One of my experimental, animated translations of a classical Chinese quatrain.

Maple Bridge Mooring at Night by Zhang Ji (fl. 753), translated for 2025/26.
Original calligraphy by and courtesy of Zheng Zhong.

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Maple
Bridge

2025/26

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An animated poetic text composed by heuristic algorithms from two main supply texts. Verse-like segments are animated in parallel columns, in two looping sequences. Words of the texts fade-in according to a recorded vocal performance. Sounding excavates ‘paraphones’ from one text and redistributes them in the other, and vice versa. Linked documentation is in live-coding notebooks: one that builds and serves the animations in real time; another that contains preliminary studies and some exposition; and one with algorithms which generate the animations by extracting & distributing phonemic paragrams, i.e. paraphones.

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Sounding

2024/25

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A bilingual paragrammic reading of—and writing with—Samuel Beckett's «l’Image»», composed in French and translated by Beckett himself. ‘Grams’ from the original French are excavated from within the words of the English translation. The animation reveals and highlights these ‘literal grams’ of the French. The reader encounters the text in at least three ways: the brownish highlighting ‘reads’ the composite text with human pacing; the white highlighting reveals French grams of Beckett's original; and the entire composite text is available for scanning and context.

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crawl
it’s image

2024

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A work of ambient poetics and dynamic typography, with similarites to the work of artists like Jenny Holzer. It is a single, arguably minor work, with an ‘extension’ comparable to that of a picture in a exhibition of visual art. It makes a melancholic statement and more or less explains itself. It has a looping but shuffled combinatorial structure.

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This Last

2025/26

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A prose poem with visual and dynamic concrete poetics.
The notebook that actually runs this version is on the Observable platform, where you will be able to read commented code.

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Shimmer

2022/23

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A prose poetic essay in explicitly paragrammatic language art. The text underlying this fundamentally dynamic, time-based work is an original composition on the interior oceanscape of breath that we experienced during the pandemic year of 2020, our respiratory rhythms threatened, invisibly, by disease. The code notebook has further details. A correspondent article first appeared in SubStance, #160 Volume 52, Issue 1, June, 2023, pages 97-99, copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Substance, Inc.

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breathe

2023

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A translingual paragrammic reading of and writing with Samuel Beckett’s “l’Image,” a constituent of his last novel. The novel, Comment c'est, was composed in French and translated by Beckett himself. ‘Grams’ from 22 paragraphs of the French are found within the words of How It Is, from the whole of the translated novel. Hover over a paragraph and the French is highlighted. Adjacent English words contain and ‘define’ the French grams. Between these definitive collocations, the artist adds Beckettian phraseology to render the resultant constrained narrative more hospitable, more ‘how it is.’

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‘l’Image’
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How It Is

2022/23

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Adapted from the author’s own translation of the classical Chinese quatrain ‘Passing Thought (one of nine)’ by Du Fu (712-770), this is a looping combinatorial presentation, produced in October 2023 for the Word Shelter, a spilt-flap display housed at the Wedding Cake House, Providence, Rhode Island.

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Passing Thoughts

2023

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All the emphasized words – which some editions may set as small caps – in Henry James’ Preface to The Ambassadors presented within one minute, the intervening durations within each minute proportional to an average time taken to read the words between those emphasized. Looped animation.

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Preface

2021

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reading, the word. Just.

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reading

2020

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All the possessive and objective English pronouns; paired nouns with sublitteral differences; verbs evoking the nine affects. Minimal linguistic change for maximal affect and significance. Derived from this notebook on Observable.

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sifther

2020

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