I ♥ E-Poetry

This work is inspired by the real-time events triggered by a fatal shooting incident in MIT and a manhunt for suspects allegedly involved in the Boston Marathon bombings as reported through social media, particularly Twitter. (Here’s a link describing the situation as I write this entry, followed by a snapshot of the #Watertown hashtag in Twitter. It is 6:00 am EST).

Part of the story of these horrifying events is how this social network is providing thousands of human observers, reporters, and analysts— all responding much faster than all the other news media— all seeking to contribute information and opinions. And this offers massive amounts of data— much of it useless for the purposes of a police investigation— but important nonetheless. Moments like this give us a way into the collective psyche, as gathered in millions of tweets— a rich dataset that will surely be studied by those with the financial and data-mining means to access the archives. But as this happens live and we can access the live tweets and hashtag, it is up to us to reflect upon what we read, as Mez Breeze has done with this work.

Taking a sample of six tweets from a 16-minute period during the early moments of the event, she focuses on some of the “firsts,” commenting with mezangelle writing in brackets after each tweet to point out an alarming trajectory of public sentiment developing in such a short time. The trend seems to begin quite innocently with factual passing along of information, to analysis and language representation of the photo, to “gamification of criminal activity on a MMO scale” (links added), to fantastically absurd speculation, all leading to violence and a panoptic society with a lynchmob mentality. As an experienced writer and artist of digital networks, Mez has used her acumen to find a kind of ideological snowball poem in the Twitter stream, expressing her sense of alarm between the lines, brackets, and parentheses.

During times of crisis, when our access to massive communication networks allow us to share information and express our opinions on public spaces, we should experience art as a means for self-reflection. Breeze’s piece, minimalistically built from tweets and a Livejournal entry,  comes to us at a speed appropriate for the moment— as do these words of wisdom by William Shakespeare, as tweeted during these events by the @IAM_SHAKESPEARE bot.

This poem is built on a two dimensional array with a simple interface that allows people to read the text horizontally and vertically. The position of the pointer (or a contact point on a touchscreen device) triggers which line or column of text is highlighted for readability. Extracted from an ambitious work titled Unbound, this interface illustrates some of the reading strategies necessary for the larger work, which is implemented in a printable form.

Paying close attention to this work, a few details stand out:

• The text is rendered with a fixed-width font (one in which each character occupies the same amount of space), which allows the creation of a precise grid.
• Each line is divided in half, forming a visually perceptible caesura right down the middle of its 45 character lines.
• Each half of each line contains exactly 22 characters, including spaces.
• All but one of the half-lines contain 5 words. The bottom line in the left column has 4 words.
• There is no punctuation in this poem.
• Most of the horizontal and vertical lines make perfect sense, though some are more challenging than others.

These are some fascinating constraints to write under, and they are methodically adhered to. One can notice how the first line and first column are very clear and the most thematic— they are the least constrained, or at least the easiest to write. But as one descends down the grid, the lines become increasingly opaque as the kinds of words that can be used become more constrained. This is not as noticeable in the columns because there are only 5 columns per half-line, restarting on the 6th column, but there are 12 lines in the poem, which makes it exponentially more difficult.

Considering how well this piece holds together, this is an impressive performance. And I shudder to think of the effort needed to write a 220-page work exploring and expanding on that concept, which took Waber 6 years to complete. I look forward to reading that work— soon.

This new entry in the PoEMM series was recently published as a free iOS app, following closely a redesigned website and a booklet documenting the series. Designed for touchscreen devices, this poem fills the screen with its lines scrolling from one side to another at different speeds and in different directions. Readers encountering this wall of text may find it a bit overwhelming— too much language at the same time to apprehend.

The desire to stabilize the text, to gain some control over it leads to touch the text, to see if one can control it, slow down its motion, maybe make it change direction. And it works… sort of. One can do some of these things, but the control is limited to a gesture— I’m being deliberately vague to leave room for discovery. To seek too much control over the text leads to a typographical explosion, of sorts that leads to obscured portions of the text, as seen below.

As the words expand beyond readability, the letter you initially touched remains transparent, becoming a color lens by which we can read the rest of the text. Motion does not cease, however, and while readability is achievable, the app is designed to resist the comfort of a static text (unless via screen capture). It also invites playful exploration, rewarding multiple touchscreen interactions with different effects.

