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
