In her editorial introducing the issue, Jill Jones rightly points to the issue’s presumptive focus on electronica and electronic music, specifically “the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound.” The poetry in this issue runs the gamut from highly experimental works to extended meditations on musical memories and forms. It’s absorbing, intriguing and puzzling – and this is just as it should be.

The spoken word tracks selected by our audio editor Emilie Zoey Baker are similarly pre-occupied with the bleeps, hisses and clicks we associate nowadays with electronic music. From Philip Norton’s bizarro Yes I Dream of Electric Sheep to Sean M. Whelan and Isnod’s Dream Machines, the works selected here paint an aural kaleidoscope that fizzes and pops, echoing electronic art from the works of Phillip K. Dick through to Kraftwerk. Check out the individual tracks or stream the hour-plus mix of electronica as one. Headphones highly recommended!

When it comes to the selected works of multimedia or ‘electronic literature’, however, we are faced with a series of disruptions that more often than not question rather than reflect the theme of the issue. Benjamin Laird’s Sound-less-scape and nothing left in, for example, present the reader (viewer? player?) with opportunities for interaction but remain stubbornly mute, like a silent rave. Joshua Mei Ling Dubrau’s Et Tu demonstrates the jump-cut nature of screen-capture technology when applied to text, while Konrad McCarthy’s TV Life strips bare the artifice of the audio-visual in a montage of movements.

The publication of these pieces – some HTML-based, others video – inevitably raises the question of genre and form. Is this literature? Is it even e-literature? As Tim Wrights asks in his review of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2, ‘What literature today isn’t electronic?’ I’d like to think, instead, of overlapping spaces – some of which may be electronic, others organic. Beverliey Braune’s Supra-text Sequences essay offers one glimpse into such a world.

When it comes to the work of Jason Nelson, one might instead ask where the electronic world actually stops. I’m really excited to be able to publish three of Jason’s work in this issue, because in many respects his work attempts to break through the imposition imposed by the computer screen to offer a neural landscape that is deeply textured and interactive. Depth: Text and Playthings addresses this tension directly, by stating bluntly ‘Your screen is horribly flat’.

Elsewhere, Nelson’s work is playful and self-referential. Branching: branch branch is a work where the traditional branching structure of file folders clashes comically with a goofy soundtrack that is perhaps more amenable to a 1980s computer game. Meanwhile, With love, from a failed planet presents a phantasmagoria of late-capitalist logos. In addition to these pieces, I’m pleased to present an interview with Jason in which he reflects on his creative practices as an electronic literature artist.

Nelson’s work offers one possible ‘entry-point’ into the world of e-lit. The work of Mez Breeze offers another. Sally Evans’ essay entitled ‘The Anti-Logos Weapon’: Excesses of Meaning and Subjectivity in Mezangelle Poetry demonstrates that electronic literature can be just as much about ‘texts’ as traditional literature. Mez’s work is justifiably renowned in e-lit circles as innovative and highly complex. In an online world where more and more of us are exposed to the vagaries of computer code, Mezangelle chews up that code, parses it with human language and spits out art. Adam Fieled’s essay on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (a work that is itself highly amenable to remediation as a hypertext) shows that the worlds of literary practise and literary criticism remain inextricably entwined.

In terms of my own personal experience of electronic literature, Mez’s work was amongst the first that I viewed (scanned? played?). Over the course of this year, working as a post-doctoral researcher on the ELMCIP project, I’ve also been met a wide range of scholars and practitioners working in the field of e-lit. For this reason, I’ve included in this issue two interviews with my colleagues at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Karlskrona, Sweden. Both Talan Memmott and Maria Engberg have inspired me to re-think my attitudes to the digital realm.

This brings me back to the question of Cordite’s place within that realm. As Benjamin Laird demonstrates in his overview entitled Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social, Cordite is by no means alone in its attempts to engage with online communities. In fact, pretty much every Australian literature journal is undergoing a process of morphing and reinvention. I’d like to think that, in the future, Cordite will evolve to include more works of electronic literature that actually engage with the medium in which the journal ‘lives’.

This is not to suggest that the thousand-odd poems we have published on the site over the past decade or not ‘alive’, or that text-based works are somehow inferior to HTML, Flash-based or interactive works. Nevertheless, I hope that these tiny steps we have taken towards the electr(on)ification of Cordite will inspire others to create engaging, accessible art that takes advantage of the multitude of possibilities made available when viewing (reading? parsing?) information using a networked computer.”