As you read and manipulate the poem, pay attention to the thematic connection between the poem’s text and its meaningful behaviors: the words’ movement and response to your touch. You’ll see how this enacts a visual deconstruction of a terminology that exposes issues of power and control over language.

This cleverly conceptualized poem engages the social media meme as an canvas, cultural construct, and writing constraint. Using a meme generating service to write the texts on the memes and publish them as images, arranging them in the page. As co-author of the webcomic The World According to Geek, Valle Javier could’ve easily arranged the images as panels on a horizontal comic strip, but instead chose to do so vertically. This reinforces a poetic reading of this work as a whole, using each meme as a unit of meaning that is part of a textual flow.

This genre of meme offers two constraints that often work together: a bipartitie language structure and each meme’s conventions. With the exception of the “My Parents Are Dead” meme, in which the language is arranged in speech bubbles, all the memes have captions on the top and bottom of the image. In many cases, the content of each caption is constrained by the meme itself, i.e. asking a question, starting a sentence with “Please tell me” (as seen above), rhyming with the original phrase, or offering a specific line (“It’s a trap!”), and more. Here is a complete list of the memes used, in order of appearance, with links to their entries in the Internet Meme Database:

• Philosoraptor
• Condescending Wonka
• Futurama Fry
• It’s a trap!
• One does not simply walk into Mordor
• Matrix Morpheus
• Ancient Aliens
• My Parents Are Dead
• The Rent Is Too Damned High
• Inception

Does anyone else see a kind of poem in the list above? Were the meme titles part of the logic behind choosing specific memes?

Whether that is the case or not, these memes tend to circulate individually, so to repurpose them as a writing constraint and combine them to produce a coherent poem is no small feat. As you read the poem, consider how the two part structure of each meme could be read as a couplet, and that the spatial arrangement (see the clip above) creates a second couplet between the bottom of one and the top of the next, which allows for multiple readings. Consider also the role of the meme in the thematic engagement with memory and forgetfulness that shapes this poem.

These words aren’t written on static images: they’re written on social media objects that have behaviors of their own and circulate as powerfully as a catchy line of verse echoes in our collective memory.

This hypertext poem takes a simple concept and makes it a tour de force. Each word is a link to an image, not of any image, but of photographs which use blurred motion and other effects to convey a sense of speed and evoke the speaker’s tone. The title suggests that either the speaker is in need of catharsis, or the poem itself is the cathartic artistic expression.

The spatial arrangement of the lines lead to readings that speed up and come to hard stops through spatial and orthographic punctuation. The punctuation marks, normally barely noticeable on the page, stand out with their whiteness on the brownish-grey background color, particularly when accompanied by all the orange link texts. Why are there no links in the punctuation? Is it because it divides, rather than link (at least when read aloud), pausing the reader in his desire to run and get away?

The linked photographs that open in new windows (or tabs) take you away from the poem, providing a sense of movement, but they are images that contain information but lead nowhere else, echoing the speaker’s frustrated desire to go away. Consider how the content of the images, particularly the blurred motion photographs, capture motion in a still medium, like the words on the screen capture time in space.

Our eyes run from left to right, only to come back to the left margin. Over and over. We click on each word and go to the next window or tab. And close it to return to the poem. Over and over. And at some point during that feedback loop, we understand.

This program mines articles in the New York Times home page, and using a dictionary and syllable counting algorithm and a few filters, discover sentences that can be cut into the shape of a haiku. The output of this generator is vetted by NY Times journalists, who identify the best ones for publication in the Tumblr blog, after generating background art based on the first line of the haiku. Read Harris’ about page for more details on this breakthrough in generative poetry.

Readers familiar with this blog or with the long tradition of generative poetry may wonder why I describe this project as a “breakthrough,” since electronic poetry has had a long acquaintance with the generation and discovery of haiku. Haiku generators have been around at least as early as 1967, as documented in John Morris’ “How to Write Poems with a Computer” (thanks to Adam Parrish for the lead).

