The first challenge is: viivakoodi, barcode, código de parras, codice a barre…

Time for a Vispo is a new blog run by Finnish visual poet, Satu Kaikkonen, where she gives a weekly challenge to create a vispo. The 1. challenge, issued by Satu on Monday 28 June, was barcode. It’s always good to have an opportunity to shake out some vispos/e-poems from the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX archive and, since barcodes have featured in a number of remixes, this challenge was such an occasion. See the collection under the remixworx barcode tag. It includes two new Flash remixes: barcode (every citizen under the sun) by babel/Chris Joseph, and id card, which is my response, a random coded e-poem with voices.

Screenshot of id card, created in Flash by Christine Wilks (crissxross)

Others from the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX archive include:

seepage by runran

artifact (bicycle – 2111) by runran

artifact (rusted sergio mix) by babel/Chris Joseph

barcode of life (detail), created in Flash by Chris Joseph

Worx by babel

sizing up by crissxross

And here’s another, barcode of life by babel/Chris Joseph, which is, strictly speaking, not part of remixworx but far too wonderful to avoid mentioning.

The current Time for a Vispo challenge is TRAFFIC, LIIKENNE, TRAFFICO but there will be a new one tomorrow!

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a collaborative blog for digital art and e-poetry remixing, started by Randy Adams (runran) in November 2006.

ELO_AI Arts Program installations

In early June an international collection of e-literature was installed in a gallery setting in downtown Providence (Rhode Island, USA) for the Arts Program of the Electronic Literature Organization 2010 Conference (ELO_AI), including my own piece, Underbelly. There were many wonderful works presented but I’d like to pick out a few that made me think about transliteracy in particular: Requiem, Ethereal Landscapes and Between Page And Screen.

The creators of these works augment their digital art and e-poetry with print, employing a delightful topsy-turvy kind of transliteracy, whereby the printed matter becomes a device for reading the digital, rather than the usual way remediation goes when texts originated for print are digitized. Reading these works, you wonder, where is the poem, where is the story? The poem, the art is powerfully and clearly present, but you’re aware that it doesn’t exist in the computer and it doesn’t exist on the page – it’s between these realms, slipping and sliding along the virtuality continuum – or perhaps it’s the reader who is transliterately sliding around in mixed reality?

Requiem and printed marker

It’s an experience that simultaneously displaces and enchants the human reader. It slides you into a magical zone where somehow your corporeal reading equipment – eyes (and reading glasses) – have been substituted by a black & white graphic and a webcam or barcode reader. It’s only when, and if, you allow yourself to be transformed like this that the poetry appears for you.

Have a look at the works, see where they take you…

Viewing Requiem - the image appears

Requiem by Charles Fisher and Caitlin Fisher

“Requiem is an augmented reality poem in which digital imagery and sound is superimposed on a physical object — in this case the card with the black and white marker. Simply hold the marker up to the webcam to begin experiencing the piece.”

Requiem, which incorporates a poem written by her father, is part of a larger, more fragmented work by Caitlin Fisher “about collections, hoarding and the things we save when people die” called Cardamom of the Dead. Download and print out a marker.

Pages from the Ethereal Landscape printed book

Ethereal Landscapes by Alexander Mouton and Christian Faur

“Ethereal Landscapes is an interactive electronic installation that immerses a viewer into a photographic artists’ book and generative video and audio data-base which a viewer can interact with in real-time through scanning the bar codes on the pages of an accompanying book….

“The concept comes from our love of the immersive quality of books (which can be held), of sound (which surrounds you), and of video (which engages your sense of temporality through its movement).”

Reading Ethereal Landscape with a barcode reader

Between Page And Screen written by Amaranth Borsuk and programmed by Brad Bouse

“…is an augmented-reality chapbook. Like a digital pop-up book, you hold the words in your hands…

“The poems—a series of cryptic letters between two lovers, P and S—do not exist on either page or screen, but in an augmented reality only accessible to the reader who has both the physical object and the device necessary to read it.”

Watch the video or print out the preview marker and try it for yourself (you’ll need a webcam).

