Stephanie Strickland's "Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot" won the 1999 Boston Review prize. Her book of poems, True North, was chosen by Barbara Guest for the Poetry Society of America's Di Castagnola Prize and appeared as the Sandeen Prize volume from the University of Notre Dame Press in 1997. Electronic True North, published on disk by Eastgate Systems, won a 1998 Salt Hill Hypertext Prize. Other poetry volumes are The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil, awarded the Brittingham Prize, and Give the Body Back.
Transgenic Artwork/Multiple Locations
I'm thinking of Eduardo Kac's "Genesis" (http://www.ekac.org/geninfo.html), a "transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics, and the Internet," presented both online and at the Ars Electronica 99 at Linz, September 1999, and trying to connect it to Wendy Tronrud's question/statement.
I'm struck with both the multiple locations and the telepresence involved in the work: a distributed system with remote participants and nested levels of agency. The text here passes from Biblical sentence to codon to synthetic gene to mutation to decoding of the altered sentence to "plain English," based on transgenic interbacterial communication. The fragility of the boundary between carbon-based life and digital data is demonstrated, as Kac says.
Digital sculptors say that it is compelling to explore the interface between the virtual and the physical, something I attempt by different means in "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot." Sand, made of silicon, is the heart of digital life and Harry Soot, as his name reveals, a man of carbon, a part of biochemical life, has fallen in love with her. The visual and hypertextual form of this "Ballad" (http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/) explores the varying boundary between them in structural and visual ways that exceed the line patterning found in the printed text on the Boston Review website.
Old habits of reading are more readily accommodated by the "Ballad" than by "Genesis": it is a person, not a bacterium, doing "interpretation"; but I'm not sure either work writes "with places," as opposed to "transitions" or, perhaps, "relationships." Space does open up, perhaps monstrously, to a world of currents and translations. We don't see these spaces full so much as feel them fill. We don't watch them perform; we perform them, in part, in connection with others, in processes of conjugal transfer that propagate themselves.