Some of the earlier ones explored in this blog are “Free Haiku!” (2002) and “Exquisite Corpse Poems” (1996) both of which use relatively simple mechanisms to produce haiku, yet produce results that employ and challenge the tradition. Generation alone is a simple enough feat, evidenced by the 28,600 hits yielded in a Google search for “haiku generator.” What makes haiku generation interesting is the complexity of its algorithm and the quality of its data set. For example, Scott Rettberg’s “Frequency” (2011) generates compelling haiku because they are selected from a set of lines he wrote guided by carefully designed constraints. The time of the individually authored data set seems to be passing, as seen in a contemporary generator, Nanette Wylde’s “HaikU” (2011), which allows its audience to contribute lines to its database.

Databases are among the most powerful tools placed at our disposal in the contemporary Web, including sophisticated dictionaries and massive and ever growing data repositories, such as Twitter and The New York Times. Two automated haiku finding Twitter bots recently reviewed in this blog are “Tweet Haikus” (2013) by Brandon Wood and “HaikuD2” (2012) by John Burger. Wood has published his source code and explained how to create a similar bot, if anyone is interested, though it is not as refined an instrument as Burger’s earlier bot, which also gives back to the original authors of the tweets. Both of these credit the original source, as does “Times Haiku.” As may be evident from this brief survey, there is nothing particularly groundbreaking in this project, from a technical standpoint.

From a cultural standpoint, this is an important moment for generative literature, (which has a rich history and corpus of its own) because it has begun to be recognized and produced in mainstream sources. For the flagship of American journalism The New York Times to legitimize this kind of generative literature by producing and publishing its results, even when hedged by an essay as humble as Harris’, is a sign that electronic literature is entering public consciousness. It is now time to remind the public that literary experimentation in digital media wasn’t invented today, and that they should learn about the body of work that preceded it.

Is it prophetic for this news to break on the week of the first Electronic Literature Showcase at the Library of Congress with an exhibition curated by Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens titled “Electronic Literature and its Emergent Forms?” I think so.

Electronic literature has arrived.

This Twitter character came to life in the “Reality: Being @spenserpratt” netprov, was christened “Tempspence” by Pratt’s followers (as a “temporary” Spencer), and lives on in this Twitter account, along with a community called The Tempspence poets. Their symbiotic existence was sustained by social media interactions of a group of people that came together through this netprov, and extended the life of the performance beyond its metaphorical covers.

When “Reality: Being @spencerpratt” ended and everything was revealed, Mark Marino and Rob Wittig did the Twitter equivalent of stepping from behind the curtain to bow and thank the audience, polling them for some of their favorite poetic constraints. The enthusiasm and pleasure in the interactions launched the Tempspence Poets and the poetry games continued in earnest for a while, with @Tempspence as moderator and communication bridge, but it has slowed down almost to a standstill. As participation waned, the authors seem to have concluded the story arc offering some closure by resolving Tempspence’s love dilemma even working in a crossover with “#sootfall.” For now, the character remains in Twitter, occasionally retweeting or participating in a conversation or two, perhaps awaiting a new storyline for him to return to activity.

This is at the heart of a networked improv fiction: a character existing beyond its scripted existence. Literature, film, television, and other media have many examples of characters appearing in multiple works and spinoffs abound, but this is an unforeseen improvisational extension of a performance of a character beyond the edges of a conceptualized work of fiction. Perhaps this could be framed as a coda or an encore to “Reality.” Perhaps this will be compiled, archived, and assigned a title as a kind of authorial retroactive continuity.

Note (March 30, 2013): I received a comment from Mark Marino that sheds some light on the character’s expanded existence:

I should mention that the Tempspence poets collectively run the @tempspence account with Rob Wittig & I. He’s like the Dread Pirate Roberts or the Pope, except rather than turning the name and role to one successor, we handed it over to the a group of bandits (fandits?) or church ladies, as the case may be.

Tempspence & the Tempspence Poets have evolved from symbiotic separate entities to a fused character, humming with potential. Let’s see what happens to the character in the near future.

