Edward Picot: Personal Website
Links: Individual works
Title: Netpoetic.com
Description: A number of video presentations by Jason Nelson on the subject of digital poetics. There are three of them so far, and so far they all deal with the creation of digital poetry using Flash. By turns fascinating, funny, inspirational and infuriating: Jason is a very engaging presenter, obviously completely at his ease in front of the camera, but there are times when he seems so determined not to take himself too seriously that he almost winds up saying nothing at all. A bit more critical analysis and hard-edged technical information would have been helpful; but this remains a quirky and absorbing introduction to digital poetry of the Flash variety, with incidental sidelights on Jason's own working methods.
People responsible for this site:
- Nelson, Jason
Title: The Graveyard
Description: Tale of Tales is a game-design studio aimed at people who find ordinary games unsatisfying. Their work often contains mythic/poetic material. In this one, an old lady stands at the gates of a cemetery: you have to guide her through the gates and along a path until she comes to a bench in front of a chapel; then you have to sit her down. When she sits, you hear a song; and after the song, you get her up and guide her out of the cemetery again. The pace is slow, the possibilities for interaction strictly limited, and the end result makes you wonder where games end and works of art begin. A "full" version can be downloaded for $5, which "adds only one feature, the possibility of death".
People responsible for this site:
- Tale of Tales
Title: Distant
Description: A series of black-and-white photographs with bits cut out of them, to reveal a fizzy-looking, slightly-shifting network of criss-crossed black lines beyond and beneath them. All the human figures have been removed. Each picture is accompanied by a sound file: the wind blowing, doors opening and closing, a river gurgling, and so forth. Very simple and effective: to me, it suggests the way in which technology is eating into our lives.
People responsible for this site:
- Garrett, Marc
Title: Cyber Birds Dance
Description: The interface for this work is the silhouette of a hummingbird, composed of little squares. Each square, when clicked, triggers an animation. There are about 260 animations altogether, all of them based on birds: wheeling, twittering, flocking, disappearing off-screen and returning. Different animations can be combined with each other. There are fragments of text; the colours are beautiful; and the piece as a whole combines state-of-the-art digital effects with acute observation of the natural world.
People responsible for this site:
- Aranda, Isabel (YTO)
Title: http://www.simonschofield.net/
Description: A sequence of pictures created using "new software tools that assemble the images over time, using many thousands of repeated operations, according to sets of rules". They combine mathematical precision and formal control with intense observation, especially of the natural world.
People responsible for this site:
- Schofield, Simon
Title: alarmingly these are not l@vesick zombies
Description: Another good one from Jason Nelson: an absurdist satire on computer games and game theory. Basically it's a series of pointless and bizarre shoot-'em-up levels, overcrowded with ugly-looking graphics and ear-jangling sound-effects. Sandwiched between these levels are instructional videos of Jason "explaining" the finer points of game theory - but all of his "explanations" are deliberately nonsensical. Very funny in places, but also - despite the fact that it deliberately avoids saying anything at all explicit - a shrewd dig at new media theorists' fascination with games.
People responsible for this site:
- Nelson, Jason
Title: Billy Collins - Action Poetry
Description: A series of twelve short Quicktime movies, by various hands, based on poems by the Canadian Billy Collins. Some are better than others, and you have to keep asking yourself if they really add anything or if the poems would have been better left as poems - but the best ones take flight from the text and achieve some genuinely arresting images.
People responsible for this site:
- Collins, Billy
- various
Title: f.wishes
Description: A Japanese-style picture of bells hanging from the bough of a tree. Each bell represents a wish, and if you click on a bell the wish will appear as a line of text at the bottom of the screen. You can type in your own wish, and drag a line upwards from it to the bough of the tree, whereupon it will become a bell alongside all the others. This draws you in. You find yourself clicking on one bell after another to find out what people have wished for, and thinking about what you wish for yourself. Like some of the best interactive new media art, it takes a simple concept and uses it as a means of exploring the shared humanity of its viewers.
