On Lionel Kearns

Jim Andrews, with text and film by Lionel Kearns

On Lionel Kearns

Andrews sets and resets numerous poems of Kearns's, beginning with "Birth of God/uniVerse," in a presentation that explores many of Kearns's ideas through his own digital designs. Digitized versions of films by Kearns, texts to assemble, interactive segments, writing by Kearns about his life and work, and a bibliography are included. An interactive anthology and a compelling presentation of Kearns's work for today's computer platforms, this piece testifies that digital poetics has a rich but still undocumented history.

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Author description: A binary meditation on the work of a pioneering Canadian poet contemplating digital poetics from the early sixties to the present. All texts are from the work of Lionel Kearns except where noted.

Instructions: To hear the sound, turn on the computer's speakers or plug in headphones. When arrows appear, they can be used to go forward or back. Some sections have texts that can be transformed by mouse movement, clicking, or dragging.

Previous publication: On Lionel Kearns was published by Andrews on his site, http://www.vispo.com, in November 2004 and was featured as a spotlight work that same year at http://www.turbulence.org. On Lionel Kearns was also published in the Winter 2006 issue of Word for Word, http://www.wordforword.info.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.