I ♥ E-Poetry

When I first encountered “Brainstrips, it was in the context of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, and because it was not identified as poetry in the collection, I chose not to cover it at the time. Now, having explored Bigelow’s work in the context of the ELO 2012 Media Arts Show, I return to this work because it challenges terms such as genre, form, and medium, resisting simple categorization.

This “three part knowledge series” dedicates each of its parts to a genre and area of knowledge. The first part uses comic strips to address philosophical questions, such as “What is art?” and “Does God Exist?” The second part, titled “Science for Idiots” has sequences of animated images and text on topics such as “global warming” and “Nuclear Fission.” The third is on “Higher Math” and it grounds mathematical principles such as “addition” and “subtraction” on stories of people going through situations that reflect ironically on the principle being illustrated.

Bigelow is clearly aware of the genre and medium he is working with in this work. For example, in the strip titled “Is color real?” not only are the characters aware of the frame for each panel, we can see the “reader’s” eyes reading the comic strip beyond the page. The quizzes and ads throughout are absolutely absurd, the results of which are designed to challenge the readers’ expectations. The narrative sequences or questions and answers designed to explain scientific topics provide ironic reflections on the topic.

How do we categorize the oblique approaches, subverted genre expectations, fourth wall demolitions, moments of absurd humanity, and precise language choices used in “Brainstrips?” In the light of Bigelow’s other poems discussed in this blog, I cannot think of this as anything other than poetry.

Having completed reading all the e-poetry in the ELC2, a little reflection is in order. Launched a little over a year ago, this collection has proven to contain some highly engaging work in a surprising number of platforms and authoring software. I was delighted to discover works in Second Life and Half Life both immersive social/gaming environments that provide the ability to create and give shape to spaces with writerly tools. Also surprising, yet disappointing was having to see movies documenting work in environments I didn’t have access to. I felt that the limited space of the anthology could’ve been better used by incorporating works we could really experience. Still, I understand the impulse to document the existence of works that may not be online or in a platform that cannot be published online, such as works designed for the CAVE.

The poetry in this collection was quite moving, with interfaces that went from minimalist to highly sophisticated. In comparison to the works in the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1 the design seemed cleaner, more transparent, better integrated to the poems. Is this an indicator that e-poetry is becoming less “interesting” and more “good?” Is it still in an experimental phase, discovering what is the message of this medium, as pertains to language? Videogames feature prominently in this collection as well. Does that mean that e-literature is blending with one of the oldest modes of artistic expression in digital media?

Whatever the case may be, this and the previous collection are a record of a global phenomenon, with works in multiple languages from all over (but not from Korea?). There is still so much to discover and recover because not every writer of dancing signifiers has been represented in these collections.

It is time to read and write about some of those who didn’t get included. Perhaps they’ll find their way into a future Volume 3 of the Electronic Literature Collection.

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.

The possibility of using computers to create immersive virtual environments in which one can interact with others has excited the imagination for decades, particularly in science fiction works like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, films like TRON (1982), text-based games like Zork, MUDs (and their many variations), the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in networked adventure and first person shooter videogames, such as World of Warcraft and Quake. Generally, games allow a limited range of options for modification (“modding”) and limit the type of interactions, keeping players focused on the violent “shooting” aspect.

Second Life was launched in 2003 as a virtual space for users to explore using their customizable avatars, create landscapes and objects with 3D modeling tools, program behaviors onto these objects with their scripting language, and interact with any of their (currently) over 1 million users. As such, this is a creative space which has inspired writers like Alan Sondheim and others to use it as a platform for writing and artistic performance.

“Trope” is a location you can visit in Second Life— and I recommend creating the free account, downloading the software, and experiencing it on your own— but viewing the machinima will provide a good sense of its approach and practices. One of the fascinating things about this island full of stories and poems is the variety of forms they take, such as a line of dominoes with a word in each piece, or a book inside of a cabin inside of a snow bubble that is floating in the air. What does it mean to read such a book in such a context?

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!

What an impressive little poetry generating machine Rui Torres has put together! The poem itself isn’t that complex, consisting of 10 variables that randomly display words from carefully chosen word datasets. Part of what makes it impressive is how Torres has crafted two interfaces to interact with the poem and one to publish the results— all of which highlight the immensity of potential texts in different ways. The horizontal interface takes a visual approach by creating a textual landscape with infinite vanishing points in all directions. The vertical, almost more viscerally, displays a number of possible poems so huge (as of this reading “999999579351521 poemas possíveis [possible poems]” that it reminds us of the permutational possibilities of this and other poems in the tradition of Raymond Queneau’s “Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes.” The background voice and sounds soothingly set a poetic tone while reinforcing a sense of space. A neat feature is that readers can assemble poems with the interface and materials provided and publish them in a blog, so they can leave behind records of their reading.

Clarice Lispector’s short story “Amor” takes us from the quotidian life of a married woman into an emotional and sensory explosion where the smallest details are magnified into sensuous monstrosity and compassion (here’s a Spanish translation). This work explores these moments in 52 short poems that saturate the senses with rich color, video, text, and sound while focusing our attention on Lispector’s luscious words through scheduled arrangement of lines on the window and a voice reading the poem aloud. The reader can move and rearrange texts and trigger the voice reading a line by clicking on it— essentially being able to create a new poem from the lines— but it feels like a distraction from the impressive work that has already been done by Torres. Perhaps he wished to make us complicit in this “plagiotropic” poetic reinscription of Lispector’s story.

Is this a poem?

Generative works that produce output labelled as poetry sometimes beg the question whether it really is or not. Poetry enjoys a cultural mystique that evokes reverence towards this literary mode and resistance to anything generated or somehow automated. After all, if a poem is a trail through the wilderness of thought and human experience (i.e. Rip Rap), would we want to follow a path carved by a computer program? I like to think that cyborg poets (what else can we call those machines built out of human and machine languages, that carry out instructions that crystallize intentions?) can build trails that lead us to surprising and rewarding places.

Whether we call them poetry or not is an issue with different and equally defensible positions, however. Celebrated poet and programmer Judy Malloy refers to some of her generated works as text arrays, for instance.

I don’t know whether Tisselli was thinking of “Synonymovie” as a poem or not, but it is interesting for me to think of it as such because it a language centered experience. The kind of exploration that this work generates is a path through cyberspace powered by dictionaries and search engines, words and images. And it leads us to reflect on the relations between chosen words with an attention that we’ve come to expect from poetry.

“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.