ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Andrews is a Canadian writer, visual poet, musician, web-artist and mathematic. He carries out his works in a multimedia way, publishing them on his websites.

Jim Andrews got a degree of English and Maths. After taking part in a literature radio program he went back to university to study Science Computer. It was just in this moment when Internet was becoming more and more famous all around the world.

But apart from writing, Jim has always had devotion for music, as we can see in most ok his musicals for vismu.com. Moreover, in 1990 he played the in a group called The Laughing Boot Quintet and he published a literary magazine called And Yet taking advantage of the program PageMaker 2.0.

In was in a radio program called Fine Lines where he discovered some visual poetry authors such as Gregory Whitehead or Helen Thorington. In this way he started corresponding with many musical poetry writers and then he took his firsts stops on the web.

However, it wasn’t until 1995 when he had an Internet connexion, so since that moment he started to Guild up his Works through computer programs.

By writing and reading big amounts of poems he started to work with CorelDraw 2.01, Photoshop and bitmap programs for visual poetry.

As the magazine for which he worked only dealt with local writers he used Internet to keep in touch with authors from other countries.

His first compositions were A , E , I and O . Although almost all his brighten up work uses letters and words he prefers using only letters because they are more attractive to him than poems or words.

In 1997 he started working with DHTML (dynamic html), his first DHTML composition was Seattle Drift . Later he wrote enigma n and Enigma n² .

Both on them try to explore the non-conventional possibilities of the poetic meaning. From 1997 to 2000 he lived in Seattle. Once he moved back to Canada he invested all his time on programming.

Before he moved to Seattle in 1997 he worked in Network commerce as a technical writer.

Jim Andrews published vispo.com, webartery.com, and moderated the webartery email list, devoted to discussion of poetics of web.art, net.art, and butterflies. If you would like to read writing about Nio, there is a review in German in the Frankfurt paper, and an article called "Fighting/Dancing Words: Jim Andrews' Kinetic, Concrete Audiovisual Poetry" in German and English by Berlin's Roberto Simanowski.

On his page you can find a list of his most successful works as well as other interesting information and if you are willing to know more about the author there are some interviews available on www.vispo.com :

Regina Célia Pinto with Jim Andrews: about his firsts steps in the web’s world.

Becoming a Full-Time Web Artist: he talks about how he became a “web-artist”.

Randy Adams With Jim Andrews: he talks about Nio.

ALICE IN FLATLAND

The poem Alice in Flatland was created between 1991 and 1992. But it wasn’t until 1995 when Jim had an Internet connexion and that’s why in the beginnings, although difficult to understand without any previous maths knowledge, Alice in flatland was a normal poem.

He had studied Maths at University and wanted to create a serious mathematic poem. Then he created Vispo, his website where we can find all his works (including the ones he composed before he became a web artist), and he added the different links that lead us to the different parts of the poem. These links are structured in a simply way, the same as in his brief tale Logic of the Street.

In this way we can appreciate a clear evolution in Jim’s work, as the context in which Alice in flatland takes place is not he same as in other of his poems.

We can say that Alice in flatland was one of the firsts poems and he pretended it to be a serious one.

Serious and mathematic, unlike his later pop-up poems, which he created using the HTML format. The pop-up poems had an easy going and less serious tone.

Jim Andrews has incorporated an Interactive character to his works as he wants the reader to assume them as a game.

In Alice in Flatland you just have to read following the links given through the story. Finally there’s a great development from Jim’s first creations to the latest ones.

After this brief introduction about the hypertext I’ve chosen I will explain the argument of the poem:

Alice arrives through a circle to a new world which is flatland. She soon realises that there isn’t neither sky nor height. There, in Flatland she knows a tree with five red eyes who try to solve her doubts by answering all her questions.

Moreover each step she takes she becomes smaller as well as all the landscape that surrounds her, so it’s impossible for her to arrive to any point and she thinks this world could be infinite.

The tree explains Alice that there are only two dimensions: width and length. And that there they live inside a radius. There isn’t up and down in this plane land and the tree thinks they’re in a book but Alice finally finds out that they’re inside a computer file.

Here you can find other poems about the author.

Translation into English from: http://mural.uv.es/paseher/desarrollo

[INTRODUCTION]

[ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ALICE IN FLATLAND]

[TEMPORAL ANALYSIS]

[CONCLUSION]

Página creada y actualizada por grupo "mmm".
Para cualquier cambio, sugerencia,etc. contactar con: asco@uv.es
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
Universitat de València Press
Creada: 5/12/2008 Última Actualización: 5/12/2008