‘oedipality, oedipality, oedipality? oedipalized’ emerges, slides diagonally
upwards, and mutates into a rapid circle of letters.
Also on The Writing Experiment website is beer by Australian perform-
ance poet and cyberwriter, Komninos Zervos (republished-a). This piece
morphs the word ‘beer’ into many other words (for example, ‘been’ and
‘beef ’, and subsequently ‘help’, ‘yell’ and ‘tell’): it moves from one word to
another by changing some letters and not others. However, the morphing
concerns the shape of the letters and words as much as their linguistic
import: sometimes the words appear as half-shape, half-word, sometimes as
only shape. Zervos’s brightly coloured and dynamic u cannot be programmed
has more elements and combines user-interaction triggered by mouse
movements with animation (republished-b). It consists of a whole alphabet
that keeps receding, disappearing and rotating, and from which the letter
‘u’ emerges, changes shape, and repositions itself on different parts of the
screen. There are other ‘u’s of different colours and sizes—some static, some
moving—and the visuals are accompanied by a partly verbal soundtrack. By
means of animation the piece plays on a number of verbal relationships:
between ‘u’ and ‘you’; between the alphabet and individual letters; and
between the letters themselves (‘u’ upside down looks like ‘n’).
Jason Nelson’s piece this will be the end of you: play6: four variable cre-
ation (republished-a) explores animation in a different way. Here, after an
initial textual bombardment, fragments of text suggest an overall, but
broken, narrative and are interspersed with a map/diagram and algebraic
formulae.
In soundAFFECTs, sections of text by Anne Brewster and myself were
taken by Roger Dean and treated with programs written by him within
the real-time image processing platform Jitter (Dean, Brewster & Smith
republished). Each text is treated as a whole image, so the words are not
manipulated at a micro-linguistic level as in The Dreamlife of Letters.
Instead the text is subjected to a number of processes, such as layering,
stretching, superimposition and compression, which act in combination:
the screen also divides into multiple frames of the same text. The com-
puter manipulation includes a process of ‘overwriting’ in which a text
progressively writes over itself or another text: this disintegration and
replacement of text creates intricate visual patterning. The text–image can
be continuously processed during any performance of it with different
results each time.
Other exciting examples of animated texts can be found in the work of
Jim Andrews, Peter Howard and Ana Maria Uribe, as well as other pieces
by Komninos Zervos, Jason Nelson and Brian Kim Stefans. The work of
most of these web artists can be found on their individual websites, but
also in the journals and archives mentioned previously.
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