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arras:
new media poetry and poetics http://www.arras.net/
Date: went live in 1998
The original function of arras.net was as a continuation of the print journal called Arras, which published poetry and occasionally fiction and reviews, and which had some concentration on visual poetics. I eventually became discouraged with the way poetry looked in html, especially poetry that was conceived for the "page," and therefore folded all of the poetry contents into a .pdf file called "Arras 4" with the exception of a few sequences that seemed to me successful as web projects (such as Andrea Brady's "White Wish").
As my own online work, such as "The Dreamlife of Letters," a long Flash piece, and chapbook settings of other poets' work in Flash and Director, such as of Christian Bök's "Eunoia" and Dan Farrell's "The Inkblot Record," began to attract some attention, and as I published more critical writing on the web, I decided I needed a page of links to my own work.
Also, over the years I've managed to collect lots of interesting links to work that is either "digital poetry" or is intimately tied to the interests of the digital poet, which is to say art projects that use texts even if not under the rubric of "poetry," including text transforming programs and video games, and so I made a page of these links that I hope will remain highly selective.
New on the site are my most recent project, "The Truth Interview," done in collaboration with the poet Kim Rosenfield, which is a gaudy recreation of a popular tabloid website in which her poems are mischievously embedded; and a .pdf of Steve Evans "Notes to Poetry," a collection of critical essays that were originally distributed by email in 1998.
Forthcoming are new .pdfs, one a collection of the political science writings of Language poet Bruce Andrews, the other the entire run of "The Impercipient," a poetry journal edited by Jennifer Moxley in the nineties. My hope is that Arras will become a bridge between web artists who are working with text but have little knowledge of contemporary experimental poetics (even as their interests often cross), and poets who are intimidated by the plethora of web art out there and need a set of "curated" links to give them a quick, hopefully exciting, introduction to the work.
(For fun, check out the "batties," my little homage to Andy Warhol and the only real sound piece that I've created: http://www.arras.net/batties.htm)