- David Prater, Cordite’s Managing Editor

it’s always on. no need to switch it on and wait for the computer to start.

it needs no power. you can go hiking with it for weeks.

it’s a musical instrument.

it’s exercise for your fingers.

you cannot delete anything. that helps from time to time.

it looks nice.

you can get multicolored ink-ribbons.

you can sell the sheets of paper as unique artworks.

it’s good for showing in a museum when you are famous.

my typewriter an olivetti LETTERA 82 (travel typewriter)

Click here to view the embedded video.

i was starting with adobe after effects but in the end used a custom written program that just filed out png-images. i then had ffmpeg assemble them together to the 33 minutes of video.

the hardest part (or so i thought) was how to find out which character were displayable by the computer and which were shown as nasty “undefined character”-boxes. i was trying to find a programmatic way but solved it in the end with a text editor. i just edited the text file containing all characters in the range and deleted all undefined characters. it took me half an hour instead of hours of writing a new program that could detect those nasty boxes.

because i received so many questions about the sound i will write a few words: the sound is me reciting the alphabet (in german). one letter per frame. in the beginning though it’s one letter every two frames with the start of the chinese section it’s then one per frame. i added quite a bit of randomization to make it more interesting and gradually increased the length of the played sounds until the middle and then reduced it again. also a little bit of filtering. one interesting thing is that the alphabet has 26 characters but the video framerate is 25 frames per second so it gradually shifts. but you won’t notice because of the radomization.

here’s the list of displayble characters for Helvetica on a mac (it won’t display in the blog posting as the blog doesn’t seem to be unicode-aware, so no arab, chinese, japanese posts here?):

alldisplayablechars

it might look different in your browser though but most of the characters should work.

The following was written as a manuscript for a speech, so it has to be spoken or heard or at least imagined as being spoken and heard.

I wrote this text for the international poetry workshop fundamentals of poetry.

What is happening when I speak? What do you hear when I speak? You can understand me (I hope) but you also hear my Austrian accent. You will know that I am not a native English speaker. So there’s meaning: You know what I am talking about. But there’s more. You can hear where I come from. You might hear that I speak German as a first language. You can hear my gender, you can hear if I am tired, you can hear if I am bored or nervous. You might hear my educational or social background. You might hear something about my personality.
Some of these properties you would even be able to hear if you would not understand a single word of English. My voice communicates more than just the meaning of the words.

Sound

Foreign languages or accents help us focus on the acoustic qualities of language: because we don’t understand what has been said or because we hear a language spoken with a foreign accent we suddenly become aware of them. Something seems to get in the way between the words and our brain trying to make sense of everything we hear. When we were children we used to play a language game called b-language. The rules were simple: each vowel was substituted by the vowel then a “b” and then the vowel again. By modifying our speech that way we hoped to be able to communicate information without enabling our eavesdropping parents to understand what we were talking about. What we learned as well was the fact that we could use language as a material that could be reshaped by cutting it up into pieces, which were then reordered. But what is the smallest meaningful acoustic unit? Or what is the smallest part of language that we are “allowed” to work with creatively? Traditional poets would say that it must be the word. The Dadaist-inspired sound poet would not go beyond the syllable and the Lettrist (and we ourselves when we were children) would vote for the letter or the phoneme. However, from the 1950s onwards, poets like François Dufrêne or Henri Chopin used electronic devices to go far beyond that last frontier of language. Chopin started to experiment with his voice recorded on tape, manipulated the speed of the recording, added echo effects, implanted microphones into his body and used multiple tracks to create acoustic palimpsests from smaller and smaller fragments of speech or voice recordings.

sound example: Henri Chopin

There is, however, a natural limit on how small an acoustic unit we can work with. Human perception can only recognise sound events as single acoustic units that are longer in duration than 10-20 milliseconds. Recordings of sound that are shorter than this boundary seem to fuse with each other.
On the other hand this effect of fusion can be used to create sounds from tiny snippets of audio recordings by putting them in sequence or layering them on top of each other. Because they are too small to be discerned, the sound grains create a new sound.

sound example: granular synthesis (time stretch)

In the previous sound example all sound grains were placed in an ordered sequence but this is not the only way to structure the snippets of course. When we choose to take a more random approach we get clouds of sound:

sound example: granular synthesis (cloud)

Or we could choose to order them more sparsely in regular patterns: then we create rhythms. Before I go on talking about rhythm I’d like to mention the missing link between sound and rhythm. When sound artists and engineers started to experiment with tape recorders they soon discovered that they could alter the finite tape reels into infinite loops. In that way, they could create never ending repetitions of a sound recording that blurred the boundary between recognisable words and pure sound.

sound example: kette (onophon)
link to onophon

Rhythm

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch sdtuy at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist
and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can
sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey
lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

