The net being a medium that transcends boundaries, I've often wondered why so much of the net art and digital literature I see is either American, British, or Canadian. It's true that English has maintained a stranglehold on the arts produced on the net over the past few years; there are notable exceptions (the French have lately been attracting attention to themselves, with works by Nicolas Clauss and Antoine Schmitt being reviewed and revered by institutions as diverse as Rhizome and trAce, and Italy, Germany, Argentina and Brazil have exported some stellar net artists), but the fact is net art and digital literature seem to be an English-speaking market for the most part. Which is why I often wonder about Duc Thuan.
Duc Thuan is a young Vietnamese digital poet whose work (which can be seen at http://www.ducthuan.com/contents.htm ) has gotten some attention in the primarily English-speaking art world. His take on electronic literature has appeared in Cauldron and Net, the Electronic Poetry Center, Whalelane and Frame.
His is an aesthetic that plays with linearity. These works seem simple, but that smooth surface is riddled from beneath by waves of complexity. Take, for instance, the piece E x s u q u e r a (2000), a little Flash/QuickTime nightmare: right away, you detect that Thuan likes the square and the rectangle: the frame, the box. In fact, the entire interface is based on the box, and subversion of the box via text and electronics: many of the frames here contain elements of concrete and process poetries which are punctuated by linear paragraphs and sentences. Narrative weaves itself in the corners and edges of these boxes; the narative frustrates the procedural nature of some of the frames; the presence of these islands of transparency amid so much opaque play warps what would be too much regularity in the hands of a lesser artist. Structurally, this work is a hypertext meditation on violence: the transparent texts deal with terrorism, gunshots, sex. The text of a typical frame in E x s u q u e r a looks like this:
"DANCE KEN TRESS DANCE TREK NESS TRANSCEND SEEK SNACK DEER NEST SNACK DEER SENT SNACK REED NEST SNACK REED SENT SNACK SEDER NET SNACK SEDER TEN SNACK
