[-empyre-] assorted links to poetical sites on the Web

[Jim Andrews <jim@vispo.com>]

An international sampling of some synthesis in letters (not meant to be 'representative'). Some
of these you'll be familiar with. Some you won't but might like to be. Most are links from
http://vispo.com/misc/links.htm .

ja

ITERATURE.COM (FRANCE)
http://www.iterature.com
Christophe Bruno does fascinating conceptual, poetical net.art. His site combines interesting
programming with a delightful sense of humour. And what a great domain name!

DOC(K)S (FRANCE)
http://www.sitec.fr/users/akenatondocks/
Philippe Castellin (Akenaton) is the current editor of Doc(k)s, a long running French magazine
of the literary avant garde.

JOGCHEM NIEMANDSVERDRIET (NETHERLANDS)
http://www.nobodyhere.com/
Jogchem Niemandsverdriet's site is highly inventive in new media poetry and personally engaging.

JAKA ZELEZNIKAR (SLOVENIA)
http://www.jaka.org/
This Slovenian poet is one of the most technologically savvy poets working on the net. Be sure
to check out Typescape.2. He had a book of poems published in 1994 and his first net.work was in
1997, ie, he has migrated to the web as a writer, and as you can see has been rather busy since.

ANA MARIA URIBE (ARGENTINA)
http://orbita.starmedia.com/~amuribe/
Ana Maria Uribe's "Tipoemas y Anipoemas" are typographical and animated poems. As you go through
her work, you see that she is a very serious visual poet of her country and is presenting a
large and important body of work on her site. She has made a strong transition from the page to
digital media; the soul that radiates from her work is intelligent, inventive, humourous, and
deeply engaged in visual poetry.

MUSEUM OF THE ESSENTIAL AND BEYOND THAT (BRAZIL)
http://www.arteonline.arq.br
Regina Célia Pinto publishes this high-quality, regularly updated site that publishes
cross-cultural and multimedia work by primarily writerly web.artists, and links out extensively
to new work. Good coverage of exciting new work in South and North America, especially.
Concerning links to Brazilian digital poetry, check out
http://vispo.com/misc/BrazilianDigitalPoetry.htm , compiled by Jorge Luiz Antonio.

REINER STRASSER (GERMANY)
http://netartefact.de/repoem/creations
Reiner Strasser is known for his work as both a web.artist and an organizer/curator of web.art
projects. Since 1996, Strasser has created a large and significant body of web.art, often in
collaboration with other artists. The primary site for Reiner's work is netartefact.de. The work
is varied technologically from masterful Javascript through Quicktime and Flash work. In it, we
see a recurring concern with connecting web.art with nature and the natural. This is an
ambitious project with generosity of spirit, and no mean feat, given the
artificiality/virtuality of the Web.

DICHTUNG-DIGITAL.DE (GERMANY)
http://www.dichtung-digital.de
Roberto Simanowski's site features reviews, interviews, and articles about digital poetics.

THE WORD PROJECT (SOUTH AFRICA)
http://www.thewordproject.com/
This site in very unusual in the way it combines kinetic/visual work, usually involving
language, with a story and also a philosophy. The visual pieces are wonderful in their insight.
They open the mind as effortlessly as opening a book. And they come to have a strong sense of
the talisman to them, if that is the right word. I mean that they are deeply meaningful and also
through the story you can see their place in an evolving person's growth. So that the
visual/kinetic pieces are strongly linked with the story, which I appreciate.

STEVE DUFFY (BRITAIN)
http://www.debris.org.uk/
Funny, thoughtful, accomplished Web art by Steve Duffy. A must see.

TRACE (BRITAIN)
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/
This is the brainchild of Sue Thomas. Trace is a very successful by-now-near-institution of
digital writing. It runs 'FuseTalk', a flexible discussion/communication piece of software that
facilitates multi-threaded conversation. They also pay for articles and works which are
published in their periodically published FRAME. They also run courses in writing, web design,
and other topics.

