This poem showcases Jhave’s talent for delicately combining theory, science, and intensely personal material in a native digital multimedia poem. The subtitle for this poem is ” a confession of carnal confusion concerning an absence of cognition” which he explains is the result of encountering “The Medium is the Message” as a teenager and being sexually aroused by one of its images. He also critiques that “most humanities scholars (McLuhan included) are ignorant of the raw technical complexity of neurology and data plumbing.” Considering that Jhave has named his website Glia after an essential component of the nervous system called Neuroglia, it is clear that he knows a thing or two about the brain and its mechanisms.

This poem is presented in several short stanzas along with quotes by McLuhan, neuroscientists, and computer scientists, replacing the poem and quotes piece by piece on a 4 second schedule, and looping back to the beginning when they reach the end. The videos are longer in duration and are also looped, changing the image-text juxtapositions as you reread the work. At the heart of this poem is an explanation of its title, extending the primary idea behind his earlier work “Typeoms.”

The poem does a beautiful job of showing how thought and words are grounded in the body and how other media (books, television, computers, Kleenex) shape the human body and its practices, softening dichotomies (body & intellect, content & form, medium & message) into feedback loops.

This poetic sequence is built around 15 typos, a hilariously plausible definition for each, and spam. Every time one clicks on the button, the program generates two short poems that incorporate the typo and offers a definition for it, each framed by a box, positioned in visually diverse ways and shifting previously generated “typeoms.” It seems like the 3 or 4 word titles are generated from the same Spam site as used in “Spam Heart,” and the poems are generated on a handful of templates and line structures, inserting and featuring the typo in boldface.

The amazing thing about this whimsical piece is how well it all holds together. These typos seem quite at home in their short generated poems, perhaps because a century of Modern and Postmodern poetry has trained readers to take interpretive leaps on seemingly non sequitur juxtapositions. And while most readers won’t read on randomly generated works closely, Jhave provides enough structure and enough of a guiding mind to make it worth the leap.

This poem by Jhave about the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster considers how humanity becomes extinct by destroying the environment so thoroughly that the world and we become unrecognizable. The speaker’s characteristically concise, witty, emotionally charged voice points out the attitudes, loss, and processes that bring about the end of man(un)kind. After reading the 27 short parts of the poem, hovering over beautifully desolate videos, Jhave inserts a little mutability into the poem, a slow accumulation of random words replacing words randomly, increasing by a factor of one word substitution per mutation level. The image above shows the title with a level 2 mutation, while the image below shows mutation level of 20.

Rereading the poem with its slow incremental mutations yields interesting variations on the original theme while it slowly loses its voice, coherence, emotional charge, and humanity. Or for more visceral effect, make a leap in mutation level— I stopped after over 200— to see how far humanity and poetry can descend into “untenable bloated nonsense.”

This poem is divided into 6 parts, each one a 4-line stanza that asks or answers a series of questions “in a wired way,” providing the linguistic text of the poems in a way that provides a traditional counterpoint to the presentation. This poem is “wired” in several ways:

• It is scheduled perfectly synchronized to a minimalist musical score consisting of an alternation of a low and a high note played in a guitar in equal time intervals. To keep things interesting, the note is sometimes played as a chord or brief sequence, with variations in volume, but keeping time like a metronome. Don’t forget that a guitar is a set of taut wires of different widths that produce musical notes when strummed.
• The text is synchronized to appear with the playing of each note, one word at a time. It starts in the center of the line and then adds a word to the left and one to the right of the growing phrase until the line is complete. Reading the text as it appears creates a new line, adding meaningful texture to the poem.
• After the initial display, Jhave inserts minimalist variations in the scheduled text, extending the range of meaning of the original text. The variations are subtle but meaningful, as Jhave adds, removes, or substitutes a letter from one or two words in the poem, and occasionally replaces a word for its antonym.
• There are 6 background videos, some of which have kaleidoscopic effects that match well the duality of musical notes, which the user can change to create juxtapositions between them and the words. The mirror images of the kaleidoscope videos emphasize thematic dualities in the poem.

