[-empyre-] six links concerning digital writing

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

Here are five links to the sites of individuals who are currently producing
work relevant to digital writing or poetics. Some you may have encountered,
some not. And a link to a piece I did last year.

EUGENIO TISSELLI (SPAIN)
http://www.motorhueso.net
Eugenio is a poet-programmer who has created an interesting body of
Shockwave work for the Web. Plus some other work in PHP and Visual Basic.
Some of Eugenio's work is exploratory of the 'semantic Web', ie, you type
something into the interface and the program then uses Google image search
or perhaps an online thesaurus or whatever to retrieve relevant data and
then does stuff with it. He also has some downloadable software online such
as MIDIPoet (done with Visual Basic) to create reactive text and image
pieces. And he has done some other strongly conceptual work in PHP where,
each time a Web page is visited, a character is deleted or generated or, in
another piece, a synonym replaces a word of the page--that is in a piece
titled "Philosophy of Language". His site is his 'book'. "And, as some
philosopher said, books are long letters to friends."

GEOF HUTH (NEW YORK)
http://dbqp.blogspot.com
Geof Huth's blog is to visual poetry as Ron Silliman's blog is to the poemy
poem. Huth reviews the work of others; primarily he reviews visual poetry
works, whether they are from print or the digital realm. And he also shows
and writes about his own work and poetics. Huth has been intensely active in
visual poetry as a writer since the eighties and perhaps a bit earlier. I
first encountered his work in the mid eighties in Seattle publications such
as empo and Poets.Painters.Composers. Later, in 1995 or 96, I encountered a
site he did on dbqp, his press/imprint--but the site was relatively short
lived and it wasn't until he started his blog that he was very active on the
Web. His blog is widely read by poets of many different approaches to
writing. This is one of the links/minds/sites that unites disparate forms of
writing in meditation on many of them.

VICTOR AZ (BRAZIL)
http://concretismo.zip.net
This is the blog of poet doing some engaging concrete and, occassionally,
javascript-based visual poetry. The blogs of Huth and Az--along with some
other blogs I like--give me the impression that the blog is actually a good
thing concerning digital writing. Not only does it allow many people who
would not otherwise enter digital writing to do so but, occassionally, as we
see in Huth's and Az's blogs, it is just right for some people who may not
wish to contribute to digital writing in some ways (which is true of us
all), but *do* have significant contributions to make in other ways that the
blog facilitates nicely. In this way, the blog is a bridge between print and
digital writing. And a bridge that lets many people cross who would not
otherwise. That's important.

JIM PUNK (FRANCE)
http://www.jimpunk.com
On the rare occassions when Jim Punk says anything at all about his work,
the word 'poetry' crops up more often than not. You may want to know that
Alt+F4 closes browser windows--though in my experience, when he multiplies
windows, he usually ends up closing them, and the pieces eventually return
control to you. Jim Punk's work is usually document-based and the language
is a hybrid of written, visual, and scripted behavior. The behaviors/scripts
speak quite strongly in his work.

DICHTUNG DIGITAL (USA/GERMANY)
http://www.dichtung-digital.com
Roberto Simanowski's site of articles about digital poetics.

ON LIONEL KEARNS (by me)
http://turbulence.org/spotlight/kearns
This is a look back at the work of a forward-looking poet: Vancouver's
Lionel Kearns. In the sixties-through-eighties, Lionel Kearns produced
poems, visual poems, and video poems that are highly relevant to digital
poetics. 'On Lionel Kearns' presents that work in the form of a binary
meditation on it.

ja