Jim Andrews
Since the beginning
Works in Victoria Canada

ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
Discussions (847) Opportunities (2) Events (14) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Andy Campbell, Dreamingmethods.com


Here is an exceptional site in literary new media:
http://dreamingmethods.com by Andy Campbell from the UK.

I have yet to explore this site as thoroughly as I believe it deserves but
have, so far, spent about an hour perusing several works. They're the sort
of works that require multiple viewings/readings. You glimpse, initially.
And you're not quite sure what you're glimpsing.

The pieces are, in some sense, made of glimpses. They involve elements of
narrative but do not seem to have the full meal deal concerning story. They
glimpse into story. Are tantalizing in that one wonders what they add up to
and how deeply one can go in such directions.

These are works created, in part, with Flash. They are distinctively visual.
Somewhat cinematic. Interactive. Textual. Atmospherically sonic. Dark and
brooding.

"Surface" is described as "A matrix of memories, fragmented thoughts,
animated scribbles, poetry and narratives from a protagonist who has burned
every last one of his material belongings." The synopsis of another is this:
"Living alone and secluded, an elderly man keeps a surreal record of his
dreams as he is slowly poisoned by his gas fire leaking carbon monoxide."

I appreciate the way Campbell is working integrally with text, image, sound,
interactivity/interface, fiction, poetry, the cinematic, and the overall
notion of the site as literary work. Integrally and also centrally with
incompleteness. All of the pieces are fragmentary. Glimpsing.

Campbell himself describes the site like this:

"Dreaming Methods projects are created as an exploration into innovative new
approaches to writing. They use the unique potential of the internet and
multimedia to blend unusual, creative narratives with other art forms.
These works are not "e-books" or hypertext sites in the traditional sense,
nor do they adhere to the usual styles and standards incorporated into
"quality" Flash sites. The aim of Digital Fiction is to use Flash to create
interesting ways of telling stories and creating abstract narratives; to
offer a blend of challenging writing, entertainment and interaction."

"Digital Fiction as a reading experience offers a purposely, almost
naturally, fragmented narrative; sentences, happenings, cut off as though
erased, re-emerge elsewhere; complex text animations allow only random
fleeting glimpses of what is or what might be going on; the choice is yours
not only in which direction you click or scroll - but in which direction you
allow the narrative to take you. Or, in which direction you wish to take the
narrative."

ja

DISCUSSION

Regina_Celia_Pinto's_"The_Craft_of_the_Web_Artist"


Here is a piece by Rio's Regina Celia Pinto (in English) called "The Craft
of the Web.Artist": http://arteonline.arq.br/web_art_considerations . You
can view this either as a text or as a multimedia piece. It looks at various
skills involved in Web art: painting and drawing, photography and film,
animation, writing, audio, interactivity, programming, and Web skills. I
enjoyed this.

ja

DISCUSSION

Vispo.com Guest Work and Collaborators


VISPO.COM GUEST WORK AND COLLABORATORS
http://vispo.com/guests

I've been publishing vispo.com since 1995; there's a great deal of work on
the site. Most of it--by 'volume'--is my own work: vispo.com is the primary
way I publish my work--but over the years the site has come to house a
significant body of work by other people and also collaborative work between
myself and others. I've collected and annotated a page of links to that
onsite work at http://vispo.com/guests .

The most recent works on this page are from 2006, and the oldest is from
1988. Soon to be 1984, actually: I'm working with Geof Huth, Dan Waber,
Marko Niemi and Lionel Kearns to recover the animated computer poetry
bpNichol did in 1984, and we will eventually get that up on vispo.com.
Anyway, http://vispo.com/guests links close to twenty years of work. I have
a sense now of working both forward and backward in time. Still trying to
forge ahead with new and, hopefully, innovative, fresh projects, but also
doing projects such as the bpNichol project and 'On Lionel Kearns' that look
back and either recover work relevant to digital poetry now or present the
work of artists who have been a big influence on me.

Most of the pieces are explorative of digital writing. The 2006 works are by
Lee Worden and Marko J. Niemi, both of whom are programmers as well as
writers. Lee, who has a doctorate in math from Princeton, has re-written his
Cutup Engine that some of you will be familiar with. This is an excellent
tool for exploring the interzones of texts. You paste text or URLs into the
Engine and it dices them in a configurable way. Marko's 2006 works are the
Concrete Stir Fry Poems. These deal with cutups also, but in a lettristic,
visual poetic manner. Marko is a remarkable poet-programmer from Finland;
his work bodes well for the future of digital poetry.

Also, the page links to the work of the Argentine poet Ana Maria Uribe, who
passed away in 2004 and whose Typoems and Anipoems are, in their entirety,
housed on vispo.com. She also collaborated in the production of Paris
Connection, a project in critical media that examines the work of six French
net artists. There are other projects in critical media such as Defib, a
series of sixteen chat interviews produced with Dan Waber; in 1999-2000 we
produced chats with writers who were attempting to produce work on the Web.
The page links also to Strings by Dan Waber, which is a project in kinetic
poetry that has been wonderfully successful; Strings is taught in many
Universities that deal with digital poetry.

