SinTax

"your skin, a kind of detonated tulle"

2011-11-19T20:29:00.001-08:00

"your skin, a kind of detonated tulle"

kiss

2011-10-29T15:57:00.001-07:00

book

2011-10-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

Hi

2011-10-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

bare reft

2011-09-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

intricate in triplicate

2011-07-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

___

The word's actually there six times, but who's counting?

the arbiters of fashion

2011-07-13T21:26:00.000-07:00

crumple zones

2011-06-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

nostalgia

2011-06-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

whenstill

2011-05-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

sangre blut

2011-05-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

+-

2011-05-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

puntualidad

2011-01-30T13:58:00.000-08:00

Another in a growing collection of Spanish-language pieces; here the word of choice is a cognate, allowing us a somewhat easy slip past the usual stumbling block of semiotics.

This one too bears an interesting relationship to the question of frame/space/canvas I've been struggling with of late. Despite our tendency to think of time as an abstraction—however concrete its effects may be—it is in truth as "real" as the space all around us, indeed, inextricably interwoven with it and thus as subject to such obvious forces as gravitation. But again I have omitted the frame here, attempting a re-abstraction of this concrete reality, then re-concretizing it as a mechanical framework, recalling all the ways in which we make ourselves conscious of the tangibility of time: schedules, dates, all the accoutrement of the essential grid placed over our lives.

a quote from John Tan

2011-01-18T19:21:00.001-08:00

In the Web era, designers create narrative spaces made up of text, images, video, etc. We add context and legibility to those formats. We also create spaces where people express themselves. We work with enacted narratives where the content is already available, and emergent narratives to be created over time. Instead of just styling symbols, we’re styling bytes in fluid narrative spaces. We’re bytographers; literally, the writers of bytes, not just glyphs.

aiddia, or language was chewing the walls

2010-12-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

On the other hand, limits often serve to define a piece in myriad ways, lending form where form is required, defining the space in which the drama of the image—for every image is a drama, an unfolding of energy and action across the otherwise static page, and is thus also a story, a poem, a fiction—can enact itself for our eyes. The lack of a defined space, a shapeless canvas, still provides that support, but offers fewer cues for the eye, less sense of dimension, depth, etc. In the sort of work I discussed in the post before last, only the image itself can provide these cues, can tell the eye where the drama takes place. Other pieces, well, they require those other cues.

interference patterns, a typoem

2010-12-17T18:25:00.000-08:00

This piece represents the first ready-for-publication piece in a new series. The impetus for the series arises from two realizations: One, that few visual poems really visualize lengthy poetic pieces, i.e., actual poems, instead dealing with only one or two words or short phrases. There are, of course, exceptions, not the least of which is Vernon Frazer, who often visualizes much lengthier pieces than this one. Still, I felt compelled to try the experiment for myself, and to infuse it with my own visual style and poetic voice, such as they are. The second drive came from some recent contemplation of a certain Mary Ellen Solt quote that actually adorns the WordPress version of this blog:

But no matter how enthusiastic the poet may allow himself to become about the potential for positive influence in the world of the new visual poem, when he gets down to practicalities, he is confronted with certain problems inherent in his materials. If he is going to find poetry in the visual dimensions of words, he must learn to handle them typographically.

Thinking on that line has made me wonder how much I've managed to live up to that statement, if at all. I'm a lover of typography, if only at an amateur level, but I wouldn't deem most of my work typographical, for unlike most visual poets I know, the visual aspect forces the "poem" in my work into the backseat. (Which perhaps itself explains this particular effort.) But I'm a passionate believer that typography and visual poetry share many of the same concerns, and that often each can be labeled an instance of the other.

Hence, Interference Patterns. Look for more of the same soon.

V, da?

2010-12-13T17:06:00.000-08:00

It was only when Hungarian concrete poet Marton Koppany made me aware that he knew my work and kindly offered some commentary that I realized just how central a role borders and limits play in my work. The realization was by no means immediate; in fact, I found myself wrestling with just how to relate his comments to my work for quite some time, generating numerous permutations of a theory of borders ... none of which proved all that satisfactory. In fact, it's only now, contemplating this particular piece, that I think I catch some glimmer of his line of thinking.

