I ♥ E-Poetry

This multimedia hypertext work weaves together unpopulated images, ambient sounds, and the text of overheard conversations in several cities to produce an immersive experience of a journey. Best experienced in cinematic conditions (good speakers or headphones, large screen, dark room, no distractions, fullscreen browser window), this is a navigationally minimalist. Each image has an area you can click on to go to the next, and it’s not difficult to find, since it tends to be large and placed over a focal point in the photograph. The simplicity of the interface and knowing from the outset that it is a linear experience, allows readers to relax into the work and not be distracted by wondering about where to go or what decision to make. The sounds and scheduled presentation of the texts also encourage paucity and reflection on the whole sequence of images as a whole.

From the outset, Mouton describes the piece as “a linear, nocturnal amble” which is enough of a narrative framework to lead us to connect the images as a single conceptual entity. The spaces photographed are not famous landmarks, the recognition of which would remind us that they are from different locations. The music and text of the conversations serve as bridges from one image to another, encouraging us to build continuity in our minds and seek a story in the piece.

Whether there is one to be found, constructed, or neither, this piece deploys language poetically, laying it over time and space in a spellbinding visual and aural canvas. As you read these voices and hear them in your mind, think about who is uttering them. Does one of the voices belong to the person whose perspective we inhabit in this work?

This poetic Internet artwork makes a visceral connection between the documentation of frags in Counter-Strike multiplayer servers and the military actions documented in the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary database. As it connects the fake videogame death to military actions that usually resulted in the loss of one or many real human lives, it performs Google Earth searches to display the location of these actions. By presenting three events and locations at a time, it allows for the visuals to load and creates a time buffer to allow us to focus our attention on a particular location for longer than the few seconds between frags allow. And since we are unable to control anything in this piece, except the choice of server at the beginning, we become powerless spectators of violence made abstract through terse language and eerie landscapes devoid of human beings.

There is a poetic quality to the simply structured constrained language in the Counter-Strike logs and military reports. Some logs don’t display user identities, producing phrases reminiscent of E. E. Cummings, such as “undefined killed someone.” This simplicity reads vertically as a kind of refrain, a violent tercet which makes the Afghan War Diary reports stand out for their rich detail. Read them aloud to appreciate how the juxtaposition brings out the violence in a piece at a poetic level through repetition and variation, rhythms and rhyme.

And think about what isn’t being said about each event, all the missing details, context, imagery, and stories that aren’t being told in reports that become pure data, dehumanized like these empty landscapes in Google Earth.

This responsive visual poem is a study of writing technologies and the word, whether it’s “ink sunk into fibrous paper” or “light through liquid crystals.” Inspired by Stephane Mallarmé’s poetic and theoretical writing as studied by Kittler, Trettien’s JavaScript (& JQuery) work explores the range of shades between the white page and the black sky as backgrounds against which writing can occur with light or ink.

Designed not only for unresponsive screens or pages, this poem is written in code to display and behave in environments that allow for readers to provide input that the words react to. As the reader interacts with the language on the screen through the two interfaces she provides, the text hovers between readability and an illegible typographical overload. And the source code offers no shortcuts, since each letter is separated by extensive code that positions it on the screen. You have to get inside the page and navigate it with the tools offered by your platform.

As far as platform is concerned, there is a noteworthy difference in how one interacts with the “write” portion of this piece. In a mouse or trackpad powered computer one must move a pointer around, which means that if one doesn’t want to accidentally mouse over the spiraling letters, one has to dodge them. This makes for a completely different reading strategy with a touchscreen device where one can simply touch a letter to activate it. The reader’s symbolic presence in the text is less evident in touchscreen devices, though the tactile interaction enhances a sense of presence at the same time.

As you interact with and attempt to read this piece, consider how effectively it engages and exceeds, not only Mallarmé and Kittler, but also Eugen Gomringer’s notion of the “constellation.”

This elegant hypertext poem consists of 28 links arranged on an excerpt from a book on bone biology. The links are barely distinguishable from the rest of the text, yet lead to poetic language that forms a distinctive contrast to the scientific text in the paragraph. The relation between the two texts isn’t simply tonal counterpoints: they are deeply interconnected, metaphorically and especially thematically. One key to understanding these relations is in the first link, which leads to the image below:

This diagram maps a relationship, showing alternatives paths a couple can take when faced with the kind of situation described in the scientific text. See where the paths lead and you’ll note recurring elements, most of which are not positive for the health of the relationship.