People responsible for this site:
- boredomresearch
- folly
Title: The Cantoos
Description: A series of very short poems - some of them only a word or two long - in a very plain typeface on a white background - but they change in various ways as you view them. Sometimes new words are added, or the wording of the poem is rewritten, or the text becomes creatively misspelt. Eventually, after a number of variation, the poem will find its way back to its original form. The possibilities of this fairly simple format are explored with great ingenuity; and whereas a lot of new media poetry tends to distract attention, in one way or the other, from the writing itself, in the Cantoos project the writing is very much to the fore.
People responsible for this site:
- Waber, Dan
Title: Between Treacherous Objects
Description: Jason Nelson's work is always worth looking at, and this is one of the most absorbing of his recent pieces. The basic idea is to take seemingly-disparate pairs of objects and put them together on the same page. This is accomplished with the vertiginous, user-responsive graphics and bizarre semi-musical sound-effects which are typical of Jason, but with a more stripped-down, simplified feel than usual, partly because many of the pages are in black, white and red.
People responsible for this site:
- Nelson, Jason
Title: LiveZine
Description: A one-off virtual magazine put together by two Scandinavian students as an art project. There's nothing revolutionary about the end product, but it's an extremely engaging piece of work making use of some well-chosen snippets of text.
People responsible for this site:
- Richter Schie, Atle
- Sundnes, Are
Title: Bus Root
Description: A young professional woman gets her car towed and is forced to catch the bus to work. She soon finds herself surrounded by a seething scrum of schoolkids, all talking at once, bitching about each other and getting on each other's nerves. By the end of the journey, despite her disdain, she seems considerably less self-obsessed than she was at the beginning, and we've had a glimpse into one of the undercurrents of English life. The performances in this short film are astonishingly natural, and the editing, use of camera-angles within a confined space, and choice of music are all spot-on. I don't know anything at all about Hannah Holland, the director, and was unable to discover anything from the Web, but this is a must-see.
People responsible for this site:
- Holland, Hannah
Title: First Screening
Description: Curated by Jim Andrews, who was also involved in re-engineering it, this is a loving recreation of a suite of animated-text poems from the Canadian poet bpNichol, created in 1983-4 using an Apple IIe computer and the Apple BASIC programming language, both of which became obsolete within the space of a few years. As Andrews points out, this is "some of the earliest programmed, kinetic poetry" ever created, which makes it extremely interesting from the literary-history point of view: but it's also lively and witty in its own right, perfectly capable of standing alongside today's more technically-advanced work. bpNichol unfortunately died whilst undergoing an operation in 1988.
People responsible for this site:
- Andrews, Jim
- Niemi, Marko
- bpNichol
Title: Interdependency
Description: Eight pictures taken inside a forest, accompanied by eight short texts. The texts take the form of e-mails to different individuals, but written in densely poetic language, and all on the theme of man's relationship with the natural environment. The pictures are big and intricate, crowded with detail, wet, chilly-looking, full of growth and decomposition. A sense of profundity and otherness emerges.
People responsible for this site:
- Weishaus, Joel
Title: Capped
Description: Another enigmatic production from the Digital Fiction/Dreaming Methods stable. This one is about fragmentary memories of a childhood encounter with aliens - at least I think that's what it's about. We find ourselves drawn through a series of multi-layered black-and-white wastelands, with text-snippets drifting amongst the weeds, brickwork and rust, hinting at a half-vanished back-story. Repays close attention and more than one visit.
People responsible for this site:
- Author X
Title: Lee Worden's Cutup Machine 2.0
Description: Hosted on Jim Andrews' Vispo site, this is a piece of software which cuts up text and reassembles the chunks in a random sequence. There are a number of these on the Web, but this is one of the most user-friendly I've seen. Very useful if you want to produce something surreal, or replicate the effects of a disordered consciousness, or just get a new perspective on your own prose. Or, to put it another way, Very up text and reassembles surreal, or replicate the effects There are a number of these number of these on the the effects of a disordered random sequence. There useful if you the effects of a disordered of software which cuts up own prose.
