I ♥ E-Poetry

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.

In the year 2000, Jim Andrews went through a significant retooling by shifting to Macromedia Director— an authoring tool that publishes content to the Web in Shockwave format, still easily accessible through its browser plugin. One of the benefits of Director was that it gave him a powerful set of tools to work with audio, allowing him to return to an early passion for radio and audio that led him to become a poet who engages media.

“Oppen Do Down” is one of his sound-centered poems (what he calls “vismu”) and it is full of his voice: recorded, shaped, looped, attached to verbal objects, and presented to reader/listeners to select, combine, stack, and enjoy.

For a close reading/listening of this piece and other vismu pieces, such as “Nio,” read the section titled “Visual Music” in my dissertation (pgs. 207-244).

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.

Like many of his books and digital works, Poundstone has researched and thought deeply about the material he is writing about. At a certain level, this work is a series of insightful and well informed essays on art, literature, the OULIPO, Surrealism, mathematics, and so much more. At another, this is a work of digital Web art, assembling graphical and linguistic elements to create emblems— critiquing a tendency in Web design a good decade before the DML “Badges for Lifelong Learning” competition tried to make it hip again. This is also a work that contain brief, yet intense moments of visual poetry in which his language oscillates between the functionally communicative and the visual art of each emblem.

Every layer in this rich work is worth reading carefully. Within the short time frame of the Web, this piece is both timely and timeless.

Ah, what a lovely, playful poem this is, streaming across the screen, captivating our field of vision and mind as we read a long line of text, mostly a single line that can be read in multiple ways as words that move at different rates hover over each other, forming multiple phrases and leading to potentially divergent readings, as divergent as the moments when the line splits into multiple ones taking different paths in the screen, crossing over each other, and rejoining at the end to continue as one, much as the reader explores the possibilities yet comes together to form a single thought in a moment when the mind says “Oh!”

This narrative poem in 6 chapters is impressive in its ability to immerse its readers in interactive virtual environments that encourage play. The prosy narrative voices tell a story of three characters that keep going deeper into a mythical virtual space while one performs the text. Each chapter produces a new experience that integrates music, poetry, animation, and an interactive interface that rewards experimentation and curiosity with a highly aesthetic experience. The narrative itself is unchanging, fascinating, incomplete… and worth exploring further.