[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. I was lucky enough to catch up with these two ladies while they were in town from London. They were in California for a youth and kids marketing conference in San Diego, and they popped up to SF afterward. Sharna Jackson lives in London and is the editor of the Tate Kids website for Tate Gallery... More

Unlike many of the artists who have so far been featured in this series, Christine Wilks can be understood as a writer of fictions and memoir rather than a poet, or at least an “experimental” poet engaging in the traditions of concrete and visual poetics so prevalent in electronic literature. Her works, while highly interactive, have the ambitions of short films — the sound, image, and text choreography is seamless and absorbing — and though one often reads quite a bit when engaged with them, recorded voices and illustration often predo... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwo... More

Poets have played with the idea of absolute compression since the start of the tradition — epigrams and haiku are two of the oldest forms of poetry — yet it’s not until the 20th century that one sees this trend extend to poems of under, say, five or ten words. Apollinaire included a one-sentence poem (called a monostich) in his first collection, Alcools, entitled “Chantre” (1913): “Et l’unique cordeau des trompettes marines.” Fans of Ezra Pound, author of the famously brief “In a Station of the Metro,” will be familiar with the even briefer poem “Papyrus” (1916), inspired by the Sapphic fragments, which runs: “Spring… / Too long… / Gongula.” The Italian poe... More

Our guest writer today is SFMOMA’s head of graphic design, Jennifer Sonderby.

Blueberry Muffin, Cochise, Lake Placid, Soft Leather, Turtle Trail. Unlike the Stein family, the group of names that describe the paint on the walls of The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde are anything but modern. The hues, on the other... More

July 22 was the hottest day in New York City since 1977. It was still 100 degrees until 10:00 at night, and if you poked your head out the window nobody was outside. Earlier in the day, looking north, I shot this view from atop of the Empire State Building with the Hudson River to the left and the East River to the right.

Click on the picture for... More

Benjamin Moreno Ortiz is a Mexican writer and artist living in Querétaro, an industrial city with a rich historical center, about two hours north of Mexico City. His first novel, Signos de la Amnesia Voluntaria, was very well received. A little less than two years ago he became fascinated with digital poetry, and in a short amount of time built up a body of interactive and video works which he dubbed “concretoons,” which can generally be described as irreverent, conceptual satires on issues dealing with poetry and the literary figures in L... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwo... More

If the comedy of subjection asks “how fast?” the comedy of dysfunction asks “how broken?” and exploits the very slipperiness of web design and programming — the way the web browser and computer screen subvert the best intentions of digital creators to make their products look good and run well. In the early days of the web, graphic desig... More

The exhibition The More Things Change samples SFMOMA’s collection to present a range of works made since 2000, offering a selective survey of the art of the last 10 years and a thematic and psychological portrait of the decade. The exhibition is also an unusual collaboration among all five curatorial departments at the museum, and over the course of the year, Open Space presents texts from each of the 10 curators.

What are the “things” in the phrase “the more things change”? In the old adage, the word may mean anything or every... More

I am standing on top of the Empire State Building in New York, where King Kong once stood, and it’s tempting to try and calculate how many tiny, insignificant San Franciscos would fit into Manhattan. It’s tempting because I had the idea to just levitate all my friends and the whole peninsula across the country and just sort of set it down somew... More

The Austrian artist joerg piringer is unique among electronic writers in that he not only has an impressive resume as a performer — he is a long-standing member of the Vegetable Orchestra, whose members play exclusively on fresh vegetables they purchased and carved into instruments that very day, and has developed several text/sound pieces for live-VJing in clubs — but he is also an accomplished programmer, having created his own programming languages for his increasingly complex work. piringer has also created several popular iPhone apps, i... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwor... More

In my last post, I described what I called a “simple” in electronic literature, which is basically a node of text/algorithm interaction — a point in time and space where the text and the code that is presenting it to you on the screen become apparent to the reader, and in fact cannot be ignored. Even when text is stable — not flying around, not changing shape or color, like when you are using a word processor — there is always code keeping it on the screen, and workers in electronic literature are almost always interested in exploitin... More

Our guest writer today is architect Chris Downey. Welcome!

Stepping through the lobby and into the atrium of SFMOMA, you may be greeted by strange sounds of dripping water, metallic pings, or intermittent clicks. Just as you think you might recognize the sound, it vanishes. Sometimes it seems to travel right past you, while other sounds seem to swerve somewhere near you. It’s hard to tell, though, as there’s no evidence of anything around that could be making the noise — or so I’m told. I cannot see and came to visit the museum with a number of friends, most of them also blind or visually impaired. We came to experience Sonic Shadows, the temporary site-specific sound installation by San Francisco’s own Bill Fontana. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was Bill’s work that greeted us as we stepped toward the atrium.

Bill Fontana, audio clip of site-specific installation Sonic Shadows, at SFMOMA, 2011.

This was an incredible experience on many levels. We had the opportu... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Some of the most interesting people come through the doors of SFMOMA. Patricia Albers is a local writer, curator, and professor. She was at the museum in mid-June to give a talk to SFMOMA and de Young docents on Joan Mitchell, who is the subject of her latest book.]

There’s the generic interview question that goes, “If you could invite anyone to dinner who would it be?” What I want to know is, what would you serve?

I would invite the subject of my next book, photographer André ... More

Jason Nelson’s huge body of electronic literature, most of it done in Flash, might at first seem the work of an obsessive outsider; the fact that he is an American living in Australia might only confirm this assumption. Each of his pieces is replete with text, images (and often video), strange sounds, and most importantly, unusual interfaces that... More

I’m happy to announce our fantastic plan for a summer poets-in-the-galleries reading and talk series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors poet Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Every Thursday evening a poet will give a reading, talk, or performance about a single artist or artwork on view. Please welcome SPT Director Samantha Giles:

In the famous Saturday salons of Gertrude Stein and her family, visual artists and writers exchanged ideas, argued, inspir... More

At this patriotic season, I have to admit, I’m more loyal to California than the U.S. of A. It is, after all, the blue state where I was born (the San Fernando Valley), and those sun-baked Fourth of July’s of my childhood — KFC and Shasta cola in Shoup Park for fireworks — are dry roasted into my memory bank. Barefoot, faded paisley bedspreads unfurled on brown crabgrass at a city-funded recreation area that right about now is probably facing serious service cuts, if not all-out closure. The memories aren’t erasable, but the sites the... More

I’ve been working for the past several years to find a way to discuss what has come to be known as “electronic literature” — it’s a creaky phrase that doesn’t survive parsing, hence the wavering between this term, “new media writing,” “digital literature,” etc. — in a way that is neither naively celebratory, presuming that computers will change writing the way DNA testing has changed crime television, nor overly technical, branching off into deep theoretical territory that seems, long before hindsight, to have nothing to do with literature or digital technology, not to mention graphic design, information architecture, film/photography, and video games, all of which at times seem to be relevant discourses.

The problem is that the artist/writers who can be said to be “electronic writers” are coming at it from different angles. Some have emerged from what is often called the “art world,” even though the most salient example of this, the artist group Young-Hae... More

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