BLAST-UP! Is a computer game, a poem and a tribute to Vorticism, the English response to continental avant-garde provocations in the years just before the First World War. Conceived by Katy Price and designed, programmed and realised by Chris Joseph, BLAST-UP! has been created to bring the spirit and ideas of Vorticism into contact with a wider audience. It also aims to extend the capacities of digital poetry, by exploring the extent of reader / user involvement in creating output and supplying input names and terms.

BLAST-UP! is loaded with vocabulary drawn from sources in British mass culture such as Heat Magazine and the Daily Mirror. The player fires at these invading words as they swarm across the screen, accumulating a list of 'Blessed' and 'Blasted' terms. At game over, BLAST-UP! prints a manifesto in the style of the short-lived Vorticist publication, Blast, produced by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis from 1912-1914.

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