The fact is that I almost always work digitally, employing a well-known vector-based graphics program to create my work. And now I realize how powerfully the medium is (at least partially) the message for me. Working digitally there's no concrete need for borders—whereas in most visual arts one applies one's medium, be it ink, oil, acrylic, etc., to a support of specific dimensions and boundaries, when working digitally all such limits are self-imposed, if at all. Every time I open the program I determine the dimensions as I please, as if I had a boundless supply of canvas and paper in all conceivable sizes at my disposal. And all too often, I end up far surpassing the dimensions of my conceptual canvas. When working digitally, the artboard stretches to suit my composition, and in fact, most of my works end up as compositions only insofar as the various elements composing the work relate to each other. This is a profound difference, for whereas any physical piece automatically relates both to its own constituents and its support—and of course, the support often acts indistinguishably from a constituent of the piece—a digital piece need not rely upon any particular support. Surely it does at one point or another, for every outlet I employ to publish my work—including online and print poetry journals, sites like Flickr, WordPress, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.—asserts its own background (read: support, canvas, page, etc.) and the work comes to exist in some relation or other to said. But the work itself remains plastic, mutable, ready to accept a background of any sort and impose its particular composition upon said. And that is vital: In the end my work relies upon no support other than what it finds, and hence can have any or no relation to a support. Thankfully, Blogger is savvy enough when it comes to handling PNGs (the file type I find myself using most often, due to its inbuilt handling of transparent backgrounds) that it can dramatize exactly what I mean in this piece: The statically sized background of the posting section allows the image above to lapse out of the canvas, establishing a new compositional relationship with the site as a whole, rather than just with the conceptual support that is the posting section.

In other words, as purely digital objects, the products of my creative practice float. They have no need for concrete support but will accept it when required. Were I to place the piece upon a page or canvas I would probably locate it toward the bottom right edge of an otherwise blank domain, but there is no need for me to do so. And in fact, as you view it here it could sit just about anywhere you'd like it to, depending upon your abilities with CSS and user style sheets. This piece has no fixed place, and that contributes something to its "meaning."

For to my mind vispo is always awaiting its reader, ready and willing to accept each individual's unique interpretation of its content within the limited semantic field it establishes. And digital vispo goes a step further: It not only awaits your imposition of "meaning" but awaits your imposition on a compositional level as well. Should you wish to print this work and place it upon your wall you may do so as you wish (presuming you have the software and know-how to do so, but, come on, every Windows machine ships with Paint at least, doesn't it?). Sure, you could do that with any other artwork ever published. But if you were to print Nude Descending a Staircase, for example, at the lower right of a large blank sheet it wouldn't be how Duchamp meant it to be displayed, would it?

The role that borders and limits play in my work is then exactly this: none. And that's what makes them so important.

I submit this to you to publish as you please, where you please. It may not be the way I'd publish it, but for me, that hardly signifies.

paper cuts

2010-12-02T17:43:00.000-08:00

so t[2(we[a(((r)))e

2010-11-29T14:37:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while this odd beach aesthetic will creep into my work.

It seems to begin with an innocent color choice. Having some entirely different palette in mind, beginning with a spearmint-and-sage green, a screaming magenta, a coral blue-green. And then things begin to ripple, undulate; I see an ocean swell rising to obliterate chalk powder sifted finely into sand. I get this odd, totally unexpected piece that seems to have made itself, would I or no.

last call

2010-11-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

aaahhhllll, or de(i)profundis

2010-11-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

forevah

2010-11-07T11:09:00.000-08:00

Kane X. Faucher’s In-Depth Review of My 2008 Publication, I discover i is an android

2010-10-06T23:29:00.001-07:00

Tracing the analog ego through the digital ID of the android, there is something of the Burgess A Clockwork Orange in the dialect set to a Burroughs cut-up machine. Its stilted and staccato phrasings that take on an order despite their (apparent) attempt at cacophony (a chaosmos). John Moore Williams elicits this in a world where a Philip K. Dick is linguistic engineer of a future fantastic.

