In Browser Poems, burrough has reinterpreted three classic works of literature from the 20th Century (“O Captain, My Captain”, “On the Road”, and “Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot”) using just two languages (HTML and CSS) in the browser as the primary agent of transformation. In the works, burrough is not interested in writing the foundational text for the poetic experience. Instead, her aim was to design a web user’s experience for the works. The works adhere to the confining graphic formatting rules of current web standards, and include text, hypertext, images, videos, and audio. In the language-image-browser redesign process, the meaning of the poems are affected as follows:

O Captain, My Captain 

O BROWSER, MY BROWSER is a browser translation of Walt Whitman’s 1900 poem, “O Captain, My Captain” from Leaves of Grass. In the original poem, the death of a ship’s captain is an allegorical reference to the death of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. In this reinterpretation, the allegory shifts to the impending death of the web. Here, short clips of YouTube videos (all 24 found by a search on the site using keywords from each line of the poem) provide a background noise, or a context, to interfere with or aid the reading of the poem.

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On The Road

In 2007 burrough created hand-made bags for City Lights Bookstore as a public art intervention to celebrate the 50th anniversary year of the publication of On The Road. The original manuscript was notoriously produced on a single scroll of paper (or, many papers taped to each another) before Viking Press published the manuscript in 1957. The complete text is rendered as a continuous page in the browser. However all instances of the word “road” have been replaced with the word “browser.”

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Waiting For You at the Mystery Spot

Adrienne Rich’s “Waiting For You at the Mystery Spot” (2000) is part of her 1998-2000 collection, Fox, which earned Rich the 2003 Yale Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. The judges acknowledged her “continuous poetic exploration and awareness of multiple selves.” In this language-image-browser redesign, the “Mystery Spot” (a California alternative tourist destination for gravitational anomaly lovers of all ages) takes on new meaning, or multiple selves, as the location of virtual Easter eggs relating to Rich’s text.

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Luke Munn Sounding Memory - Launch

Sounding Memory is a new project which dialogues with a series of acoustic recollections. Participants are asked to recall a sound that made a substantial impression on them, describing this sonic memory in their own words. The artist uses a mixture of found sounds and recordings to sculpt a sonic response. These recollections and their audio responses are continually collected and posted online, forming a dialogue over the course of a month as the work unfolds.

Luke Munn is a Berlin based artist with a sound and socially focused practice. His work centers around sound and our relationship to it: often incorporating site-specific aspects, dialogues with the audience, visual elements, or everyday objects. His work has featured in the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Q-O2 Brussels, Laborsonor Berlin, and others – with performances in Paris, Dublin, Chicago, Berlin, Auckland, and New York.

Ben Baker-Smith - Infinite Glitch - no longer active

Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch is a stream-of-conciousness representation of this overwhelming flood of media, its fractured and degraded sounds and images reflecting how little we as an audience are able to retain from this daily barrage.

Infinite Glitch is an automated system that generates an ever-changing audio/video stream from the constantly increasing mass of media files freely available on the web. Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of popular media hosting sites, torn apart, and recombined using collage and glitch techniques to create an organic, chaotic flood of sensory input.

Benjamin Baker-Smith is currently employed as a video editor, streaming media expert, and web developer at Backstar Creative Media in Chicago, IL. He maintains a website and active blog at bitsynthesis.com, and is a contributing writer for vagueterrain.net and the Backstar company blog (backstar.com/blog). He has done freelance web design for Statewide Software (statewidesoftware.com) and lectured on basic website creation to students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the creator and maintainer of Upflickr (Rubygems.org/gems/upflickr/), a Ruby gem that makes it easier to upload and organize images on flickr using the Ruby programming language.

Scott Kildall - Playing Duchamp - launch

I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists. — Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp is widely recognized for his contribution to conceptual art, but his lifelong obsession was the game of chess, in which he achieved the rank of Master. Working with the records of his chess matches, Kildall has created a computer program to play chess as if it were Marcel Duchamp. In a series of open challenges, he invites all artists, both skilled and unskilled at this classic game, to play against a Duchampian ghost.

Jody Zellen - Lines of Life - launch (allow pop-ups)

In the physical world of art galleries and studios, Jody Zellen’s groundbreaking new exhibit “Lines of Life” doesn’t exist. There’s no building a person can enter to experience the Los Angeles based artist’s commentary on the perils of war and its domination of the media over the years.