In the meantime, the Web retains traces of their interactions, captured in Storify lists, Tumblr sites, and the short-lived Twitter archives. Here is a list of the games, as reported by Marino and Wittig in this article:

• #prattplus7: replace each noun in a famous Spencer Pratt quote with the noun 7 later in the dictionary.
• #twouplets: (Twitter couplets) rhyme your tweet with someone else’s.
• #centode: Tweet about your boyfriend or girlfriend for a collective poem.
• #shibboleth: type a tweet or post a doodle that people could use to prove it’s you.
• #ekphrastic: describe yourself in a revealing picture
• #imspencer: type a line you want to hear coming out of @spencerpratt’s mouth
• #myccb: describe the people you live with as though they were the CBB housemates
• #jungbro: describe your personality as made up of CBB participants

Read this Tumblr for more elaborate descriptions. It’s worth noting thatThe Tempspence poets continued with other poetry-generating constraints (some documented here), such as: #randompoem, Twitter Chain (“To play Twitter Chain #twain, help tell a new tale from Tempspence’s life. Each person contributes 1 sentence at a time…”), #saga, and who knows what else they’ll come up with.

This Twitter fiction netprov is based on a simple enough premise: reality star Spencer Pratt lost his his cellphone while in London for Celebrity Big Brother, and it was found by a struggling poet who began to use it in whimsical ways to promote poetry. During the three-week performance, the poet prompted Pratt’s followers to write poems based on constraint he provided, was outed as an impostor, dubbed as Tempspence, continued to develop a relationship with his readers as he shared details of his life, and eventually migrated (reborn?) to a new account, @Tempspence, as Pratt regained control of the account.

With this work the authors of OccupyMLA extend their artistic inquiry into identity in social media by “occupying” a celebrity account (with the owner’s permission) and using it as a performance space that comes with a large audience to begin with. They don’t occupy it directly, however, they do so with a carefully scripted character, inspired by Arthur, the protagonist of Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene.” As the performance unfolds, readers’ familiar with Spenser’s epic poem can easily recognize parts of its plot mapped onto Tempspence and modern day London. In addition to the fun poetry games and engaging narrative arc, the larger story is the dynamics of audience trust when unwittingly drawn into what is essentially an activist work.

Before “Reality” the @SpencerPratt twitter account was a fairly typical celebrity twitter account, in which Pratt tweeted about his life, interacted with his followers, and directed his almost a million followers’ attention to causes or topics he was interested in supporting. Once the putative phone changed hands, the beginning of the relationship between the newly authored @SpencerPratt and his followers was a dream come true for many, because they were getting retweeted like never before. These 15 seconds of fame are prized because they are a mark of recognition: something they wrote and tweeted got the attention of a celebrity and was shared online with hundreds of thousands of people. Tempspence himself seemed caught up in the excitement of the moment, as he realized the power— and responsibility— he was donning with this Twitter account.

Perhaps realizing he had a greater responsibility to his vocation as a poet, he quickly began a series of poetry games with his followers, using the prized retweets and follows as a kind of currency to reward those who played along. The poetry games played are a wonderful testament to ancient, modern, and contemporary poetic constraints, and the poems produced by @SpencerPratt’s followers show they were quick learners in what became a kind of Twitter course— the kind taught at Underacademy College. And some of the lessons were more subtle.

Tweets like “I came across a notice for The West Port Book Festival in Edinburgh and thought Heidi & I might grab a flight!” are like a smart bomb, focusing the power of celebrity to direct an audience to a cultural event they might not otherwise attend. Sure, the followers who go just to see Spencer Pratt and his wife Heidi Montag are going to be disappointed, but at the same time they get the thrill of the chase and a chance to be exposed to some book culture. On a similar vein, the tweet “Can anyone recommend little bookstores in London where I might find some quality poetry? I’d like to buy something special for Heidi” and its follow up when he gets a quick, obvious recommendation “yes, I know all about those. But I’m looking for favs. Undiscovered gems! The more obscure the better!” send followers on a search for small, independent bookstores with specialized content. Whether the followers are in London or not is irrelevant: fans eager to please Spencer Pratt are probably not in a demographic known to be interested in obscure bookstores specializing in poetry, but they may do their homework and be exposed to an important aspect of book culture.

