Books by Aaron Tucker
Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films (2017)
This book examines the convergent paths of the Internet and the American military, interweaving a... more This book examines the convergent paths of the Internet and the American military, interweaving a history of the militarized Internet with analysis of a number of popular Hollywood movies in order to track how the introduction of the Internet into the war film has changed the genre, and how the movies often function as one part of the larger Military-Industrial- Media-Entertainment Network and the Total War Machine. The book catalogues and analyzes representations of a militarized Internet in popular Hollywood cinema, arguing that such illustrations of digitally networked technologies promotes an unhealthy transhumanism that weaponizes the relationships between the biological and technological aspects of that audience, while also hierarchically placing the “human” components at the top. Such filmmaking and movie-watching should be replaced with a critical posthumanism that challenges the relationships between the audience and their technologies, in addition to providing critical tools that can be applied to understanding and potentially resist modern warfare.
Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (2014)
This collection of essays tracks the history of the Internet through the last 30 years of popular... more This collection of essays tracks the history of the Internet through the last 30 years of popular films, exploring how the Internet is, at once, the most terrifying and most beautiful invention of the 20th century. In it, I close-read films like The Net, Hackers and The Matrix trilogy, along with more recent works such as Tron: Legacy, The Amazing Spiderman, Iron Man 3 and Avatar. Themes include: the history of the internet and its shift from FTP to browser to dense interconnected devices; the internet as suburban intruder in film; how the internet is bridging the uncanny valley ; the internet, movies and apocalypse; how the internet has moved from global village to global city; the military Internet; surveillance and how to police Web 2.0.
Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (2018)
J. Robert Oppenheimer: reluctant father of the atomic bomb, enthusiastic lover of books, devoted ... more J. Robert Oppenheimer: reluctant father of the atomic bomb, enthusiastic lover of books, devoted husband and philanderer. Engaging with the books he voraciously read, and especially the Bhagavad Gita, his moral compass, this lyrical novel takes us through his story, from his tumultuous youth to his marriage with a radical communist and the two secret, consuming affairs he carried on, all the while bringing us deep inside the mind of the man behind the Manhattan Project. With the stunning backdrop of Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer’s spiritual home, and using progressively shorter chapters that shape into an inward spiral, Y brings us deep inside the passions and moral qualms of this man with pacifist, communist leanings as he created and tested the world’s first weapon of mass destruction ? and, in the process, changed the world we live in immeasurably
Irresponsible Mediums: the Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (2017)
irresponsible mediums uses the ChessBard engine to translate Marcel Duchamp's chess games into po... more irresponsible mediums uses the ChessBard engine to translate Marcel Duchamp's chess games into poems and collects them with an introduction from two-time Women's U.S. Chess Champion Jennifer Shahade.
Bookthug, Fall 2017
The Chessbard engine co-created by Aaron Tucker and Jody Miller (http://chesspoetry.com)
Write Here, Write Now (eTextbook)
Write Here, Write Now
Funded by an eCampus Ontario Grant, 2017
FULL TEXT: https://pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca/writeh... more Funded by an eCampus Ontario Grant, 2017
FULL TEXT: https://pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca/writehere/
Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research utilizes PressBooks to create and host a writing e-textbook for first year college and university students that would effectively integrate into traditional, hybrid, online or flipped classroom models. Equipped with embedded videos, diagrams and linked modules, this all-in-one multimedia textbook will be geared towards multiple learning styles and disciplines. The components of the textbook, including the embedded videos, could be swapped in and out in order to accommodate a professor's best idea of his/her own courses design. The reiteration of materials provided by text and embedded lecture videos coupled with in-text activities the students will complete outside the classroom will ensure students attain maximum understanding and mastery of the fundamental analytical concepts taught in most introductory writing and research courses. Students would be better prepared to participate in the follow-up teacher-facilitated component, whether that takes place in a traditional classroom environment or interactive online educational space.
punchlines (2015)
punchlines is a lyric long poem that probes the poetic tensions in the everyday languages of comp... more punchlines is a lyric long poem that probes the poetic tensions in the everyday languages of computer-user collaboration. Within the narrative structure of a Canadian couple’s drive down the West Coast of the United States, the poems set this exploration between the call (poem title) and response (the poem itself) of jokes and punchlines, echoing the input-output (call/response) of modern computer-user cooperation, with the ultimate goal of infusing code with poetry and poetry with code. The first section is the initial trip down the coast while the second section houses poems in response to the return trip. There is little stopping in this long poem.
