Draft:Jim Andrews

 Jim Andrews  is a Canadian digital poet, essayist, and visual/audio net artist.

Early life and education
Jim Andrews was born in 1959 in Vernon, British Columbia, the son of Richard James Andrews and Emily (Cail) Andrews. The family moved to Victoria, B.C. in 1970, where Jim attended Belmont High School. He completed a degree in English and Mathematics at the University of Victoria in 1983. During the following six years he produced a literary radio show at CFUV-FM called Fine Lines and later, ?FRAME? which was distributed each week to 15 campus/community stations in Canada. In 1987 he returned to the University of Victoria to study Computer Science and Mathematics. in 1989. He originated the literary magazine And Yet (1990) and managed the poetry reading series at the Mocambo coffee house in Victoria. By 1993, as the World Wide Web began to transform what was seen on computer screens and to connect writers and artists around the globe, Andrews adopted this new hyper-linked digital network as the medium for his own emerging work. In 1997 he moved to Seattle to work as a technical writer for an Internet start-up, returning to Victoria in 2005. Andrews currently lives in Vancouver.

Notable Works
1.	Seattle Drift (1997)- In this work, Andrews focusses on the intersections of text, image, and sound, creating a poem that drifts across the screen, the words gently moving and reorienting themselves in an ongoing series  of configurations. Readers are invited to navigate through a virtual cityscape while encountering snippets of poetry and ambient sounds. The experience evokes a sense of wandering and exploration, suggesting casual sensuous encounters of a flâneur or flâneuse exploring the scenes and soundscape of the city. The poem, written in DHTML (Dynamic Hypertext Markup. language) is an expression of Andrew’s poetics in its simplicity of design and directness of conceit. On another level, this e-poem enacts a critique of current and historical poetry scenes, taking as a starting point a traditional notion of poetry (verse) and leading the reader into the new scene of electronic poetry.

2.	Enigma n (1998) (Audio-visual version published in 2002): Readers explore and exploit a series of fragments that change and interact with one another on the screen, allowing them to delve into the hypnotic atmosphere of sound mix and visual effects. The poem elaborates an anagrammic reshuffling of letters in the word "meaning". The user has three options initially: "Prod," "Stir," and "Tame." When selected, each yields a different configuration of the letters which can be nudged into asynchronous orbits around an uncertain center. “Enigma n is a magnificent simulation of the autopoetic features of the textual field in which meaning arises from the instability of the signifiers. A recent version of this work (2023) has been described as “a wildly innovative work of interactive granular synthesis, colour, music and digital poetry”.

3. Stir Fry Texts (1999-2024). A series of collaborative e-poems published progressively beginning in 1999, inspired by William Burroughs’s notion of “cut-up” and “fold-in” composition. Andrews’ stir fried algorithm allows a participant to slice and dice a target text and then dish it out. The layered color-coded text emerges in response to the momentary movement of the mouse. Each element can be interpreted as a different voice within the poem. Although the resulting text is produced largely independent of a reader’s intentions, it cannot be generated without the reader’s inputs.

4.	Nio (2001) : An interactive audio work and sound project programmed to produce music in response to a visitor's actions   It is a mix of music, sound poetry, and visual poetry that invites the player to create a little composition from the sixteen contained audio recordings. In verse one the player plays with layers of audio and visuals. In verse two, she plays with synchronized layers and sequences of audio and visuals. It is a kind of lettristic dance, or alternative music video. In Nio, when a new sound begins playing, it causes the animations to change, which is a case of the audio controlling the visual. Nio was produced in Shockwave, which is now obsolete. Although no words are involved, it is a poetic work that pulls directly from avant-garde literary tradition which challenges conventional definitions of poetry.

5.	Oppen Do Down (2001): An atypical musical instrument that allows the user to select loops of five-second duration with a singing voice uttering similar sounds to those graphically represented on the screen. The reader can stack up to eight layers of sound by selecting multiple words.

6.	Arteroids (2001-2004) collapses the boundaries between poem and game. The user navigates an id-entity,/I. piece of text over the screen and shoots down menacing words or sequences that float randomly into the field of vision. When hit, these arteroids explode in circular sprays of atomized letters accompanied by a distorted sounds. If the id-entity word is hit by the antagonistic text elements, it explodes. The controls of the game allow the text elements to be edited and changed, Their speeds and colors can be altered, and its other behaviors can be modified The game questions the limits of poetry and breaks down barriers between art forms. It tests words in new environments and suggests new ways they might behave and interact as texts. This is a new kind of non-static art, in which the outcomes are never the same twice. It is a more concrete form of conceptual art with a hands on-component. Even choosing where and whether to destroy certain phrases is a creative activity

7. On Lionel Kearns (2004): A digital essay combining text, images, sound and cinematography to present a randomized nonlinear exploration of Lionel Kearns' poems, ideas, and influences. Although much of Kearns' early work preceded the digital age, Andrews’ treatment suggests that it was a forerunner of what was to come. The centre piece of the essay, referenced and quoted in various iterations and configurations, is Kearns’ Birth of God / uniVers (BoG/uVr) digital mandala, composed in 1965, which is frequently attributed as a non-electronic precursor of code poetry. . Andrews’ digital artistry showcases his ability to layer, collage, and integrate multiple media forms to create a cohesive and informative example of electronic literary criticism.

8.	 Jig Sound (2007-2011): Interactive sonic composition tool and playback instrument created with Director/Lingo, based on Andrews’s concept of the heap, a musical form consisting of a collection of sound files, each represented visually as a sound icon that can be attached to other such sound icons via horizontal or vertical lines. The lines make the sound files play sequentially or simultaneously. Usually the sounds are structured as loops. A sound icon also can theoretically have an animation associated with it. So that when the icon’s sound plays, its animation plays too, synchronized to the sound.

9.	 dbCinema (2010): A graphics and language synthesizer that uses results from Web searches to render a processed animated poem according to parameters established by the viewer, who enters a ‘concept’ word and other instructions. The user can alternatively use local directories of images, making it possible to assemble unique animations from both private and public sources. This versatile and participatory tool can produce unique personal examples of patterned and abstract poetry and art. Viewers use ‘brushes’ to adjust minute details that influence events on the screen, as they ‘paint’ the ‘movie’ that they collaboratively produce with the network. DbCinema is a unique and important development tool for experimental generative cinema and related fields.

10.	 Aleph Null 1.0 (2011): is a set of interactive digital tools that offers the user a chance to play with a dynamic, ever-changing textual landscape. In the spirit of Andrews’ earlier works such as A Pen and dbCinema, Aleph Null uses language and imagery as the ink of a pen that writes reconstituted images on the screen. Controlling both input and output, the operator induces a limitless visual output that spreads continuously across the screen, never repeating its endless patterns. The participants can create their own images that the Algorithm chews on, morphing, obliterating, layering, altering them, depending on the brush or nib that the user chooses. Once the process begins, it tends to invoke a kind of meditative state, as the watcher views or interacts with the ongoing events on the screen. To use Aleph Null is to enter Andrews’ thought process, poetics, and vision.” Aleph Null 3.1 (2019): is a software tool, a never ending project, and a series of collaborations with other artists. Its most recent configuration is as a series of gallery prints, presented in a fine art photographic tradition.

11.	 Sea of Po (2024): A new interactive kinetic poetry animism project including a tool set for visual poets and artists, along with an experiential poetry magazine for the works of digital collaborators.

These are a few examples of Jim Andrews' diverse body of work.