It is worth mentioning that throughout the performance (judging from some tweets referring to this) @SpencerPratt received increasing amounts of negative tweets, particularly as the “truth” about the “person” writing in the Twitter account came to light. This is a crucial moment in the performance, because the trust that followers had in the account (a verified one, no less) had been betrayed. It is a testament to Marino and Wittig’s artistry that they were able to regain the audience’s trust by “coming clean” as an impostor and provide enough character-driven context to win over followers. As the audience gained interest in the character it christened as Tempspence, they continued to participate in the poetry games, learning about poetry, electronic literature, the Oulipo and more than they imagined they’d learn when they chose to follow @SpencerPratt.

As the netprov unfolded, willing participants got to write poetry and interact with a fictional character, while those uninterested in interacting with anyone that wasn’t the “real” Spencer Pratt wrote hateful tweets, unfollowed the account, or simply tuned it out. No one is forced to follow anyone or read anything in Twitter, after all. Did those followers who became emotionally invested in Tempspence’s situation feel betrayed when they discovered he was a character? Perhaps. Was this unethical behavior by the authors? No.

They produced a work of performative literature, one that Spencer Pratt wished to direct his followers’ attention to. This is pretty much the same as watching a movie or TV show he recommends, except that it is much more sophisticated because it is a multilayered metanarrative about the performances of a persona. Ghostwriters may not have the most respected jobs in the literary world, but their work isn’t a crime: it’s an established extension of the author function. Spencer Pratt authorized Marino and Wittig to perform this work on a space that belonged to him (as much as anyone can own a Twitter account), along with an audience he had developed. Perhaps he risked losing some followers by playing a trick on them because it might lead them to reflect on how much of a scripted character the Spencer Pratt they see on TV and read on Twitter might be.

It’s about time people realized that unreliable narrators aren’t just safely shut away in books anymore, because literature now extends into social networks and human relations.

I recommend reading the whole transcript of this informally erudite and witty performance to discover a compelling story with a payoff worth analyzing but better left unspoiled. When you get to the end, note the use of the @ symbol at the beginning of each tweet to recognize who is being addressed in that final exchange.

And return tomorrow to read an entry about @Tempspence and the Tempspence Poets.

This bot is a stand-in for Kazemi at the Game Developer’s Conference happening at the time of this posting in San Francisco, because he will not be able to attend for the first time in 10 years. So instead of pining away on Twitter as #GDC tweets flood his stream, he created a bot so his friends could have the pleasure of his company in their own streams, which as we know, is almost as good as his being there. If that were all this piece was, it would be little more than a Kazemi-themed Twitter equivalent of this:

But there’s more to it. Kazemi has been very careful in his design. For instance, he is up-front about it being a bot, so he isn’t really trying to fool anyone into unwittingly becoming the subject of a Turing test. He could’ve patched his bot to his Twitter account, after all, and used the #GDC hashtag, but that would violate his notion of “basic bot etiquette” (a three laws of robotics for social media bots). This bot generates tweets from a template with variables for company names, bars, games, and Twitter friends that have opted in. And that is a key component.

Reading the tweets reveals that:

• Kazemi knows GDC very well from attending it for the past 10 years.
• The data set for the bot is informed by titles of real sessions at the GDC.
• Its scheduling is fine tuned to post at irregular times during dates and times relevant to the GDC activities and consistent with a very active social life that includes board games with friends and plenty of alcohol consumption.
• This bot LOVES the GDC, and is practically a cheerleader for the event by weaving in different iterations of GDC (without actually using the hashtag) along with “colorful metaphors.”
• The total effect is very consistent with the kinds of tweets generated by the event, as evidenced below.

What Kazemi has created is a realistic performance of himself at this conference, one that can serve as an amusing way to fill that Darius-sized empty spot at GDC. It is a kind of placeholder, a reminder that he’s around, and wishes he could be at GDC, which might be just the reminder needed to keep him in the loop when something relevant to him comes up. It is also a kind of practical in-joke, since people who follow the bot and opt in to be included in occasional mentions will attract others, who might unknowingly follow the bot and even ask it questions (as has already been the case). Perhaps most importantly, this bot seems to be a critique at how vacuous the GDC Twitter stream seems to be— people might as well be bots.

Is Kazemi attempting to elevate the conversation with a parodic performance of what not to say or do?

Whatever the answer might be, @Darius_at_GDC has just woken up, after just a few hours of sleep.

And he seems to have a full couple of days ahead of him. Have a good one, Darius at GDC!