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Komninos Zervos

Techno-literatures on the internet

Please read.

This text is constructed as a hyperlinked essay.

Reading the text on this page constitutes the essay.

Hypertext links are used in the same way as numbered references in a

traditional essay except that instead of leading to a bibliography they link

to a webliography.

It is suggested that the text is read before following any of the links.

The advent and accessibility of internet communication technology over recent

years has seen the translation of many traditional literary print publications

to the internet and the proliferation of new journals and other forms of

electronic publishing like the e-zine or electronic magazine, which exists

solely on the net without a print equivalent.

Sites dedicated to famous poets, and those not yet famous poets' own home

pages, are increasing in number daily and showcase the texts of these

individuals. This is providing a new and larger audience to poets worldwide

and many Australian poets have established home pages to take advantage of the

greater global exposure.

As well there are on-line magazines and sites which publish everything that is

sent and also cater for participatory poetry from many contributors.

On-line home pages of poetry organisations and online poetry writing workshops

provide a valuable resource for beginners and veterans alike. The internet

also allows tertiary institutions formally teaching creative writing courses a

forum for outlining those courses and presenting the work of their students.

There are many sites which just search the internet and find poetry sites

which they then recommend through their links. These sites are performing a

filtering, scrutinizing and reviewing role in the domain of techno-literature.

The internet provides a new means of publication and a new audience for poetry

but it also has given rise to new kinds of techno-literature and to the means

of performance of new forms of multimedia literature. A literature, a poetry

has developed that can not be published in the traditional print medium. It

represents a use of words that previous to high powered graphic computers and

the multimedia capabilities of the internet, could not be conceived or

achieved.

There are poetries on the internet which move with time and space, that jitter

and jump, that appear in various layers of text revealed by the viewer and

their mouse clicks, that jump via active links to other blocks of text of a

site - poetries that defy linear progression, poetries made up of words but

words not used in the same way as on a printed page.

These poetries use all the old literary devices of metaphor, rhyme, rhythm,

allusion, alliteration, assonance, to create images, evoke emotions and tell

stories, as well as new ones of colour of words, movement of words, spatial

placement of words in a 3D environment, sounds, music, voices, images, video

and scanned artifacts.

During my masters year, 1995, I created multimedia poetry on my computer for

CD-rom production completely oblivious to the vast amounts of emerging

techno-literatures throughout the world. I initially called them text

animations. I was making dimocopo or digital moving concrete poetry but found

that was not sufficient to describe exactly what I was producing as it

neglected the sound experiments I was doing with computer voices and sound

manipulation software. I considered dimocoposo as an alternative but it was

clumsy and still not accurate. When Richard Barbrook from the Hypermedia

Research Centre emailed me and suggested that pomo was very 80's and Eduardo

Kac, holographic/visual poet emailed and suggested what I was doing was

different from concrete poetry anyway and should be called something new, I

decided to give it a very generic name of cyberpoetry.

I had created a poetry that could not be published in a print publication but

could only be experienced via a computer and CD-rom.

In 1996 I was keen to see if anyone anywhere else in the world was doing this

kind of work? Since the kind of literature I was looking for could not be

published in print it was useless to go to the traditional literary sources to

find out about cyberpoetry. I began to search the internet for

cyberpoetry/techno-literatures.

I established a web site of my own and began gathering the internet addresses

of cyberpoetry sites which I compiled into a cyberpoetry gallery.

It was a fortunate time to begin such a search as the internet had not only

recently become graphical but was entering its multimedia phase, and I had the

luxury of a ten week residency at QUT's Centre for Innovation and the Arts to

experiment with software, internet browsers, design, audio, video, content

development and creation for the new medium, the internet, which had its own

rules and restrictions to consider.

After a year searching the net, making contact with other cyberpoets and

swapping links with other sites it seems to me that the new forms of

techno-literature fall into seven categories.

The first category, which takes advantage of the hyperlinking abilities of the

internet, is hypertext poetry.

The earliest of this kind of poetry and fiction originated as Mac hypercard

stacks, and then progressed to html on the internet. Canadian David Rockeby's

'liquid language' first appeared as a hypercard stack in 1989, and is still

available for download from his website.

George Landow has been a major hypertext theorist on the net, and in print,

and describes the non-linear hypertext literature as linking between blocks of

text or lexias an expression first coined by Roland Barthes to describe the

way literature works. Hypertexts can be contained within a set number of

documents to link between or open webs which link out to other documents on

the internet. At the Brown University website all kinds of examples of

hypertext can be found as well as an archive of past webs/hypertexts.