This article is crossposted from Transliteracy.com

hack & food - remix #1 (by runran)

Remixworx is a collaborative blog for creative digital media remixing, started by Randy Adams (aka runran) in November 2006.

To date there are 429 posts – i.e. remixes of audio, Flash animations, digital images, visual poetry, texts… but there are many more remixes scattered throughout the comments areas. We’ve lost count, but there must be well over 500 (perhaps more than 600?) remixes within the whole blog.

Last May I took a few trails from remixworx to E-Poetry ’09 in Barcelona:

Beyond the high quality of the works presented, the collaborative axis of remixworx is more than respectable, and the sheer variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically)—kinetic visual poems often combining text/animation/sound—appearing on the site is marvelous.

Chris Funkhouser, Encapsulating E-Poetry 2009

One year on and I’ve been thinking about remixworx again… But first, here’s how I viewed things two years ago, also in the merry month of May:

so what’s it like to participate as a remixer? one player’s perspective…

It’s exhilarating, stimulating, fun, liberating… There’s room for each artist/writer to stamp their mark on R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX, but R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is just as likely to stamp its mark on each of us too. Unpacking someone else’s creative work, remixing it and adding something original of your own is a transformative process that works both ways. Often it’s a multi-authored piece so you can trace its generative history, see how it’s mutated. Coded works, such as Flash pieces, you have to literally get inside to deconstruct, to decode them, which is almost like getting inside someone else’s head. It’s an oddly distant but intimate form of co-creation.The process opens you up to new ways of working, new ideas, new creative challenges, new techniques, new ways of looking at the world, both online and off.

screenshot of bookish stones

All of which is still true for me, but in contrast to two years ago the rate of remixing has slowed down considerably, which perhaps accounts for the elegiac tone of some of the more recent remixes – e.g. bookish and bookish stones – but it’s not over yet. These days it’s a languidly unfolding remixworx, very different from the heady days of rapid turnover and the almost frantic pace of remixing in our first year or two. Of course, in the early months there were more of us doing it, but mainly the project has been sustained by the core remixers: Randy Adams (runran), Chris Joseph (babel) and me (crissxross). The three of us still feed the blog but we’ve all become so busy with other projects/jobs/lifestyle changes… you could say that remixworx is on a frugal diet these days.

it’s vispo for lunch again (by runran)

To give you a taste, here are a few from the feasting time:

i have been eating vispoetry

breakfast vispo

vispo soup

bread and circus

bread circus

Underbelly screenshot

Underbelly is my latest playable media fiction, created in Flash. It’s about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former colliery in the north of England. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices, along with her ticking biological clock, and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of the artist’s repressed fears and desires mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal.

Earlier this week, I performed Underbelly at the Transliteracy Conference at DMU, Leicester, UK, so I thought it was high time I went public with the piece online. It’s a ‘beta version’ at present and I’m hoping to get some user feedback to help me swat any bugs (of which there’s a swarm, I’m sure) and iron out any usability issues. When you’re working alone outside any institution or formal group, it’s hard to get this kind of feedback prior to publishing, so any comments from netpoetic readers would be most welcome!

It’s been a struggle to get Underbelly into shape, partly because I was teaching myself ActionScript 3.0 as I was developing the piece. Currently, it relies heavily on AS frame-scripts because that’s what I was most comfortable with when I started work on it about 18 months ago. I suspect I have a lot of garbage collection issues, which is hardly surprising, the amount of messy code I brushed under the carpet! Initially, I attempted a more object oriented approach but, although I knew it would be cleaner, I found that it was simply beyond me at the time.

Since then, very recently, I’ve been learning how to code games in AS3 which has been a real eye-opener. It’s helped me recognise a much better process and workflow for developing playable media fiction in future. In retrospect, I realise I approached the making of Underbelly in a completely topsy-turvy way. For example, I didn’t arrive at a user interface design until very late in the process. In future I’ll design and thoroughly test the structure, storytelling procedures and UI elements in a wireframe prototype before going any further.

