Artists Statement

Net poetry (2013)

The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text, discovering a network of poems called “the Worl” within the World Wide Web. The Deletionist, based on the work of book artists and erasure poets, takes the form of a JavaScript bookmarklet. It can automatically create erasures from any Web pages the reader visits. Similar methods have been used to erase all text and to turn webpages into Katamari Damacy environments or Space Invaders levels, to make a game of destroying language. Between such extremes and the everyday Web, The Deletionist finds a space of texts that amplify, subvert, and uncover new sounds and meanings in their sources. Neither an artificial intelligence nor a poetry generating system in any standard sense, The Deletionist has a repertoire for uncovering patterns and revealing poetics at play within our most extensive textual network.

• Amaranth Borsuk, University of Washington Bothell, Seattle, Washington, USA. Her most recent book is As We Know, a collaboration with Andy Fitch. She is the author of Handiwork (Slope, 2012), and, with Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen (Siglio, 2012), a book of augmented reality poems. The two recently collaborated on Whispering Galleries, an interactive erasure using LeapMotion. Abra, a collaboration with Kate Durbin (forthcoming, 1913 Press), received an NEA-sponsored Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and will be issued this year as an artist’s book with an iPad app by Ian Hatcher.  amaranthborsuk.com
• Jesper Juul is an Associate Professor the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Design. He has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990’s, at the IT University of Copenhagen, MIT, and the New York University Game Center. His publications include Half-Real on video game theory, and A Casual Revolution on how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii brought video games to a new audience. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things.” His latest book, The Art of Failure, was published by MIT Press in 2013.
• Nick Montfort develops computational art and poetry, often collaboratively. He is on the faculty at MIT, USA, and is the principal of the naming firm, Nomnym. Montfort wrote the books of poems #! and Riddle & Bind, co-wrote 2002: A Palindrome Story, and developed more than 40 digital projects including the collaborations, The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between. The MIT Press has published four of his collaborative and individual books: The New Media Reader, Twisty Little Passages, Racing the Beam, and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, with Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities coming soon.

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