New Word Order: Basra

"In the gaming environment of New Word Order: Basra, the player is invited to read, explore, and destroy words taken from a Billy Collins' poem, sample lines of which read, 'walk inside the poem's room/ and feel the walls for a light switch. They begin beating it with a hose/ to find out what it really means.' If interpretation itself disfigures poetic language, then the player of New Word Order: Basra makes that violence literal by using an arsenal of weapons (including a crow bar) to disfigure and reconfigure the words of Collins' poem." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two

"Sandy Baldwin is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. Under his leadership, the CLC develops projects such as The Phenomenology of the Virtual, an ongoing collaboration with the artist/theorist Alan Sondheim on experience and performance in virtual environments and The Plain_Text Project, facilitating discussion and debate on the agency and programming of writing technologies. He has a forthcoming book on nanotechnology and cultural theory, [another] forthcoming book co-written with Alan Sondheim on the analog and the digital, and another book in progress on codework and poetics. Baldwin was a member of several groups pioneering chat room poetry and performance in the early 1990's, with widely published work and performances around the world (including at Lollapalooza). His recent creative work focuses on interactive spatial poetry in computer game environments and hybrids of machinima, video, and codework." -- from Contributor Bios, The Iowa Review Web, Volume 8, Number 3, September 2006