R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX - selected works (screenshot - detail)

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX (remixworx) is a space for the remixing of digital media, including visual poetry (vispo), electronic poetry (flashpo), playable media, animation, music, spoken word, texts and more. In New Directions in Digital Poetry, Chris Funkhouser describes the project as “a particularly impressive display of cannibalism-by-design.” He goes on to say:

Beyond the high quality of the artworks, the collaborative axis of Remixworx commands respect, and the sheer variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically) embraced by the collective – usually involving kinetic visual poems in combination with graphical animation and sound – is remarkable.

It began as a blog in November 2006 and has grown to number over 500 individual works of media. The front page only displays the latest pieces so, recently, we created a new gallery page of selected works to open out the remixworx collection. Now there’s a browsable interface of thumbnails where you can see, at a glance, relationships between remixes and have access to the works at your fingertips.

On the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX blog, the source material is made available and all media is freely given to be remixed. Each new work is remixed, literally or conceptually, from other works on the blog. Then, the new work is linked to the blog post(s) that contain the component parts, thus the blog ‘talks to itself’ – “I link therefore I am” (Mark Amerika). The project promotes no single ‘author’, and we keep dogma chained outside the gate. It is not a tame place, though, and artful innuendo is evident.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is also a playful environment – as with much ‘creative discourse’ – and we are always surprised and delighted by the remixes. We respond to each other, to newsworthy events, and to trends in politics or art. Some works have been remixed several times and represent a creative dialogue that utilizes social software to explore ‘open source’, “a philosophy … that promotes free redistribution” (Wikipedia). We sometimes post completely new work because R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX needs to be fed. In regards artistic practice, R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is unabashedly new media – ‘born digital’ – but the project has roots in photography, literature, audio technology, film, animation, poetry, computer programming, dada and outsider art.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a creative micro-community. Most R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX members work or have worked professionally, in one capacity or another, with social software and/or digital media – most members were brought together, initially, by the trAce Online Writing Community. R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX continues in a spirit of learning and sharing – in the original spirit of the World Wide Web. Some members have won awards of one kind or another for digital art and writing. Often, in the heat of working on a complex project, a person needs to let off steam – R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a place for that, as well.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is an accumulation of spontaneous ideas that spawn at random intervals, a flexible community, an adaptable entity that has been shown in a variety of ways – performed live at festivals and conferences, or remixed live as part of DJ/VJ events. The present page of ‘selected works’ has been created to ‘open the project up’, so to speak, with a visual interface, separate from the blog. It is presented as an online journal of digital art and writing that spans 2006 to 2012.

Many thanks to Randy Adams (runran), who initiated the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX project, for pulling together the selected works page, currently containing 183 pieces. Also, a shout out for Chris Joseph (babel) – check out the blog for his latest remixes.

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

Play-read or read-play, however you approach it and whoever you identify with, you’ll become entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, attention and the search for meaning. Inevitably, it’s a contrary game – there can be no winners.

I began creating Rememori about a year ago, when my father was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s Disease but still living at home, being cared for by my mother. I finished the work a few days ago, coincidentally just as my father moved from a hospital ward into a Nursing Care Home. On the face of it, the main reason why it’s taken so long to make is because I took time out to work on other projects. During that period my father had a third massive stroke and the prognosis didn’t look good. So for a while, I think I was reluctant to return to the piece. I’m glad I did. There can be no happy endings in situations like these but, now that we have him settled in our preferred Care Home, there’s a sense of respite. I think the work reflects that, certainly in the later stages of the game.

Although drawn from personal research and experience, Rememori is not factual nor biographical – it’s a playable poem or poetic game created in Flash. For facts that speak of a wider context, here’s a quote from the Alzheimer’s Disease International’s World Alzheimer Report 2009:

An estimated 35.6 million people worldwide will be living with dementia in 2010. This number is estimated to nearly double every 20 years, to 65.7 million in 2030, and 115.4 million in 2050. Much of the increase is clearly attributable to increases in the numbers of people with dementia in low and middle income countries.

Modified image of brain: source thanks to Wellcome Library, London.

Bournemouth University’s Media School is delighted to announce the second annual prize for new media writing.

The prize encourages writers working with new media to showcase their skills, provoke discussion and raise awareness of new media writing, the future of the ‘written’ word and storytelling. The prize is split into two categories: student and professional. The winners in each category will receive a valuable bundle of new media hardware and software. The judging panel are looking for good storytelling (fiction or non-fiction) written specifically for delivery and reading/viewing on a PC or Mac, the web, or a hand-held device such as an iPad or mobile phone. It could be a short story, novel, documentary or poem using words, images, film or animation with audience interaction.

Anyone can apply! Whether you’re a student, a professional, an artist, a writer, a Flash designer or an enthusiast, the competition is open to all. It’s an international competition, open to all outside the UK. The deadline is midday on Monday 31 October 2011 and each entry should be submitted by email to submissions@newmediawritingprize.co.uk. Shortlisted entrants will be invited to the awards ceremony on the 23 November where the winner will be announced. There will be substantial media coverage for the Awards, and winners will be given full acknowledgement in all press releases and related material.

For further information please visit the New Media Writing Prize website.

A high profile Awards Ceremony will be staged at Bournemouth University on Wednesday 23 November. An esteemed panel of judges will select winning entries that will be published on high profile new media web-hub, The Literary Platform, the Bournemouth University website and will be showcased at the Awards Ceremony.

So much history is buried beneath our feet, and histories buried in other ways, by forgetfulness or disregard. If you live in a former mining area in Britain, that history is deep underground. Evidence of the coal mines have been erased from the landscape, swept away in less than a generation. Deeper still in the past there’s a buried history of women working underground too. When I found out about the women miners, I thought of my sister, the sculptor, Melanie Wilks, working on the site of a former colliery turned into parkland, hand-carving stone on the very ground above where those pasts are buried.

