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

Concrete Stir Fry Poems by Marko Niemi


CONCRETE STIR FRY POEMS
by Marko Niemi
http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts/marko

Marko Niemi (Finland) has written five "Concrete Stir Fry Poems" that extend
the notion of the stir fry form into graphics. Of letters. He has also
re-written the programming of the stir fry form in these concrete works.
These five works play on relationship, stasis, and dynamism/transformation,
among other things. For instance, "still-life" consists of the letters in
the word LIFE discombobulatable into parts of each other via moving the
mouse over the piece. "four musicians" consists of the letters in the word
ECHO. These pieces are quite "concrete" in the Noigandrean sense concerning
their simplicity and iconic nature; but they are also contemporary in their
algorithmic, generative construction as things written in programming code
and graphics of letters. The "Concrete Stir Fry Poems" extend the
algorithmic exploration of language and other media implicit in the stir fry
form and explores its relations with the earlier work of the concrete poets.

The 'Stir Fry Texts' project began in 1999 (
http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts ). Since then, Pauline Masurel and Brian
Lennon have written stir frys, and Shuen-shing Lee has translated one into
Chinese. It is an ongoing project, apparently.

The stir fry is basically a form (like a sonnet is a form) that can contain
any sort of content that can be put in a web page (text, image, object,
sound, etc). The content consists of n texts (and/or images, objects, etc),
each of which is cut up into m pieces (though the m pieces needn't form a
coherent whole, especially if they are <objects>). When the wreader mouses
over the mth part of the jth thang, it is replaced with the mth part of the
(j+1)st thang (mod n). The piece retains its contiguity, resulting sometimes
(especially in the textual works) in a defensive twitching that resists
perfect control by the wreader; the behavior has been likened to a
hedgehog's if you try to touch its belly. This has not been confirmed. The
interface also provides controls to view each of the n thangs in their
entirety, without discombobulation.

In addition to writing the "Concrete Stir Fry Poems", Marko, in 2004, also
helped update the programming. I wrote the DHTML code in 1999, when
cross-browser/cross-platform DHTML was very hard to achieve, particularly
given that the stir fry keyed on the innerHTML DHTML method, which had not
been implemented at all in some browsers. Marko helped me update the
programming so that the stir frys now work on most browsers and platforms. I
see his new work in the "Concrete Stir Fry Poems" does not use the innerHTML
method at all and is compactly described in a small .js file.

Many thanks to Marko Niemi for his explorations of the stir fry form--it is
an experiment in literary/media/programmerly hybrid form and wildly
associative poetics.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

Re: Conference Report: Where Art Thou Net.Art? On Zero One/ ISEA 2006


> ...the dream of a new
> art form that would side-step a mainstream art
> world mired in curators, museums, galleries,
> objects, and old aesthetic issues. This was the
> dream of Net.Art, a revolutionary new
> international movement of artists, techies, and
> hackers, led in large part by the unassuming,
> unabashedly ambitious new media curator from the
> Walker Art Center, Steve Dietz, now director of
> Zero One.

a dream about side-stepping curators led by a curator? crash crash.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

Re: recent new media/net art debates/rebates: the new divers.


to add to my last post.

the context in which kids study poetry is primarily in learning to read and
write. the study of poetry can also be part of a study of history or various
other fields--or of course you can simply study poetry, also--but poetry is
important in learning how to read and write because it often is amongst the
intensest engagements with language, freeest, most meaningful, least
formulaic, is ideally free-spirited and free-thinking. When you study how to
read and write, the reading and writing of poetry is extremely useful in
giving students a sense of some of the the limits and more passionate
aspirations of writing and thinking and feeling with language.

to be literate, one needs not only to be able to read but also write.

a majority of people in society know how to read and write.

they are producers of writing.

when everyone becomes producers of new media, we will no more drown in a sea
of mediocrity than we now do concerning the written word (we sort of
do--we're still above water though maybe weary). nor will it mean the end of
art any more than widespread verbal literacy spells the doom of the written
arts. we certainly become more selective.

ja
http://vispo.com

ps: sorry if you're receiving this a second time. i posted this earlier but
it doesn't appear to have been posted, or at least i wasn't sent a copy.
software bug?

DISCUSSION

Re: recent new media/net art debates/rebates: the new divers.


to add to my last post.

the context in which kids study poetry is primarily in learning to read and
write. the study of poetry can also be part of a study of history or various
other fields--or of course you can simply study poetry, also--but poetry is
important in learning how to read and write because it often is amongst the
intensest engagements with language, freeest, most meaningful, least
formulaic, is ideally free-spirited and free-thinking. When you study how to
read and write, the reading and writing of poetry is extremely useful in
giving students a sense of some of the the limits and more passionate
aspirations of writing and thinking and feeling with language.

to be literate, one needs not only to be able to read but also write.

a majority of people in society know how to read and write.

they are producers of writing.

when everyone becomes producers of new media, we will no more drown in a sea
of mediocrity than we now do concerning the written word (we sort of
do--we're still above water though maybe weary). nor will it mean the end of
art any more than widespread verbal literacy spells the doom of the written
arts. we certainly become more selective.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

Re: recent new media/net art debates/rebates: the new divers.


It seems absurd that we aren't talking more about what Annie mentions
below, about
finding ways to promote our work elsewhere, to circumvent those
establishments
that drove us in this direction, that made us want to move outside the
traditional infrastructures.

But...I keep saying this, and am beginning to sound preachy. Jeez though,
we
put as much effort into promoting our work to the net, the global net, as
we do
with applications for 2,500 dollar grants, we wouldn't care what Charlie
said or how
many books we were left out of.

.......Jason

This makes a lot of sense, I think. How would you characterize that other
(or those other) audience(s) on the Web, say?

A couple of things come to mind.

A New Media Institute once flew me in to participate in a conference
called 'Sensing the News'. It wasn't an art institute, but a 'journalistic
think tank'. I was confused why they invited me to show my interactive audio
work and other work since I'm not a journalist, so I asked the organizer why
she invited me. She said that journalists also have to come to grips with
interactive media on the Web and the idea of the conference was to show the
people there, almost all of whom were journalists, possibilities both from
journalism and from other fields.

But of course!

Journalists give a damn about new media because they too have to come to
grips with it. More generally, if we ask who gives a damn about new media,
the most pressing audience consists of those who have to come to grips with
it.

ARN quotes Charlie Gere:
"The web," Charlie says, " has the alarming potential of realising the
idea of the artist Joseph Beuys, that everyone is an artist. This could
spell the end of art as we know it, when everyone becomes a producer and we
all drown in a sea of mediocrity made up of billions of minutely-niched
microchannels."

If "everyone becomes a producer" then they are part of the most pressing
audience for new media. Because producers need to come to grips with new
media. Questions and issues that arise and are relevant to producers may not
have dawned on those who are solely consumers of new media.

It isn't so much a matter of everyone becoming a producer of art, either,
but rather of new media in some form. Whether it is journalism or government
information or entertainment or educational, etc.

It would be wonderful to drown in a sea of educated, informed citizens of
enlightened democracies.

To go back to the beginning of my post, there is another part of the
audience I haven't mentioned, and that's the young. They grew up with the
Web. They are quite savvy about the Web even if their pop net is mainly for
yuks. There is useful work to be done in infiltrating the pop net, as well
as the other spheres I mentioned.

ja
http://vispo.com