Digital Humanities Projects by Aaron Tucker
Loss Sets
Loss Sets translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed wi... more Loss Sets translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed with 3D printers. The project aims to respond to the multiples of loss (physical, environmental, artistic, personal) that occur in 2016 and, as such, the poems respond to a number of topics that include ISIS’s destruction of millennium-old artwork, the melting of Canadian ice fields and sculptures, the death of loved ones, prosthetics, decaying memories. The sculptures were then built in response to these losses and guided by concerns around the future of what 3D printing, as guided by a utopian, post-capital world in which any object can be made or replaced, will be conceived of and used for.
Loss Sets came about as an extension of Tucker’s earlier work with Jody Miller on the ChessBard and his interests in using computer programs as collaborative creation and translation tools, speaking to his interests in how computer programs read and create and how humans and “human” documents, like a poem, might be read differently by different computer softwares and manifested using different hardware (a 3D printer for example).
Working with Ryerson’s Digital Media Experience Lab, the Ryerson Geospatial Maps and Data Centre and the Ryerson Centre for Digital Humanities, the poems are first turned into coordinates along the X,Y and Z axes after which, under collaboration between Namir Ahmed, Tiffany Cheung and Aaron Tucker, those points are mapped into the 3D modeling software Rhino; using the Rhino plug-in Grasshopper, the models are further manipulated by using geographical information from the Columbia Ice Fields until a sculpture is “carved away” from a 32x32x32 cube. The results are then printed using a 3D printer.
The ChessBard
The ChessBard inputs the algebraic notation for a chess game in .PGN format (digital file format ... more The ChessBard inputs the algebraic notation for a chess game in .PGN format (digital file format for archived chess games) and outputs a poem. The poems are based on 12 source poems Aaron wrote, 6 poems for the white pieces, 6 poems for the black pieces: there is a 64 word poem for each colour’s pawns, knights, rooks, bishop, queen and king. When a piece lands on a square it triggers a word from the source poems and the translator compiles them together and outputs a poem.
The ChessBard was co-created by Aaron Tucker and Jody Miller
Further description: http://chesspoetry.com/about/about/
Full poetic Statement: http://chesspoetry.com/poetics/
Publications by Aaron Tucker
Shifting Sister Squares: Florine Stettheimer’s Portraits of Marcel Duchamp
Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism, 2019
This chapter explores Florine Stettheimer's two portraits of Marcel Duchamp, arguing that her two... more This chapter explores Florine Stettheimer's two portraits of Marcel Duchamp, arguing that her two versions of the artist are best understood through their opposition to each other; by capturing two instant sides to Duchamp, taken as a pair, the two portraits give a rich and complex understanding of the artist that demonstrates their deep friendship and artistic bond.
Addressing Machine Co-authorship(s) via Translative Creative Writing
Creative Writing Studies , 2019
This paper theorizes the potential role that machine translation can have in both teaching and pr... more This paper theorizes the potential role that machine translation can have in both teaching and practicing creative writing.
“3D Printing in the Humanities” (Forthcoming, 2019)
Book Chapter in the forthcoming Doing Digital Humanities 2. Ed. C. Constance, R. Lane, and R. Sie... more Book Chapter in the forthcoming Doing Digital Humanities 2. Ed. C. Constance, R. Lane, and R. Siemens. Routledge: Forthcoming, 2019.
While on-campus maker spaces often tout 3D printers for their utopian capabilities, there is a great deal of opacity around how introducing 3D printed objects into a Humanities classroom or scholarship would add value to those spaces or work. Beginning with a series of questions that users of 3D printers should consider when deciding what to print and how to integrate the technology, the chapter argues that the use of 3D printing in the Humanities revolves around the key notions of: first, replication (of past, present or future objects; of the technology’s capabilities to quickly replicate those printed objects); second, visualization (the technology’s ability to present alternate modes of representing data); and, third, tactility (that the physical objects occupy sensual space, with concrete weight, volume, and feel). Using a range of examples of 3D printing in the Humanities, such as Donna Szoke’s Decoy, Morehshin Allahyari’s Material Speculation, the University of South Hampton’s Making History Project, and the collaborative project Loss Sets, the chapter will then lay out some of the basics of 3D printing, including hardware and software, the difference between typical printing filaments, what to consider when working collaboratively in a maker space, as well as outlining a number of post-printing techniques that can further transform finished printed objects. This chapter will provide the reader with the initial tools to imagine the scope and reason for her/his own use of 3D printing, and suggestions towards the types of hardware and software that would best manifest that project.
