''Shan Shui'' is an

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or Generative literature, algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature ar ...

work by Chen Qian Xun, first published in 2014, that combines background images with poetry through digital technology. There are nine different background images in five different places on the page. When the reader clicks on the page, the background images change. At the same time, a poem will be appear in every click, the poem was made by re-ordering some of the character in a

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

that has 38 Chinese character and the to create as a new landscape.

Origins and influences

''Shan Shuis author, Chen Qian Xun, is a media artist and researcher who has traveled to many countries and is passionate about learning languages. She is passionate about studying digital technology and language to express art. ''Shan shui'' was her first work. This experimental work provided experience for her subsequent productions.

Publication history

This work was originally published in CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action, Issue 14, in Fall 2014. It was subsequently collected during the winter by

Drunken Boat (''The Drunken Boat'') is a Symbolist poem written in the summer of 1871 by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, then aged sixteen. The poem, one-hundred lines long, with four alexandrines per each of its twenty-five quatrains, describes the drifting a ...

, an online literary journal. It was included in the Electronic Literature Organization Collection Volume 3 in 2016.

Genre and programming

This digital work combines images and language with coding. The work used JavaScript and was published on a website. The poem is a generative one, wher the computer generates poems in Wujue (五绝), a format that provides four lines of five syllables following certain tonal constraints.

Literary significance and critical reception

LICHENG XIE in If DeLillo was an E-Lit Writer: DeLillo's Language as Visual Art in the Digital Age cites ''Shan Shui'' as an example to show the image features of natural language. Random arrangements of poems and background images are combined into a variety of meaningful landscape paintings, making the language part of the background image. He believes that this work highlights the relationship between language and image, and shows the "reshapable" characteristics of language in pictures. In Beauty in code - 5 ways digital poetry combines human and computer languages, Author David Wright also use this work as an example in his visual verse. Poets have combined poetry and images for centuries. While poets of the past would use sculpture and poetry together, contemporary poets can use digital technology for the same purpose. ''shan shui'' is regarded as a symbol of the combination of poetry and digital coding. Zijun Wang contents that the use of background images as part of the meaning of the piece qualify this piece as electronic poetry as well as

computer-generated poetry Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in certain ...

References

{{reflist

External links

Shan Shui , ELMCIP
See the original work at

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