Lewis Lacook is a poet, Net artist, critic and musician. His work has appeared in CTheory Multimedia, Big Bridge, Cauldron and Net, _sidereality, Real Poetik, 5_trope,  Rhizome, hyperrhiz, artifacts, Lost & Found Times, furtherfield and elsewhere. He co-edited the Avant-Garde Poetry Sampler in Issue #5 of Slope. In 2000, anabasis published his chapbook Cling, and BeeHive published The Odious Art of Lewis Lacook as an e-book for the Palm Pilot in 2001. Forthcoming is a selection of poems in e-book format, Drowning in the Age of Mid-Air, from xpress(ed).

Other works:

"A work in progress at this time is "Anningan," a cross between a hypertext and a chat bot. Both narrative and lyric, disjunctive and linear, the work operates using several  interactive and active strands. What you communicate to the work determines the flow of the writing. There are many layers to the piece, and not all are viewable in one run-through. "Anningan" plays at presence and absence, communication and silence, desire and obsession.

"Flash Poetry Generator 3.0" was featured at the "American Avant-Garde: Second Wave" symposium at Ohio State University in the summer of 2002. Based on some earlier Flash and QBasic applications I wrote, the generator takes a list of noun phrases from the user and a list of verb phrases, combining them with a randomizing algorithm to create poetry. In this latest version, both the background animation and the music are customizable, allowing the user to further mold their own experience of the piece. Viva la Interacion!

"Sonic City" sparked my "Instruments" phase, wherein I spent a lot of time making interfaces for musical and poetic machines. Seeing the works as instruments similar to musical instruments, I created works like "Sonic City" to allow users to "jam" with the work as a whole.

"Instrument 3" is another "Instrument," this one with a set of poems and some user-triggered animation. It was featured in my Flash Poetry Gallery in Web del Sol's "Artifacts."

"Bliss" is an early experiment of mine with user-input text. This is a narrative-ish hypertext piece in which the user, by filling out a form at the beginning of the work, provides essential information to flesh out the text. This was made for Reiner Strasser's "Project Hope."

About this work:

"Autonobiography #2" is a robust media hypertext – that is, it's heavy with media other than text. This includes user-controlled animation features and user-controlled sound work. The work was composed during the summer of 2002. The last panel of text was written with Lawrence Upton and Bob Breuckl.

Favorite works of hyperliterature:

Christopher Fahey, "Ada 1852"

David Knoebel, "Click Poetry"

Jason Nelson, "Pong"

On the Web: Lewis Lacook homepage