Loss Sets: Project Snapshot (2018)
Project included in: Making Humanities Matter. Ed. Jentery Sayers. University of Minnesota Press.... more Project included in: Making Humanities Matter. Ed. Jentery Sayers. University of Minnesota Press. 2017.
Loss Sets translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed with 3D printers. The project aims to respond to the multiples of loss (physical, environmental, artistic, personal) that occur in 2016 and, as such, the poems respond to a number of topics that include ISIS’s destruction of millennium-old artwork, the melting of Canadian ice fields and sculptures, the death of loved ones, prosthetics, decaying memories. The sculptures were then built in response to these losses and guided by concerns around the future of what 3D printing, as guided by a utopian, post-capital world in which any object can be made or replaced, will be conceived of and used for.
Loss Sets was co-created by Aaron Tucker, Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung and Namir Ahmed
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 4.1. University of Lisbon. 2016.
Susan Je... more Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 4.1. University of Lisbon. 2016.
Susan Jefford’s work on Reagan-era action movies established the “hard body” as the over-muscled biological spectacle that functioned as a unifying force for both “a type of national character” and “the nation itself.” The “mastery” that the hard body represented is echoed in the equally spectacular hard technological bodies of the exoskeleton-enhanced protagonists of Elysium and Edge of Tomorrow. While Jeffords argues that the 80s hard body was deeply suspicious of “technological innovation” as a possible polluter of the hard body’s individualism, the contemporary hard technological body arises in reaction to the increased globalization of the world and terrorist attacks that has made international borders and conflicts far murkier than the 80s cold war villains and conflicts.
Different than the all-encasing machine “suits” of Pacific Rim or the Iron Man and Robocop films, the exoskeleton, specifically as combat weapon, is a literal “man-in-the-middle” soldier and one that deliberately melds the human and the machine so that both biological and technological are visible simultaneously. After briefly tracking the representations of the exoskeleton through Aliens, The Matrix Revolutions and Avatar, this paper focuses on the recent use of exoskeleton combat in Elysium and Edge of Tomorrow, two films which showcase the biological muscle combined with and augmented by a technological apparatus generates a spectacle reminiscent of the 80s hard body. In this, the hard technological body has morphed its focus of mastery from international and physical conflicts to virtual and borderless ones. Such a transition encourages the contemporary machinic movie audience to view themselves not as the healthy symbiotic posthuman N. Katherine Hayles promotes; instead, the hard technological body, in an attempt to heroically reassert human exceptionalism, treats his/her computerized technology, specifically the Internet, as, first, a tool to be conquered and then a weapon to conquer with.
Review: Gary Genosko. Remodelling Communication: From WWII to the WWW . University of Toronto Press 2012. x, 162.
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2015
Exhibitions and Performances by Aaron Tucker
The Chessbard. Turn On Literature Prize Exhibition.
The ChessBard was longlisted for the Turn on Literature Prize and was exhibited in the Roskilde L... more The ChessBard was longlisted for the Turn on Literature Prize and was exhibited in the Roskilde Libraries, Denmark.Oct. 2017.
O ChessBardo
Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória. Porto, Portugal.
The specific version of the Chessbard adds a... more Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória. Porto, Portugal.
The specific version of the Chessbard adds an extra layer of complexity by having the poems that the ChessBard produces be translated, at the end of each stanza, into Portuguese (as a nod to the host city Porto). In its base version, the ChessBard is deeply rooted in Roman Jakobson’s notions of intersemiotic translation, wherein texts of one medium (a chess game) are translated into a text of another medium (a poem). This process is further complicated by the interpenetration of computer code at varying levels, all of which generates a symbiotic and dense ecosystem of computer-human creation; that this takes place within the context of a chess game brings to light the game-nature of language itself, in particular within poetry, and the types of rules and play that structure and manipulate creative human language. Using the API translator Yandex, the added computational layer of intralingual translation, as Jakobson would call it, further complicates the ecosystem by adding a further strata of language (that itself is enacted by the various codes that translate then surface that language). This sentiment challenges the audience/player’s ability to parse and “read” the pieces being created, highlighting the potentially playful ubiquities and dense lingual interdependence between human-humans, human-computers, computer-computers, that arise in a 2017 version of the global village.
