Depending on how loose a definition we use of the word "special," this is the fourth special issue at Unlikely 2.0. It is the second guest-edited issue. The first, in December 2005, was The South African Issue. I wanted to do the issue because of the West's conception of Africa as other, and it came about when the excellent Aryan Kaganof hooked me up with David Chislett. David did an outstanding job of bringing us an incredible assortment of South African talent, and I did a lot of sitting around. Thus we combined our talents, and the issue went quite smoothly—our only problems revolved around posting between the U.S. and South Africa around Christmastime, when I very cleverly do all of my special issues. David brought us a few musicians, a few visual artists, a filmmaker, and a number of writers; slightly more material than appears in Unlikely in a typical month. After a while, the work dropped into the archives of Unlikely, and is now accessible, not by issue, but by topic, from the navigation buttons to the left. This was deliberate. The issue was intended to decrease otherness, so to separate the South African issue from our normal archives would be inappropriate.
I guess the beginnings of the idea for the Cross-Media Issue began in 2004 when I hit a few message boards, announcing that I was making UnlikelyStories.org a multimedia site. I posted the information at the writer's workshop at Zoetrope, and some joker told me that this was a writer's site, so naturally they weren't interested in "Doom" (with which he equated all visual art). This was entirely stupid: real writers enjoy visual art, music, film, and a wide variety of artistic forms, even when we don't create them ourselves (as I don't). What he meant that he personally was a hack and an imbecile, and therefore didn't visit any sites that might not potentially benefit his writing career. I did not know that, by making UnlikelyStories.org multimedia, I would be getting rid of so many of that type of "writer" in my inbox, but it's been a great side benefit. The biggest benefit was the opportunity to work with real artists who work in mediums which I'll never learn.
The immediate catalyst for creating the issue was the increasing popularity of visual poetry among traditional poets. Visual poetry is hardly a new thing—one could easily argue that it predates our species. But it's current surge in popularity has been refreshing and enjoyable. And while I've seen a great deal of scholarly essays explaining some of the concepts behind it (there's an outstanding one in this issue), I've seen relatively little that just breaks it down for the non-artist, in the context of the technological changes facing artists. I tried to write such a thing, and habit took over, and it came out as a call for submissions. This was bad. First, I'm completely unqualified to judge Cross-Media work, except as a viewer. Secondly, I didn't know enough people working in Cross-Media. Thirdly, it looked hard.
Fortunately, I met Dan Waber last year, working on a tribute to Vernon Frazer. I saw that he knew his stuff, both in terms of Cross-Media work and Internet technology. Furthermore, when that project was over, he said to contact him if I ever wanted to do anything else. I don't know why he did that. But I asked him to guest-edit a Cross-Media issue, and fortunately, he agreed.
And did a fantastic job. After reading a huge number of submissions, Dan found thirty-four artists (and groups of artists) with a sampling of work that would introduce the concepts and varieties of contemporary Cross-Media work. The completed issue includes two Adobe Acrobat files, five Acrobat Shockwave animations, thirteen scripted animations, six movies, fourteen music files, 369 images, 223 .html pages (excluding the scripts), and two Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
In a few hours, I'll upload this gibberish, and it'll appear at Unlikely, with a handy-dandy list of articles on the right-hand margin, helping you find all this cool stuff. In the middle of February, that list of articles will be updated; around the beginning of March, it'll change entirely. At that point, this body of work must drop into the archives. Normally, when one produces something like this, one archives it into a single directory, with it's own address, as a snapshot of this extraordinary meeting of diverse talent and craft. But I began the call for submissions with the statement:
This compels us, then, to treat Cross-Media work the same as any other. Since most of the work in this issue cannot clearly be placed into a category like "Poetry" or "Movies," most of the work in this issue is being placed in more than one (something I normally avoid doing even when I can, just so that the link structure of this site doesn't get too obscene). As a result, future readers of Unlikely might be browsing through the "Poetry" section and suddenly stumble across a film, and people looking at "Visual Art" might find themselves listening to a poem being read. When this issue ceases to be current, it will transform the entire Unlikely archives into a Cross-Media experiment.
If, in the future, people wish to link to a table of contents of the Cross-Media issue, they can link to this essay. I'll place one here, along with this disrecommendation that the work be approached that way. This is a "special issue" in the sense that Dan Waber guest-edited it, K. R. Copeland made a logo, and we sent out a "special" call for submissions. But Cross-Media work is not "special" in the sense that it is separate from the rest of creativity (and we will accept it for future issues, using our normal guidelines. If this sort of work is experimental today, it is our hope that it will be considered perfectly natural tomorrow.
One more thing: Our main page currently has the Cross-Media artists in alphabetical order, and Dan's introduction recommends his suggested starting points. The bar on the right-hand side shows another way to read through this issue, in which I've ordered the works, not by preference, but in a way that I hope presents an arc by which you can get a clear idea of the progressions between ideas developing in Cross-Media. Rest assured that if I put the review of Doom 3 last, it's to make a narrative circle, and is in no way a dis.
Introducing the Cross-Media Issue by Dan Waber
Publishing the Cross-Media Issue by Jonathan Penton
syrupin w/9 letters & 5 spaces by mIEKAL aND & Lyx Ish
Song Shapes by Jim Andrews
Jim Andrews reviews Doom 3
Five Spoken Word Visual Poems by The Be Blank Consort
Green by Tantra Bensko
Two Excepts from The Cyborg Opera by Christian Bök
The Poet's View by Mairéad Byrne
Offerings by Holly Crawford
Four Spoken Word Poems by Barbara DeCesare
Missing by Martha L. Deed
Two Songs by Dulabomber
Seven Visual Poems by Paul Dutton
Red by Amanda Earl
Alphaglyphs by endwar
I STALKED MARTHA STEWART! by Vernon Frazer
Cross-Media by Michael Harold
Three AVATAR Sketches by Sharon Harris
Bin Badder by Pete Hindle
In Germania, The Portuguese Did Sing by Geof Huth
Snowglyphs by Geof Huth
This Is Your Final Nitris by Adeena Karasick
Vedic Space, String Theory, and the Eternal Knot by Karl Kempton
Graffiti by Márton Koppány
As You by Donna Kuhn
Seven Visual Poems by Janan Leikazu
Two Visual Poems by Kaz Maslanka
Five Visual Poems by Sean McCluskey
Memory Tables by Gil McElroy
Twelve Digital Poems by Marko Niemi
I Don't Want to Go to Nashville by Rupert Owen and Snuffbox Films
Once More Around the Sun: a 2007 calendar by W. Bradford Paley
American Flact by Alan Semerdjian
Two Visual Poems by Spiel
In Other Words by Nico Vassilakis
Three Blogger-code Visual Poems by Ted Warnell
Five Visual Poems by Derek White
Jonathan Penton is the Editor-in-chief of Unlikely 2.0. Check out his bio page.