A label like “posthuman” may spring readily to mind, but that would court the usual issues of what that “post” would designate. It is not necessarily the end of the human that Williams offers us, but its continuation along the trajectory of a digital-based language. Williams’ conceptual force majeur can be described as an exploration on how a techno-linguistics factors in the re-imagining of how consciousness of our “I” is constructed. It is in each precious and irreparable virtualization of that “I” brought about through our connection to various technological interfaces that sets the scene for our becoming-androids.

It is on that uneven split between the analog and digital, and the golem and cyborg, where Williams wages his poems, the tension for consciousness suspended upon the twisting hyphen of a wobbly dialectic. The frequent invocations of Adam and Eve, beyond signaling some kind of crude genesis where “machines make new men”, asks us to ponder the significance of ourselves as golems living within a given linguistic architecture where the landscape becomes increasingly digital. And, as we know, the biblical Adam was the first golem, made of clay and given the Word by which he came to life (perhaps rendering Eve in the most predominant Genesis narrative of many an Adamic byproduct, a veritable simulacrum).

It would appear that the distinction between analog and digital is juggled throughout Williams’ svelte but puissant offering. Language in its analog capacity has a generally apparent function if one exists within the social discourse in which it appears, whereas “objets digitale” usually have their functions nested inside them like a virtual egg, a potentiality. Williams writes in our analog language, but does so digitally, teasing out what an android language – effectively, our language mediated – would look like. A predominant theme in literature and cinema concerning androids is the search for identity, and it is a rough and ready allegory for our own search by way of language. Condemned to meaning, the ego and id are smothered under a technological superego that has its discursive demands for proper participation. Williams retires the old binaries by resisting crude comparison; instead of posing the question clumsily as “how would we speak as androids?” he takes as a starting proposition that we (already) are, if we extend the definition of android to be more metaphorically inclusive. Rather than a voluntary merger where human speakers elect to embrace becoming techno-homunculi, it is the scene of a shocking discovery where at the root of possessing a raft of State-sanctioned ID cards, one is already part of a large normative program:

dior dna not available, evoke sids.
eve’s ok, kid. it’s adam i’d worry about.
iris disc over is an an and-ran
diode red nun as ire focus’d in
nods you coffee rise anon dare do id.
i ‘ad cover, I and ID

At first blush, Williams may seem to be relying heavily on the rubric of langpo, but as one reads further, each capitalization is conspicuously marked, and each contracting apostrophe stands like a lemma or an enthymeme, bringing the poetic flow to term by constructing its own flow, its own logic. The discovery is not only that the narrator learns of being an android, but that others are as well, and that the entire social system is run on a program. The question of whether social normative frameworks make us programmed or programmers is left deliciously open for consideration. In the vertically-based arborescent model of a social program that hierarchically attempts to determine identity, Williams demonstrates with experimental vigour and dark candor that perhaps the one adventitious thing that flouts it is the rhizome of language as the real conduit of ego discovery. And so, in the unmasking of that ego, one comes to unmask the real codes that buttress the social landscape. The social is only apparently hardware, but it is the mutable software of our language that truly has the potential to reprogram ourselves and the environment around us.

Copies of I discover i is an android are available through Trainwreck Press.

iu

2010-10-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

Wanted to take a moment to announce my latest publication, iu, from mIEKAL aND's superb Xexoxial imprint. Head to the Xexoxial site to pick up a copy of your own.

