trAce Workshop
Members, Spring, 1999

 
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Diane Caney
Believe

Diane Caney is assistant editor and web-manager for Australian Humanities Review. Her primary individual creative works are varieties of writing, all of which traverse generic boundaries. She works in both print and electronic media. Her work can be accessed at: http://www.overthere.com.au

"Believe" is a work in which several poems, stories and images circulate around ideas about isolation and despair while also trying to find some form of peace/bliss. The writing in "Believe" is deliberately evasive as there are many life-traumas which might underpin the author's angst. While the work visits various aspects of my autobiography, it is also a piece in which the reader is invited to: "Write yourself, backwards and forwards, until it makes sense."  

 

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Janet Holmes
The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot

Janet Holmes's second book of poems, The Green Tuxedo, was named the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year for 1998 and also won the Ernest Sandeen Prize from the University of Notre Dame and the 1999 Minnesota Book Award. Her earlier book, The Physicist at the Mall, was the Anhinga Prize winner for 1993. She teaches in the MFA program at Boise State University (USA). Her collaboration with poet Stephanie Strickland is the hypertext work "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot."

The Ballad's theme of the passionate relation between silicon- and carbon-based life is illumined by links both within and outside the poem to images, statements, and URLs that move into many web spaces: algorithmic art, webcams, scale-inversion experiments, hyperbolic geometry, robot wisdom/AI, ethics of hypertext, poems of science, and more. It is designed to be read intuitively, though the link "How?" gives novice hypertext readers some guidance into the poem. http://webpages.mr.net/holmes

 

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Jennifer Ley
The Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks

Jennifer Ley is the editor of two Internet poetry sites, The Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks, and Riding the Meridian, which has just debuted.

Her poetry, artwork and hypertext poetry suites have been published widely on the Internet, by, among others: The Animist, Octavo, Recursive Angel, 2River View, Conspire, Agnieska's Dowry, PoetryMagazine.com - her work is archived at poetrycafe.com Examples of her hypertext work were published at Conspire, November, 1998; Snakeskin, October, 1998 and Animist in February, 1999.

Ms. Ley's work is also anthologized in print in the upcoming Athen's Poetry Circle's second anthology, in Silhouettes on the Electric Sky and in Will Work for Peace.

Her project for the workshop was to redesign the entry points for the Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks, which hadn't had a really good facelift for years. The site now sports an intuitive opening interface, which links either immediately into the poetry on site through iconic 'buttons' or to a more linear exploration through an imagemap constructed to point people towards specific parts of the site.

Because so many of the older pages of Astro needed redesign/recoding ... three buttons have been reserved to link into new/future threads.

At Heelstone, two new hypertext projects can be found in working form:

On Freedom and Confinement in the Victorian Age
The Body/Subtext

 

 

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Marjorie Luesebrink
Fibonacci's Daughter

M.D. COVERLEY is the pen name of MARJORIE C. LUESEBRINK, M.F.A.   She teaches writing and literature in the School of Humanities and Languages at Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California.  Her non-fiction and scholarly articles on folklore, contemporary literature, and hypertext technology have appeared both in print and on-line.

A full-length, CD-ROM hypermedia novel, Califia, is forthcoming from Eastgate Systems.

"Fibonacci's Daughter" tells the story of a mystery at the Mall--where a woman named Annabelle Thompson is selling insurance--against ill fate. The structure of the piece plays with space/time/predictability--the location of the shops in the mall and the revelation of breaking news. It uses the number sequences and concepts developed by Fibonacci in both the fiction and the organization. Leonardo de Pisa, Fibonacci (1175-1250), was best known for his treatise, Liber abaci, the Book of Numbers, in which he explained the golden mean and called for the adoption of Arabic numerals.

In "Fibonacci's Daughter", a thoroughly modern woman demonstrates that strange convergences of culture can arise out of our commerce. In this tale, then, we have Liberace meets Liber abaci.

Recent short fiction on the web includes: "The Lacemaker", a story episode in the collaborative "The Book of Hours of Madame de Lafayette" produced by Christy Sheffield Sanford.
"Life in the Chocolate Mountains", in the current edition (#7) of Salt Hill (Syracuse University).

 

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geniwate
Empiricosis

geniwate [Jenny Weight] lives in Adelaide, Australia. She had a short collection of poetry entitled published 1996 (wakefield press/friendly st). She soon felt constricted by the print medium, so started experimenting with performance poetry that incorporated audio and visuals (puppetry). From there it was a small conceptual step (but a huge technological one) to progress to multimedia poetry.

The Empiricosis project is structured as if it were an empirical research project aimed at answering two questions. Firstly, "Are formulas like poems?" secondly "Are poems like formulas?". There are several "experiments" aimed at proving one way or the other. (!) it is meant to exist in that territory between humour and seriousness. Included is some of the history of the> development of the scientific method and the percieved division between it and "art".

Last summer, she attended a school run by ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) on this theme. She recently won the trAce-Alternate X Hypertext Competition.

Geniwate's work can be seen at Ida's Poetics and sitefrite

 

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Helen Whitehead
Mirror, Mirror

Helen Whitehead is a writer and editor for Web and print. As well as creating her own writing, she facilitates children's hypertext and other writing projects in the UK and all over the world, including as Editor of the trAce Online Writing Community's children's writing web site Kids on the Net.

Other work Visions and Dreams
Cave Bytes (with Leonie Winson) for the Nottingham NOW97 Festival
Kids on the Net

Mirror, Mirror is a triangular-shaped hypertext representing one person's spiritual journey through the seven steps of searching, learning, openness, meditation, inspiration, yielding and discovery, ending in the ultimate spiritual battle. The reader follows these spiritual pathways, making a choice at the end of each stage, from two options which will sometimes be obviously diametrically opposed. In other places the rightness or wrongness of the choice is subtle and not obvious until it is too late to avoid the consequences.......

While the structure and narrative of Mirror, Mirror is complete, it does not yet take full advantage of graphics, animation and other up-to-date web technologies. The author would welcome collaborations in this or other projects with web programmers, graphic designers, musicians or artists. Please contact me.

 

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Meg Wise-Lawrence
Omega Musical Journey

The Omega Musical Journey was started as a companion to the MotherRocks music column (the Mother is Me magazine. My other articles on music have been published in Perfect Sound Forever and forthcoming in the Washington Review.

I'm the creator of the Acorn Mush: the creative pages and The Germ: A Pre-Raphaelite Exploration.

My rock 'n' roll novella "Sometimes You See Africa" was excerpted in Coffeehouse: Writings from the Web." I've had a one-act play, "It's Not Like Adrian" produced, and am currently working on a fiction project revisiting old characters, but many years later.