Loss Sets - YOU | I: Story Interfaces & Reader Experience.
Loss Sets was exhibited at Winona State University Contemporary Art Gallery in Oct. 2017.
Loss... more Loss Sets was exhibited at Winona State University Contemporary Art Gallery in Oct. 2017.
Loss Sets has been included in the Electronic Literature Festival, You/I at Winona State University and Making Humanities Matter (University of Minnesota Press).
Loss Sets translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed with 3D printers. The project aims to respond to the multiples of loss (physical, environmental, artistic, personal) that occur in 2016 and, as such, the poems respond to a number of topics that include ISIS’s destruction of millennium-old artwork, the melting of Canadian ice fields and sculptures, the death of loved ones, prosthetics, decaying memories. The sculptures were then built in response to these losses and guided by concerns around the future of what 3D printing, as guided by a utopian, post-capital world in which any object can be made or replaced, will be conceived of and used for.
Loss Sets was co-created by Aaron Tucker, Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung and Namir Ahmed
The ChessBard at Philalalia
The ChessBard was part of the Philalalia Festival in Philadelphia, U.S.A. on September, 2016.
... more The ChessBard was part of the Philalalia Festival in Philadelphia, U.S.A. on September, 2016.
The ChessBard travelled to Philadelphia on September 15th 2016 for an exhibit and performance at the Tyler Contemporary Gallery at Temple University. In front of a large and interested crowd, two-time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion Jennifer Shahade played blindfolded against Aaron Tucker; the game, which Shahade won by checkmate, was translated in real time behind them. This was followed by a very spirited Question and Answer period with a number of really wonderful and insightful queries and comments from the spectators.
The ChessBard
The ChessBard was exhibited as part of the Electronic Literature Organization Festival in Bergen,... more The ChessBard was exhibited as part of the Electronic Literature Organization Festival in Bergen, Norway in August of 2015.
The ChessBard was included at the 2015 Electronic Literature Festival’s Exhibition in Bergen, Norway. The link to the exhibition, which include a number of other amazing works, can be found at http://elo2015.h.uib.no/index.html.
The ChessBard inputs the algebraic notation for a chess game in .PGN format (digital file format for archived chess games) and outputs a poem. The poems are based on 12 source poems Aaron wrote, 6 poems for the white pieces, 6 poems for the black pieces: there is a 64 word poem for each colour’s pawns, knights, rooks, bishop, queen and king. When a piece lands on a square it triggers a word from the source poems and the translator compiles them together and outputs a poem.
The ChessBard was co-created by Aaron Tucker and Jody Miller
Loss Sets.
Loss Sets was displayed at the Electronic Literature Organization Festival. Victoria, Canada. Jun... more Loss Sets was displayed at the Electronic Literature Organization Festival. Victoria, Canada. June 2016
Loss Sets translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed with 3D printers. The project aims to respond to the multiples of loss (physical, environmental, artistic, personal) that occur in 2016 and, as such, the poems respond to a number of topics that include ISIS’s destruction of millennium-old artwork, the melting of Canadian ice fields and sculptures, the death of loved ones, prosthetics, decaying memories. The sculptures were then built in response to these losses and guided by concerns around the future of what 3D printing, as guided by a utopian, post-capital world in which any object can be made or replaced, will be conceived of and used for.
Loss Sets was co-created by Aaron Tucker, Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung and Namir Ahmed
Uploads
Books by Aaron Tucker
Bookthug, Fall 2017
The Chessbard engine co-created by Aaron Tucker and Jody Miller (http://chesspoetry.com)
FULL TEXT: https://pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca/writehere/
Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research utilizes PressBooks to create and host a writing e-textbook for first year college and university students that would effectively integrate into traditional, hybrid, online or flipped classroom models. Equipped with embedded videos, diagrams and linked modules, this all-in-one multimedia textbook will be geared towards multiple learning styles and disciplines. The components of the textbook, including the embedded videos, could be swapped in and out in order to accommodate a professor's best idea of his/her own courses design. The reiteration of materials provided by text and embedded lecture videos coupled with in-text activities the students will complete outside the classroom will ensure students attain maximum understanding and mastery of the fundamental analytical concepts taught in most introductory writing and research courses. Students would be better prepared to participate in the follow-up teacher-facilitated component, whether that takes place in a traditional classroom environment or interactive online educational space.
