) - A very short cautionary animation about what happens when you're norty, based on a picture-story done by my daughter Rachel when she was 5 or 6. To see it on YouTube, go to http://youtu.be/4AgTmpAu4EU; or to see it on Vimeo, go to https://vimeo.com/90351743.

Job's Comforters (September 2013) A text-based poem-video derived from the Old Testament Book of Job.

Gilgamesh (2012 - 2013) A puppet-animation based on the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, made entirely using open-source software, apart from a short animated section at the end which was made using Macromedia Flash MX.

Dr Hairy in: (2010 - ) A series of short puppet-videos chronicling the misadventures and frustrations of an ordinary (but rather hirsute) General Practitioner called Dr Hairy. Episodes are currently being published on this site, on You Tube and on the excellent DVblog video blog site.

The Dr Hairy videos (plus extras) are now available on DVD! £11.50 per copy - they're chortletastic, and they make ideal gifts for anyone over the age of 0. To buy one, pay a visit to the Dr Hairy website. In addition to the first 13 episodes (everything up to and including "Mentoring" on the list below), the DVD includes "The Problem of Healthcare" (see below) and "The Making of Dr Hairy" (documentary short, narrated by Brown Baby).

Episodes:

  • Jan 2010: Dr Hairy in: Phoning the London Hospital
  • Mar 2010: Dr Hairy in: Private Charges
  • April 2010: Dr Hairy's Address to the Nation (Election Special)
  • July 2010: Dr Hairy in: Old Fashioned Medicine
  • Sept 2010: Dr Hairy in: Frank Talking (Part 1)
  • Nov 2010: Dr Hairy in: Frank Talking (Part 2)
  • Dec 2010: Dr Hairy in: Frank Talking (Part 3)
  • Apr 2011: Dr Hairy in: Appraisal (Part 1)
  • June 2011: Dr Hairy in: Appraisal (Part 2)
  • July 2011: Dr Hairy in: Appraisal (Parts 3 & 4)
  • Nov 2011: Dr Hairy in: Child Safety
  • May 2012: Dr Hairy in: Mentoring

The Problem of Health Care (Feb 2012): A Flash cartoon satirising the UK Government's plans to reform the NHS. You can see the video on YouTube by clicking here, or you can download it by right-clicking here and selecting "Save link as..." from the drop-down options.

Psychedelic Pie (Jan 2012): Psychedelic music and video, created from materials found on the Web. You can see the video on YouTube by clicking here, or you can download it by right-clicking here and selecting "Save link as..." from the drop-down options. Attributions: backward guitar and psychedelic viola by Robinhood76; psychedelic percussion by Satoration; sitar by Kaiho - all from Freesound. Morning traffic timelapse by MegaTokkie, YouTube. Blackrock Sunrise (community video); London Underground (community video); and Haleakala Sunset by Mike McCabe - www.archive.org.

And (2009 - 2011) - An abridged version of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South - abridged on the principle of leaving out all the important bits.

  • September 2009: Chapters 1-8
  • November 2009: Chapters 9-16
  • August 2010: Chapters 17-24
  • January 2011: Chapters 25-32
  • July 2011: Chapters 33-40
  • September 2011: Chapters 41-52

London Churches (2009 - ) - A project about the experience of visiting all the churches in the City of London, plus a few more.

  • Part 1, July 2009: St Martin-in-the-Fields; St Paul's Church, Covent Garden; St Clement Danes; Temple Church; St Dunstain-in-the-West; St Bride's, Fleet Street; St Martin, Ludgate.
  • Part 2, November 2009: All Hallows by the Tower; St Olave; St Margaret Pattens.
  • Part 3, June 2010: St Helen's, Bishopsgate; St Andrew Undershaft; St Ethelberga; St Botolph without Bishopsgate.
  • Part 4, May 2011: St Stephen Walbrook; St Margaret, Lothbury; St Michael, Cornhill; St Peter, Cornhill; St Edmund, King and Martyr; All Hallows-on-the-Wall.
  • Part 5, Oct 2011: St Andrew Holborn; Christchurch, Newgate Street; St Vedast-alias-Foster; St Anne and St Agnes.

The BP/Gulf of Mexico oil disaster (May 2010) - a response to the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

Friday Morning at the Surgery (May 2011) A short Flash "poem" about surgery work. The accompanying music was developed using Andre Michelle's lovely Tonematrix.

