I ♥ E-Poetry

This multimedia poem is an assault on the senses— visually, kinetically, and aurally— it bombards the reader with so much information, color, sound, and stimulus that it is difficult to process, much less read. The text is handwritten and moves, spins, changes around some boxes the reader can manipulate, moving each whirling cluster to a spot in the window where it might be legible. The music, noise, and speech loop loudly but barely understandably, much like the handwritten text. Even in the menu page the typed text is so skewed that it is barely legible. How does one approach this piece?

Well, as it turns out Lewis LaCook has been a member of WebArtery for years, so one way to get some insight is by seeing what he may have said about the piece in this online community.

there were many inspirations behind [Jeffrey]===one was the discussions on representation/non-representation we’ve been
bc-ing about (which is why the piece is called jeffrey==these discussions were foremost in my mind)===another was jason nelson’s sex project, wherein one drags shards of a poem around===another too was the visual work of john m. bennett,
whose print mag LOST AND FOUND TIMES is full of this “re-introduction of the body”===

all of these went into this piece===i was concerned primarily with the texture different layers of chicken scratch would make===& ALSO was quite enamored of some of the flash animation i’ve seen=== [links added] (“undeserved praise”).

This piece was named after of the members with whom LaCook was corresponding with, Jeffrey Jullich, who praised the work for approaching the boundary of the “representational limit” without falling into asemy.

So this piece is about that edge between meaning and meaninglessness, legible writing and visual art, audible but barely discernible speech. It reinserts the body into digital media through handwriting, speech, and interactivity and the result is messy, full of noise and, perhaps, meaning.

Note: There is a broken link to a page called “Hackoo,” and I’ve linked to an captured image in the Internet Archives captured around the time the work was published.

This aural piece is a kind of Lettrist sound poem, because it uses verbal language in sub-morphemic units (with thanks to Melissa Lucas for the term). In other words, the poem is concerned with putting together snippets of vocalized language sounds that don’t carry semantic meaning, all performed a capella, recorded, edited, and spatially arranged by Jim Andrews. The visual composition is as non-referential as the sounds, activated by moving the pointer over the pulsating colored squares.

This rough (“rude”) little gem is Andrews first audio piece produced with Macromedia Director— an important exploration with a digital tool that allowed him to produce works like “Enigma n2,” “Oppen Do Down,” “Nio,” and “Jig-Sound” before Adobe bought out Macromedia and changed the audio engine for Director. For a detailed account of these audio works, read “Visual Music” (pgs. 207-244) in my dissertation, Typing the Dancing Signifier: Jim Andrews’ (Vis)Poetics.

This linear hypertext poetic project is structured by the constraint of following the germination of beans over the course of 23 days, while learning Web design with Macromedia Dreamweaver 4. Each day, Black builds a page using daily photographs of the beans and writing a poem inspired by her impressions of the beans that day.

There is an infectious youthfulness to the project as we see the beans sprout, take root and grow both in the beer glass and in Black’s mind. The page designs and poems are playful, experimenting with layout, line breaks, incorporating images, and with simple animation layers. The ending comes as a shock with an unexpected reversal that has little to do with beans but much to do with an important function of pets for children.

Note: The animations in this piece were created with a Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 feature called dynamic layers, which used DHTML, JavaScript and a tag called MM_timelinePlay. This tag currently only works in Internet Explorer, which maintains backwards compatibility with old JavaScript code. In addition to recommending using that browser to best experience this piece, I must point out the appropriateness of the use of a “timeline” tool and tag in this time-based project.

Published the same year as New Digital Emblems (2000), these four short kinetic poems read like subverted graphic design experiments. The bright monochromatic, textured, shaded, or divided backgrounds contained by a borderless window serve as a stage into which words move in from several directions to form and develop the poems. The electronica inspired sounds punctuate moments in each poem, such as the apparition of words or the twist at the end of “Nil,” also emphasizing the rhythm of the scheduled presentation.

There is a tantalizing weirdness to these poems that make them feel like little brain twisters, especially to those inclined to try to make sense of them. Why is the F capitalized in “Denied?” What frame of reference is Poundstone evoking with the sounds and word containers in “Basic Con?”

I have my own ideas, so you try and figure it out! If it’s at all possible….

The first two of this list of poems stand out because of their use of Flash. Komninos’ approach to Flash in his poem “Beer” is similar to the work he published in animated GIFs: a sequence of words, morphing from one to the next producing surprising and amusing juxtapositions. It is with “Love” (image above) that he took advantage of Flash’s strengths: responsiveness to user input and audio synchonization. “Love” creates a simple interface that triggers some not-lovely sounds when moused over or clicked on. The words readable within its circles are replaced by their opposites, portraying love as a kind of minefield full of triggers that can turn trust into jealousy, heartache into separation, or simply cause pain.

The rest of these Flash poems are full of Zervos’ characteristically dry sense of humor that nonetheless cut sharply into whatever topic they choose.

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.