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 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 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 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 suite of four poems based on W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” was written using GTR Language Workbench— a kind of textual Photoshop that allows users to algorithmically select and transform a text. This free and downloadable Mac & Windows software tool created by Andrew Klobucar and David Ayre can be used to analyze and transform texts, generating new ones using new and historical algorithmic methods, such as the Oulipian N+7. It also allows writers to create new algorithms or sequences of transformations to act upon texts, as seen in its tutorial videos (see the Processors and Mixed Processors tutorials in the program’s Help section).

Scholar, poet, and musician Chris Funkhouser is well versed in the use of this software, listing 5 creative works produced with it in his website. These three poems were selected from his month-long participation in the WordXWord 30/30 Poetry Challenge starting on April 1, 2011. For 30 days, he used this software to (in his words) “canniballize” the lyrics to Handy’s song to generate daily poems, perhaps also inspired by the prompts offered. Funkhouser’s algorithmic interventions can be understood as a series of jam sessions or musical remixes that act upon the original the textual recording (that is, the poem)

Funkhouser’s prefaces his four poems with Handy’s lyrics, which allow us to appreciate the connection and distance from the original. This is enhanced by the repetitive structure of blues lyrics, as can be seen in the first stanza:

Original “St. Louis Blues:”

I hate to see that evening sun go down
I hate to see that evening sun go down
‘Cause, my baby, he’s gone left this town.

“St. Louis Blues 2011:”

“Removal Us:”

Note how instead of repeating the line he chose to transform the lines individually, perhaps with different algorithms, yet keeping the last word intact or rhyming to retain some of the original structure. Some of the versions are quite different from the “seed” language, yet the variations are remarkably coherent because they’re guided by Handy and Funkhouser’s creative visions and to a certain extent Klobucar and Ayre’s vision for the software tool. Keep this in mind when reading the poems, especially in the context of the possible transformations one can put language through with this software.

This tool becomes a writing instrument in Funkhouser’s expert hands, who without typing is able create conceptual poems in a compositional process one could call language jazz.

Note: The software currently works only in Macintosh and 32-bit Windows operating systems.

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 responsive visual poem is a study of writing technologies and the word, whether it’s “ink sunk into fibrous paper” or “light through liquid crystals.” Inspired by Stephane Mallarmé’s poetic and theoretical writing as studied by Kittler, Trettien’s JavaScript (& JQuery) work explores the range of shades between the white page and the black sky as backgrounds against which writing can occur with light or ink.

Designed not only for unresponsive screens or pages, this poem is written in code to display and behave in environments that allow for readers to provide input that the words react to. As the reader interacts with the language on the screen through the two interfaces she provides, the text hovers between readability and an illegible typographical overload. And the source code offers no shortcuts, since each letter is separated by extensive code that positions it on the screen. You have to get inside the page and navigate it with the tools offered by your platform.

As far as platform is concerned, there is a noteworthy difference in how one interacts with the “write” portion of this piece. In a mouse or trackpad powered computer one must move a pointer around, which means that if one doesn’t want to accidentally mouse over the spiraling letters, one has to dodge them. This makes for a completely different reading strategy with a touchscreen device where one can simply touch a letter to activate it. The reader’s symbolic presence in the text is less evident in touchscreen devices, though the tactile interaction enhances a sense of presence at the same time.

As you interact with and attempt to read this piece, consider how effectively it engages and exceeds, not only Mallarmé and Kittler, but also Eugen Gomringer’s notion of the “constellation.”

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.