[-empyre-] 'Sound Seeker' and '88 Constellations for Wittgenstein'

[Jim Andrews]

Here are some recent online literary works I've enjoyed and see as 
significant. These just happen to be both from Canadians.

ja
http://vispo.com

SOUND SEEKER
David Jhave Johnston
http://glia.ca/conu/soundSeeker/wordpress/
Jhave Johnston is a poet-programmer living in Montréal who has produced a 
large body of intermedial net art for many years at glia.ca. His most recent 
project, Sound Seeker, like most of his work, is a Flash app. He says in the 
"About" section that Sound Seeker is "an online real-time beat-synchronized 
poem animator. Sound drives the rhythm of the words: their speed and style 
of display can be controlled." What you see on the homepage of the project 
are twelve experimental videos produced by Jhave with Sound Seeker. You can 
access the underlying interactive Flash app itself in the "Method" section 
of the documentation. In the "Motivation" section, Jhave discusses remarks 
by Rudolph Arnheim concerning intermedia. This is a fascinating project that 
also has terrific documentation.

88 CONSTELLATIONS FOR WITTGENSTEIN
David Clark
http://88constellations.net
"Lyrical and philosophical, this sprawling feature-length interactive film 
for the internet contemplates the life and work of the influential Austrian 
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein through 88 interactive Flash animations, 
each one corresponding to a constellation from the night sky. The viewer is 
invited to navigate through a web of interconnecting narratives that move 
from association to association; bringing Wittgenstein's work into 
conversation with our contemporary digital culture. The work is an 
interactive collage. It is story of a man's life told in fragments. It is a 
map of coincidence and correspondences. It is a digital film. It is 
story-telling as browsing." The form of this piece is like that of Clark's 
earlier piece 'A is for Apple' at http://aisforapple.net , which you may 
know. Clark teaches in Halifax.