Jason Nelson: Digital Art and Wonders
I’ve collated representative digital creations, but immediately below are my various portals and relevant sites.
Digital Art Portal: http://www.secrettechnology.com (won a Webby Award in 2009)
Interactive Works for Giant Touch Screens: http://www.cubecryptext.com
Digital Writing Interfaces: http://www.digitalcreatures.net
Video Discussions of my work: http://www.youtube.com/user/jntalks
artworks continued on next pages….
t: The Poetry Robot w: https://vimeo.com/135326362 d: Interactive and autonomous poetry/art driven robot. The ability to venture towards, avoid and then circumvent unwanted obstacles, certainly when combined with the delivery of poetic content, might be considered evidence of life, sentient, semi-intelligent life. And yet the whirling motor hum coming from a small circular creature, arms with touch screen hands reaching up from its back, roaming around the room is only a half-life. The Poetry Robot doesn’t understand or, dare I say, even care about gallery visitors watching/reading the textual wonders it shines up from LCDs. It doesn’t know or feel bonded to its digital poet creator. Its only desire is to move, avoid and feed/recharge. But still, we wonder. Is the Poetry Robot a lost adventurer? Are the words and images coming from its prayerful hands/screens expressing fear and desire, a frustration with its ability to understand. Or perhaps it is trying to find us, to warn/advise us of a future where life in redefined in binary and servos.
t: Cryptext and NomenCluster w: http://www.cubecryptext.com/ d: Art Games and Digital Poetry for giant touch screen spaces Cryptext (an interactive puzzle/science fiction mystery game) and Nomencluster (a generative artwork/game created by user’s hand movements using poetry and science designs) were built for one of the world’s largest, most advanced touch screen spaces, located at QUT’s The Cube (four 40ft sides, over 40 touch screens, towering over two stories).
Cryptext, a puzzle science fiction game, where players use giant wheels, one to each touch screen, to solve a cryptic X-files style mystery surrounding a secret military technology program. And Nomencluster an interactive artwork/game where players create with science shapes and designs, and through each of the six levels poetic text is generated by the player’s movements.
t: Tilty Table Interactive Exhibit at the Tech Museum in San Jose, California w: http://www.thetech.org/about-us/media-room/tech-museum-innovation-announces-winners-virtual- exhibit-creation-contest d: The Tech Museum in San Jose, California ran a contest for Exhibitions conceived in Second Life, with the winning interactive artworks being fabricated and included in the Exhibition. I won for an interactive Table that functioned as a mouse and allowed users to move the artwork by moving the table.
Digital Art Games: Interview with me about Art/Poetry games in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/sep/13/the-meaning-of-art-games
Video games are a language, a grammar or linguistics of various texts. The sounds, the movement, the graphics, the rules or lack of rules, everything about a video game is a component of language. A digital poetry game must combine all these elements, strange and interactive stanzas, crossed out and obstructed lines, sounds and texts triggered and lost during the play. Indeed the game interface becomes a road to inhabiting the digital poem, to coaxing the reader/player into living/creating within the game/poetry space.
t: game, game, game and again game w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/gamegame.html (French translation: http://revuebleuorange.org/bleuorange/03/nelson/ ) d: GGGAG is a digital poem, game, and anti/pro-design statement. The western world’s surroundings, belief systems, designed culture-games, create the built illusion of clean lines and definitive choice, cold narrow pathways of five colors, three body sizes and capsule philosophy. Within new media art the techno-filter extends these straight lines into exacting geometries and smooth bit rates. This game attempts to re-introduce the hand- drawn, the messy and illogical into the digital, via a retro-game. Hovering above and attached to the poorly drawn aesthetic is a personal examination of how we/I continually switch and un-switch our dominate belief systems. Moving from faith to real estate, from chemistry to capitalism, triggering corrected poetry, jittering creatures.
t: i made this. you play this. we are enemies w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/madethis/enemy6.html
Boing Boing Article: http://boingboing.net/2008/12/03/i-made-this-you-play.html
Interview with me in Cordite Poetry Review: http://cordite.org.au/interviews/jason-nelson/ d: IMTYPTWAE is an art game, interactive digital poem which uses game levels built on screen shots from influential community based websites/portals. And using messy hand drawn elements, strange texts, sounds and multimedia layering, the artwork lets users play in the worlds hovering over and beneath what we browse, to exist outside/over their controlling constraints. Your arrow keys and space bar will guide you, with the occasional mouse click begging for attention.
t: Evidence of Everything Exploding w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/explode/evidence2.html
Huffington Post Article: http://www.secrettechnology.com/explode/evidence2.html d: Using a top down, platform engine (without gravity) EoEE is a game driven digital poem exploring various historical and contemporary texts. Each level’s poetic content is built from the document’s sub-sub texts and curious consequences. With Bill Gates’ letter to the Computer Brew Club about monetizing hobby computing, we find the seeds of an empire, James Joyce is caught in an infinite loop of changing texts, Fidel Castro’s boyhood letter to the US president praising America and asking for money signals an opportunistic future.
t: Scrape Scraperteeth w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/scrape/scrape1.html d: Commissioned by the San Francisco Gallery of Modern Art.