I’d be interested to hear what kinds of development models other artists who do their own programming use. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Perhaps it’s different for each project?

Transliteracy Conference

Tuesday 9 February 2010, 9:30 – 17:30

Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, Leicester, UK

In association with the Institute of Creative Technologies & the NLab Small Business Network,  De Montfort University
www.transliteracy.com/conference2010.html

Deadline for Abstracts:  1 December, 2009

Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.  Since 2005, when Professor Sue Thomas introduced this concept in the UK, transliteracy has been taken up and explored by a broad range of academics and practitioners, from information scientists to literary theorists, artists and writers. The first Transliteracy Conference will take place at Leicester’s new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, on 9 Feb 2010.  This one-day event offers an opportunity for academics, artists, business people and practitioners to share discoveries, ideas, and creative works that amplify and augment transliteracy research.

This Call for Presentations invites 250 word abstracts.  Presentations should be 10-15 minutes in duration, and can be used to show work or deliver a short paper.  The Conference Panel will group presentations together thematically in sessions scheduled to include time to explore the issues and ideas raised through discussion.  Phoenix Square is well equipped with the latest technology, so presenters will be able to show work on screen and via the internet.

Themes to be explored include:

• transliteracy and libraries
• transliteracy and the arts
• transliteracy in education
• transliteracy in communications
• transliteracy in the workplace
• transliteracy and transdisciplinarity
• transliteracy in action – examples of transliterate works, like digital fiction, networked arts projects, or library resources

Abstracts should be submitted in the body of an email to transliteracy@googlemail.com  Please include a 100-word bio and contact email address.
Deadline for abstracts is 1 December, 2009; notification of acceptance by 18 December, 2009.
Further information can be obtained from Louisa Allen at transliteracy@googlemail.com
We expect to charge a modest delegate fee to cover costs.
Selected materials from the conference will be published online at www.transliteracy.com

For more about The Transliteracy Research Group (TRG) see www.transliteracy.com
To discuss Transliteracy visit transliteracy.ning.com

Since transliteracy research began at DMU in 2005 under the umbrella of PART (Production & Research in Transliteracy), group members have produced a significant range of projects, events, presentations and publications, stimulating an informal research network around the theory and practice of transliteracy.

Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger have now established The Transliteracy Research Group with the aim of focusing PART’s work yet more closely. TRG will continue to draw in a broad coalition of theorists and practitioners, both from DMU and other international institutions and organizations, whilst continuing  to develop our already strong links with business, local community, and the broader cultural sector. A major strength of transliteracy events at DMU is that participants have come from academia, the arts, information sciences, pedagogical researchers, and the creative industries, and this has impacted in many different areas.

The Transliteracy Research Group (TRG), is a research-focussed think-tank and creative laboratory.  The public face of the group resides on a new blog, www.transliteracy.com.  This blog will be run by Thomas and Pullinger, with regular contributions from the following De Montfort staff, Phd students, and graduates of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media:  Tia Azulay, Heather Conboy, Gareth Howell, Anietie Isong, Jess Laccetti, Kirsty McGill, and Christine Wilks.

Please join us as we develop this new field of academic research. You can contribute via comments to the blog or join the community ‘Transliteracy Notes’, designed by Gareth Howell.

Also announcing The Creative Writing and New Media Guest Lectures Archive

As well as the new research group, we would like to bring to your attention a new resource, an archive of all the Guest Lectures given during the four years of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media:  www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com. This archive contains lectures from theorists and practitioners as varied as Christy Dena, Rita Raley, Alan Sondheim, Caitlin Fisher, and John Cayley.  Created by CWNM graduate and digital artist Christine Wilks, this resource will be of value to practitioners, students and academics with an interest in transliteracy, digital fiction, digital art, e-poetry, and cross-media.  Please feel free to use this archive and discuss it in ‘Transliteracy Notes’.

And forthcoming Transliteracy Conference

We will be hosting a day-long Transliteracy Conference on Tuesday 9 Feb, 2010, at the brand new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, Leicester, UK.  Please watch for our Call for Presentations, coming next week.