The human brain is capable of making sense of the words in the above paragraph by neglecting the shuffled letters as long as the first and last letter of each word remain in the original position. However, if I read the same paragraph, or tried to accomplish a re- ordering of recorded speech in the same manner, you would understand almost nothing. As in all acoustic disciplines, timing is an essential property (musicians of course know that) of language. It is so in common language and it becomes even more obvious in poetry. You can easily hear if the author of a poem breaks the meter (willingly or unwillingly).
But I don’t want to talk on about Iambic pentameter or other poetic forms that you are certainly well aware of. I’d rather refer to a more general definition of rhythm: Rhythm is the “movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions” (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary II, Oxford University Press)
Whereas, in Europe, poetic rhythm traditionally referred to the meter, to a sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables, repeating phonemes and pauses, other cultures offer different views on rhythmic language structure. People along the Congo river found a way to communicate across the waterway by drumming the tones of their language. They extend everyday words to more complex phrases which, together with the tonal qualities of their language and a known context, form complex patterns that can be distinguished to transport simple messages:

sound example: Talking Drums

In south India, musicians traditionally went in the other direction. Instead of imitating their spoken language by drums, they invented a large set of syllables called Konnakol for the composition, communication and performance of drummed as well as spoken rhythms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another non Eurocentric view on rhythmic language is provided by American black culture, which we are familiar with through Hip Hop and Jamaican Dancehall. A less known variant of swift rhythmic speaking is rooted in the tradition of livestock auctioneering in the US Midwest. The auctioneer repeats numbers and filling words in an extremely fast sequence, in order to sell cattle or horses:

Click here to view the embedded video.

These examples show that the combination of rhythm and language can lead us far beyond the usual verse, especially with the introduction of electronic sound manipulation tools that can extend these ways of creating rhythm by adding a plethora of new possibilities. One of the most important is the possibility to create and use multiple tracks recorded from the same sound source. The Dadaists were the first to write “Simultangedichte” that were intended to be read by multiple voices at the same time. Henri Chopin extended this idea to the tape machine and created layers and dense textures of his own voice only by recording his vocalisations over and over again. Contemporary recording technology enables us to record tracks or small snippets at the click of a mouse, or at the tap of a finger on a smart phone. Those recorded sounds can easily be arranged into complex compositions and rhythms. In this way, a single sound of half a second’s duration could be used to create polyphonic arrangements lasting for hours.

sound example: one of my own pieces (pakgn)

A New Kind of Poetry

In the above sections, I made you listen to some examples for how sound and rhythm could enhance and extend poetic or even non-poetic language. Before the advent of computer technology, poets had to either be musicians themselves or work with other musicians in order to make use of these “sound tools”. Today, this technology is literally in our hands when we take out our smart-phones or open our laptops. There is no longer any need (if indeed there ever was any) for instructors to tell us (as my music teacher told me) that we are not talented enough to play musical instruments. You can open the program or “app” and start recording your voice, manipulate it and arrange it to create poetic compositions that could not exist in books or on paper.
The support of traditional musical instruments has enhanced and influenced poetry ever since antiquity by reinforcing, as well as requiring, rhythm and meter. New technologies could play a similar role: for the first time, we have full control over a huge set of sonic and temporal parameters of recorded and performed language, and this could foster a completely new kind of poetry, one made up of emotion, information, language and sound.

Create and control tiny sound-creatures in the shape of letters that react to gravity or each other and generate rhythms and soundscapes.

http://joerg.piringer.net/abcdefg

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is a sound toy, a performance tool and an art work in its own right. You can play with the letter-creatures and watch and listen how they interact with each other or use them to produce soundscapes like you would with an electronic musical instrument. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz blends art, biology, fun and physics to create a unique, dynamic and interactive sound ecology.

This app is the result of my ongoing research of vocal sounds and their relation to dynamic typography in the form of performance, video and software art.

ORK

short for Objects R Kool. ORK is an object oriented language with a very verbose syntax. Unlike most of the esoteric programming languages you have to write a lot of code even to get the most simple task done.

a simple hello world-program would be written like this:

When this program starts:
There is a scribe called Writer.
Writer is to write "Hello, world!"

or a script that outputs the input could be like:

There is such a thing as a mouse.
A mouse can be_eaten.
A mouse has a status which is a word.
A mouse has a voice which is a scribe.
A mouse has an input which is an inputter.

When a mouse is to be_eaten:
There is a word called squeaky sound.
input is to readOne squeaky sound.
If input says it's done then status is "eaten".
voice is to write squeaky sound.

There is such a thing as a cat.
A cat can eat a mouse.
A cat has a Lingo which is a linguist

When a cat is to eat a mouse:
The mouse is to be_eaten.
Lingo's first operand is the mouse's status.
Lingo's second operand is "eaten".
Lingo is to compare.
If Lingo says it's not equal then I am to loop.