People responsible for this site:
- Andrews, Jim
- Worden, Lee
Title: A Book of Graffiti Art
Description: A virtual book composed of graffiti photos taken in Rio de Janeiro by the new media artist and curator Regina Celia Pinto. Most of the graffiti depict faces. Simple, well-made and striking.
People responsible for this site:
- Pinto, Regina Celia
Title: The Art of Sleep/The Art of Silence
Description: The Tate Online site (www.tate.org.uk) is currently playing host a small collection of net art, and has commissioned a new piece from Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the Korean-American duo. What they have produced in response to this commission is "The Art of Sleep": "Employing their usual mix of animated black and white typography, jazzy music and humour, the work explores the international contemporary art market from the artists' perspective." The real treat, however, is an accompanying "Interview" with Young-Hae Chang called "The Art of Silence", which is just hilarious.
People responsible for this site:
- Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
Title: The Flat
Description: One of the best pieces to appear on the Dreaming Methods/Digital Fiction site so far, this is a typically accomplished piece of Flash work, a brooding supernatural mystery story set within the confines of a flat. Visitors/readers need to search each room of the flat in turn for clues, while a timer counts them down in one corner of the screen. When the timer reaches zero there is a crash, a shadow crosses the outside of a window, someone rattles the handle of the flat's back door, and it opens to reveal a white hooded figure in an overgrown garden. Compelling.
People responsible for this site:
- Author X
Title: Samarost 2
Description: I'm not a games fanatic, but you've just got to give this one a try. It's a puzzle/story. Two aliens arrive on a planet where a little man lives, steal some pears from his pear-orchard, then steal his dog too and fly off in their spaceship. The little man jumps into his own spaceship and gives chase. When he gets to their world you have to help him through a series of interactive puzzles to get his dog back. It's funny and challenging, the artwork has got a really textured feel to it, and there's a story too: eventually you find out exactly why the two aliens wanted to steal pears and a dog. It comes in two chapters: you can play right through the first chapter for free, but you have to pay $6.99 if you want to try the second chapter as well.
People responsible for this site:
- Amanita Design
Title: Le Parc
Description: A funny, subversive and beautifully realised Flash animation about a naughty man who sneaks into a park because he can't resist the flowers, and then starts to alter the behaviour of everyone else on the premises. I found this on the Anima Mundi website (http://www.animamundi.com.br/) which was mentioned by Regina Pinto in one of her circular e-mails.
People responsible for this site:
- Rhinn, Bruno
- Marrchal, Herve
Title: Logozoa
Description: Logozoa are "word animals" or "textual organisms" which Robert Kendall, the proprietor of this site, wants to release into the world in order to mess up our certainties about life. It's a beautifully playful-but-serious project, and you can participate by sticking a Logozoa text somewhere appropriate, and sending Robert a photograph of it to keep in his "zoo". The Logozoa site also includes, as a subsection, "Soothcircuit", which is an elegant I-Ching style online oracle. Ask it a question (or just give it a click) and it will produce some profound (or sometimes frivolous) comments about your life.
People responsible for this site:
- Kendall, Robert
Title: World of Awe
Description: The story of "a traveler in search of a lost treasure" ranging from "the lament over the absence of a lover to a comical declaration of loyalty to a floppy disk." I've only just started exploring this: at first I was put off by the complexity and size of the website, but then I found myself being drawn in by the tongue-in-cheek cleverness of some of the writing. Start with the Love Letters, which are brief and often very witty.
People responsible for this site:
- Kanarek, Yael
Title: Yantra
Description: A series of brilliantly-coloured geometric animations, accompanied by science-fiction music. Intensely mesmerising. If the almighty were to choose a screensaver, this would probably be it. Make sure you visit it more than once.
People responsible for this site:
- Wood, Philip
Title: Urbanalities
Description: "A cross between a short story, a poem, an animated comic and a musical." An audio track to die for and some of the hippest graphics a browser can browse: geometric, dynamic, with funky lettering. The texts may not be all that profound but for sheer pizazz this takes some beating.