What we have here are digital talismanic suggestions. In this series of vispo, design elements construct a place for you and eye to land. The dotted i returns u see. Letterforms conjure humanity in their very simplicity. These compositions rework certain concrete poetic ideas. The letters i and u undergo new permutations. It’s a satisfying jaunt through renewed verbo-visual possibilities. John Moore Williams is part of the next wave of visual poet.
- Nico Vassilakis

I didn't know who I am before I saw iu. I didn't know what I was, or the difference between I and U. I was continually thinking U were I when you were nothing of the kind. But in this book, in this John Moore Williams book, we discover that I am the mother of U, who is I bent in the middle and whose feet point up to the sky. Sometimes, I am a shadow. Sometimes, I is a change. Sometimes, I am in a pile of U's and cannot get out. Sometimes, I is a whirling of shapes. Sometimes, I am spare. Because I go on forever, and I end at the end of each finger, each of which is just another I. I is clean. I am dirty. And in John Moore Williams' hands of ten small I's, I is everywhere and everything, the letter is examined as a meaning and a shape, the I is made into structures of beauty, and if you read the book you just might know what I am and you are.
- Geof Huth

iu is a textual journey that begins as a root, working its way up and around the viewer in a labyrinthine web of finely-woven vispoage.
Williams' unending quest for uncharted wordscapes is most present in this newest work, uniquely and intricately grafted into a new flesh, begging exploration.
- Matina L. Stamatakis

from the introduction:

We are used to thinking of letters as merely media, as windows through which some message is conveyed without interference. They are the superconductors of significance, channels devoid of impedance or static, through which content is, ideally, passed with crystal clarity. This is perhaps most obviously true of the letter I, which has become so concretely associated with individual identity that it has practically disappeared as its own entity. The shape itself reinforces this disappearance; of all the letterforms it is perhaps the sparest, the most Spartan. Compounding this is the fact that it lends itself so easily to the conflation of form and content—it is, unlike most single letters, a word, and one that abstractly yet forcefully resembles its referent. It is the human form in hieroglyph, a body inscribed.

iu seeks to accept, complicate and reject this conflation, this crystal-clear union of sign and signifier. In accepting the sparest of letterforms as its subject, then attempting to create a wide variety of forms out of this simple cloth, the book embraces the generativity of restriction. At the same time, it attempts to explore the multifarious and complex meanings of identity and individuality through simple, iconic forms. Many of the pieces employ the archetypal forms and arrangements of the comic book, that most lyric and identity-obsessed of popular fiction forms, while others work through more concrete arrangements, attempting to graphically depict the semantic content in much the same way the letterform itself does. Oh, and then there’s the letter U, which our shorthand age has rendered nearly as pictographic as I.

red act

2010-09-19T18:42:00.000-07:00

eYe SEEthing

2010-09-18T12:30:00.000-07:00

xit

2010-09-11T15:45:00.001-07:00

own

2010-08-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

edit

2010-08-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

rorschachabet

2010-07-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

For Satu's wondrous Time for a Vispo project.

traphic

2010-07-07T20:26:00.000-07:00

fr iu(pc) t

2010-06-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

vis a(ges) vis

2010-06-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

modulations

2010-05-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Marton Koppany for the inspiration.

de_sign 2

2010-05-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

de_sign

2010-05-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

a shhh in e

2010-05-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

slither.ring

2010-04-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

hitchcock, a rough draft of a font

2010-04-22T21:24:00.000-07:00

noctemerge

2010-04-13T17:36:00.000-07:00

texterior

2010-04-12T20:51:00.000-07:00

text(u)reborn

2010-03-29T18:27:00.000-07:00

transfur protocols

2010-03-28T15:42:00.000-07:00

insideout

2010-03-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

ambeen't et tu

2010-03-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

mal[e]form

2010-03-20T16:22:00.000-07:00

ayya

2010-03-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

Buckle

2010-03-14T20:36:00.000-07:00

eonoown

2010-03-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

Blogostasis

2010-03-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

Hey all,

Some of you may have noticed I haven't been terrifically active here of late. The reasons are many and exciting:

Most pertinent to the dearth of new work here is the fact that I've been laboring away at a manuscript for mIEKAL aND's fabulous Xerolage imprint of his Xexoxial Editions. The work is complete and now in mIEKAL's hands, so new work should begin to trickle back here soon.
Nearly as pertinent, and, if possible, even more exciting, is the launch of the new visual poetry journal, The Bleed. Exciting new works from Vernon Frazer, Amanda Earl and Rosaire Appel are already live, and vispo luminaries like Andrew Topel, Peter Ciccariello and Bernd Reichert are in the post. The Bleed already caught the eye of Travis Nichols, editor at the Poetry Foundation, and was "mentioned" (i.e., linked to with an unnamed anchor) in his recent story for the Huffington Post. More on that soon.
Also working on two new manuscripts. One, called Numerology: a Book of Puns, is a set of minimal visual poems based on, you guessed it, numbers. The second is a suite of poems based on HTML. Look for installments from those works in the (near) future.

