Wordtoys

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Wordtoys is a pioneering work in the field of electronic literature in Spanish, which proposes a reading exercise as a task in deciphering that doubles as a narrative toy. It gathers together a series of works in hypertext, e-poetry, and audiovisuals made from 1996 to the present. Framed within the context of net poetry, with roots in the historical avant-garde that emphasized the materiality of signs, these works are constructed using randomness, permutability, process, games and re-writes.

This sort of digital analogy of a book, a toy book, allows us to access pieces like Procesador de textos Rimbaudeano (Rimbaudean Text Processor) and Escribe tu propio Quijote (Write your own Quijote). In the latter Gache reminds us that in her Quijote, Cervantes (the narrator) tells us that he is not the author of the book, but that he found it in a manuscript written in Arabic, and she tells us that in 1944, Jorge Luis Borges wrote Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote (Pierre Menard, Author of Quijote), in which the French symbolist attempts to re-write the original text. Gache proposes that we write our own Quijote through a word processor console but that, no matter how hard we try to resort to our imagination, we can only write Cervantes’s original text. In the case of El idioma de los pájaros (The Language of Birds), she presents a series of bird automatons who, with synthetic voices, recite poems on birds from famous authors. These birds turned machine-poets have been programmed to recite words. Gache reminds us: “Aren’t words always someone else’s?”

(Source: Netescopio)

Screen shots: 
A woman in historic women's dress carries a letter from which bubbles float, spelling 'WORDTOYS'
The Wordtoys virtual book being turned between a page covered in butterflies and an airplane spread.
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Maya Zalbidea