People responsible for this site:
- babel
- escha
Title: Scenes of Provincial Life (vlog)
Description: This isn't exactly an individual work, but I'm listing it in that category, as well as under personal websites, because it does have real unity as a collection. Michael Szpakowski has been making short quicktime movies since 2003 and there are now nearly 100 of them - so he's setting up this vlog to collect them in one place. Unassuming and often very personal, full of humour and detail. The music is often especially striking.
People responsible for this site:
- Szpakowski, Michael
Title: Story Machine
Description: My thanks to Jim Andrews (http://vispo.com/) for posting a link to this. It's a fascinating experiment in nonlinear story, halfway between an animation and a comic. In the end, I think, it's unsatisfactory because the back-story doesn't come through strongly or coherently enough to really pull you in: but there are some brilliant effects.
People responsible for this site:
- BalloonHead, aka Simon Norton
Title: For All Seasons
Description: Four short texts about childhood memories, one for each season of the year. Click on each text and it comes alive. The words on the screen turn into fish, flowers, dead leaves or snowflakes, which drift, swirl or swim around the screen as you move your mouse. Beautifully designed and crafted.
People responsible for this site:
- Muller, Andreas
Title: Fresco
Description: A "generative movie" accompanied by a generative soundtrack - in other words it never plays the same twice, so look at it more than once. In a letterbox-shaped panel, flickering abstract shapes dance, or sometimes freeze, against a vague grey background, to the accompaniment of haunting music. The result is fascinating, multi-textured and somehow profound: abstract art with soul.
People responsible for this site:
- Szpakowski, Michael
Title: Moving Toward Haiga
Description: Undemonstrative and comparatively low-tech, these pieces are beautifully designed, meditative, filled with glowing colours and a sense of stillness.
People responsible for this site:
- Weishaus, Joel
Title: Dawn
Description: Text, photography and sound by Alan Sondheim, put together by Reiner Strasser. Typically of Sondheim, the text mixes a profound sense of wonder at the beauties of nature with a restless consciousness of the miseries life can bring. In the same way, the piece itself mixes ravishing images with a restlessly crackling soundtrack. The result is a masterpiece.
People responsible for this site:
- Strasser, Reiner
- Sondheim, Alan
Title: Interwoven
Description: The idea behind this is beautifully simple - to merge different pictures into each other through a kind of weaving. The way this idea has been realised is fantastically clever, subtle and well-controlled. It's about "time and space, nature and seasons".
People responsible for this site:
- Strasser, Reiner
Title: Humans
Description: It's probably wrong to describe this as an "individual work" because it's so huge. David Daniels has asked fellow-artists, family-members and friends a series of questions about their lives, feelings and beliefs and fashioned their answers into prose-poems, text-pictures, text-sculptures and text-animations of fantastic inventiveness. It's a hymn to humanity on a colossal scale. If (like me) you thought the PDF format was a waste of time, look at some of these and think again.
People responsible for this site:
- Daniels, David
Title: This is how you will die
Description: Wavering between black humour and just plain black, this is a text fruit-machine which serves up fragmented narratives purporting to tell you how you will die. Doomy soundtrack, grungy graphics and some unexpectedly funny moments .
People responsible for this site:
- Nelson, Jason
Title: Forest Park, A Journal
Description: Combining poetry, prose and narrative; personal impressions, autobiography, philosophy and quotations from other authors; this is new media writing in the tradition of Thoreau. It's an acquired taste, but it has a rhythm all of its own, the stopping-and-starting, determined rhythm of someone climbing a rugged path up a mountain - which is entirely appropriate, since pathways and mountains are thematically central to the work.
People responsible for this site:
- Weishaus, Joel
Title: News from Erewhon
Description: A sequence of parallel narratives produced by Millie Niss and Martha Deed, both of them using a free-association technique and starting from the same randomly-selected keywords. The results are surreal, poetic, sharply-observed and funny; the quality of the writing is extremely high; and the work as a whole is a beautifully-designed piece of new media.
