I ♥ E-Poetry

This augmented reality (AR) work tells the story of three generations of women through a series of short poetic videos organized spatially on a table top installation. In the version documented in the video, the work used a printed out marker system and a webcam connected to a computer to move from one marker to another. As the camera is able to identify the markers, the software replaces them with a short video with a voice recording of Fisher reading a poetic text. Beautifully produced, the videos visually engage the theme of memory by focusing on old photographs, photo albums and family heirlooms, and reinforcing this aurally through vignettes that breathe life into these objects.

AR technologies are fascinating because they open up the world as a canvas for artistic creation, bringing the digital world into analog spaces. Markers like QR codes are easily detectable by computers equipped with a camera and the right software, and can be placed anywhere to produce locative works, or arranged spatially as Fisher has done with tabletop objects, Carpenter with maps, and Borsuk with the book.

The main challenge for these kinds of works is that the computational infrastructure needed can be an obstacle for potential readers. The mechanics of looking at a screen with one’s eyes and a different surface through a camera or waiting for a video to load over a slow data connection can hinder what might otherwise be an immersive experience. Fortunately, multiple technologies are moving in directions that will facilitate this kind of experience, as is the case with portable devices with screens and cameras that can be used “as a magic looking glass to explore the story world” (to quote Fisher). As computers become so portable and miniaturized as to become wearable and ubiquitous, electronic literature will increasingly move out from its virtual spaces and write on the world.

In the meantime, there is a glitch aesthetic to be explored in these early technologies, such as the visual and aural overlays we can witness in “Circle” as the camera catches multiple markers at a time. By arranging the markers so close together using swiveling sticks to reveal markers and having others on constant display, she has written both single and choral voices that sing across holographic split-screens.

This work is published as a video documentation of a simultaneously analog and digital poem— an instance of extreme inscription as described by Matthew Kirschenbaum. Written on a semiconductor alloy with “a focus GA ion beam” at font sizes much smaller than a pixel, requiring an electron microscope with magnification “ranges from 400x all the way to 10000x.” The naked eye cannot read this poem unaided, so the video takes us through an edited journey into the poem’s text reminiscent of Prezi, but much cooler in its materiality.

The text itself is a series of anagrams based on an excerpt from the technical manual for the ion beam. Note how Husárová’s use of line breaks focuses our attention on the poetic qualities of the original text, and how each increased level of magnification leads to more highly compressed texts. Her juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary technologies— poetry, alphabet, particle beams, electron microscopy, superconductors, and software— make an intriguing statement on writing in this digital age.

Read this work closely to discover what it is.

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 work is a kind of hypertext edition of Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” contextualizes the poem by placing it in conversation with historical and biographical events, culture, music, poetry, visual arts, and its publication history.

Its interface is simple (though unexplained): when you click on an image of a line from the poem on the  “Arriving” column the image changes to one from a different printing of the poem, displaying its date on the left, and loading a random set of lines and images on the “Departing” column. Each date brings up a scanned image of the print publication as a visceral lesson on the impact of the materiality and socialization of texts, as Jerome McGann demonstrated in The Textual Condition. The lines and images in the “Departing” column are excerpts from other materials— clicking on them brings up an image, text, or embedded video (note: currently works best in Chrome) beneath the column. The title links to an “About” page, which is a scholarly short article that goes into detail on the contexts, inspiration, and theory that informs the work.

This digital re-reading — operating as both a detourned archive and an artistic re-imagining — puts the many editions of Hughes’ poem in direct contact with a constellation of images, texts and voices that respond to its call.

If the Emancipation Proclamation is in the National Archives in Washington DC, where is Langston Hughes’ poem? It survives in versions, editions, printings, copies, recordings, web pages, and more, each one imparting form and context to the work. Each production and reproduction is a performance, waiting for a reader to make it come to life with their own reception performance. The poem is in those interactions between text and reader, writer, editor, and text.

Moore and Trettien have crystallized their scholarly reading of the poem in this creative edition of the work, leveraging technologies and resources available to them in 2009 and encoded into the work’s materiality. This is e-poetry as editorial scholarship in the age of the Digital Humanities.

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 collaborative work created in the now-defunct Google Wave is documented as a video which shows writing at different stages scrolling up the screen. Each screen-captured image scrolls upwards at a speed that allows readers to apprehend most of the work— less if you’re unfamiliar with mezangelle— visually enacting the wave metaphor. The music for this piece, “Something Happened When You Were Born” by minusbaby, contributes to a sense of collaborative building through its aural structure, visualized below.

Judging by the shape of the sound waves (get it?), this instrumental piece has a relatively simple structure: a slow crescendo in volume and electronica elements (lasting about 2:30 minutes) with a shorter (about 1:00 minute) diminuendo. This structure can be mapped with the visual collaboration we can see in the waves of Wave interactions, mirroring the intensification of interactions between Breeze and Hinton as they shape their work and a reduction of activity as they tweak it into final form. Would we be able to visualize the interaction if they simply published the final version as a printable text?

