'I go searching': every day for a month Kirsten Lavers (who is 'really'
a visual artist (UK)) typed a variant of this phrase into Google, and
worked with the text on the first page of results, in the animation
program Flash, selecting, rearranging and visually reformatting it. Now,
the reader will be served a different one of the resulting pieces, keyed
to the date on their own web browser (This work is published in the
online journal How2). Christophe Bruno (France? see iterature.com) uses
Google results summaries too, especially the elliptical (& often
misleading)
extracts from the pages found. Bruno has also devised a piece which in
response to a search, compiles a kind of ur blog using existing blog
texts. S/oren Pold (Denmark) showed this (and his terrific paper
embedded these practices right in the history of the book). Alan
Sondheim (US) issues text bulletins daily to listservs and other
locations: Maria Damon' related these often peculiarly intense and
discomfiting missives to
the genre of begging letters, and to the urgency and desperation
manifested in some of Walter Bejamin's writings. Is this possibly the
most significant single online poetry practice, (and/) or is it spam? A
question older than the web ... A young team of writers and computer
scientists from Rhode Island and Chicago is developing new
tools to harvest material from the internet according to semantic
relationships with an intentionally written text, which then
incorporates
and is altered by it. The aim of the project (the Error Engine) is for a
truly relevant literature that
co-exists and is imbued with the 'flimsy but largely successful
construction of reality' in the news; but the radical poetics was in the
claims made for the actual
technology, which apparently uses a species of 'evolutionary
computation' in a configuration inherently open, thus there will never
be any one 'solution' to the task it performs 'only the best possible
adaptation to current circumstances'. A potent new metaphor! (But woah,
if you are taking stuff from other people's pages and re-using it, do
you have an ethical obligation to give them something back, and/or to
cite them? Another old chestnut ... ) jUS!tin katKO (US) walks, or runs,
a video recorder around 'the readable city' (pace Robert Venturi, quoted
by S/oren Pold earlier), holding up or out a sig or tag written on his
own hand like a traffic cop goes STOP or a director CUT. To us, the film
shown is very fast and loud, with hectic music, and then shown again
with jUS!tin adding live performance of voice and eventually body,
leaping around in frontof the figures on the screen and throwing himself
repeatedly with cartoon force at the floor, THWACK! etc. He hurt himself
a little bit. Hugely exciting work from this young associate of Keith
Tuma, cris cheek and mIEKAL AND -- credit to them! (and that was only
one of the things he showed). This was on the evening bill, along with
Joerg Piringer's (Austria) 'spambot', which apparently took a page of
that often engaging linguistic spam randomly compiled alongside the
advert to evade mail filters, and turned it first into an airspace full
of words which then completely morphed it into a slick elegant dance of
abstract forms, this showing too accompanied by recorded and live
voice-sound (Piringer is into sound petry also). Elizabeth Knipe (US)
was the third performer and her quiet, intimate and rather beautiful
films-with-poetry ('bucolic' I thought about one, and 'lyric' another)
don't fit into the theme I've taken to cohere just a fraction of the
day's contents around, but whatever. I am now about to be late for the
morning's proceedings, which will be scarily theoretical, but come for
tonight's fun part those who can!! 8 p.m. at Birkbeck College, London:
presentations of the Error Engine (as above), Philippe Bootz (a
long-established French e-poet) and Brigid McLeer (UK out of Ireland).
Yes, this is cross-posted, but I have to tell.

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