DAJUIN YAO (TAIWAN)
http://www.sinologic.com/
Dajuin says of his work
"i'm a chinese composer/artisan/art historian. Nowadays i do mainly electroacoustic
music/computer music/musique concrete. But concrete poetry has been my secret love since the
mid-1970s. i stopped experimenting with concrete poetry in the early 80s. I then started making
concrete poetry for/on the web/computer in early 1997 (site: Wonderfully Absurd Temple --
pronounced "Miao Miao Miao" in chinese, believe it or not), after i learned the basics of
animated GIF and web publishing.
Two years later, i had a paradigm shift and started "Wenzi Concrete" ("words concrete"), which
focuses on works that use only chinese characters, spoken words, found speech, found text,
etc. -- all based on, and limited to, the chinese script system. For some of the pieces, it's a
sort of "musique concrete" and "objet trouve" concepts applied to chinese language. it is also
what i call "calligraphy for the future." It is also the work of a "character fetishist.""

TED WARNELL (CANADA)
http://www.warnell.com
Ted Warnell primarily uses html as the material for his visual poetry. Speaking of poetry and
programming, Ted's site is an interesting synthesis of language as image and image as language;
interesting to have a look at the source code, often, in his work.

DAVID AYRE (CANADA)
http://ayre.ca/library/cl ("natural language generation" resources)
http://ayre.ca/library/perl ("perl for poets" resources)
David Ayre is doing a doctorate in Computer Science in Vancouver. In Computational Linguistics
and AI, if I'm not mistaken. I first met him about 1990; we were both just getting into the
study of computers. We met at a literary event, however, in Vancouver; David has been involved
in The Kootenay School of Writing, which is sort of langpo north, for many years. He is
currently working on what I suspect will be the world's weirdest word processor. An ambitious
work in Java I look forward to experiencing.

KATE ARMSTRONG (CANADA)
http://katearmstrong.com
Kate's background is in film and philosophy. She is a gifted writer, and her net.works are
intriguing.

MEZ (AUSTRALIA)
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker
Mez makes interesting programs that run on the wetware OS.

TURBULENCE.ORG (USA)
http://turbulence.org
Turbulence.org, Helen Thorington's project, is not strictly a literary site, but those tend to
be the type of literary sites I like. Turbulence has been strong in synthesis of arts, media,
and programming since it started in 95 or 96. Also, check out http://new-radio.org/helen which
contains links to Helen's own work.

JOE KEENAN (USA)
http://www.buffnet.net/~joecow
Joe Keenan's DHTML poetry is beautiful, memorable, thoughtful, soulful, and very inventive in
its new media. May require IE for the PC.

DAVID KNOBEL (USA)
http://home.ptd.net/~clkpoet
David Knoebel's site combines text and sound in imaginative, writerly ways. David has done many
interesting collaborations with Reiner Strasser, Ted Warnell, and others.

CHRISTINA MCPHEE (USA)
http://www.naxsmash.net
I dig Christina's long scrolling works that combine writing and other media. Meditations on the
cyborg and the pleasure of ruins.

BEEHIVE (USA)
http://beehive.temporalimage.com/
Edited by Talan Memmott and Alan Sondheim, BeeHive is where writers can go to be designed by
Talan (author of Lexia to Perplexia).

UBU.COM (USA)
http://ubu.com
A learned, varietous, and rewarding assortment of links and works concerning visual/concrete
poetry, sound poetry, historical writings on poetics, and much else. UBU Web is the brainchild
of Kenneth Goldsmith. The site contains a knowledgable historical perspective on visual/concrete
poetry and many links to international contemporary work. This site, along with Light & Dust, is
the main repository on the Web for pre-Web poetical work of the avant garde.

LIGHT & DUST (USA)
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm
Karl Young, long time polyartist and visual poet, has put together a fascinating resource of
primarily pre-web poetical avant garde work. My favorite section of the site is
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lettrist/lettrist.htm , a great intro to French lettrisme. The
site is international with a special focus on out-of-the-way American avant garde from the
sixties through the eighties. Young has also written at length about the late bp Nichol, a
friend of his, who is important in Canadian letters of the synthetic avant garde.

THE ELECTRONIC BOOK REVIEW (USA)
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3
Yeah, pretty bookish still in the pov, but usually well-written.

ALAN SONDHEIM (USA)
http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
Alan Sondheim is an extrordinary writer.