Article: http://blog.sfmoma.org/2011/07/third-hand-plays-scrape-scraperteeth-by-jason-nelson/
Article on the Design Blog Brown Paper Bag: http://www.brwnpaperbag.com/2011/07/19/jason-nelson- scraper-scraperteeth/
Recombinatory and Infinitely Zooming Mosaic Poems
Using the same basic engine, I’ve created numerous of these interactive image/text based poems. After Sydney’s Siberia went on to win awards and accolades, I was commissioned to create similar works for the Queensland State Library around the Brisbane Floods and the Japanese Media Assistance Team around the Tsunami among others. t: Sydney’s Siberia w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/sydney/sibera.html
New Scientist article: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/12/digital-poets-and-programs- free-verse-from-the-page.html d: It is not technology making our wires, nodes and swimming data streams, our ever growing networks, beautiful. Instead it is the stories/poetics, the forever coalescing narratives that form the inter/intranet into a vitally compelling mosaic. To explore, simply mouse-over/navigate to an appealing square, click and click, read, contemplate connections and repeat. Sydney’s Siberia recreates how networks build exploratory story-scapes through an interactive zooming/clicking interface. Using 121 poetic/story image tiles, the artwork dynamically generates mosaics, infinitely recombining to build new connections/collections based on the users movements. The images/texts come from exploring Newcastle, Australia as a patchwork, a complex mix of architectural tendrils, whose stories extend to and are strained by the overshadowing behemoth of Sydney to the West.
t: messages for our future: a collaborative digital poem about the Japanese Tsunami with images and words from survivors in Tohoku, Japan. w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/japan/
Turbulence article: http://turbulence.org/blog/2012/03/14/messages-for-our-future/ El Pais Newspaper article: http://blogs.elpais.com/arte-en-la-edad-silicio/2012/04/despues-del-tsumani- reconstruccion-creativa.html
t: this is how you will die w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/death/deathslot.htm
Included in the ELO Collection 2: http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/nelson_thisishowyouwilldie.html
Video of me discussing the work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WlCMOLTNZE d: A recombinatory slot game with 15 five-line death fictions/poetics. Each time the player pushes the spin button, a new death scenario comes to the screens. If the player wins more spins they can continue, if they lose, they have just forecasted their death. To create the random death scenarios, Jason wrote 15 short fictions, each divided into five sections: where you will die, how you will die parts one and two, and what happens after you die parts one and two. Each of these sections then become the channels of the Death Pokie machine. When all sections stop spinning, then you have a new random fiction sequence, a series of lines that form the story of your future demise.
Generative Works:
These are Digital Poems/Net-Artworks which are built partially or wholly from public data sets. t: Vholoce: Weather Visualizer. w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/weather_rss/weather_rss.swf
Interview and Exhibition of my work at MIT’s Leonardo: http://www.leoalmanac.org/lea-new-media- exhibition-interview-with-jason-nelson/ d: Vholoce: weather visualiser is a unique website that transforms live weather data into dynamic and interactive works of art. (url is included below) Combining meteorological science, net technologies and digital artwork, Vholoce: Weather Visualiser uses real time weather data to create a series of visualisations. The weather visualiser currently lets the user choose cities from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. With Each city's current weather conditions (numbers representing temperature, humidity, pressure, wind and weather description) are then loaded into five different visualisations Prose: Poetics, Animated, Molecular, Abstract: Noir, and Video.
