[-empyre-] is: institutionalization was: art games pre computers

[Jim Andrews]

> However it seems to me that contemporary practice doesn't or
> shouldn't last forever - it evolves and changes (another concern is
> the turgidity of the mainstream artworld since the 60's which Hughes
> has referred to as "The New Shock of the New" - but no time for
> that). So two things can happen to it.  It can be institutionalised
> by the mausoleums and thus became a "legitimate" part of the
> historical record.  Or it dies with the artist(s) and is effectively
> lost and forgotten though (like early computer art) may assume some
> "apocryphal" status.

i think there are other options with some types of work, paul. FIRST
SCREENING by bpNichol is an example of this. i worked on this with some
other artists interested in bpNichol's work. the project is at
http://vispo.com/bp . we recovered work he did in 1983-84 on the apple iie
in the apple basic language. this is some of the first programmed+kinetic
poetry and it's mentioned in chris funkhouser's new book 'prehistoric
digital poetry' from the u of alabama press.

we present various versions of FIRST SCREENING at http://vispo.com/bp .

we recovered the original bits from a 5.25" floppy that was 20 years old.
that took some doing. there are emulators for the pc and mac for the apple
iie. so you can view the original version via an emulator. it's probably a
bit faster than the original, but otherwise, i gather it's pretty accurate.

marko niemi, a fabulous poet-programmer, did a javascript version. i worked
on it a little bit, but mainly the javascript version is marko's.

we did a quicktime of the emulated version, also, for people who don't want
to download the emulator yadayada.

and we also present the bits and some documentation of a hypercard version
of FIRST SCREENING that was made after bpNichol's death. i don't know of any
way to get this version running, but there it is, and documentation on it.

lionel kearns, geof huth, dan waber, and myself also wrote about bp and
FIRST SCREENING.

and there it is, available on the web.

another (earlier) project i worked on is ON LIONEL KEARNS at
http://vispo.com/kearns . lionel kearns and bpNichol are the only canadian
poets i know of who were thinking and practicing some sort of digital poetry
as far back as the sixties. ON LIONEL KEARNS presents video poems, visual
poems, and poemy poems by lionel from the sixties through the eighties that
are thinking through issues of digital art that still obtain. the project
presents lionel's work in various ways, mostly interactive shockwave pieces.
it's a contemporary wreading of his work. a binary meditation on his work
and its relation to the contemporary situation.

so, you know, i don't agree that to recover and present this sort of work,
at least as we've done in these projects, is to kill it.

especially if artists have access to the material and can use it in their
own creative endevours, whether these are in recovering the work or using it
in their own work, i think that's how the work shows its relevance to
successive generations.

another example of work recovered. i did some dhtml interactive poetry from
97 through 2000. dhtml was not particularly standardized at the time, and my
work only ran on the pc and some of it only on internet explorer. marko
niemi translated this work into finnish and also updated the dhtml
programming so it runs on pc, mac, and linux, and in most browsers on these
platforms. so i took his code and updated the english versions with his
code. some of that work is at http://vispo.com/animisms/enigman ,
http://vispo.com/animisms/timesuite/MilleniumLyricIntro.htm ,
http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts , and
http://vispo.com/animisms/SeattleDrift.html .

here's a case where a fellow poet-programmer found the work relevant enough
not only to translate it but to update the code.

ja
http://vispo.com