People responsible for this site:
- Deed, Martha
- Niss, Millie
Title: Black Holes
Description: A black screen, across which fragments of text in various different colours, fonts and sizes come and go as you move your mouse; plus photographic images, some of them stretched and slanted, some not; while bleepy squiggly music plays, punctuated by muffled explosions as if from a video game in an arcade. Most of this is generated at random, prompted by the movements of your mouse. Visit it more than once. Despite all the random juxtapositions it's got an off-the-wall unity of tone and design.
People responsible for this site:
- LaCook, Lewis
Title: The Lexicon of Krechers
Description: A virtual-reality book about fantasy-creatures who are supposed to live inside human beings. Beautifully designed, genuinely insightful about the human condition at times, with some haunting combinations of word, image and sound.
People responsible for this site:
- Nielsen, Sonya
Title: Road Movie
Description: The graphic for this is a simple video loop of a car driving into a rural landscape. The music is piano and a plangent, wistful horn. Beneath the picture is a series of coloured lines: mouse over the lines, and the music changes subtly. Utterly mesmerising.
People responsible for this site:
- Szpakowski, Michael
Title: 391-37: Zinhar
Description: Edited by babel, "391-37: Zinhar is a collaboration between Zinhar.com and 391.org in Turkish and English that represents a bioscan in slow motion..." A bioscan is a process of "DNA bar-coding" every living thing. This is a wonderful piece of design, but also a very thought-provoking work about modern science, information technology and the stuff of life.
People responsible for this site:
- babel
Title: rsstango
Description: A magnificently lush track by The Divine Comedy is reworked into a fable about our times.
People responsible for this site:
- Loseby, Jess
Title: >>oh<<
Description: "A short poem by Jennifer Hill-Kaucher became a visual poem by Dan Waber which then became an interactive audio-visual poem (in Flash) by Reiner Strasser." Like everything by Strasser, this is beautifully designed: controlled, restrained, simple and contemplative.
People responsible for this site:
- Strasser, Reiner
- Waber, Dan
- Hill-Kaucher, Jennifer
Title: undirection
Description: Brilliant topographical work by Jason Nelson, which cleverly exploits our instinctive feeling that web pages must have spatial relationships with each other - B is below A, C is to the left of B and so on - to create a dark, spiky and poetic world, folded over on itself and with unexpected holes in it.
People responsible for this site:
- Nelson, Jason
Title: Jewel of the Erie Canal
Description: Martha Deed and Millie Niss are mother and daughter, and this is a picture-portrait of North Tonawanda, a derelict area near where they live. Sharply-observed and ironic, both socially aware and aesthetically beautiful, with a very precisely-judged relationship between the images and the Wurlitzer organ soundtrack.
People responsible for this site:
- Niss, Millie
- Deed, Martha
Title: On Lionel Kearns
Description: Jim Andrews' homage to Lionel Kearns, a pioneering Canadian poet who in the 1960s started producing work which now seems uncannily prescient about the digital age. Contains reproductions of poems, videos and commentaries - but although many of these reproductions look like straight text at first glance, Jim presents them in ways which cleverly draw attention to the difference between text and the digital medium. Approachable but subtle.
People responsible for this site:
- Andrews, Jim
Title: Return to my native city
Description: Michael Spakowski's short movie about his feelings when he returned to Sheffield to help look after his father, who was dying and is now dead. Intensely personal, deeply-felt and poetic.
People responsible for this site:
- Szpakowski, Michael
Title: The Sense of City Road
Description: A collage of poetry, photographic images, historic titbits etc. about City Road in Cardiff. A fascinatingly ramshackle site: I love it.
People responsible for this site:
- Robson, Lloyd
Title: Girl/Birth/Water/Death
Description: The short story which converted me to hyperliterature. Technically primitive, but very well-written and (to me) highly suggestive of the possibilities of nonlinear fiction.
People responsible for this site:
- Conway, Martha