Christian’s Possession

Donna Leishman’s “Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw” is inspired by real historical facts. Christian, daughter of John Shaw (Land of Bargarran, Erskine ), as Leishman explains somewhere, has fallen victim to what is one of the most notorious cases of demonic possession in Scotland. She points out that Christian’s case implicated “local people” as her “tormentors.” Among them seven, three men and four women, were executed to death in Gallow Green in Paisley on charges of witchcraft. Soon after these events took place however people realized that they had “overreacted to nothing more than the psychotic fantasies of a young girl.”

On the whole, the historical facts are fused with suggestiveness. This leaves one wondering on the inherent conceptual structure of the text. In a sense, its linearity is displaced, thus the reader/viewer has to know something about the story before going through the sophisticated unfolding of the text. This may not be the case with “RedRidinghood” (Leishman’s Master thesis) as the audience is well-acquainted with the story.

The elegant and hand-made images seem unwilling to let go of established referents. As one progresses through the text though, s/he is forced to admit that they build together an abstract concept of temporality, capable of very specific applications to historical circumstances. In a way, this shifts the focus from trying to understand what the text is about into testing the audience’s active involvement and meditating on his/her understanding of the real.

hybrid

"Lexia and perplexia" plays with the image as well as the language creating a hybrid literature consisted of both human and electronic elements.
 The text itself is a combination of this two elements, but even more interesting is the image that inserts a picture of an eye into the electronic field as if it suggests that the person when sitting in front of the screen becomes only those eyes / or head sometimes/ while the rest of the body virtualy dissapeares because of its passivity and non-importance.. It becomes an unnecessarily limb that can and is easily cut of / from the picture/. I also noticed the mirror efect that suggests the paralel world we are living in as we enter the field of electronics- internet. . It is kind of scary to think how addicted we are of that identity and how libmless we are if we decide to rebel .. 
So sweet the world is where travelling is in the eyes and minds , so perfect it becomes.. so inhuman.
 

"Faith"

Hello! My name is Flutur and I am following the electronic literature blog remotely. Robert Kendall’s “Faith” is a visual poem, as Ana reminds, but also a kinetic one.

The independent movement of the colored lexical units along the white screen is seminal, because it helps to establish and expand the text. Its expansion, especially, takes place in the form of a rhetorical release - most of the predicates are cut apart, most of the copulas are semantically displaced, and the lines and sentences constantly fragmented, in the end favoring the isolation of the single word.

Grammatical transfers take place thus producing the counter-effect of the traditional ‘single transcendental principle’. It announces an inconsistency between the destabilizing effects of the rhetoric as it is presupposed by the title of the poem, “Faith,” and the metaphorical compromise that the reader has to deal with in going through the poem.

The sentences care for a gravitational field which can be monitored as they marshal one another. At the end, however, they seem to violate the materiality of the language itself and adopt specific poetical postures. As the title of the poem falls down the page, the reader/viewer understands that there is a fundamental change in tone from the assertion of transcendence in the beginning of the poem to the acknowledgment of negation and hence absence and death at the end.

Oulipoems

Oulipoems are interactive poems where interactor can create poems. In „Sundays in the park“he can change meaning of the words by clicking on them. The words collide in new ones or group of words tears itself on smaller parts, but group still sounds the same. During all that time, two unsynchronized voices are reading the default words. I had fun reading „Morningside Vector Space“because it showed the same text through eyes of different types of people. Except that one and „The muse“all other poems are connected with war theme, but they don't have the same features. „ No War“ has no text, except those two words. It is a sound poem. „Headline news“is a two dimensional Rubik's cube where interactor is trying to make sentence in rows and in columns. In „Poggle“interactor is trying to compose a poem from phrases that are offered to him in limited time. „The electronic muse“also offers interactor to create his own poem, but here is offered whole sentences in many different styles, such as Shakespeare’s. I liked „Oulipoems“because everything is based on Oulipo which combines poetry and mathematics. Words are random, but they follow a certain pattern.

text and image

For today's discussion of words and image, it will be useful to refer to Picture Theory by WTJ Mitchell. He distinguishes between three ways in which image and text can interrelate, each signified by a different typographic convention. "Image/text," with a slash, designates "the problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation." In other words, if the image and text seem to point in different or even opposite directions, the slash indicates the tension between them. On the other hand, if the image and text are related and work in the same direction, Mitchell uses the term image~text, with a hypthen between them. Then "imagetext" , written as a single word, indicates "composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text " (89). Here the lack of space between the two terms indicate that they have fused, creating a single inextricably combined effect. I hope these terms will be useful in discussing the different effects of the works we will be exploring today.

faith 4 nippon & betty

hi there,
sorry for posting so late (or so early).
i liked the poem faith because of all that colour not just colour of the text but all the colour talked about. it feels like tyrany of the visual, and if not tyrany then definitely domination of it. robert kendall talks about red, neon, sunny, black and as well its the coulr of the letters used. almost no interaction apart from `turning` the page over gives the reader littel or no control over the text. so I`ll just jump (or take a leap) to YoungHaeChang`s LastDay to say a few words about it. LastDay offers no interaction besides turning on the work or turning it off. he`s using two-colur style by choice so he offers us (as you said) modernist aesthetics as well as speed and need of progressing forward. Nippon likewise starts with counting down like movies used to start so it can prepare you and give you feeling of performing (something) to a reader of the text/veiwer of the picture.. colures offered like black&white or red&white give us most simple and at the same time most contrasted semple. union of sound and picture, rhythmic change of frames pull us in - in a search of contemplation- audiovisual heaven for some, and for some other maybe even torture. cabaretical, jazzical music in Nippon agrees with colour red and the text which is talking about fun for men outside his house and other from hios wife, red is considered as coulour of forbidden fruit, easy woman and cabaret. does this make any sence? see you all soon.
asp (ana)

Stir Fry Texts

Stir Fry Texts is highly political hypertext about authorship, economy and the capitalist society in general. Through the appropriate tool of word generation, the authors are questioning the need for copyrights. Hypertext in this specific case allows a demonstration of arbitrariness of words and letters. If we do not posses the letters that we are using, why do we insist on making money from them? This hypertext shows how words and ideas can be (easily?) created, not for the economic reason, but for pure fun, the need for artistic expression or something else.