The dualities expressed in this poem manifest themselves in so many ways, from traditional to electronic poems, low to high notes, static to scheduled kinetic texts, yes and no, all the way to the presence and absence of marks on a page (ink on paper) to the combinations of an and off electric signals— the ones and zeroes of binary code.

This generative poem is built from “spam, code, thesis work, and a little bit of language’s heart.” Each part of the poem is organized into three strophes: the first one uses a larger font, the second one consists of a single word, and the third uses three words. Upon opening the poem, the first strophe is selected randomly from a dataset, after which it begins a sequence that reads coherently from one textual generation to the next. The second and third strophes are always independently randomly selected from their datasets, creating new textual combinations with the constant sequence in the first strophe.

If you focus your reading on the first strophe and read it sequentially, you’ll get a strong sense of what the poem is about, but you’ll be missing some of the wildly creative combinations that result from Jhave’s word choices and generative algorithms. So while this poem never really ends (by itself), you can get a sense of closure by sensing the logic behind the word choices and phrases generated. And there is just enough of a predetermined logical path to keep us from getting lost in the poem’s “infinite inbox.”

P.S. I received a note today from Jhave about this poem: “To give a bit more info: middle word is from thesis, bottom cluster is from a Russian spam site that auto-harvests words, it has in my mind one of the richest ecosystems of multi-syllable words online.”

This deceptively simple poem contains a limited number of verses scheduled to change from one to the next so rapidly that all but the unchanging final line is unreadable, unless you click and hold the mouse button, which stops the text. That is all the control one has, basically allowing random access to the verses. Fortunately for those who value closure, this is not a combinatorial work at the level of the line (which would probably create more permutations than could be read in a lifetime of clicking), but at the level of accessing the verses, which don’t seem like they have a meaningful sequence and progression. In other words, one can click on the poem enough times to get access to all or most of the verses and formulate a sense of what Jhave is trying to say with the poem.

Three ideas seem to inform this poem, from most likely influence to least:

• Futurism: Particularly in its manifesto-like tone and use of different typographical sizes, particularly as seen in the Vorticist manifesto Blast.
• Eternal return: The idea of time and matter in the universe as cyclical is replicated by the poem’s structure, making the idea of the reboot as a creative re-launching of ideas.
• Total Perspective Vortex: the way Jhave portrays humanity and its discontents seem to justify the need for a regenerative self-destruction, reaching a far different conclusion from E. E. Cummings in the final lines of this poem.

Okay, there are four influences.

And there are more than 100 words in this posting.

Perhaps it’s time to

REBOOT THIS BLOG NOW

Who or what is David “Jhave” Johnston? He is a digital media artist and poet, certainly, but what exactly is “he?” William David Johnston is a human being, that is a biological, social, legal, (and spiritual?) entity— the kind Auden wrote about in “The Unknown Citizen”). He is also an artist that adopted a nom d’ordinateur, “Jhave,” whose artistic techniques are codified in the digital tools he creates or appropriates, blurring the boundaries between human and machine to the extent we could call him a cyborg. But aren’t we all? “Sound Seeker” is a record of how David Jhave Johnston develops as a cyborg artist and poet.

“Soundseeker” is several things: a Flash tool created by Jhave to synchronize text to sound, a blog that documents the development and fine-tuning of the tool and its interfaces, a blog documentation of an independent study Jhave did “with the guidance and input of Jason Lewis of OBX Labs at Concordia University, Fall 2008,” and it’s a collection of 12 poetic sketches— thinking through writing with these technologies.

“Glider - Language as Life” (above) schedules aphoristic lines of poetry synchronized to the tune of a minimalist soundtrack, juxtaposing it with videos of a pond and insects that can run on water without breaking its surface tension. Is Jhave suggesting that he is merely gliding on the surface of a poetic field with depths have yet to be explored?