All that being said, I'm really glad I came by Blogger today, as they seem to have finally decided to do something about the insane and well-deserved popularity of Wordpress, making their blogs more website-like and adding a lot of richness to their template interactivity. Kudos, Blogger. Because of these changes, expect to see a lot more developing here (as time from the above-listed tasks allows, of course).

concrete

2010-02-22T08:20:00.001-08:00

2010-02-20T15:46:00.000-08:00

NEVE(R)EVEN

2010-02-16T20:37:00.000-08:00

rose windows bloom below

2010-02-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

please enlarge

nnnnnnnigh

2010-01-12T19:48:00.000-08:00

scalelacs

2010-01-11T18:19:00.000-08:00

Avantexte Press

2010-01-05T17:12:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce the foundation of Avantexte Press, where you'll soon be able to purchase prints by myself and my good friend and fellow artist, Mara Patricia Hernandez. Avantexte Press will also soon begin publishing books, inaugurating our series with [stext:viscereality], an anthology of pwoermds and visual poems created by many of the greats of contemporary visual poetry. Go take a look!

eyeye

2010-01-02T21:17:00.000-08:00

out_look_out

2009-12-27T13:51:00.000-08:00

vis(aud)ible 4

2009-12-23T06:28:00.000-08:00

moi/mua

2009-12-22T19:50:00.000-08:00

flow(e)red

2009-12-18T19:33:00.000-08:00

i_con

2009-12-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

eye_dr_eam_a_i_n 1

2009-12-01T06:09:00.000-08:00

fitful1

2009-11-28T13:59:00.000-08:00

fitfull

2009-11-24T20:56:00.000-08:00

v.2

2009-11-20T23:29:00.001-08:00

un title

2009-11-19T22:14:00.000-08:00

O 'o these(s) pil(l)grim_ages

2009-11-18T21:44:00.001-08:00

Inter_section

2009-11-18T21:09:00.000-08:00

memecuit

2009-11-16T21:32:00.001-08:00

meme

2009-11-16T19:53:00.000-08:00

ol

2009-11-14T10:24:00.000-08:00

ionon

2009-11-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

dol/lo/ar

2009-11-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

variants

2009-11-07T19:44:00.001-08:00

sangredges

2009-11-04T21:34:00.001-08:00

webbue 2

2009-11-03T18:48:00.000-08:00

webbue

2009-10-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

caultion_redux

2009-10-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

inforME

2009-10-27T16:08:00.001-07:00

caultion

2009-10-27T06:52:00.001-07:00

stexxt_ag'in

2009-10-25T21:04:00.000-07:00

sighte

2009-10-15T21:05:00.000-07:00

in_still

2009-10-06T20:20:00.001-07:00

labyrinths

2009-10-04T18:28:00.000-07:00

(o)i(ll)spill

2009-10-01T18:36:00.001-07:00

con_cept_i_on

2009-09-30T17:44:00.000-07:00

a glas ciel

2009-09-25T22:20:00.001-07:00

ec/ce/ho/mo_nym

2009-09-22T18:44:00.001-07:00

ec/ce/ho/mo

2009-09-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

letter never changes

2009-09-20T19:28:00.000-07:00

miuserly

2009-09-17T22:22:00.000-07:00

on Taggart's "Slow Song"

2009-09-14T21:11:00.001-07:00

nth door

2009-09-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

portal australis

2009-09-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

doubled door

2009-09-03T23:05:00.000-07:00

idoori 2

2009-09-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

A somersault (based on a text by Thierry Brunet)

2009-08-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

nodoor (another collab with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen)

2009-08-29T01:13:00.000-07:00