The Mandrake Vehicles are three installments of poetry in motion by Oni Buchanan and animated by Betsy Stone Mazzoleni, originally published as a flash-animation CD in Buchanan’s book Spring. Each installment is broken into seven stages, and each contains two hidden poems. The first stage starts with a text block regarding the mandrake plant. In the second stage, certain letters move,…
Tag: digital poetry
Reflections of Human Handwriting
Michael Madsen’s “Letters Demand Things” is a work of digital poetry that includes two related visual poems. The poems are examples of concrete poetry and also incorporate audio and animation. The first poem, “Vowel Submission,” reacts to the user’s mouse and the second poem, “Typespeak,” requires the user to type on the keyboard, creating a unique experience with each interaction. While both…
Artificial Visuals in “Chemical Landscapes”
When I was first starting to read full-length novels as a child, I remember skimming the page for dialogue – the only part of the story I was interested in. The descriptions of people and landscapes bored me (and interfered with my own imagination), so I skipped them. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was missing the…
Lemons, Sugar, and Water
Ingrid Ankerson along with Megan Sapnar Ankerson co-founded the digital arts and poetry journal Poems that Go. “Today is Lemonade” by Ingrid Ankerson is a piece of digital poetry from 2000. This digital poem is a silent video that has simple animation that goes along with the lines of the poem. “Today is Lemonade” overall could be seen as a…
Mincing Words in “Correspondence”
The Surrealists of the early 20th century were known for cutting up and rearranging found literature and compositing new texts from the old, free from the binds of logic and creative suppression. In the 21st century, this technique’s digital counterpart is known as stir fry text, coined and spearheaded by visual poet Jim Andrews. Programmed in DHTML, the pieces are “texts that…
The Digital Collage of “Hymns of the Drowning Swimmer”
I was very interested by the aesthetic of the Jason Nelson games our class played for class, so I decided to explore his other works to find something for this blog post. I settled on “Hymns of the Drowning Swimmer,” an anthology of digital poetry. The title screen, pictured above, will reveal the titles of the individual poems when the…
But I Never Asked…You Did
Alan Bigelow’s piece entitled “Because You Asked,” created using Flash in 2006, is an interesting piece of electronic literature because it is a mix of autobiography and digital poetry. At first glance (and read through) it seems as if the artist is a presenting a creative confession of in his personal thoughts, but as you dig deeper it can be…
“Out of Touch”: The Internet Isn’t Your Valentine
Christine Wilks’ e-poem “Out of Touch” (OOT) begins with the raising and lowering of a typographical font that mimics the appearance keys from a keyboard. Maybe it was my slow internet, but the first time I viewed Wilks’ work the keys lowered and raised so slowly I began to think I too needed to join in typing my own keyboard to get things…
Play, Oh Play
Jason Nelson’s “Uncontrollable Semantics” is a work of digital poetry in which 50 different environments incorporate minimal words, music/sound, and mouse-driven interface. It is a work of hypertext poetry in which the user chooses one of four words on the screen to move from page to page. At each page, the user will experience new words, new images, and new…
The Absurdist Tour Guide: wandering through “Sydney’s Siberia”
Jason Nelson’s Sydney’s Siberia opens to a framed portrait of a man on a wall, with Nelson’s red pen marks circling his head like a halo. The text above the portrait, in both black and white letters, reads: “between 1875 and 1877 twelve men and women created the folly history society. their goal was to photograph strangers, build histories of important and far…