In poems like “plife” Jhave used a 3D digital sculpting tool called Mudbox to imbue words with greater physicality than having them cast shadows like the other objects in a video. These words have an almost organic plasticity as they grow into something more than what they mean.

There is so much more to be said about this collection, but I leave it up to you to explore. To see such a virtuoso cyborg artist and poet at play is a reward in and of itself.

From January to May 2008, Jhave produced a series of 30 sketches, experiments in motion photography, usually involving water, in which he tests out different ways of juxtaposing and superposing his poetic texts with video clips. Published as a blog, Jhave describes the project in the about page as:

I am making a film about god shot on location in my bathroom.

This site chronicles the various screen tests made during production. It is a list of online digital-poetic experiments with source code posted (as often as i get time) that will document the evolution of discrete programming and aesthetic techniques and diverse tangents as they arise in my art practice.

During those six months, these sketches document his exploration of kaleidoscope photography, liquids of different viscosities, different interfaces, textual pacing, animation, positioning, and use of Flash effects and much more. The first one, “Kaleidoscope Study #1” explores multiple videos of water (with and without objects) as a background for scheduled unrhyming couplets.

Others, like “Eyes - CU” uses kaleidoscopic motion photography of a face underwater to both draw attention to the very human details of pore, hair follicles, and the nooks and crannies where air bubbles accumulate, while at the same time creating monstrous inhuman symmetries.

Still in the bathroom, the kaleidoscopic photography can turn a tiled shower into a symmetrical cell, where fragmented doubled human bodies are trapped and poetic texts fall into place.

Towards the end of the study, Jhave had moved out of the confines of the bathroom to photograph the water flows of thawing Montreal, as well as human and vehicular traffic flows in Brazil.

When you open the study, remember that it is a blog, so the last posting will be the first one you see. I suggest you scroll down to the bottom and explore this chronologically to see how certain ideas and techniques evolve and flow.

And since Jhave published the source materials and code, this is a gold mine of intuition into his artistic, poetic, and programming development.

The default display for this series of “THOught-poEMS” is a looped linear sequence of stanzas displayed in randomized fonts hovering in random positions over randomized video clips, while a cluster of words flock towards the pointer’s location on the text. Jhave provides the reader with control over several variables: videos, font, position, and gives him the ability to toggle, play, or pause the presence of text, video, flocking words, and sound. Finally, the reader can choose to see the video singly or doubled with a mirror image of itself.

This all seems quite complex, but Jhave is wise to have a default that the reader can simply read, not needing to interact with the controls he places at their disposal, unobtrusively hidden away on the lower portion of the screen. This allows him to foreground the effect of layering his stanzas with videos of a variety of magnified liquids (with and without solids) and the sounds of water and air (in the variety of shapes: rain, flow, whistle, song, voice, wind, etc.). The alliterative, silky linguistic text of the poem itself explores how thought is grounded in the materiality of the body and brain, a biological machine referred to in Cyperpunk and computer culture as wetware.

My suggestion: have a tall glass of water, and then read the work in its default display, noting how you read the text as layered, then start exploring options and tweaking variables, asking yourself what each variable contributes to the experience of the poems.

This “tiny tale of tourism between bodies” is a poetic narrative about an alien being that teleports into a human body and what ensues. This poem is structured into 123 lines and 121 background images with titles, and allows readers to play through the work on a fairly rapid schedule or use arrows to navigate from line to line, image to image. Clicking on the screen repositions the text, which may allow readers to move the text to a more readable space on the photograph, but otherwise doesn’t seem to contribute much to the content.

Speaking of which, the gorgeous photography focuses on details that make the familiar world strange, a sense reinforced by the caption given to each photograph. This sense of alienation from the familiar is echoed by the lines of the poem as they tell the story of the alien-human character intermixing technical and scientific diction with more familiar language choices. Together, the images, caption, and text teleport us into the mind of a speaker whose relationship to his body and the world around him has been transformed.

With this poem, Jhave offers us an alternative perspective similar to that sought by Martianism, best exemplified by Craig Raine’s famous poem “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.”