I ♥ E-Poetry

This work in progress is a wonderful example of how digital media can be used in an integrated way to create art that transcends traditional media and genre distinctions. As Meyer describes the concept best in this artist statement.

I wrote a novel, and it was a poem, and I called it Into the Green Green Mud. But coming from an experimental theatre background, where script and performance are distinct entities, the text was only the beginning. How would I “perform” this novel? The standard performance of a novel is justified black text on white paper. But is that really the best way to explore time and love and change and the weather?

His theatre background has attuned him to what is understood as the performative turn, a paradigm shift that for the past several decades has focused attention on the performance as a key signifying act. The notion of script and performance is literalized by HTML works, because they consist of a source code that is interpreted by software and hardware to produce a readable work. As a multimedia artist, Meyer keenly aware of the analog and digital materials available to him,

The first performance of Into the Green Green Mud is under way, and I’d like you to be a part of it. We’re starting online, with original illustrations, animations, fonts, and music. OddBird will write the code, and Teacup Gorilla will write the music. From there we can make it a reading, a rock concert, a book, or all of these things at once.

Two aspects stand out from this description: its collaborative nature and handcrafted aesthetic. While Meyer wrote the text of the novel, drew the illustrations, designed three fonts, and has shaped the presentation of the work, he is producing it with two teams of people close to him (brothers and friends) on the code backdrop and musical composition. And it shows. Every component of this project is lovingly custom made, coming together to enhance the original text with a design acumen parallel to Wes Anderson’s distinctive mise-en-scène.

Fittingly enough, the concept of mise-en-scène was appropriated from theater by film theorists to emphasize the compositional nature of filmmaking, emphasizing the blank canvas around which a shot is composed. Like theater, which begins with an empty stage that needs to be developed into a meaningful space by carefully designing, placing, blocking, and scripting every element, so the filmmaker and Web designer need to build each shot and node in their medium to achieve their desired effect. As a programmer with a background in experimental theater, Meyer uses pure HTML and CSS to arrange each element of this project: text, static and kinetic images in multiple layers, and wireframes to shape and arrange each aspect dynamically in in browser windows that come in many shapes, sizes, and screen resolutions.

Part of the pleasure of this “novel (with pictures)” is that we can appreciate each layer of this performance as it becomes deployed. Meyer’s narrative verse is reminiscent of Shel Silverstein’s illustrated books, as are his drawings. His prose and verse are arranged graphically, but also using HTML conventions, such as ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists, and formatting as definable characteristics of text. Its whimsical alliterations, metrical bursts, and distinctive voices are enhanced by custom fonts, as can be seen in the example below.

Most of Into the Green Green Mud is displayed as a clean text in handmade fonts arranged near the center of the screen, as can be seen in the image above. The earlier images in this entry show some of the other layers implemented, such as wireframes, images, and animations (though you’ll have to visit the site to see the kinetic aspects in action). This is a publicly available work in progress with fully documented code— a patient performance slowly unfolding over time— so that every time we visit, we are likely to discover a newly transformed page or chapter.

This virtuoso creation by a talented young poet, writer, artist, typographer, programmer, and musician is a taste of things to come as new generations of digital media and code literate creators come of age.

This minimalist scheduled poem engages our ability to hold language in memory in order to act upon it. The text is displayed on two spaces simultaneously, though the header stream begins first before the second one in the box begins to compete for our attention. Each text is displayed one word at a time at a rapid rate, faster than we have grown used to with works by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries or William Poundstone’s “Project for Tachitoscope.” In those cases the texts are synchronized to music, and potentially accompanied by other graphical elements, but Hatcher’s poem strips away all distractions from the text, which allows attentive readers to focus most of their consciousness on one of two textual streams, since it is virtually impossible to actually read both and make sense of them. You have to choose a track or risk having your train of thought derailed, so to speak, because of the speed at which they are displayed— 170 miliseconds per word (over 5 words per second).

The text written for this extreme kind of presentation has to be powerfully expressive with minimalist materials. Because the words are center justified, their length variations create visual rhythms that could be understood as a kind of meter. A slightly longer pause garners great attention for the words immediately preceding and following it, since it can be read as a line break after a very long line. Repetitions of words and phrases, even with minor variations, amplify their message dramatically under these conditions. And easily apprehensible juxtapositions between the two streaming lines can resonate powerfully for a reader attuned to them.

A peek at the source code reveals that this is not just a sped-up text. The text array is presented in lines 6-8 of the code— I recommend reading them at a rapid horizontal scroll for a parallel experience of the executed text. Even if you don’t know HTML, JavaScript, or Ruby on Rails, you may intuit that the text you read on the source code isn’t quite the same as that displayed when executed. Certain word or phrase repetitions vary, as do pauses in the display, and this happens as designed by Hatcher. The result is an endlessly variable text, with small variations that draw attention to different portions of the text in order to create different impressions in a reader’s memory.

As you read this text (multiple times, preferably) consider the impact of the variations detailed above in the context of the work’s title as you appreciate Hatcher’s powerful meditation on language and memory.

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 poetic Internet artwork makes a visceral connection between the documentation of frags in Counter-Strike multiplayer servers and the military actions documented in the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary database. As it connects the fake videogame death to military actions that usually resulted in the loss of one or many real human lives, it performs Google Earth searches to display the location of these actions. By presenting three events and locations at a time, it allows for the visuals to load and creates a time buffer to allow us to focus our attention on a particular location for longer than the few seconds between frags allow. And since we are unable to control anything in this piece, except the choice of server at the beginning, we become powerless spectators of violence made abstract through terse language and eerie landscapes devoid of human beings.

There is a poetic quality to the simply structured constrained language in the Counter-Strike logs and military reports. Some logs don’t display user identities, producing phrases reminiscent of E. E. Cummings, such as “undefined killed someone.” This simplicity reads vertically as a kind of refrain, a violent tercet which makes the Afghan War Diary reports stand out for their rich detail. Read them aloud to appreciate how the juxtaposition brings out the violence in a piece at a poetic level through repetition and variation, rhythms and rhyme.

And think about what isn’t being said about each event, all the missing details, context, imagery, and stories that aren’t being told in reports that become pure data, dehumanized like these empty landscapes in Google Earth.

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 “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.