Black or White (the gravy version), November 2010. Michael Jackson's "Black or White" rewritten as a song about gravy, and turned into a funky video with some help from my daughter Rachel (known on YouTube as HoolaHoopKid). To view it on YouTube go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGk2-T6_wI, or to download it from this site (58.2 MB) right-click the following link and select "Save Link As...": http://edwardpicot.com/blackorwhite.mov.

Bramble Jelly (March 2010) - a video about making bramble jelly, which you can see on DVblog at http://www.dvblog.org/movies/03_2010/bramblejelly.mov; or else you can download it from this site by right-clicking here and selecting "Save As..."

 

Everyone I can think of who has died (July 2009) - A video, originally published on the DVblog site at http://dvblog.org/movies/06_2009/picot/everybodyicanthinkof1.mov, where Doron Golan introduced it as follows: "Edward Picot is writing the names of all the people he can think of who have died onto leaves, then floating them down a stream near his house." Also available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0mn9OJ62wI.

House of Dreams (June 2009) - About a year ago the musician and video artistMichael Szpakowski posted on YouTube a remix of Radiohead's "House of Cards", and I was so smitten with it that I kept trying to think of some words to go with it. Eventually I came up with a video called "House of Dreams", which has just been posted on the DVblog site at http://dvblog.org/movies/06_2009/picot/houseofdreams1.mov. It uses images from Second Life and The Endless Forest, footage from the original Radiohead video for "House of Cards", and some of Michael's own video imagery. You can also see it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRr4e8ve7O8.

The Puzzle Box again - At the beginning of the year I gave The Puzzle Box a makeover (mainly a new index-page, but quite a lot of internal changes too) and prepared a print version for publication. You can see the made-over online version via the link above; or, if you're interested in the printed book, you can find it on Amazon UK if you search for "Edward Picot The Puzzle Box", or get it from Lulu.com, the publisher.

I recently had an e-mail about The Puzzle Box from Matt Fair, author of the epic philosophical sound-poem The World Owes You a Living. He wrote: "I want to tell you how much I enjoyed The Puzzle Box -- anyone who brings in William Blake as a character in a story has my attention -- wonderful dive down into the deep mythic roots of the world-soul and human soul. Story as medicine, thank you."

The Puzzle Box, a story for children in 12 chapters:

  • Chapter One, February 2008 - "You are the digital realm's answer to J K Rowling! It's quite lovely... I'm on the edge of my seat." (Michael Szpakowski, multimedia artist and composer)
  • Chapter Two, March 2008
  • Chapter Three, April 2008
  • Chapter Four, May 2008
  • Chapter Five, June 2008 - This chapter is dedicated to David Daniels, the great American shape-poet, who died in May. Two of his last e-mails to the WebArtery group were about The Puzzle Box: "I want to buy this yellow cards. This is gripping... truly healthy and mysterious in an elegant way!"
  • Chapter Six, July 2008 - "We are enjoying The Puzzle Box very much!" William, Artselector.com
  • Chapter Seven, August 2008 - "This is wondrous" - Joel Weishaus; "I am reading your 'The Puzzle Box' and loving it." - Regina Celia Pinto
  • Chapter Eight, September 2008
  • Chapter Nine, October 2008
  • Chapter Ten, November 2008
  • Chapter Eleven and Chapter Twelve, December 2008 - "The Puzzle Box has all the magical numinous quality of Lewis, Tolkien, and L'Engle." - Millie Niss

Flower Story (originally created in 2003; reworked in July 2008), a story for my daughter Rachel (who was then three and a half) with some stop-frame Flash animations. This is a piece of apprentice-work, really, so please look at it with some of your critical faculties switched off.

Bluedolph (December 2007), a Christmassy animation.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, (February 2007, April 2007, June 2007, July 2007), visualisations of Wallace Stevens' famous thirteen-part poem. The first three parts were completed in February, the next three in April, the next three in June, the last four and the interface in July. "This is a very beautiful visual poem... I am showing it to everyone I know" - David Daniels. (David Daniels runs a site called The Gates of Paradise and is a very fine visual poet himself, someone whose work I admire greatly.)