Digital Humanities Projects by Aaron Tucker
Loss Sets came about as an extension of Tucker’s earlier work with Jody Miller on the ChessBard and his interests in using computer programs as collaborative creation and translation tools, speaking to his interests in how computer programs read and create and how humans and “human” documents, like a poem, might be read differently by different computer softwares and manifested using different hardware (a 3D printer for example).
Working with Ryerson’s Digital Media Experience Lab, the Ryerson Geospatial Maps and Data Centre and the Ryerson Centre for Digital Humanities, the poems are first turned into coordinates along the X,Y and Z axes after which, under collaboration between Namir Ahmed, Tiffany Cheung and Aaron Tucker, those points are mapped into the 3D modeling software Rhino; using the Rhino plug-in Grasshopper, the models are further manipulated by using geographical information from the Columbia Ice Fields until a sculpture is “carved away” from a 32x32x32 cube. The results are then printed using a 3D printer.
The ChessBard was co-created by Aaron Tucker and Jody Miller
Further description: http://chesspoetry.com/about/about/
Full poetic Statement: http://chesspoetry.com/poetics/
Publications by Aaron Tucker
While on-campus maker spaces often tout 3D printers for their utopian capabilities, there is a great deal of opacity around how introducing 3D printed objects into a Humanities classroom or scholarship would add value to those spaces or work. Beginning with a series of questions that users of 3D printers should consider when deciding what to print and how to integrate the technology, the chapter argues that the use of 3D printing in the Humanities revolves around the key notions of: first, replication (of past, present or future objects; of the technology’s capabilities to quickly replicate those printed objects); second, visualization (the technology’s ability to present alternate modes of representing data); and, third, tactility (that the physical objects occupy sensual space, with concrete weight, volume, and feel). Using a range of examples of 3D printing in the Humanities, such as Donna Szoke’s Decoy, Morehshin Allahyari’s Material Speculation, the University of South Hampton’s Making History Project, and the collaborative project Loss Sets, the chapter will then lay out some of the basics of 3D printing, including hardware and software, the difference between typical printing filaments, what to consider when working collaboratively in a maker space, as well as outlining a number of post-printing techniques that can further transform finished printed objects. This chapter will provide the reader with the initial tools to imagine the scope and reason for her/his own use of 3D printing, and suggestions towards the types of hardware and software that would best manifest that project.
Loss Sets translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed with 3D printers. The project aims to respond to the multiples of loss (physical, environmental, artistic, personal) that occur in 2016 and, as such, the poems respond to a number of topics that include ISIS’s destruction of millennium-old artwork, the melting of Canadian ice fields and sculptures, the death of loved ones, prosthetics, decaying memories. The sculptures were then built in response to these losses and guided by concerns around the future of what 3D printing, as guided by a utopian, post-capital world in which any object can be made or replaced, will be conceived of and used for.
Loss Sets was co-created by Aaron Tucker, Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung and Namir Ahmed
Susan Jefford’s work on Reagan-era action movies established the “hard body” as the over-muscled biological spectacle that functioned as a unifying force for both “a type of national character” and “the nation itself.” The “mastery” that the hard body represented is echoed in the equally spectacular hard technological bodies of the exoskeleton-enhanced protagonists of Elysium and Edge of Tomorrow. While Jeffords argues that the 80s hard body was deeply suspicious of “technological innovation” as a possible polluter of the hard body’s individualism, the contemporary hard technological body arises in reaction to the increased globalization of the world and terrorist attacks that has made international borders and conflicts far murkier than the 80s cold war villains and conflicts.
