I ♥ E-Poetry

This poem may seem like a simple slideshow that combines text and images but it is built with born-digital materials that have little to do with print culture. The background images are taken from sprites—graphical objects that form part of a program visual design and contain programmed behaviors. Both in its choice of sprites and fonts, the work favors an 8 and 16 bit videogame aesthetic, evidenced by its pixellation and bold fonts. And even though by turning these materials into images, their programmed behaviors are stripped, they retain cultural impact, particularly for those familiar with their provenance. One doesn’t have to be videogame aficionado to appreciate their aesthetics, since a few decades of exposure to these videogame graphics has caused some cultural burn-in, to the point that they’ve become part of our visual and computational vocabulary.

As you read the poem in all its retro glory, consider how the speaker’s nostalgic language resonates with the materials it was written with.

This multimedia hypertext work weaves together unpopulated images, ambient sounds, and the text of overheard conversations in several cities to produce an immersive experience of a journey. Best experienced in cinematic conditions (good speakers or headphones, large screen, dark room, no distractions, fullscreen browser window), this is a navigationally minimalist. Each image has an area you can click on to go to the next, and it’s not difficult to find, since it tends to be large and placed over a focal point in the photograph. The simplicity of the interface and knowing from the outset that it is a linear experience, allows readers to relax into the work and not be distracted by wondering about where to go or what decision to make. The sounds and scheduled presentation of the texts also encourage paucity and reflection on the whole sequence of images as a whole.

From the outset, Mouton describes the piece as “a linear, nocturnal amble” which is enough of a narrative framework to lead us to connect the images as a single conceptual entity. The spaces photographed are not famous landmarks, the recognition of which would remind us that they are from different locations. The music and text of the conversations serve as bridges from one image to another, encouraging us to build continuity in our minds and seek a story in the piece.

Whether there is one to be found, constructed, or neither, this piece deploys language poetically, laying it over time and space in a spellbinding visual and aural canvas. As you read these voices and hear them in your mind, think about who is uttering them. Does one of the voices belong to the person whose perspective we inhabit in this work?

This award-winning responsive poem focuses on the Australian ghost town Wittenoom, abandoned due to toxic dust caused by asbestos mining. Each of its nine parts focuses on an aspect of the abandoned town and consists of an image from Wittenoom, generally portraying urban decay, an brief looping instrumental audio track, links to other parts of the poem, a title for the section, and a text accessible through different responsive interfaces. A brief parenthetical help text near the bottom left corner of each screen provides encouragement that hints at the interface, promting readers to explore the interactivity and intuit its internal logic. The thematic focus and consistent visual design pull the work together, while the varied interfaces lead to new explorations of the spaces, together producing an experience both jarring and immersive.

For example, the initial interface (pictured above) is invitingly simple: readers just need to select the falling “photographs” to bring them to a readable foreground. The photos (little screens, actually) are color coded to allow readers to remember which ones they read and therefore read all of them, minimizing repetition. Other interfaces are more complex and require practice getting some control over them, such as the one pictured below, which has a three-dimensional cube-like cluster slowly moving and rotating in the screen as it follows the pointer.

A pattern in the poem’s distinctive nodes is the reader’s progression from disorientation to clarity, from digital environments tracking a reader to readers understanding their rules taking control over the same. And yet, stabilizing the display of text for readability reveals the oldest encryption algorithm of all: poetry itself. The parallels between the overall poem’s strategies and Wittenooms’ corporate, labor, medical, and political history are worth exploring, especially considering the bigger picture of human beings and their environment.

This work prompts readers to write according to a set of poetic constraints, offering original, famous, and obscure forms and examples. The interface offers a series of virtual pages floating in fixed positions in space, and allowing readers to tilt them, zoom in and out, and flip them over to read the examples on their verso. A close examination of its yellowed pages reveals barely perceptible ink marks from handwriting on the other side, but that information is missing when one flips the page. Why evoke such physicality in the pages?

One reason for this and other complementary design choices is to give the readers a sense of the age of these poetic traditions. We can see Medievalism in its use of paper images, the ornate borders on each page, the choice of poetic examples using Early Modern English, the references to hermetic texts— such as the Smaragdine Tablet, which is called a sonnet by virtue of its 14 lines— and by using grid structures to organize language into letters for horizontal, vertical, and diagonal reading. With references to obscure and famous sonnet structures from Italian, English, and German traditions (Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus) and a few invented ones based on Medieval traditions, this work reminds us that we can look to the past as a source of rich poetic experimentation.

