Draft:Jim Andrews

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  The disambiguation page for the primary name is James Andrews (disambiguation). Robert McClenon (talk) 16:05, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

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Jim Andrews is a Canadian poet, programmer, visual and audio net artist, mathematician, essayist, and critic, known internationally for his innovative work in digital poetics and electronic literature.

Jim Andrews has been creating and experimenting with digital poetry since the 1990s, and is recognized as one of the pioneers in the field. His works, which explore and exploit the intersection of language, sound, graphics, and interactivity, are characterized by the innovative use of multimedia and digital technology to make unique, immersive literary and artistic experiences. Andrew’s technical expertise, along with his unconventional approaches to his art, enables him to create works that engage with the materiality of digital textuality, treating words, sounds, and images as editable objects that can be manipulated through code. By setting letters or words in motion in three (virtual) dimensions, Andrews promotes the dynamism of the digital text.

Language, both natural and digital, is at the heart of Andrews’s ideas and compositions. His works, which exist in both portable and web-based versions, challenge traditional notions of literature by inviting and invoking direct audience participation, encouraging his readers to engage with the text. Andrews refers this activated audience as wreaders. The diversity of outcomes of such interactivity results in works that cannot be enclosed, contained or encapsulated in conventional categories or sets of traditional literary constraints.

Andrews is a prominent figure in the field of digital art and literature. Aside from his creative work, he is also known for his theoretical writing in the field of electronic literature, having presented papers on the subject at conferences and published articles on literary theory in academic journals. He remains an active member of the electronic literature community in which he is respected for his collection of unique digital tools and works of art, his innovative approach to the form of the digital essay, and his leadership and generosity in sharing insights, ideas, and algorithms. Many of his works and projects over the years feature collaboration and the direct involvement of other artists. Andrews’s technical expertise enables him to create works that engage the materiality of digital text in which words, sounds, and images are treated as editable objects that can be manipulated through code.

The appeal of Andrews' works lies in how, through constructing "poetical toys," he presents models for making a work’s algorithmic interactive processes materially present in the reader's perceptual and conceptual experience. By employing functions and structures of computer games, the wreader is inscribed into the field of signs that they attempt to process. In this situation, the concept of text becomes transformed into something that is no longer predetermined and immutable. Text becomes dynamic, as it coexists with, and is constituted by, the wreader’s act of reading/playing/visualizing, interpreting and responding to what is happening on the screen.

Andrews has been recognized for his contributions to the evolution of electronic literature. His works are frequently discussed in academic contexts and assigned in university courses, while being displayed in galleries and exhibitions around the world. They are also available (appearing and disappearing as they morph into various embodiments) on his website: www.vispo.com, which remains a principle venue for his audience and fans.

Early life and education

Jim Andrews was born in 1959 in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada where he grew up until age 11. His father, Richard James Andrews, worked for the federal Forestry Service and his mother, Emily (Cail) Andrews, worked in a credit union. Jim was a goaltender for the Vernon Vikings hockey team. The family moved to Victoria, B.C. in 1970. Jim attended Belmont High School, where he played Frankenstein the monster in a school drama beside co-stars Meg Tilly and Jennifer Tilly.

Jim completed a degree in English and Mathematics at the University of Victoria in 1983. During the following six years he produced a literary radio show at CFUV-FM called Fine Lines and later, ?FRAME? which was distributed each week to 15 campus/community stations in Canada. Sometimes the other stations sent him reel-to-reel audio for airing on his radio show. This was his first experience with artistic networking and the creation of something radiophonic, artful, and imaginative. Radio and recorded sound were his first electronic media. He edited sound in the traditional way by cutting up audio tape with a razor blade and reassembling the pieces, the results being recorded on cassettes. Other shows were done live or as a mixture of live and studio work. The studio, with its radio and audio equipment, became his preferred tool for editing and compositing. Instead of typewriting text on a page, he was writing on tape, and on air.

Andrews was influenced by the radio art and theoretical writing of Gregory Whitehead and the other audio writers, together with the work of Marshall McLuhan and the mentorship of Seattle's Joe Keppler and margareta waterman, who encouraged him to focus on the nature and properties of his medium, which was, essentially, language in all its dimensions and aspects.

