Individual Work
Jason Nelson: Net Art/Digital Poetics

This site is a visual index that provides a paragraph of description of each of Jason Nelson's works. Scrolling from the bottom of the page to the top lets one view the artist's work chronologically from 2001 to the present, offering one potential trajectory for the field development as a whole, spanning hypertexts, short fictions, poems, haikus, games, all of which are computer generated and include images in combination with multimedia elements, code, text, and sound. Browsing the collection means witnessing the ways electronic literature involves readers and shows the potential for involving programming and multimedial devices and embedded text as in, for example the flash-based work titled, "this will be the end of you: play4: within within." Here, holding the mouse allows the user to move "into words" and to play with text as it emerges. Readers control the movement on the interface by holding or releasing the mouse and can thereby determine the mouse-driven fly-through of texts and images that float towards or away from the user. Another work, "game, game, game and again game," uses a side-scrolling gaming interface to navigate through a mix of poetic content and corresponding hand-drawn elements. This play, either literal or through the interface, serves as a metaphor of what Nelson wishes to transfer with the artwork: some scattered [imaginations, some] oddly organized fire of thoughts and incomplete ideas," as well as a simple comment about the internet, its nonlinearity, and the new possibilities of digital poetics.

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