I ♥ E-Poetry

This subtly haunting poem tells the story of how each letter from the alphabet disappeared, or was made to disappear, by corporations obeying a secret agenda. The conspiracy theory overtones are underscored by the use of sound, a short loop of metallic whispering wind or water and a handful of soft musical notes. Clicking on each letter on the left hand column will take you to the corresponding letter and narrative of its disappearance, with the large letter disappearing as you read the accompanying text, but it also starts a slower, almost imperceptible, fading process of those letters in the entire work. If you click through quickly and read the whole poem you may not even notice, but step away for a minute and you’ll find that the letters you have read have disappeared from all the language in the poem and the result may be challenging to read (see image below). This more than anything provides a visceral impact, as we try to read a barely functional language mutilated by loss of letters.

Using frames, pop-up windows, animated GIFs, error codes, forms, and pop up menus, this suite of 10 short e-poems written between 1998-2000 by Vietnamese poet Duc Thuan are a snapshot of the pre-2000 Web and its concerns. The interface is minimalist, evoking the title, and the works themselves are simple to operate yet their content suggests an ironic relation to the title. From the opening, Thuan establishes an aesthetic of code and malfunctioning in “Crash,” an idea explored throughout the suite in poems like “The Hidden and the Shown,” “Interact,” and “Interact.” “Imaguage of Consciousness” accompanies images of Web advertising banners along with jarringly loud music to warn us of directions we should avoid. The final poem “Diary of a Drunkard I Only Met Once” uses the simple interface of nested menus to organize a poem in way that provide multliple reading possibilities and stanzas embedded within lines, something evocative of Jim Rosenberg’s work.

These are deceptively simple works, worthy of focused attention to appreciate their complexities.

This work combines poetry with one of the oldest native genres in digital media: the videogame. Based on the 1979 Atari arcade game Asteroids (which in turn references the 1962 ur-videogame Spacewar!), Arteroids replaces the ship and asteroids for words and phrases. The game begins easily enough, because the words move slowly on the screen, but as you advance in levels the game becomes incrementally faster and more challenging, until you reach the point in which you can barely read the texts because you’re focused on survival.

This poem sets us up for an experience of language that is both familiar and alien. Playing a videogame and reading a poem are traditionally such different kinds of experiences that require vastly diverse skill sets that when they come together in this work they startle you into new ways of thinking about these genres. There is much poetry to read— and write— in Arteroids’ multiple interfaces, which go beyond simply playing the game.

This e-poem is prominently discussed in the opening chapter of C.T. Funkhouser’s “New Directions in Digital Poetry.” I dedicate the final chapter of my dissertation, “Mining the Arteroids Development Folder,” to this work, its versions, and the digital preservation challenges that it poses (pgs. 255-289).

“A Pen” is an exploration of text as a tool for writing, rather than as the result of writing. It is about the interpenetration of code and language in programmable media to imbue letters and words with behaviors, allowing the poem to emerge from their play. It is about creating tools for the readers to become involved in the process of shaping the poems that arise from these processes. Last but not least, it is a further development in Jim Andrews’ lifelong exploration of the visual characteristics of written language, and the capabilities of computers to both render it and reinvent statuesque letters as dancing signifiers that respond to input from the reader.

Quoted from “The Electric Pen” in my dissertation (pgs. 137-157).

In this poem, Andrews returns to the question of what is the meaning of language in digital media (as he posed in “Enigma n” 4 years earlier), this time drawing attention to the materiality of its sound rather than its visual information. When played continuously from start to finish we can hear a slightly manipulated recording of Andrews’ voice saying “meaning” three times with different tone and enunciation. The visual information in this poem is the audio waveform for the recording- an important interface to manipulate audio files in audio editing software, such as Audacity (free, open-source, cross-platform software— I recommend it). The neat thing about this poem is that it randomly selects a starting point in the waveform and a width for a selection area, automatically playing that loop a random number of times before jumping to a new random location and width (or shall I say duration?). The reader can select where to go, but not the other variables, drawing attention to words, letters, spaces between words, and even phonemes. Is there meaning in sub-phonemic pieces?