I suspect that successfully taking this “psychometric test” leads to “an unequivocal sense of certainty.” I’m just not certain of what.

This “psychometric trial” prompts readers to explore their sacred name through manipulation of the “lettered sieve” an infinite set of language constructed as follows:

For the following trial, imagine the alphabet, followed by, in alphabetical order, all permutations of pairs of letters of the alphabet, followed by all permutations of triples of letters of the alphabet, followed by quadruples, and so on for quintuples, sextuples, and so on. Let us call this infinite set of letters a ‘Lettered Sieve.’ Possessing a working concept of the Lettered Sieve is essential to completing the first seven parts of the trial.

The procedural construction of this kind of data set that dates back to antiquity and proliferated among monks in the Middle Ages, who used them for reflection on mystical topics. This work’s design evokes that frame of reference with rich details, such as background images of old paper, fully capitalized text with variable letter size and evenly justified margins, words arranged to form shapes, and more. The language choices also evoke mysticism and even self-harm, all while challenging the imagination with language procedures that might give even Oulipians nightmares to carry out.

As you read this work, think about how they focus your attention on the manipulation of language— mathematically, conceptually, visually, and physically— in a masterfully visceral display of ostranenie.

This scheduled poem plays like a silent video composed of a series of photographs of a wheat field in the background and kinetic language in the foreground. The text unfolds through a series of transformations of words by moving letters around into to form other words, and letter substitutions that create rapid word sequences. Timing is all in this poem, which could be organized internally by the speed at which its words are transformed and the means by which they change from one to the next. Notice the speed at which a sequence of four letter words change through letter substitution, forming a stream of associations, and the emphasis this gives to the pause at the end. Contrast this to the longer words that transform into other words by moving letters around, emphasizing each word and its meaning as moments with a thematic charge that punctuates the poem.

Allow this short poem to loop and read it a few times to allow its thematic and visual coherence to sink in.

This video poem created in Flash is a meditation on the word game Hangman. The Western banjo rock music— a clip from Modest Mouse’s “3 Inch Horses, Two Faced Monsters“— evokes the American “wild west,” reminding us of its improvised deadly justice system that often resulted in hanging. This cultural backdrop enhances the poem’s ruminations on what would otherwise seem like an innocent little word game. Its scheduled presentation of language appropriately conforms to the game mechanics, placing blanks and filling in all of one letter at a time until the complete phrase is readable. The animation centered on the letter “O” is a pictorial analysis that cleverly leads to the poem’s title. Its use of color is not only a reminder of the imaginary stakes in the game, but also shapes the reading in some of the poem’s stanzas. As you watch and read this short e-poem and appreciate its deconstruction of the game, consider what it has to say about the real and imagined human body and that of language.

This kinetic visual poem by a pioneer in electronic literature was initially written in 1982 to be displayed in electronic signboards and video monitors.The more recent Flash version replicates the signboard nicely, allowing each word to fit in the screen as it scrolls from right to left, the conventional way such signboards deliver texts for ease of reading. Kac doesn’t want to make things easy, though, because the words don’t make sense when you read them, even if you know Portuguese. Here’s the complete text of the poem from Kac’s website.

For a translation and complete decoding of the poem read pg 143 in Bohn’s Reading Visual Poetry. It is as thorough and revealing as you may want it to be and you’ll know exactly what it’s saying.

But what’s the fun in that? If you’re up to the challenge, try manipulating the text a few ways (reading it out loud, typing it out, and playing with spacing— all in no particular order). As you puzzle over this enigmatic piece, keep in mind a few details about its designed display: this is a text designed to scroll horizontally over time, with spacing designed to only display one word at a time. Do we interpret this as line breaks? Each word contains exactly 9 letters, all represented in capital letters. Why? Was this a constraint in electronic tickers at the time? Or would using a combination of upper and lower case letters provide too much information that Kac didn’t want to reveal?

Most importantly, as you manipulate the text, consider that the display medium is designed to present a text over time for readers to apprehend and retain in memory. If you really want to take on the challenge, try decoding it in your head. Of course, if you don’t know Portugese, this might be too much and you may want to go straight to Bohn’s analysis above.