t: Textual Skyline w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/textsky/textsky.html
New Media Scotland: http://www.mediascot.org/remediatingthesocial d: Our webscapes and netvilles are increasingly dominated by short bursts of emotional language, brief stabs of charged textual opinion. And every minute those words build small cities of influence, beauty and terror, creating brief communities of poetic power. Textual Skyline explores these notions through a net¬- based interactive, generative and multidimensional flash engine/interface using RSS news feeds to create a digital poetry city. To create these strange cities actionscript code searches through designated news feeds for specific words or phrases that represent emotive states (death, victory, love, profit, attack, defend and a few hundred others). Then for each charged word a building block is placed on the screen, two layers deep, forming a skyline of poetic text and art. Additionally, each of the text blocks will contain animated, hand drawn and other multimedia content. The finished work will let readers/users load RSS feeds from a variety of net communities (really any site with such a feed can be used), and as those feeds change so to will the digital poetry city (on reload). Also, various thematic styles will be explored through the inclusion of four different visualization themes (text only, architectural, chaotic and in essence the work explores the language of emotion used in news reporting, identity creation and expression through blogging, and community driven sites like Boing Boing, Fark, Metafilter and others. It uses that language to generate an architectural poetic text land/screenscape.
t: Videograph Fictions w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/graphoem/graphoem.html
Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/10/digi-po/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/07/brian-stefans-on-digital-literature-for-sfmoma/ d: Statistical data is often coldly displayed, used for factual representations. Graphoem: Video graph Fictions recontextualizes graphs and other data through interactive interfaces to create a series of fictional artworks exploring pop-culture. Few digital fictions have layered fiction over video driven by responsive graphs, and this work pioneers the intersection of pop-culture and digital poetry expression. Indeed it is often cited as one of the first digital poems to use statistical data as the driving narrative force. This kind of re-mixing of formats is integral to contemporary new media arts and electronic literature.
Indeed it has been cited as the first digital fiction to incorporate the use of the statistical tool of a graph to be the primary driver of the poetic and fictional line. As the graph is in itself a story telling device for numbers, the transference to fiction and poetry was both innovative and an effective way of exploring and organizing literature. The artwork has both been translated into German, which is rare for electronic literature works, but has also been widely cited, including in the prestigious Digital Humanities journal.
t: Birds Still Warm from Flying w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/ausco/poecubic2.html
(used in the Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing)
Discussion of my work in a Brazilian University: http://www.experiencefestival.com/wp/videos/my-work- about-jason-nelson-in-a-brazilian-university/AJlcZcHQ6Rs d: Interactive poetry cubes allowing multi-linear/dimensional play and reconfiguration. One possible reading is as 3-dimensional concrete poetry sculpture generator. The cube interface allows the reader to move the interface in 3-dimesional space, with the all elements placed on the cube transforming in proportion to the cube’s movement, perspective and warping is reasonably maintained as the cube is moved. Furthermore, each of the rows and columns can be moved to further recreate the placement and graphical nature of the poem. Each of the sides of the poem are colour coded to give the reader a reference point for the initial configuration of the interface, so changes become more apparent.
t: Wittenoom w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/wittenoom/starthere.html (winner of the Newcastle New Media Poetry Prize) After being appointed to the Australia Council’s Literature Board (NEA equivalent) was blasted in our conservative newspaper the Australian: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/poetrys-death-by- a-thousand-hits/story-e6frg6z6-1225987952516 d: Digital poetry should surround the reader, to encompass them in the experience, to entice their hands and eyes to move with the language and explore the interface. It’s critical for digital writers to see the interface, visuals, sounds, and movements as poetic/fiction elements. Multimedia and interface components are not just navigational holiday lights to pretty up the place, they add/change/expand the artwork. Within this work, I designed a responsive creatures as both fun to play and allow the reader to jump between texts, to read in their own ordering, to non-linearly explore the inherently non-linear nature of poetry. Layering is also of prime importance, as creating a sense of thematic and visual depth, embeds the poetry in a larger world, a more complex poetic.
In Western Australia the ex mining town of Wittenoom that once was home to thousands is now empty. The town and the surrounding region’s air is literally cancerous. After years of prosperous asbestos mining and dozens of hill sized tailings piles open to the area’s powerful winds, signs warn anyone entering the region of the tiny lung lesion fibers. Like a much smaller Chernobyl, Wittenoom represents the quick riches and fast ignorance of industry, leaving empty houses and playgrounds intact and unused.
t: The Bomar Gene w: http://www.heliozoa.com/gene/genetic1.htm
Interview in the Iowa Review: http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/vol9n1/
Winner of the 4th International Prize "Ciutat de Vinaròs" for Digital Fiction Featured at the ACM Exhibition. d: Within every human there is a singular gene, unique only to that individual. And with that gene comes a singular ability, a rare, mostly never realized capacity for interacting with the world. The Bomar Gene explores this mythical gene, through a series of ficto-biographies, with each story being retranslated and spatialized through interactive interfaces and embodied animations. Each section opens up to such questions as: How are we defined by our genetic code? What does it mean to be an individual, to be unique? What are the implications of a society obsessed with rare abilities and super-powers? An interactive fiction/poetry hybrid.