An article about Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, written by Katie Haegele as part of her Digitalit series, appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in July 2007. Another article, this time by Mark Garrett, appeared on the Furtherfield site in September 2007 (Furtherfield "was founded in London in 1996 and is... dedicated to the creation, promotion and criticism of adventurous digital/networked media art"). Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was also included in the gallery section of HZ #11 (HZ is the net journal of a Swedish arts organisation called Fylkingen, which was established in Stockholm in 1933 and is the oldest forum for experimental music and intermedia art in Sweden); and three sections of it were included in the second season of Michael Cousin's Outcasting site.

"Train Coming", June 2007 - A few weeks ago my friend Michael Szpakowski launched An Exciting Competition on his site, to publicise a literary magazine called "And Then..." from the USA. He published a song with lyrics by Robert Roth and Carletta Joy Walker and music by himself, and invited people to submit a karaoke version of it, or some other piece of digital art using the song as a jumping-off point. My submission is an extended version of the song, much in the style of Bob Dylan, with an accompanying video. WARNING! - this is a big download, so right-click the link, select "Save as...", and occupy yourself with something else while it runs its course. Alternatively, download the sound-only version on MP3, which is much smaller. For the video version click here, and for the sound-only version click here.

Creative Week, April 2007: Anyone living in the London area might be interested to know that my work has been featured in the April edition of Creative Week, a monthly newspaper about the arts distributed in and around the capital.

Frog-o-Mighty, (November/December 2006), a story in Flash made up with the help of my daughter Rachel, using some of the ornaments on our living-room window-sill.

Some fragments of my Mum, (September 2006), a Flash piece about my Mum, who was eighty earlier this year.

A Short History of Everything, (July 2006), a Flash montage of text and images, which reworks some of the text and images from Myron Turner's Timeline.

An Unimportant Story, (Adult Content - June 2006), a nonlinear story in four "strands", using HTML and JavaScript.

Banana Story, a short animation in Flash, based on a story made up by my daughter Rachel.

Rilke and the Archaic Torso, a mixture of commentary, undercommentary and poetry which I produced as a response to the German poet Rilke's famous poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" ("Archaischer Torso Apollos"). Uses JavaScript and Flash. Millie Niss, whose website is at http://sporkworld.org has just started keeping a weblog and publishing work by other artists, and I'm very fortunate to be the first guest artist whose work she has used.

The Greyhound Murder, (Adult Content), a nonlinear murder-story in Flash.

Don Quixote's Dream, originally submitted as part of the collaborative project Ovelhas de Quixotes/Quixotes and Sheep, launched by Regina Celia Pinto and engineered by aLexandre Venera.

Triptych: The Lost Sheep, originally submitted for Regina Celia Pinto's open-source collaborative blog The Big Sheep. Requires a screen-width of 1024 pixels. Please don't go clicking on this expecting it to do something clever: it's just three pictures in a row: no interactivity or anything; but the new media artist Babel has done an excellent interactive reworking of one of the images, which can be seen at http://arteonline.arq.br/blog/mixes/babel.htm.

Sheep, originally submitted for a themed collection about sheep brought out by the ArteOnLine group. Regina Celia Pinto, who runs the group, called it "essentially political and very intelligent... a narrative that can be understood by everybody". It was created just before the 2005 General Election.

Chicks. "ohoh oh oh oh this is just great!" - Alan Sondheim. A short animation for children, composed with the help of my daughter Rachel.

The Stream, a nonlinear story/poem with pictures.

Linesland, a short animation for children, composed with the help of my daughter Rachel.

The Bonfire, a prose poem with pictures.

Penguin Memories, a very short piece in Flash, with audio and pictures, which I made up for my daughter Rachel.

Sweetheart's Expedition, a picture-story for children which I made up with my daughter Rachel about her toys.

The Recycling Bins, (Adult Content), a nonlinear short work of hyperfiction, including one song.

The Sound of Church Bells, a hyperpoem.

Up Close and Virtual, review of Close Reading, a book of hyperliterature criticism, for the trAce organisation.

For Alan & Reiner (earth blown out to stars), a response to Alan Sondheim and Reiner Strasser's Tao. Both Tao and earth blown out to stars were published in The Museum of the Essential (and Beyond That), a Brazilian-based website run by Regina Celia Pinto.

Documentary Websites, an article for the trAce organisation.

What makes them click?, a comparative review of work by Lewis Lacook and Deena Larsen/geniwate for the trAce organisation.

For my older stuff, please see the Contents page.

Subscribe: If you'd like me to list you as a subscriber, and send you updates about new material as it appears, please e-mail me.