The controlling metaphor for this piece is that of the health of a relationship is similar to bone health is best understood when reading how each conceptual domain maps on the other. You’ll notice how gender helps you understand the language of this biological text, and  see how the processes and approaches described help you understand the relationship in the poem.

Once you’ve explored the hypertext and appreciated how the poem emerges from the interplay of these arts and sciences, take a look at the code for a more independent representation of the poetic text. You may also appreciate that you are not dealing with an old-school hypertext with many documents brought together with links, but with a minimal number of files using JavaScript links to lines within the same document— a code design that resonates with the themes of interiority and exteriority of bodies, bones, and relationships.

This work prompts readers to write according to a set of poetic constraints, offering original, famous, and obscure forms and examples. The interface offers a series of virtual pages floating in fixed positions in space, and allowing readers to tilt them, zoom in and out, and flip them over to read the examples on their verso. A close examination of its yellowed pages reveals barely perceptible ink marks from handwriting on the other side, but that information is missing when one flips the page. Why evoke such physicality in the pages?

One reason for this and other complementary design choices is to give the readers a sense of the age of these poetic traditions. We can see Medievalism in its use of paper images, the ornate borders on each page, the choice of poetic examples using Early Modern English, the references to hermetic texts— such as the Smaragdine Tablet, which is called a sonnet by virtue of its 14 lines— and by using grid structures to organize language into letters for horizontal, vertical, and diagonal reading. With references to obscure and famous sonnet structures from Italian, English, and German traditions (Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus) and a few invented ones based on Medieval traditions, this work reminds us that we can look to the past as a source of rich poetic experimentation.

I suspect that successfully taking this “psychometric test” leads to “an unequivocal sense of certainty.” I’m just not certain of what.

This “psychometric trial” prompts readers to explore their sacred name through manipulation of the “lettered sieve” an infinite set of language constructed as follows:

For the following trial, imagine the alphabet, followed by, in alphabetical order, all permutations of pairs of letters of the alphabet, followed by all permutations of triples of letters of the alphabet, followed by quadruples, and so on for quintuples, sextuples, and so on. Let us call this infinite set of letters a ‘Lettered Sieve.’ Possessing a working concept of the Lettered Sieve is essential to completing the first seven parts of the trial.

The procedural construction of this kind of data set that dates back to antiquity and proliferated among monks in the Middle Ages, who used them for reflection on mystical topics. This work’s design evokes that frame of reference with rich details, such as background images of old paper, fully capitalized text with variable letter size and evenly justified margins, words arranged to form shapes, and more. The language choices also evoke mysticism and even self-harm, all while challenging the imagination with language procedures that might give even Oulipians nightmares to carry out.

As you read this work, think about how they focus your attention on the manipulation of language— mathematically, conceptually, visually, and physically— in a masterfully visceral display of ostranenie.

This work of generative Internet art presents an essay to readers that reads like an essay written by a graduate student that has done nothing but read Postmodern theory for years. The result might be brilliant, nonsensical— perhaps both— but it exists on a different reality as the rest of the world’s and is likely to have little impact on anything. You might as well pump all that high theory into a machine and put together a little program to produce some semi-random output from that lexicon and then see if readers will read the results at face value.

For this piece to have any function at all, requires a mind that is eager to project meaning onto experience. If we expect an experience to be meaningless, our minds certainly do not bother to piece together the chaos of clues that make the world comprehensible. With Chomsky’s famous pseudo-sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” for example, we undergo an initial attempt to identify a meaningful message. Convincing the mind to choose at the crossroads between potential comprehensibility and inevitable noise is an important task.

This is a crossroads readers of poetry reach when they come across a particularly challenging poem. In many cases, they will make the interpretive leaps because they hope the poet’s intentional hand (whether real or imagined) will catch them and lend them support in their interpretation— either that or because their professor asked them to and they know they have him or her as a safety net. But what is the point in reading the output of this “behavioral art?”

Part of it is figuring out the intention behind the algorithm. What point does JudsoN want to make with a work that generates endless theory papers, with keywords, sections, figures, captions, references, and a title? Is this work a critique of this kind of writing?

But more interesting (to me) is to examine the artistry in the program— one we can’t access but we can intuit, and even reverse-engineer. And the only way we can do so is by reading multiple iterations, carefully, to find patterns, repetition, variations, places where the algorithm fails or suceeds in producing grammatical or sensible sentences. This is old-school data mining: carefully focused human intelligence scrutinizing a text to find conceptual gems. Gloriously absurd or lucid phrases that excite the intellect, even if by accident.