Different than the all-encasing machine “suits” of Pacific Rim or the Iron Man and Robocop films, the exoskeleton, specifically as combat weapon, is a literal “man-in-the-middle” soldier and one that deliberately melds the human and the machine so that both biological and technological are visible simultaneously. After briefly tracking the representations of the exoskeleton through Aliens, The Matrix Revolutions and Avatar, this paper focuses on the recent use of exoskeleton combat in Elysium and Edge of Tomorrow, two films which showcase the biological muscle combined with and augmented by a technological apparatus generates a spectacle reminiscent of the 80s hard body. In this, the hard technological body has morphed its focus of mastery from international and physical conflicts to virtual and borderless ones. Such a transition encourages the contemporary machinic movie audience to view themselves not as the healthy symbiotic posthuman N. Katherine Hayles promotes; instead, the hard technological body, in an attempt to heroically reassert human exceptionalism, treats his/her computerized technology, specifically the Internet, as, first, a tool to be conquered and then a weapon to conquer with.
Exhibitions and Performances by Aaron Tucker
The specific version of the Chessbard adds an extra layer of complexity by having the poems that the ChessBard produces be translated, at the end of each stanza, into Portuguese (as a nod to the host city Porto). In its base version, the ChessBard is deeply rooted in Roman Jakobson’s notions of intersemiotic translation, wherein texts of one medium (a chess game) are translated into a text of another medium (a poem). This process is further complicated by the interpenetration of computer code at varying levels, all of which generates a symbiotic and dense ecosystem of computer-human creation; that this takes place within the context of a chess game brings to light the game-nature of language itself, in particular within poetry, and the types of rules and play that structure and manipulate creative human language. Using the API translator Yandex, the added computational layer of intralingual translation, as Jakobson would call it, further complicates the ecosystem by adding a further strata of language (that itself is enacted by the various codes that translate then surface that language). This sentiment challenges the audience/player’s ability to parse and “read” the pieces being created, highlighting the potentially playful ubiquities and dense lingual interdependence between human-humans, human-computers, computer-computers, that arise in a 2017 version of the global village.
Loss Sets has been included in the Electronic Literature Festival, You/I at Winona State University and Making Humanities Matter (University of Minnesota Press).
Loss Sets translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed with 3D printers. The project aims to respond to the multiples of loss (physical, environmental, artistic, personal) that occur in 2016 and, as such, the poems respond to a number of topics that include ISIS’s destruction of millennium-old artwork, the melting of Canadian ice fields and sculptures, the death of loved ones, prosthetics, decaying memories. The sculptures were then built in response to these losses and guided by concerns around the future of what 3D printing, as guided by a utopian, post-capital world in which any object can be made or replaced, will be conceived of and used for.
Loss Sets was co-created by Aaron Tucker, Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung and Namir Ahmed
The ChessBard travelled to Philadelphia on September 15th 2016 for an exhibit and performance at the Tyler Contemporary Gallery at Temple University. In front of a large and interested crowd, two-time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion Jennifer Shahade played blindfolded against Aaron Tucker; the game, which Shahade won by checkmate, was translated in real time behind them. This was followed by a very spirited Question and Answer period with a number of really wonderful and insightful queries and comments from the spectators.
The ChessBard was included at the 2015 Electronic Literature Festival’s Exhibition in Bergen, Norway. The link to the exhibition, which include a number of other amazing works, can be found at http://elo2015.h.uib.no/index.html.
The ChessBard inputs the algebraic notation for a chess game in .PGN format (digital file format for archived chess games) and outputs a poem. The poems are based on 12 source poems Aaron wrote, 6 poems for the white pieces, 6 poems for the black pieces: there is a 64 word poem for each colour’s pawns, knights, rooks, bishop, queen and king. When a piece lands on a square it triggers a word from the source poems and the translator compiles them together and outputs a poem.
The ChessBard was co-created by Aaron Tucker and Jody Miller
Loss Sets translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed with 3D printers. The project aims to respond to the multiples of loss (physical, environmental, artistic, personal) that occur in 2016 and, as such, the poems respond to a number of topics that include ISIS’s destruction of millennium-old artwork, the melting of Canadian ice fields and sculptures, the death of loved ones, prosthetics, decaying memories. The sculptures were then built in response to these losses and guided by concerns around the future of what 3D printing, as guided by a utopian, post-capital world in which any object can be made or replaced, will be conceived of and used for.
Loss Sets was co-created by Aaron Tucker, Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung and Namir Ahmed