You’ll appreciate how this early kinetic piece takes a time-based electronic display medium previously used for information and advertising purposes, and subverts its utilitarian customary clarity by writing a poem that goes against the medium’s design.

This work combines selections from entries by people who participated in Neddam’s interactive Mouchette website and places them in conversation by assigning them to moveable avatars and scheduling their presentation. Neddam’s character and online persona, Mouchette, is inspired by the protagonist of a 1967 Bresson film of the same name, in which a much-abused teenage girl resorts to suicide at the end of the film. The site’s aesthetics, theme, and protection of anonymity have inspired many people to open up and discuss their suicidal tendencies, experiences, and offer advice, forming a support community that may have saved many lives and spared others from unnecessary suffering.

This work’s title echoes Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in which he considers ending his own life, an idea reinforced by the use of images of celebrities who committed suicide, such as Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain. The use of avatars (most of which face the reader) on a two-dimensional space is evocative of a dramatic stage in which these characters are presenting a series of soliloquies. This metaphorical space is representative of the site itself, a networked location in which people can share their deepest and darkest secrets, their typed voices entering a conversation while being physically all alone.

As you read the texts in the speech balloons and move avatars around the screen space, remember that this is not meant to be seen as a literal stage, which would violate the logic of the soliloquy (as much as attempting to pluralize “Lone Ranger”). This is partly cyberdrama, but more a combination of dramatic monologue and confessional poetry, in which someone’s intimate thoughts are given a voice through an avatar— a visualization of a character.

The Confessional poets in the 1950s and ’60s focused their poetry on the inward gaze through a highly stylized, formalized discourse reminiscent of Modernism. The Post-Confessional poets in the 1970s and ’80s largely abandoned such distancing effects, offering a raw, direct, even explicit account of intensely personal material in their poetry. This work suggests the potential for an even less self-measured confessional mode of expression— Post-Post-Confessional writing, if you will— made possible by the potential for anonymity and publication immediacy of the Web.

Perhaps this is a sign of the times.

This generative poem attacks marketing on several levels: the generative poem in the center of the page does so thematically, the banners that surround it conform to standards for Web advertising banners, and Portuguese commercial slogans are cut up and remixed to expose their underlying messages.

This last strategy is inspired by the Situationist practice of détournement— revealing some of the ideological content that is difficult to notice when posed as a catchy phrase. Marketing slogans use of language in many of the same ways as poetry (such as compression, rhyme, meter, alliteration, and visual design) but to sell products rather than for artistic purposes. Situationists and Concrete poets like Décio Pignatari sought to reclaim visual language from commercial use, notably in his “Anti-Advertisement,” a famous détournement of Coca Cola’s Portugese (and Spanish) slogan.

Is Torres quoting Pignatari by using several shades of red in the banners?

One thing to consider as we read the generated poems and slogans while they change every few seconds, is that the poem in the center coheres better than the slogans, which rapidly reveal its capitalist values. Consider the message of the remixed slogans in the still image above (my translation, clockwise from the top): “Science belongs to us,” “Delicious Spectacle,” “Moved by technology,” and “The discovery that saves.” Positively Machiavellian.

If you can’t read Portuguese, I suggest clicking on the @ sign, signing and sending the current iteration to a blog Torres has set up to gather the output of generative works. Then run the output through a translator to get a sense of the ideas presented, as I did with “Viva semanas” (“Live Weeks”) running its text through Google Translate:

Not consumption. It is rhythm -
money bold
pause it touches.
The power of plagiotropia is deep -
absolute oblivion.
There are things that the card does not inspire -
for all other is devouring.
Moved by the war
- For the pleasure of parody -
advertising inspires us.
Images that can bind
- Generation in motion -
eccentric calling every week.
Appear in your dreams!
With credit, all transports -
good enough pure
have is coming.
Cries of Viva!
It feels good to grow and so little
glue is real:
Foam pricing
because life is rare!

Note how the poem critiques advertising as “binding” and associating it with consumption, hunger, and endless devouring of merchandise and credit. The original word for “glue” in the antepenultimate line is “Cola,” once again echoing Pignatari’s poem.

Go read the poem, generate your own iteration, and discover more of Torres’ critique of marketing in the digital age.