Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
This “online sonic mashup engine” assembles 1260 poetry audio recordings from the Penn Sound archive and provides simple, intuitive tools for very specific kinds of analysis. Whimsically toned like much of Jhave’s work, he could’ve easily used this engine to create an e-poem or a series of them: expressions of the tool and his vision. Instead, he released the tool for users to have their own creative explorations and analysis of the material.
This poem showcases Jhave’s talent for delicately combining theory, science, and intensely personal material in a native digital multimedia poem. The subtitle for this poem is ” a confession of carnal confusion concerning an absence of cognition” which he explains is the result of encountering “The Medium is the Message” as a teenager and being sexually aroused by one of its images. He also critiques that “most humanities scholars (McLuhan included) are ignorant of the raw technical complexity of neurology and data plumbing.” Considering that Jhave has named his website Glia after an essential component of the nervous system called Neuroglia, it is clear that he knows a thing or two about the brain and its mechanisms.
This poetic sequence is built around 15 typos, a hilariously plausible definition for each, and spam. Every time one clicks on the button, the program generates two short poems that incorporate the typo and offers a definition for it, each framed by a box, positioned in visually diverse ways and shifting previously generated “typeoms.” It seems like the 3 or 4 word titles are generated from the same Spam site as used in “Spam Heart,” and the poems are generated on a handful of templates and line structures, inserting and featuring the typo in boldface.
This poem by Jhave about the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster considers how humanity becomes extinct by destroying the environment so thoroughly that the world and we become unrecognizable. The speaker’s characteristically concise, witty, emotionally charged voice points out the attitudes, loss, and processes that bring about the end of man(un)kind. After reading the 27 short parts of the poem, hovering over beautifully desolate videos, Jhave inserts a little mutability into the poem, a slow accumulation of random words replacing words randomly, increasing by a factor of one word substitution per mutation level. The image above shows the title with a level 2 mutation, while the image below shows mutation level of 20.
This poem is divided into 6 parts, each one a 4-line stanza that asks or answers a series of questions “in a wired way,” providing the linguistic text of the poems in a way that provides a traditional counterpoint to the presentation. This poem is “wired” in several ways:
This generative poem is built from “spam, code, thesis work, and a little bit of language’s heart.” Each part of the poem is organized into three strophes: the first one uses a larger font, the second one consists of a single word, and the third uses three words. Upon opening the poem, the first strophe is selected randomly from a dataset, after which it begins a sequence that reads coherently from one textual generation to the next. The second and third strophes are always independently randomly selected from their datasets, creating new textual combinations with the constant sequence in the first strophe.
This deceptively simple poem contains a limited number of verses scheduled to change from one to the next so rapidly that all but the unchanging final line is unreadable, unless you click and hold the mouse button, which stops the text. That is all the control one has, basically allowing random access to the verses. Fortunately for those who value closure, this is not a combinatorial work at the level of the line (which would probably create more permutations than could be read in a lifetime of clicking), but at the level of accessing the verses, which don’t seem like they have a meaningful sequence and progression. In other words, one can click on the poem enough times to get access to all or most of the verses and formulate a sense of what Jhave is trying to say with the poem.
In the Spring of 2009, Jhave was experimenting with two digital tools that allowed him to manipulate typography in different ways: Mudbox and Mr. Softie. He had first experimented with Mudbox in the Fall of 2008 when he was producing the Soundseeker sketches, and produced 7 more pieces compiled under the title MUDs. At the same time, his typographical experimentation with Mr. Softie resulted in 7 short pieces published as Softies. These works extend Jhave’s fascination with the physicality of language particularly when embedded within videos.
Who or what is David “Jhave” Johnston? He is a digital media artist and poet, certainly, but what exactly is “he?” William David Johnston is a human being, that is a biological, social, legal, (and spiritual?) entity— the kind Auden wrote about in “The Unknown Citizen”). He is also an artist that adopted a nom d’ordinateur, “Jhave,” whose artistic techniques are codified in the digital tools he creates or appropriates, blurring the boundaries between human and machine to the extent we could call him a cyborg. But aren’t we all? “Sound Seeker” is a record of how David Jhave Johnston develops as a cyborg artist and poet.
“Soundseeker” is several things: a Flash tool created by Jhave to synchronize text to sound, a blog that documents the development and fine-tuning of the tool and its interfaces, a blog documentation of an independent study Jhave did “with the guidance and input of Jason Lewis of OBX Labs at Concordia University, Fall 2008,” and it’s a collection of 12 poetic sketches— thinking through writing with these technologies.
“Glider – Language as Life” (above) schedules aphoristic lines of poetry synchronized to the tune of a minimalist soundtrack, juxtaposing it with videos of a pond and insects that can run on water without breaking its surface tension. Is Jhave suggesting that he is merely gliding on the surface of a poetic field with depths have yet to be explored?
In poems like “plife” Jhave used a 3D digital sculpting tool called Mudbox to imbue words with greater physicality than having them cast shadows like the other objects in a video. These words have an almost organic plasticity as they grow into something more than what they mean.
There is so much more to be said about this collection, but I leave it up to you to explore. To see such a virtuoso cyborg artist and poet at play is a reward in and of itself.
From January to May 2008, Jhave produced a series of 30 sketches, experiments in motion photography, usually involving water, in which he tests out different ways of juxtaposing and superposing his poetic texts with video clips. Published as a blog, Jhave describes the project in the about page as:
I am making a film about god shot on location in my bathroom.
This site chronicles the various screen tests made during production. It is a list of online digital-poetic experiments with source code posted (as often as i get time) that will document the evolution of discrete programming and aesthetic techniques and diverse tangents as they arise in my art practice.
During those six months, these sketches document his exploration of kaleidoscope photography, liquids of different viscosities, different interfaces, textual pacing, animation, positioning, and use of Flash effects and much more. The first one, “Kaleidoscope Study #1” explores multiple videos of water (with and without objects) as a background for scheduled unrhyming couplets.