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1. New Word Order: Basra

   New Word Order: Basra [NWO] is a mod for the game Half-Life, consisting of a playable map and custom textures. Gaming is the largest demographic of new media usage, and Half-Life stands out for its combination of first-person shooter action and compelling story. It remains the most popular online multiplayer game. Every object in Half-Life is either shootable or background. What if the objects are words? How does language play into your interactions in the violent world of the game? The text in NWO is composed of phrases from "Introduction to Poetry," a short poem from former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. The thematic violence in Collins' poem resonated through the creation of NWO in early 2003, during the second invasion of Iraq. When you enter the map you see words hanging in the air. You can jump and climb on them, you can run along the tops, you can keep playing and wandering in the space. You soon attack the words. You use the broken words as a reduced and processed writing. Break the words, destroy the letters. NWO, along with every game and every image, is about the re-circulation of bodies and interpretive agendas.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.02.2011 - 10:13

2. The Mandrake Vehicles

   The Mandrake Vehicles consists of three "vehicles," each one surfaced with a large text block concerning the biological development, folklore, occult ritual, magical association, and homeopathic usages of the mandrake plant. The surface text blocks can be read linearly from one to the next. However, each surface text also conceals a depth of two additional poems (as well as liquid layers, when the letters are in a transitional state). In each vehicle, both of these inner poems have technically been visible all along in the top layer, but remain undetected because of the presence of the other letters and characters. The inner poems of each vehicle are unearthed as letters drift off the surface of the poem and the remaining letters solidify into new poems. In addition to the relationships created between the contents of the three poems of each vehicle, relationships are also forged between words of the different layers that share the same letter(s). In the liquid layers, letters cast off scales of themselves which fall down the screen, colliding with other cast-off scales to form the detritus words, the trash cast off by the process.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.02.2011 - 14:30

3. Plaintext Performance

   It's a live writing performance over the net combining 1) keyboard writing, 2) machinated, algorithmic writing, and 3) feeds from the processes surrounding the writing (like system monitoring, net connection monitoring, ftp log, etc). All in realtime and plaintext. It was performed live at the BIOS symposium, Center for Literary Computing, West Virginia University, September 2006, with a unix ytalk session as a sideshow. The static version shown here is based on the exhibition "e and eye - art and poetry between the electronic and the visual" at Tate Modern, London, October 2006. It's part of a series of work called "protocol performances". 'Protocol' is meant both as a lower level set of rules of the format of communication, and as statements reporting observations and experiences in the most fundamental terms without interpretation, relating it to phenomenological 'noemata' - thought objects, and thus identifying a data stream with a stream of consciousness. 'Performance' is meant both as a data protocol's physical performance as much as its play on the meaning as an artist-centric execution of work.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 16.03.2011 - 10:31

4. Family Tree

   The digital project Family Tree is conceived as a mobile responding to two forces: wind and gravity. The reader/listener conjures these at will by moving the mouse: left and right to create movement through wind in the horizontal plane, and up and down to apply the force of gravity and create a vertical movement along the family tree. In this way, the reader/listener shapes the reading experience, causing the text to move and rearrange itself on the digital page. Family Tree can be regarded as an exercise of memory, investigating stories told and our ever-changing recollection of them, as well as a path towards some kind of source DNA: stories mix, converse and change, as people from different places and times are faced with each other. This imaginary space is flexible and open to new possibilities.

   (Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

   Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 14:21