Concrete Stir Fry Poems by Marko Niemi

CONCRETE STIR FRY POEMS
by Marko Niemi
http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts/marko

Marko Niemi (Finland) has written five "Concrete Stir Fry Poems" that extend
the notion of the stir fry form into graphics. Of letters. He has also
re-written the programming of the stir fry form in these concrete works.
These five works play on relationship, stasis, and dynamism/transformation,
among other things. For instance, "still-life" consists of the letters in
the word LIFE discombobulatable into parts of each other via moving the
mouse over the piece. "four musicians" consists of the letters in the word
ECHO. These pieces are quite "concrete" in the Noigandrean sense concerning
their simplicity and iconic nature; but they are also contemporary in their
algorithmic, generative construction as things written in programming code
and graphics of letters. The "Concrete Stir Fry Poems" extend the
algorithmic exploration of language and other media implicit in the stir fry
form and explores its relations with the earlier work of the concrete poets.

The 'Stir Fry Texts' project began in 1999 (
http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts ). Since then, Pauline Masurel and Brian
Lennon have written stir frys, and Shuen-shing Lee has translated one into
Chinese. It is an ongoing project, apparently.

The stir fry is basically a form (like a sonnet is a form) that can contain
any sort of content that can be put in a web page (text, image, object,
sound, etc). The content consists of n texts (and/or images, objects, etc),
each of which is cut up into m pieces (though the m pieces needn't form a
coherent whole, especially if they are <objects>). When the wreader mouses
over the mth part of the jth thang, it is replaced with the mth part of the
(j+1)st thang (mod n). The piece retains its contiguity, resulting sometimes
(especially in the textual works) in a defensive twitching that resists
perfect control by the wreader; the behavior has been likened to a
hedgehog's if you try to touch its belly. This has not been confirmed. The
interface also provides controls to view each of the n thangs in their
entirety, without discombobulation.

In addition to writing the "Concrete Stir Fry Poems", Marko, in 2004, also
helped update the programming. I wrote the DHTML code in 1999, when
cross-browser/cross-platform DHTML was very hard to achieve, particularly
given that the stir fry keyed on the innerHTML DHTML method, which had not
been implemented at all in some browsers. Marko helped me update the
programming so that the stir frys now work on most browsers and platforms. I
see his new work in the "Concrete Stir Fry Poems" does not use the innerHTML
method at all and is compactly described in a small .js file.

Many thanks to Marko Niemi for his explorations of the stir fry form–it is
an experiment in literary/media/programmerly hybrid form and wildly
associative poetics.

ja
http://vispo.com