There are many practitioners of hypertext literature, like Michael Joyce in

the U.S.A. and John Cayley in the U.K. Also Martin Auer, the place, and Mark

Amerika's grammatron, just to name a few.

Another interesting practitioner using java codes and layers of text is Stuart

Moulthrop at the University of Baltimore; whilst in Australia, Spinifex Press

has pioneered an interesting concept, The Building of Babel Site, which is an

interactive final chapter to a published book. (Editorial note).

The second category of cyberpoetry also utilises the hyperlinking feature of

the internet but links are not always text. Image, sound, video and animation

are linked to or used as links to blocks of text. This is known as hypermedia

poetry. Very good individual sites exist on the web but three good galleries

are the Electronic Poetry Centre, Machine Made of Words, and the work of the

students of the Hypermedia Research Centre in Westminster headed by Richard

Barbrook.

Simon Pockley, an RMIT masters student, recently won an internet award for his

hypermedia journey site called Flight of Ducks.

The third category of poetry that cannot be published in print is the random

poetry generator. This involves software programs that generate poems to a

formula, e.g. Martin Auer's Poetry Machine, a very sexy haiku generator, or

perhaps some surrealist generators.

The fourth category, is sound manipulation poetry. Oral poetry has been around

since before written poetry, but sound manipulation and sound as meaning,

sound as emotional journey, even sound-as-noise and noise-as-sound type poetry

grew from the revolutionary arts movements of the early 1900's in Europe and

the mid 1900's in the U.S.A. A very comprehensive site for contemporary and

traditional sound poetry can be found at the ubuweb site maintained by Kennyg,

and in Australia by John Reeves.

Apple's text to speech technology plus a plugin called talker have allowed a

new kind of experimentation with computer voices. Hello, my name is Victoria

is an example of a poem that reads itself when you arrive at the page (if you

have a mac that is!). The talker plugin page has many more examples, and so do

I on my site.

The fifth category of cyberpoem is an old form too, that of spoken word

poetry, as it is known in the U.S.A., or performance poetry in Australia and

the U.K. The internet provides a means of publication for this artform

alongside text and image. Bob Holman, of Nuyorican Poets Cafe fame, has an

excellent site called mouth almighty and is responsible for world wide word, a

resource site for spoken word poetry. On-line archives of people like Jack

Kerouac reading his poetry exist on the net; like the previously mentioned

ubuweb, these sites document past spoken word artists.

Contemporary spoken word performers like Henry Rollins and John Cooper Clarke

(U.K.) are also represented on the web.

A new form of performance has happened also over the internet with sites like

the telepoetics site which uses teleconferencing software to broadcast live

performances in different physical locations around the world. And there is

even a Brisbane site for telepoetics.

New forms of visual poetry, make up the sixth category of cyberpoem. Poems

which are 3D holograms (holopoetry) are being produced by Brazilian Eduardo

Kac. I have attempted to create 3D stereogram poetry, and there are many more

experimental visual poetry sites, some approaching the artform from a visual

arts perspective and some from a literary perspective.

In Australia the tableau group or Electronic Writing Ensemble of South

Australia has an excellent gallery of work. There are also Spanish sites,

Argentinian sites, German sites, in fact sites which feature visual poets from

all over the globe, like the wr-eye-tings scratchpad and grist on-line.

The seventh category of cyberpoem is the animated text type cyberpoem and many

examples can be found at my site and at Janan Platt's site, the machine made

of words site. Animation of text is being accomplished with java, animated

gif, shockwave, quicktime and even fancy html scripting like paz's site. The

birdhouse artists collective is a good site for htmlart as they call it.

While I have tried to identify the kinds of categories that techno-literatures

fall into, there are obviously cross-overs between the categories. One thing

is for sure, these categories of techno-literature did not exist prior to the

internet and multimedia computer. Writers of techno-literature no longer

conceive of words on a two dimensional surface, in lines across a page, but

rather words in a space, a three dimensional cyberspace, in which text moves

around, to tell a story, evoke emotions and create imagery.

Komninos Zervos has recently been short listed for the Australian Teachers of

Media Awards in the category Most Innovative/Creative Web Site. He is a

cyberpoet who teaches writing at Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus.

Notes and Debate

Komninos Zervos TEXT Vol 5 No 1

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TEXT

Vol 1 No 2 OCTOBER 1997

http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/

Editors: Nigel Krauth & Tess Brady

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