"Screen" by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, et. al.
Okay, I admit it: I want a CAVE. And after watching this video, you will too. But unless you have a lot of money (about a million dollars) to build one and specialized personnel to operate it, or have access to one of the couple dozen ones in existence around the world, you may have to satisfy yourself with a video of a performance of “Screen.”
The poetic texts displayed place us in a room where a couple’s relationship is on the verge of collapse. The language flies at the reader at an accelerating rate until the very structure of the lines of text can no longer cohere and falls into an unreadable mess of light— the visual “ink” for writing in the CAVE. Talk about an immersive reading and playing experience!
Let the fund-raising begin!
"Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers" by Justin Katko
Designed to be presented in The Cave at Brown University (an immersive virtual reality space) this manifesto poem is presented here in a greatly diminished form: a small Quicktime window without a fullscreen option. As such, rather than being a full on assault on the senses and aesthetic sensibilities, it seem like an harmless little annoyance, which is a pity, because it is a fascinating work.
When you look at the images keep in mind that this was created with a text editor, because you are looking a letterforms atomized beyond what even Lettrisme aimed for. Listen to the poem’s rhythms and mixture of poetic, manifesto, and technical language, punctuated by a series of “mother fuckers” spoken with a gusto worthy of Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