t: a tree with managers and jittery boats w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/tree/
Review: http://leonardoflores.net/post/26070777031/a-tree-with-managers-and-jittery-boats-by-jason
d: Multi-level menus as poetry generator, for when lines branch and branch. When writing a poem, often any line could generate out new directions, intersecting poems, branching possibilities. Using the modified code of a menu-sub-menu, I am experimenting with a poem within a poem within a poem. Enjambent as menu as poetic turn. A few factors I’m playing with: 1. the menu fade away timing (more or less?) 2. the mixing of various level depths 3. only one first entry, that extends to dozens of depths? 4. how else might this be used? 5. Rollover or On Press to trigger? I plan to continue with this work, plotting more complex poetic interactions between lines and nodes. Additionally, it might be interesting to interlink two or more deep menu poems. Of course this form of non-linearity is so complex that reading must become an entirely exploratory and focus-intensive activity.
t: Mysterious Basement Machines of the Prairie or Uncontrollable Semantics Part Two w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/semantics2/dreature11.html
Featured at the 2013 MLA conference Exhibition.
Similar work won me the Jury Prize at the ELO’s Exhibition at West Virginia University in 2012. http://dtc-wsuv.org/elit/elo2012/elo2012/Nelson.html d: With Adobe Flash losing favour among designers and device manufacturers, HTML5 JQuery and other software possibilities have started to supplant Flash’s interactive powers. This work is a sequel of sorts to my Uncontrollable Semantics. It’s created specifically for tablets and uses interactive elements which respond to cursor and swipe movement. Each of the sections is a new power, mysterious and unreachable and yet entirely engrossing.
t: with love from a failed planet w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/flanet/
Exhibited numerous places including Croatia and the Screengrab New Media Art Prize: http://www.brzezinski.zdnet.pl/michal-brzezinski/artist/artistic-events/re-referendum-new-media-gallery- croatia d: An interactive logoed world populated with 45 strange and fantastical stories of the societal/cultural failure of influential net portals, fast food giants, newspapers, airlines, manufacturers and other oddities. And Huffington Post is included! Initially I had assumed the creation of this net-artwork would be risky, as some of those whose end I forecast might sue. Oddly, these folks must be pleased with my depiction of their end. This work will be published in the innovative net-based poetry journal Cordite Review.
t: the Poetry Cube w: http://www.secrettechnology.com/poem_cube/poem_cube.html
Article on the Australia Council’s Website: http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/writersguide/craft,_part_two/professional_profile_150_jason_nelson
The Poetry Cube is used in dozens of courses around the world and has poems entered from hundreds of poets, both famous and unknown. d: The Cube allows users/poets to enter a 16 line poem, with those lines automatically placed within the multi-layered sections. Use the buttons to move in and out, recombining the poems by turning the Cube upwards, downwards and inwards. Built to act as a bridge between the print and digital worlds. Why a cube? Why are these elements of dimensionality/multimedia/interactivity important in a digital poem? And also does the newest Cube version make the previous creations (like updated versions of software) failures and delete-able? As for the later question, I would love to wax romantic about how all creations are important, either within a historical context or because they hold together as digital poems despite their shortcomings. And while this might be true for scholars or readers of my work, as an artist I see the first two cubes as experiments, trial runs, explorations of a form. I suppose an argument could be made about how all creations are experiments leading to the next generation of poets. And while this is something I will revisit later, I can say my intentions with the first two were firmly as playgrounds. While the last cube is an attempt at a complete work, or rather a complete interface. I make the distinction between work and interface, because most of the digital poems I create are in flux, in constant states of revision.
t: six sided strange w: http://turbulence.org/spotlight/jasonnelson/wocu1.html
French Newspaper Article: http://www.ecrans.fr/L-etrange-en-six-faces,13297.html d: Six Sided Strange is a net-artwork series built from unsolvable Rubik's cubes and hidden narratives, from pixilated game character collages to abstract streams of color and lines. The cube is central to how we organize and understand. It is a puzzle of unsolvable junctures, a humanistic shape created to order and organize. Six Sided Strange disrupts the cube, wandering inside/around the recombinatory playground of Rubik's 56 squares, exploring how images and designs relate to narrative. These are interactive/dynamic sculptures, brief storylands, and all manner of wonderments. There is nothing to win, but then again there never was. Screen based digital art often suffers from two-dimensional limitations and lacks true interaction. These cubes pioneer the use of true 3-d interactive screen based spaces. And with a total of 12 different cubes, each section explores new ways these spaces can be artistically and poetically used, from abstract to remixing found images.