When this program starts:
There is a cat called Lucifer Sam.
There is a mouse called Gerald.
Gerald's status is "alive".
Lucifer Sam is to eat Gerald.

more info:
http://codu.org/eso/#ORK

and one of the possibly most verbose languages is called

English

i rather quote the Esoteric Programming Languages-wiki than write about English myself:

English is a declarative programming language. Many people are familiar with it even if they don’t know any other programming language.
[…]
A compiler of English (usually to some other high-level language) is called a ‘programmer’. They are usually humans and they err.

a hello world example program:

This program writes "Hello World" (without quotes) to the output.

a fibonacci sequence program:

Read an article about the Fibonacci sequence. Now write a program that computes it.

more info:
http://www.askoxford.com/

there’s a huge number of similar languages (around 6500 that are still in use).

the first of the two languages is called

AlphaBeta

It uses the letters of the alphabet as commands. Upper- and lowercase letters are different commands.

A quote from the description page: AlphaBeta uses 5 registers as a way to store memory, 2 are changeable and hold an integer, 1 is a result register and cannot be changed, 1 is used for looping and the other is used for memory ( like brainfuck‘s > and < ). There is no way of comments. Also, AlphaBeta has 1 kb of ram.

a hello world programm in AlphaBeta:

cccCISccccCIScccCIYx
SGSHaaCLgDLihhhDLDLgggDL
TTGaaCL
SGccbbbCLDLgggDLjggggDLSHDL
TTGaaaCL

a program that copies its input to its output:

JCLigggO

more info:
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/AlphaBeta

the second language is

Capuirequiem

Capuirequiem uses the ASCII characters with the number codes 33 to 126 as commands or literals of the language.

a hello world program:

[Hello World!]O

a program that prints out the fibonacci sequence:

[This function output a number in decimal format]Z
[
[]D/V
D /01!\$ 48,_KW\C/
!SB DL Z\O
]"n{

[Print out the fibonacci sequence]Z
[1.]O 0"a{1"b{ [
"a}"b}D"a{_KD"b{
"n}X [.]O
1L
]X

The language is known to be Turing complete.

more info:
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Capuirequiem

LOLCODE is inspired by the infamous lolcat internet meme. Lolcats are images distributed via the net with cats and their written “thoughts” on it. The language they speak is called lolspeak (lol is the net-acronym for “loughing out loud”) an english dialect. An example of lolspeak would be the question: “I Can Has Cheezburger?” (it’s also the name of the biggest lolcat-blog).

LOLCODE’s commands are modeled after lolspeak words and grammar. And so a typical “hello world”-program would look like this:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

or a program that counts to ten:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
   UP VAR!!1
   VISIBLE VAR
   IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

unlike code poetry in the almost esoteric programming language perl, poems written in LOLCODE can also be understood or at least read by non-programmers.

(picture by kn0thing)

if you’d like to try it out yourself an online javascript translator and interpreter can be found here:
http://fullvolume.co.uk/static/lolcode/

more info:
http://lolcode.com/
http://www.icanhascheezburger.com

However each programming language makes more or less concessions to the human mind. Some are easier to understand others are very hard to cope with. There’s a certain genre of programming languages called Esoteric Programming Languages that play with these degrees of understandability. Languages invented as a satire on programming like Brainfuck that features illegible code like

>+++++++++[<++++++++>-]<.>+++++++[<++++>-]<+.+++++++..+++.>>>++++++++[<++++>-]
<.>>>++++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<---.<<<<.+++.------.--------.>>+.

which simply prints “Hello, World!” are one extreme. The other would be a language called English which will be presented later on in this series.

Most of the examples are taken from the Esoteric Programming Languages Wiki which features a vast amount of ideas.

But not all of them are meant as a satire, some of them can be used to prove or compute certain properties of programs:

Turing tarpit
A Turing tarpit is a Turing-complete programming language whose number of commands, operators, or equivalent objects is very small. These include brainfuck (8 commands, all with 0 operands), OISC (1 command, 3 operands), and Thue (1 command, 2 operands).
(wikipedia)

Universal Turing machine
The classical and best know (at least in computer science) Turing tarpit is the universal Turing machine that is somehow the grandfather of all esoteric computer languages. Alan Turing invented it as a thought experiment to reason about computation in general. It’s the concept of a very simple computer: basically an infinite tape that can be written to and read from and a small machine that reads and performs the code on the tape. Turing machines are able to calculate everything that is computeable in principle given an infinite amount of memory and time. This property of Turing machines is called Turing-completeness.

So much for this time, more examples will be following soon including my own ideas for a new language…

it’s really an amazing tool if you know how to program in java. you write and test your app in java and then compile it to javascript having the compiler take care about browser quirks. being fed up with flash and java applets in the browser this seems to be the new way (for me) to do more complex stuff without any plugin at all.

check out nam shub micro (the online app).

i also discovered a service that lets you translate text to speech online. just press the speak button in the app to have your text spoken.