The search for meaning that drove the New Critics teach generations of scholars and students to perform close readings of texts, was completely subverted by Post-structuralist theory, which showed that all meaning is constructed and can therefore be deconstructed. We might have come full circle with generative works like “Essay,” carefully reading that which we know is meaningless, because we might find something worth ascribing meaning to.

This scheduled poem plays like a silent video composed of a series of photographs of a wheat field in the background and kinetic language in the foreground. The text unfolds through a series of transformations of words by moving letters around into to form other words, and letter substitutions that create rapid word sequences. Timing is all in this poem, which could be organized internally by the speed at which its words are transformed and the means by which they change from one to the next. Notice the speed at which a sequence of four letter words change through letter substitution, forming a stream of associations, and the emphasis this gives to the pause at the end. Contrast this to the longer words that transform into other words by moving letters around, emphasizing each word and its meaning as moments with a thematic charge that punctuates the poem.

Allow this short poem to loop and read it a few times to allow its thematic and visual coherence to sink in.

For the past three years, Jhave has been using his Twitter account as a platform for a poetic constraint. Whenever a person follows him (that is, not a ‘bot) he writes a tweet poem that is exactly 140 character long. As one can see in All My Tweets, he had started this practice before, but committed to it on February 8, 2010— “continuing the anti-pragmatic stance of twitting (doesn’t that sound absurd?) only whn followed by a non-robot and always with exact letters”— and has since adhered strictly to the constraint.

Read individually, each tweet is a concentrated prose poem: a conduit for Jhave’s imaginative, political, and bodily voice. He claims his tweets “never reference much of a reality” but I think they do— they are tweet-sized stream-of-consciousness performances, snapshots of his thought process. Read the examples above, all written within a few days of each other and you’ll notice there are threads that weave in and out of each tweet, such as an interest in grain-based products (bran muffin, corn meal, bread, breakfast cereal), perhaps because they were all written in the morning. Tweets written with greater time intervals between them still share ideas, but not in as high a concentration, which suggests that this is more of a spontaneous performance rather than a large work delivered over time.

To provide a sense of some of Jhave’s language choices over the course of these three years of performance, I have generated a Wordle word cloud with the 50 most commonly used words, after filtering out the most “common” English words (articles, conjunctions, and such).

Those familiar with his work will recognize some of these words choices expressed in his whimsically and powerfully expressive e-poems (read more). Those unfamiliar have a rare opportunity before them: by following him on this social network, they can prompt the creation of a new piece of this social media performance, subscribing to enrich their Twitter stream with occasional and original snippets of poetry.

This work is a series of live Twitter performances of characters, each of which has an account and interacts in this social network to form what Breeze describes as a “socumentary.”

“A “socumentary” is an entertainment form that merges Choose Your Own Adventure /Alternate Reality Drama/Social Game and Social Networking conventions. The result is a type of synthetic mockumentary that exists entirely within social media formats.

This work was launched on May 8, 2010 at the Arnolfini Gallery as part Performance Writing 2010, unfolded over the course of four sessions in which the characters interacted in concentrated bursts until they came to an abrupt end on May 27, 2010. This highly organized series of character conversations on the social network invited the audience to participate by interacting with the primary characters, becoming secondary characters in the unfolding narrative. Organizing everything was the cryptic Pupa Mistress, who prepared transcripts of the events, prepared summaries of the events with a meta-narrative that is more fascinating than the interactions themselves, gathered some of the interactions on a Twitter list, and engaged some of the secondary characters between sessions.

The characters’ personalities and their interactions are what make this work come alive, since they enact some Twitter and social media archetypes.

I will not go into too much detail on each character’s proclivities, but if you’re a Twitter user you’ll recognize some of the behaviors. Each one seems to have an interest they can be tracked with: photography, World of Warcraft, poetry, augmented reality, love, and plain hostility. The secondary characters range from curious observational and active engagement to trolling, all of whom Pupa Mistress measures, collates, describes, and narrates.

The narrative that unfolds in and between the episodes are imperfectly collected by the blog, Twitter list, hashtag, and account records. And as in “#OutsideUrDoor” one needs to be a kind of Internet detective to follow each trail of crumbs and assemble a narrative sure to creep the bejesus out of you. Enjoy!