Much of that imagery has floated through the cyber world, monopolizing the thousands of news websites that populate the web. So what better place for Zellen, a net artist, to exhibit her work than in the online world. On Oct. 25, “Lines of Life” will open to the world on the website TERMINALapsu.org, a space sponsored by Austin Peay State University’s Department of Art and the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts to showcase and examine internet and new media art.

“I am interested in drawing and how a computer algorithm traces an image turning it into a line drawing,” Zellen said. “In the ‘Lines of Life’ I will begin with a grid of images that are computer traces of news imagery, that when rolled over display the source image.”

The piece will feature 72 different clickable squares, with each square taking viewers down a different “life line.” The relatively new medium of internet art often allows viewers to take part or interact with a given work, and that’s the type of experience Zellen’s piece offers.

“An integral part of this project will be a series of Flash animations that utilize clips of soldier’s videos of the Iraq war uploaded to You Tube,” she said. “The film footage is not credited as it is meant to fill in the background becoming the live action behind the line drawings and be the motivation for the movements within.”

Michael Demers - The Sky is Falling ( A Day in the Life ) - launch

This work consists of captured Sony PlayStation3 video from Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, edited to reflect the seamless passing of game time and “real” time. One minute of “real” time equals approximately 30 minutes of game time. The resulting 24 two-minute videos record the passing of one game day.

References to playable characters, AI characters, and accompanying sound effects have been edited from the video in an effort to focus on the notion of a virtual space with the possibility of non-virtual habitation, defined in part by the passing of game time during the observers “real” time. The health meter, magic meter, stamina meter, weapon and magic selections and the game compass have been unedited as a digital referent in the hyperreal environment of the game engine.

The footage was captured using the Haupauge HD PVR, and edited on a MacBook Pro using Final Cut Pro. The 24 html pages were built in Adobe Dreamweaver, and use javascript to call a specific page (and the embedded video) based upon the users local time (ex: If someone is viewing the page at 3:40pm local time, video15, containing footage from 3:00 to 3:59pm game time, will be played). An additional piece of javascript tells the browser to refresh itself every two minutes, to ensure that subsequent videos will load appropriately.

BIO
Michael Demers has taught college level Digital Art and New Media courses since 2007. His own work incorporates culture and cultural identity in a synthesis of critical investigation and his own adolescent preoccupation with toys and other weird ephemera. He has exhibited internationally, most recently at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Artists Space (New York), and the Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA), and is a member of the White Columns Artist Registry (New York), the Rhizome Curated ArtBase (New Museum, New York), BitStream New Media, and is a core commentator for TINT Arts Lab (London, UK). He received his BFA from Florida Atlantic University, an MFA from Ohio University, and a Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Diplom from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, Germany.

Jessica Westbrook and Adam Trowbridge - AfterBirth Spectacular - launch

Building on the conceptual foundations brought forth through the works of psychologist Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan and artist/writer Mary Kelly this project considers the current state of birth (distribution and reception) in its captured and deliverable form and the shifting sensitivities and expectations indicated through an abundance
of vernacular media/dialogue published online. This project considers questions regarding: transparency, power, sexuality, demystification, media induced [false] memory, attraction/repulsion, game inclinations, biological/virtual experiences, empathy, and our relationships with the “natural” world.

AfterBirth Spectacular is networked based art because it invites users to participate in a birthing process through interactive video accessible on the web. The intention is a visceral, interactive experience with a real, and intensely personal moment. A user can give birth too, interactively, forwards and backwards, using a scrubbing gesture.

Motivations
1 : A YouTube keyword search for “live birth,” “birth,” “home birth” turns up thousands of relevant results. Women frequently publish themselves in the throws of labor on the internet for their friends, neighbors, and the whole world to see, share and comment on.

2 : I dont remember being born, but my son (b.2000) does. He saw it on video. Now he “remembers.” Is all this broadcasting changing the definition of memory?

Phillip Andrew Lewis - From Red Paint Hill - launch

In 1768 the famous historical American surveyor, Thomas Hutchins, identified Red Paint Hill as the navigational landmark and point of beginning for the North Tennessee land now know as Clarksville. At the confluence of the Cumberland and Red Rivers, the city began its development with the geometric forms outlined in this survey. Along these plotted lines, roads and passageways were formed. As the city grew beyond these original plots, the grid quickly broke down.

Using the historic city design, current field recordings retrace the original grid lines with sounds found along these boundaries. The sonic survey becomes a new connection to the origins of the city.