Andrews returned to the University of Victoria to study Computer Science and Mathematics in 1989. He was not initially focused on the relevance of computers to art or literature until, in his third year, he took a course entitled Language and the Theory of Computation. which opened his eyes, ears, and imagination to the computer’s creative potential in poetry, art, and music. This experience launched him into a role as a local digital art activist and promoter. He originated the literary magazine And Yet (1990) and managed the poetry reading series at the Mocambo coffee house in Victoria. By 1993, as the World Wide Web began to transform what was seen on computer screens and to connect writers and artists around the globe, Andrews adopted this new hyper-linked digital network as the medium for his own emerging work. In 1997 he moved to Seattle to work as a technical writer for an Internet start-up called TechWave, returning to Victoria in 2005. He now lives in Vancouver.

Notable Works

1. Seattle Drift (1997)- In this work, Andrews focusses on the intersections of text, image, and sound, creating a poem that drifts across the screen, the words gently moving and reorienting themselves in an ongoing series of configurations. Readers are invited to navigate through a visually rich virtual cityscape while encountering snippets of poetry and ambient sounds. The experience evokes a sense of wandering and exploration, suggesting casual sensuous encounters of a flâneur or flâneuse exploring the scenes and soundscape of the city. The poem, written in DHTML (Dynamic Hypertext Markup. language) is an important expression of Andrew’s poetics in its simplicity of design and directness of conceit. On another level, this e-poem enacts a critique of current and historical poetry scenes, taking as a starting point a traditional notion of poetry (verse) and leading the reader into the new scene of electronic poetry, with a concrete poetry transition to smooth the way.

2. Enigma n (1998) (Audio-visual version published in 2002):. “A philosophical poetry toy for poets and philosophers from the age of 4 up.” Readers explore and exploit a series of fragments that change and interact with one another on the screen, allowing them to delve into the hypnotic atmosphere of sound mix and visual effects. The poem elaborates an anagrammic reshuffling of letters in the word "meaning". The user has three options initially: "Prod," "Stir," and "Tame." When selected, each yields a different configuration of the letters which can be nudged into asynchronous orbits around an uncertain center. “Enigma n is a magnificent simulation of the autopoetic features of the textual field in which meaning arises from the instability of the signifiers. A recent version of this work (2023) has been described as “a wildly innovative work of interactive granular synthesis, colour, music and digital poetry”.

3. Stir Fry Texts (1999-2024). A series of collaborative e-poems published progressively beginning in 1999, inspired by William Burroughs’s notion of “cut-up” and “fold-in” composition. Andrews’ stir fried algorithm allows a participant to slice and dice a target text and then dish it out. The layered color-coded text emerges in response to the momentary movement of the mouse. Each element can be interpreted as a different voice within the poem. Although the resulting text is produced largely independent of a reader’s intentions, it cannot be generated without the reader’s inputs. Though variable by its very nature, any resulting piece has the potential to exhibit a consistent focus and theme and to issue an emergent aesthetic message. The entire collaborative project questions the nature of authorship and suggests that texts have independent lives of their own.

4. Nio (2001) : An interactive audio work and sound project programmed to produce music in response to a visitor's actions It is a mix of music, sound poetry, and visual poetry that invites the player to create a little composition from the sixteen contained audio recordings. In verse one the player plays with layers of audio and visuals. In verse two, she plays with synchronized layers and sequences of audio and visuals. It is a kind of lettristic dance, or alternative music video. In Nio, when a new sound begins playing, it causes the animations to change, which is a case of the audio controlling the visual. Nio was produced in Shockwave, which is now obsolete. Although no words are involved, it is a poetic work that pulls directly from avant-garde literary tradition which challenges conventional definitions of poetry.

5. Oppen Do Down (2001): An atypical musical instrument that allows the user to select loops of five-second duration with a singing voice uttering similar sounds to those graphically represented on the screen. The reader can stack up to eight layers of sound by selecting multiple words.