“Enigma n2” is one of a series of “vismu” pieces in which he uses a similar interface to explore the waveform of Wallace Stevens’ reading of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the Black Sabbath song “War Pigs,” Sarah Vaughn’s “Stardust” and “Black Coffee” (both songs cut and mixed together), and Margareta Waterman’s amazing nonsense poems and writings “F8MW9.” They are all worth exploring, for the works they deconstruct, for the interfaces Andrews’ develops, and for the ways in which they focus our attention on the aural information of these pieces.

This piece presents an intriguing case of problems that can arise with proprietary authoring tools. In 2007, Andrews started to develop “Jig-Sound,” a work that expanded upon his exploration of interactive audio. Andrews started this in 2000 with works like “Rude Little Song,” “Oppen Do Down,” and “Nio” all of which used snippets of looped audio recordings of his singing voice (Andrews was once in a band and ana capellagroup). Each piece offers interfaces that allowed for stacking or sequencing each audiovisual elements, and “Jig-Sound” offered the most sophisticated tools of them all, that is, until the release of Adobe Director 11 in 2008.

Here’s a little historical context: Macromedia launched “VideoWorks” back in 1985 (changing its name to Director in 1988) as a multimedia authoring tool used to create applications based on a timeline and producing output for CD-ROM, Kiosks, and eventually Shockwave files on the Web. In April 2005, Adobe purchased Macromedia— mostly interested in its other product, Flash— but aside from re-packaging Director as an Adobe Product and offering a patch to resolve some issues with Director MX 2004, it mostly left the product alone. When it released version 11 in 2008, it was significantly changed, sporting a new audio engine and other features.

And “Jig-Sound” no longer worked. The published Shockwave files still play, thanks to some backwards compatibility, but they occasionally cause the Shockwave player to crash. Jim Andrews, after completing a few new “heaps” for the work, moved on to other projects. “Jig-Sound” remains to this day, a “work in progress.”

And Adobe seems to have largely abandoned Director and its community of creators. What will happen when the company decides to stop developing the Shockwave player or stop providing backwards compatibility? I am seeking solutions, and have opened a project in DHCommons to explore this issue.

Wilks uses a simple and elegant interface, sophisticated visuals, and delicately crafted soundscapes to draw readers into a moving poetic memoir. This work weaves in all these elements narratively and thematically to explore the troubled relation between a child and her father who suffers from tinnitus, probably from being overexposed to loud noises as a fighter plane technician during WWII. The connections between hearing and deliberate or desired deafness, birds, planes, models, toys, family, soldiers, safety, danger, love, anger, pain, and other themes are gracefully interwoven in this richly layered work.

Wear headphones or connect your computer to speakers to get the best experience of this delightfully immersive work.

This poetic memoir uses a simple interface to involve the reader in the unfolding of the text, deepening the connection with the material. The memory of her mother’s sewing, their relationship, the clothes her mother made for her, and how those clothes were ways of shaping her all come across strongly in the narrative. The tensions between a girl growing up to adulthood and the conflicting impulses of strengthening and severing family ties is represented by the tools— sewing machine and pins versus seam ripper and scissors. This work is a great example of how a well crafted interface can truly enhance a narrative and poetic experience.

“V: Vniverse” is the online supplement and version of a book publication, titled V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L’una. Strickland, a well published poet in the print world has created bridges between print and electronic media (as discussed by Funkhouser and Odin), representing her poetry through familiar and creative interfaces. The navigational interface for “V: Vniverse” is designed to encourage exploration and provide new experiences of her poetry. Read the artists’ statement to see how deep the connections go and how much thought Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo put into creating the Vniverse.

Or if this is all too much, go “look up in perfect silence at the stars” to discover crisp haiku-like tercets and what they combine to say as part of a larger structure such as a son.net or a constellation. You will be rewarded by lines of thought that link science, mathematics, the Web, Simone Weil, prehistoric and modern woman, and so much more.

Ah, what a lovely, playful poem this is, streaming across the screen, captivating our field of vision and mind as we read a long line of text, mostly a single line that can be read in multiple ways as words that move at different rates hover over each other, forming multiple phrases and leading to potentially divergent readings, as divergent as the moments when the line splits into multiple ones taking different paths in the screen, crossing over each other, and rejoining at the end to continue as one, much as the reader explores the possibilities yet comes together to form a single thought in a moment when the mind says “Oh!”