Not really. And that is one of the points of this work. The traditional representation of works as a static printable or displayable document favors the final version, flattening potentially lengthy processes into a single moment in time: that of publication. Textual scholars who seek to represent multiple versions of works go to great lengths to do so, via footnotes, variorum editions, digital archives, or fluid-text editions.

Google Wave implemented a metaphorical interface to visualize workflows over time, moving away from the page as metaphorical interface, as we see in “track changes” functionality in Microsoft Word. There are many other online collaboration tools: some become well established, others come and go as Google Wave did.

Keep this in mind as you watch and read this collaborative work and experience how its poetic compression and decompression happens in the time and space between Breeze and Hinton.

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 is a true story about the untimely death of someone close to the speaker, who seeks to reconstruct the story of her death in a way that can provide closure and hopefully justice. It is also a reflection on analog and digital storytelling and the objects that hold these stories.

The work’s interface displays each portion of this linear narrative as a kind of slideshow, sequentially presenting each piece of the argument and evidence in a way that makes a compelling and moving. In tune with its media, it is very “electric” with plus and minus symbols on the sides of the slideshow (in the shape of a battery) that serve as a navigation interface. The electricity in the title, the battery, shaped interface, the line of ooooooo’s at the base of the slides— which indicates one’s position in the narrative, all seem to symbolically suggest the energy required in a assembling materials and evidence to put together a compelling narrative, one that might lead to an official investigation.

Much like HTML documents are composed from multiple separate digital objects and assembled on the fly to produce a coherent composition, the detective and narrator both need to put together body of material, circumstancial, and experiential evidence in way that creates a logical chain of events. The source code for this work reveals tension between the representation of the information and its display because the whole sequence is organized in a very deliberately as an ordered list but the code used to create it is that for an “unordered” list <ul>.

The order is given in the documentation, something which is human-readable but not executable by a machine. Consider how this resonates with the evidence and the chain of events that the narrator creates but that the detective is unwilling to believe or act upon.

Think about how the material evidence— the note, photograph, calendar, phone numbers, witness, and other analog objects— are flawed when telling Katie’s story to those who knew her. The most compelling evidence is narrative itself, Katie’s story— her alcohol and drug abuse and her rehabilitation, the stories which reveal her character, hopes, plans— which the detectives couldn’t (or wouldn’t) use.

All we have is stories, the documentation for our lives, and the objects we leave behind won’t tell our stories. People will.

This narrative poem tells the mock-heroic adventures of an unlikely antihero on an imaginary quest. As Bigelow describes the piece,

In “How They Brought the News from Paradise to Paterson,” a first-person speaker narrates his story (in heroic verse) as he swims from one end of a resort pool complex to another in search of what he thinks is more alcohol, but is in fact a journey to find his marriage
and himself. The poem plays with the epic and tragic within a setting stifled with consumerism and class separation.

The poem is structured as the monomyth, in which the speaker, while lounging at the Paradise pool bar in a 5-star resort in Barbados, overhears what he interprets as a call to adventure: the bar has run out of rum. Taking upon himself to embark upon a journey through the pool complex to find the god-like Concierge at the far end, whose “sage advice / and quick, imperious commands” would restore the flow of rum in Paradise.

In the monomyth, the hero’s journey into the unknown is also into the unconscious. As the speaker goes deeper into the pool complex, he speaks of his wife, who is enjoying herself in the resort by herself, medicated in her own way, reading romance novels, and

longing for imaginary heroes
true lovers surviving the great divide
in the push and pull
of life’s restless tides.

Does the speaker seek to prove himself a hero (to himself or to his wife), so he can bring the story of how he saved [the] Paradise [bar]? Would the feat save his self-esteem, which seems to ebb as he descends from one pool level to another and encounters its bartenders.

As you read this poem, you may detect echoes of two similar journeys informing the work: Dante’s allegorical journey into Hell, through Purgatory, and finally achieving Paradise to find his Beatrice, and J. Alfred Prufrock’s [spoiler alert] failed journey to “ask an overwhelming question” that will “disturb the universe.” The situations are inverted, however: our hero begins in Paradise and moves away from his Beatrice, and we can imagine him as a married Prufrock who is no less a failure in love.

Will the speaker of our journey succeed in his literal and/or symbolic journey? Will the mermaids sing to him? Will he find the rum needed to sweeten Paradise? Is he a hero or anti-hero? You will have to read this multi-layered narrative to discover its conclusion.

To best appreciate the conclusion, it helps to know something about the technology used to create this e-poem and Bigelow’s history with it. This is the third work written with open Web technologies— HTML, CSS, and JavaScript— a major retooling from Adobe Flash, which he used for his previous work. These newer works are designed to work equally well with browsers, smartphones and tablets by using the JQuery library and a linear, yet multilayered compositional structure. A peek at the source code (control - u) reveals deceptively simple code in which each “section” consists of 3-4 objects— background, image, animation and text— all superposed with varying levels of opacity (established in the css code), and an optional sound layer, to produce a coherent page, or screen. The act of progressing from one section to another in this linear document changes one or several of these layers, signaling narrative shifts.

And it all feels so normal, so harmoniously put together, so in tune with the speaker’s voice and narrative, that when Bigelow punctuates the end with a variation on the pattern he has lulled us with, the effect is all the more poignant.