Such fragments of contemporary life and shards of history I hauled together to build Underbelly in digital media, collaging a rich and often grotesque mix of imagery, spoken word, video, animation and text. It’s an interactive story about a woman artist who, while sculpting on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery, is haunted by a medley of voices.

Melanie Wilks carving on site of former power station, picketed during 1984 Miners’ Strike

It includes video of my sister carving and the voices are performed by me. The historical content is drawn from the testimonies of 19th Century women miners collected by Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission of 1842, which exposed working conditions in the pits.

Sisters

My sister and I were raised in Morley, an industrial town in Northern England, whose prosperity in previous centuries was built on shoddy mills, coal mining and quarrying. Our family has lived in this area for generations and, although we both moved away, we found ourselves returning to Morley to live.

When we were growing up here, the place was black, black with soot from the mill chimneys and heavy industry. Pollution clings to carboniferous sandstone and almost everything, apart from the modern housing estates, was built from the local sandstone. It felt like the coal-black of the pits had risen above ground, as if the back-to-back houses, the chapels, the pubs, the civic buildings were built from coal. I even remember, as a baby, my sister used to like eating the stuff. We had coal fires, of course, and there was warmth, but I wanted to escape all that blackness and the weight of the Victorian heritage bearing down on us.

'The Miner' in Woodkirk Quarry where Melanie carved it in 2007

So it’s ironic that I ended up back in my old hometown, Melanie too, both of us creating artworks that are rooted in the locality, which Underbelly clearly is if not my other works. As for my sister, well, most of her creative output is located in the area. She carves it from the local sandstone, often working in the local quarry (where she met her husband, Neil, an ex-miner). She is quite literally a local artist. Whereas, in some sense, I’m not really present in Morley. I’m in my computer most of the time, in virtual space, roaming the internet, connecting, conversing and often collaborating with other people, geographically far away, in other countries.

And where does my work exist? It’s digital, conjured up out of code – just zeros and ones when you get down to it – it’s nowhere and anywhere and all over the place, scattered or drifting, packets of data being pulled and pushed in cyberspace. Whereas Melanie’s stone sculptures are unequivocally present, rock solid in a geographical location. We’re at opposite ends of the scale – sisters, so similar and yet so far apart in terms of the materials and processes we work with. But both of us, in our different ways, working with the past in the present.

Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism

'The Miner' being installed outside Morley Town Hall

Recently I gave a talk about Underbelly, and performed it too, for the Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism Conference at Hull University. My aim was to explore the connections between the digital fiction’s vernacular Victorian representations and its 21st Century sculptor, whose art practice is based on that of my sister, hand-carving in what could be viewed as a traditional and vernacular figurative style. It’s no coincidence that Melanie’s work is often commissioned by local communities in West Yorkshire to commemorate the passing of their traditional industries or, more particularly, the passing of those working lives. There’s a poignancy to the sculptures but they also evoke a strong sense of Neo-Victorian civic pride – for example, The Weaver and The Miner, two sculptures by Melanie sited in front of Morley’s grand 19th Century Town Hall.

The unveiling of 'The Weaver' outside Morley Town Hall, 2007

For my presentation, I tried to unearth some of the rich ironies, contradictions and correspondences between our almost diametrically opposed art forms, our experiences as working women, our uses of the past, and also how and where our artworks are situated in the (past)present. You can see the images I talked about and draw your own connections in my Underbelly Cabinet of Curios, which is a digital collection of some of the sources, influences and catalysts that gave rise to Underbelly. There’s also a peek at one stage of the process of writing and structuring the digital story. In another compartment of the ‘Cabinet’, I’ve collected some creative works by others that struck a chord with me in relation to the themes I explore in Underbelly. Speaking of which, here’s another…

Neo-Victorian Folk Song

Another instance of a vernacular Neo-Victorian aesthetic in a traditional artform, The Unthanks sing The Testimony of Patience Kershaw. I used some of the same girl’s testimony in Underbelly too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks to James Pope, one of the judges for the New Media Writing Prize 2010 (which was awarded to Underbelly) for drawing my attention to this moving Neo-Victorian folk song (originally by Frank Higgins) on The Unthanks album, Here’s The Tender Coming.

(cross-posted from crissxross.net blog)

For my performance of Underbelly in Edinburgh, UK, on Halloween at Inspace no one can hear you scream I intend to wear shoes as red as wounds. Why? Because Underbelly, my work of playable media fiction, is an exploration of women’s bodies in relation to the land – past and present, inside and outside, above and below ground – and shoes, especially red ones, are loaded with associations.

I’m tempted to say more but instead, it might be more fun to point you to my Underbelly Cabinet of Curios. It’s a digital collection of some of the sources, influences and catalysts that gave rise to Underbelly, and a peek at one stage of the process of writing and structuring the piece. Within the cabinet, you’ll also find some connections and contextual curios, creative works by others in other media that struck a chord with me in relation to the themes I explore in Underbelly… and, if you follow the merry dance, the significance of red shoes.

Since I spend so much of my time stuck at my desk in front of a computer, I’m really looking forward to stepping out and into performer’s shoes – not least because there’s such a fantastic line-up of other artist-performers at Inspace on Halloween:

48 hours | Inspace no one can hear you scream

Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 for 8pm.
Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

As part of the third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, we present an evening of language in digital performance with works by Martin John Callanan, JR Carpenter & Jerome Fletcher, Donna Leishman, Maria Mencia, Netwurker Mez, Stanza and Christine Wilks.

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.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?