The oldest links on the page are from my pre-Web days as a writer and audio
producer. There's a radio show I produced on the poetry of Seattle's Joseph
Keppler (there are over 100 other shows in the vault, not online). And the
page links to some of the music of The Laughing Boot Quintet, in which I was
the drummer and audio engineer. There's also a link to a Paul McKinnon
recording done at Mocambopo, a reading series I organized and hosted in
Victoria Canada in the nineties (Mocambopo kept going like the Energizer
Bunny for years after I left and only recently moved venues).

And there are links to other work such as collaborations with Brian Lennon
and Pauline Masurel concerning stir fry texts; a link to my page featuring
some of Ted Warnell's work; a link to Jorge Luiz Antonio's page that he
maintains on vispo.com on Brazilian Digital Poetry on the Web; a link to
Shuen-shing Lee's translations into Chinese of some of my work; and a link
to work by Uruguay's Clemente Padin.

There's also a link to PRIME, the Peace Research Institute in the Middle
East, which I maintain on vispo.com with my friend Sid Tafler. PRIME is
headed by Sami Adwan, a Palestinian, and Dan Bar-On, an Israeli. Together,
they work on some fascinating and incredibly worthwhile projects in
peace-building between Palestinians and Israelis. Sid edits the site and I
do the HTML.

Anyway, all this work by others and in collaboration with others has been a
true joy in my life. The page is ongoing, as mentioned--it isn't finished
yet--nor am I, I hope. But I wanted to acknowledge this work and thank those
who have contributed fine work to vispo.com and collaborated with me on
other work. You discover alternative approaches to poetry in just about all
this work, that attempt some synthesis of arts, media, and fields such as
programming and mathematics or music and recorded sound. As well as attempts
to write of the poetics of such practice. It's about putting it all
together, connecting, staying human, discovering the nature of our altered
humanity and language so that we can address life with fresh insight and
communicative power.

Vispo.com is an attempt to create a literary work alternative but related to
the book; to create works and experience imaginatively attuned to the media
and methods of the Net. Being truly literate involves not only reading but
writing; vispo.com is an attempt to write through new media. It is my life's
work; and the work on vispo.com by others and in collaboration with others
is a huge part of the nature of that life and work to put it all together,
to make strong connections. The French poet Isou said "Each poet will
integrate everything into everything." And this was way before the Net. Same
job, different time and circumstances.

Again, many thanks to those whose work is on http://vispo.com/guests , and
to you for reading.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

Lee Worden's Cutup Engine 2.0


LEE WORDEN'S CUTUP ENGINE 2.0
http://vispo.com/cgi-bin/wonder/cutup/cutup.cgi

Some will recall the Cutup Engine Lee Worden had up on the Net for several
years. You cut and paste text into it or feed it one or more URLs, and it
dices the text nice. William S. Burroughs said that when you cut audio tape,
the future leaks out. The Cutup Engine provides an unexpected view through
the interzones of texts. Data structures, however dimensional, are
expressable as strings.

It's great to have this wordenful, creative tool back on the Net after an
absence of a couple of years. Lee Worden has re-written it and added a few
features.

You can adjust the "chunk size". The cutup code splits the source texts into
words (html tags are treated as one word). It constructs the cutup text, by
default, by pulling chunks of 3 to 7 words from the source texts and adding
on chunks until the total, by default, is at least 1,000 words.

The total length of the cutup is adjustable from 1,000 to 10,000 words.

Cutups are stored on the server for 30 days. They aren't moved to the public
archive unless you visit the piece at least a day later. In that case,
they're scheduled for being moved to the permanent archive, which is
browsable. Copy the URLs of cutups you want to submit to the permanent
archive and visit them a day later. That'll do it.

Lee has also implented an interesting feature that makes the Cutup Engine
part of your browser. You bookmark the link described at
http://vispo.com/wonder/cutup/about.htm . From then on, you can click the
bookmark to cut up whatever page your browser is currently displaying.

You can also check out the Perl source code.

Lee Worden is a mathematician who investigates systems. More about Lee at
http://two.ucdavis.edu/~worden/pub/cv.pdf .

ja

ps: He has also written something about cutups that is part of a stir fry
piece at http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts/4.html

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: New on post.thing.net


thanks for the links to interesting blogs.

one thing the blog doesn't usually do is explore the whole screen. the jim
punk/abe linkoln blog is exceptional in that regard.

i'm not sure what the limitations are of the blog concerning the form of the
html.

i prefer to create the html myself and have the whole screen for
composition.

also, i'm curious about the nature of the dependence on the blog company.
when people started making sites back in 1994-2000, many used free resources
like geocities. but that turned out to be less than optimal because the
companies instituted pop-up ads in the sites. or ads on the pages
themselves. that sort of thing.

when i started my site, initially the url was islandnet.com/~jandrews. then
it was speakeasy.org/~jandrews. i eventually got my own domain name,
vispo.com, because it's more memorable and it lets me change hosting
services while retaining all the links in to the site. i understand that's
possible with blogs, too.

here are some other interesting blogs:

MARKO NIEMI
http://nurotus.blogspot.com
Finnish poet-programmer and translator

MAURA MCDONNELL
http://visualmusic.blogspot.com
Irish musician/scholar

JIM LEFTWICH
http://jimleftwichtextimagepoem.blogspot.com
Long-practiced visual poet

ja
http://vispo.com

.