6. Arteroids (2001-2004) collapses the boundaries between poem and game. The user navigates an id-entity word over the screen and shoots down fragmented words or sequences that float randomly into the field of vision. These word fragments descend upon the user’s id-entity like asteroids, and, when hit, explode in circular sprays of atomised letters accompanied by a distorted sounds. If hit by the green and blue antagonistic text elements, the id-entity word explodes itself. The text that glides into the screen can be edited and changed, its speed and colour can be altered and it can be shot and destroyed or allowed to keep on floating across the screen. The game asks us to question the limits of poetry and forces us to break down barriers between art forms. It tests words in new environments and suggests new ways they might behave and interact as texts. This is a new kind of non-static art, in which the outcomes are never the same twice. It is a more concrete form of conceptual art with a hands on-component. Even choosing where and whether to destroy certain phrases is a creative activity

7. On Lionel Kearns (2004): One of Andrews more spectacular pieces, this multimedia tribute to poet Lionel Kearns combines text, images, sound and cinematography to present a randomized nonlinear exploration of Kearns' poems, ideas, and influences. Although much of Kearns early work preceded the digital age, Andrews’ treatment suggests that it was a forerunner of what was to come after. The repeated centre piece of the essay, referenced and quoted in various iterations and configurations, is Kearns’ Birth of God / uniVers (BoG/uVr) digital mandala, composed in 1965, which is frequently attributed as a non-electronic precursor of code poetry. However, it is Andrews’ own skill and digital artistry that suffuses this essay, and showcases his ability to layer, collage, and integrate multiple media forms to create a cohesive and informative example of highly original electronic literary criticism.

8. Jig Sound (2007-2011): Interactive sonic composition tool and playback instrument created with Director/Lingo, based on Andrews’s concept of the heap , a musical form consisting of a collection of sound files, each represented visually as a sound icon that can be attached to other such sound icons via horizontal or vertical lines. The lines make the sound files play sequentially or simultaneously. Usually the sounds are structured as loops. A sound icon also can theoretically have an animation associated with it. So that when the icon’s sound plays, its animation plays too, synchronized to the sound. Andrews made several heaps of sound that worked in Jig Sound. They are available as Windows 32-bit executables at https://vispo.com/jig

9. dbCinema (2010): “Described by Andrews as a ‘graphic synthesizer’ and ‘langu(im)age processor’ (db here denoting database), the application uses results from Web searches to render a processed animated poem according to parameters established by the viewer. Andrews’ algorithm uses Director to assemble images and text after viewers have entered a ‘concept’ word and other parameters. There are two versions of dbCinema: a rudimentary version (0.50) and a formerly offline advanced version that now functions on the Web. Both use Google Image search and alternatively permit viewers to specify local directories of images, thereby making it possible to limn beautiful animations from both private and public sources.

In its ultimate form, dbCinema is highly versatile and elaborately participatory. It produces high quality patterned and abstract art . Compiled images perpetually emerge, simultaneously preserved and layered on the screen. Viewers use ‘brushes’ to adjust minute details, such as the speed of geometry or the background color, and establish other important parameters. The ‘brushes’ inscribe deep kinetic elements into dbCinema projections, enabling viewers to create and configure what happens on the screen. Viewers use this tool to ‘paint’ the ‘movie’ that they collaboratively produce with the network. DbCinema is a unique and important development tool for experimental generative cinema and related fields.

10. Aleph Null 1.0 (2011): is a set of interactive digital tools that offers the user a chance to play with a dynamic, ever-changing textual landscape. In the spirit of Andrews’ earlier works such as A Pen and dbCinema, Aleph Null uses language and imagery as the ink of a pen that writes reconstituted images on the screen. Controlling both input and output, the operator induces a limitless visual output that spreads continuously across the screen, never repeating its endless patterns. The participants can create their own images that the Algorithm chews on, morphing, obliterating, layering, altering them, depending on the brush or nib that the user chooses. Once the process begins, it tends to invoke a kind of meditative state, as the watcher views or interacts with the ongoing events on the screen. To use Aleph Null is to enter Andrews’ thought process, poetics, and vision.” Aleph Null 3.1 (2019): is a software tool, a never ending project, and a series of collaborations with other artists. Its most recent configuration is as a series of gallery prints, presented in a fine art photographic tradition.

11. Sea of Po (2024): A new interactive kinetic poetry animism project including a tool set for visual poets and artists, along with an experiential poetry magazine for the works of digital collaborators.

These are a few examples of Jim Andrews' diverse body of work. His creations consistently challenge traditional notions of poetry and art, pushing and probing the Interface between the artist, the artist’s work, and the audience.

Some of the above mentioned works exist only in the bowels of the Way Back Machine digital archives. However, many are still available, along with more contemporary work at the artist’s website: www.Vispo.com

Bibliography

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