Spring 2015 Contributors:
Alan Bigelow
Alan Bigelow's work, installations, and conversations concerning digital fiction and poetry have appeared in the Library of Congress (USA), SFMOMA, La Bibliotheque Nationale de France Paris), Turbulence.org, Rhizome.org, The National Art Center (Tokyo), Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, MLA 2012-2013, FAD, VAD, FreeWaves.org, The Museum of New Art (MONA, Detroit), Art Tech Media 2010, FILE 2007-2013, Blackbird, Drunken Boat, IDEAS, New River Journal, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and many other place worldwide. He is currently a Professor of Humanities at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York, USA. You can see his work at http://www.webyarns.com.
FLY is an artist, poet, singer, and media figure. He is also a housefly. "Life of FLY" is a brief glimpse into his life and work.
Chris Joseph
Chris Joseph [chrisjoseph.org] is a British/Canadian digital writer and artist. His past projects include the interactive multimedia fiction series 'Inanimate Alice' with author Kate Pullinger; 'NRG', a bicycle-powered interactive multimedia narrative; and 'The Breathing Wall', a digital novel that responds to the reader's rate of breathing. He is editor of the post-Dada magazine and artist network 391.org, and currently lives in London, UK.
"multicomplicity" is a digital fiction that reimagines Guy de Maupassant's 1885 short story "Mes Vingt-cinq Jours" as a futuristic technological resort for clones.
J.R. Carpenter
J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, writer, researcher, performer and maker of maps, zines, books, poetry, short fiction, long fiction, non-fiction, and non-linear, intertextual, hypermedia, and computer-generated narratives. Her pioneering works of digital literature have been exhibited, published, performed, and presented in journals, galleries, museums, and festivals around the world. She is a winner of the CBC Quebec Writing Competition (2003 & 2005), the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Award (2008), and the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her first novel, Words the Dog Knows (2008). Her second book, GENERATION[S], a collection of code narratives, was published by Traumawien in 2010. In 2012 her web-based work CityFish was short-listed for the New Media Writing Prize in Bournemouth, UK, and the Electronic Literature Organization presented a retrospective of her work in Morgantown, WV, USA. She has served as a Digital Literature and Performance Writing faculty mentor for the In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge residency program at The Banff Centre since its inception in 2010. She is currently a PhD researcher at Falmouth University in association with University of the Arts London. She lives in South Devon, England. Her website is luckysoap.com.
"Walks From City Bus Routes" is a web-based computer-generated guide 'book' perpetually proposes plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh and its environs using JavaScript developed by Caden Lovelace and images and text culled from a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s and a pamphlet called "Walks from City Bus Routes" published by Edinburgh City Transport in the late 1950s.
J.P. Sipilä
J.P. Sipilä (1981, Helsinki, Finland) is a poet and video artist. Sipilä creates compositions that generate tranquil moving images in relation to poetic texts that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition.
His poems appear as dreamlike fragments where the "I" is never stable. By applying a poetic and often fragmented language, Sipilä creates emotional, meaningful poems regardless of if the works are written on paper, displayed on screen or composed within installations.
"Sleight of Tree" is an installation on the web and it, as Marc Neyes on his article on Awkword Paper Cut says, "opens up as one big moving poetic experience. Scrolling texts, moving stills, tranquil videos, crumbs of sounds, words, thoughts, slices of life, but different. 'Sleight of Tree' feels complete, but somehow never finished. It is poetry beyond words."
Aaron Oldenburg
Aaron Oldenburg is a game designer and new media artist whose primary interest is in game rules as an expressive medium. His video and interactive work has exhibited in festivals and galleries in New York, Berlin, Sao Paulo and Los Angeles, including SIGGRAPH and FILE Electronic Language International Festival.
He teaches game design as an Associate Professor in University of Baltimore's Simulation and Digital Entertainment program and has an MFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In October 2003 he finished two years as an HIV Health Extension Agent for the Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa.
The purpose of "The Mischief of Created Things" is to create an interactive environmental narrative dealing with new images of West Africa and philosophies of game design. The content is based on my two years as a development worker in Mali. The imagery is intended to inspire players to find the magic in the mundane and references a hybrid of traditional Malian and Western culture overlapping between magic and technology.
Jody Zellen
Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist who works in many media simultaneously making interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artists' books. She employs media- generated representations as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations that combine text and image.
Her interactive installations include "Time Jitters," commissioned by the Halsey Institute for Contempoary Art in Charleston, SC, "The Unemployed" a data visualization at Disseny Hub Museum (Barcelona, 2011), "The Blackest Spot," (Fringe Exhibitions, Los Angles, 2008), and "Trigger" (Pace University, New York, 2005).
Her net art projects are "Spine Sonnet," 2011 (commissioned by LACMA), "Lines of Life," 2010 (commissioned by terminalapsu.org), "Without A Trace," 2009 (commissioned by turbulence.org). Other net art projects include "Ghost City," an ever changing poetic meditation on the urban environment, urbanfragments.net, allthenewsthatsfittoprint.net, talking-walls.com and disembodiedvoices.com.
Recently she has been making iPhone/iPad apps. Her six apps "Urban Rhythms," "Spine Sonnet," "Art Swipe," "4 Square" "Episodic" and "Time Jitters" are available for free in the App Store. She was awarded a Center for Cultural Innovation Artistic Innovation Grant in 2011 and a Mid Career Artist's Fellowship from the California Community Foundation in 2012.
The linear sequence in "Time Jitters" runs about eighteen minutes. It combines drawn and pixelated images that are derived from photographs found on news websites. The work is a meditation on how the media presents these news worthy events. The animation is a sequence of over forty separate fragments each using a different news photograph as its point of departure. The original images are scaled back, diffused and subtly manipulated; yet what they reference never disappears. Images of war, crowds, man made and natural disasters are prominently featured in the work. I want the viewer to recognize the tenor of the imagery yet also appreciate the way I have taken it apart and recontextualized it, see it as a sequence of moving elements that coalesces in readable imagery that then breaks apart becoming another in an endless flow, just like the news.
Arian Katsimbras
Arian Katsimbras is a third-year MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. He is very hungry. He is from Reno.
Emily Dhatt
Emily Dhatt is a second-year MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. She is originally from Seattle, Washington, and she has three cats.