Spring 2023 Editors’ Note
Spring 2023 Editors’ Note By Florence Gonsalves and Amanda Hodes Welcome to the Spring 2023 issue of The New River: A Journal of Digital Art & Literature. Since 1996, The New River has sustained its reputation as one of the longest-running journals devoted to electronic literature and digital art. With the development of new technologies, […]
YOU JUST GOT LAID OFF!—Ivan Zhao
“YOU JUST GOT LAID OFF!” By Ivan Zhao We recommend experiencing this piece in fullscreen at this link. You Just Got Laid Off is a webart piece made as an emotional response to the massive layoffs happening in the tech industry, my own experience having a rescinded offer, and the lackluster approach that many […]
Cafeína—José Aburto
“Cafeína” By José Aburto Please experience this piece in fullscreen at this link. It all starts with a cup and inside it we pour all the possible variations of a coffee. Each ingredient has been resignified with a verse, but all the poems have the same end: “you must stay alert.” This interactive poem is […]
Didactic Mergers, Things r Happening, We r Aging and Here—Dahlia Bloomstone
Didactic Mergers, Things r Happening, We r Aging and Here By Dahlia Bloomstone In Didactic Mergers, Things r Happening, We r Aging and Here, there is a collision of the animated and IRL, divided into three acts. The repetitive parts of the script are meant to think through aging in the sex work industry […]
Gray Hairs—Terhi Marttila
Gray Hairs By Terhi Marttila Please experience this piece in fullscreen at this link. Accessibility notice for flashing and visual strain. Gray Hairs is an interactive poem for the browser (desktop and mobile devices) about ageing and the gendered practice of dyeing one’s hair. Black circles (hairs) on screen slowly fade to invisibility. Clicking […]
Fading—Anni Garza Lau
Fading By Anni Garza Lau Please experience this piece in fullscreen at this link. Content warning for gender violence. For its ideal operation, it is recommended to use 1920 x 1080 screens, but if the text does not appear complete, reduce the size of the browser to 80% and refresh. Using simple mouse gestures and interacting […]
The Water Seller (Mai Ruwa)—Faith Bassey and Deena Larsen
“The Water Seller (Mai Ruwa)” By Faith Bassey and Deena Larsen Please experience this work in fullscreen at this link. “The Water Seller (Mai Ruwa)” portrays a woman’s determination to succeed, learn, and heal—even through the death of her husband and disapproval of her village. The story is set in Nigeria in 1988, a time of […]
The Love Letters Suite—Scott Rettberg
The Love Letters Suite By Scott Rettberg The Love Letters Suite is a set of four code poems I made during the month February 2023. There are few different elements at play here that diverge from my usual creative practice in electronic literature. The first is […]
I could kiss, say, —Jon Stone
“I could kiss, say,” By Jon Stone Please experience this piece in fullscreen at this link. “I could kiss, say,” can be played with keyboard (space + arrow keys), mouse or touch screen. It is a ‘ludokinetic poem’; that is, a poem that imbues the reader with responsibility for (and implicates them in) one or […]
Lecsicon—¡wénrán zhào!
Lecsicon By ¡wénrán zhào! Please experience this piece in fullscreen at this link. Below is a prompt the artist wrote for GPT 3.5 Turbo, the large language model that currently drives ChatGPT. In response, the model creates acrostics but in sentence form. Thousands of word-sentence pairs compose this piece, Lecsicon: Linguists Enthusiastically Catalog Symbols, Interpreting Carefully […]