I am sorry to report that a couple weeks ago Millie Niss, a superb, 36 year old electronic artist and (often Oulipian) poet from the Buffalo NY area, departed from this earth. However her Spork World lives on. I never met or talked with her, and to be honest was only vaguely familiar with her work until recently. Just wanted to shout out to the NET that I feel she left us with some really great stuff! For instance the Regex Haiku Generator is some of the most wonderfully succinct programmatic poetry I've seen. As with many of her online works, an Adobe Flash application is employed with a rare sense of outrageous straightforwardness. Functionally inviting yet often confounding in effect...

As one can discover, many of her creations are not as playful as these. Some are rather intense, dynamic, unrelenting. Speaking for myself only, I feel her oeuvre is like a breath of fresh air in certain spheres of the media arts where swift, pack-minded fashion and technical cleverness/materiality have often reigned. Millie went beyond.