Individual Work
Generative Poetry

Electronic Literature has been gaining a lot of popularity within the recent years. There are more and more authors that are beginning to write Electronic text versus hard copy text. Published in 2005, "Generative Poetry" is a work by Geniwate, whose real name is Jenny Weight. Jenny Weight is an Australian artist and scholar. She publishes critical works using her real name. This work uses pictures from the collaborative work she did with Brian Kim Stephens, "When You Reach Kyoto" and was made using a software called "Director". It attempts to create environments that will work on a variety of different levels. It uses algorithmic rules in text assembly and creates a fugue type of experience.

The story is formulated in three different sections and all three use Geniwate's "concatenation engine". The first one, "Concatenation", creates an explosion of different letters and words that put together phrases when the reader follows the algorithms. These algorithms are used to randomize the word selection and the arrangement of each word that appears on the screen. It addresses real issues such as interracial conflict and the politics of despair. It is a recombination to suggest that whatever side a particular conflict you are on, the issues were the same. The issues consist of trauma, homelessness, injury, and confusion. It's set up has many rules to constrain the recombination. Without the rules, there would not have been words to this section and instead it would have been a jumble of different letters that have zero meaning. Reading through the different sections, the words come together to make a story that is based on alot of things that have to do with war. In one facet, the story talks about going to heaven, which through my eyes meant that a soldier died. There was another part of the work when geniwate made the words come together speaking of a soldier's son, and how he does not want his son to end up like him. This made me conclude that the soldier was referring to his brutal PTSD that most soldiers have to deal with when they get out. Not only does it speak about war, but it talks of things going on throughout the world that no one seems to pay that close of attention to, like homelessness.

The second section, "When You Reach Kyoto", places the engine in collaboration with Brian Kim Stephens' photography and text and was published as part of the Machine poetics- a page space project.

Semtexts is the last section to the piece and has combinations work at the level of syllable and letter. It is an engine that recombines meaning semes- or at least meaningful syllables- in unexpected ways. This last piece creates a word engine that manufactures unexpected combinations of syllables and prompts users to new concepts.

All three of these works use "space poesis" to express different things in works with their distinctive textures. "Space poesis" is another term for "Digital poetics", or in other words "Poetry's electronic presence". From code to code, the making of poetry has established itself on a completely different spectrum using hypertext through visual/kinetic text to writing in networked and programmable media. What writing is becomes altered by how it is physically written through its production technology, its files, codes and URLs.

When users scroll through "Generative Poetry" they must know that to hear the sound, the volume must be turned on, and then from there on out they must click to generate new poems or to cut up the text. This piece has an abstract connotation and there are alot of different ways that each user can interpret it. The way that the user interprets "Concatenation" and it's enacting of violence, will be the way that they will interpret the next two pieces because it flows into one another.