Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
Open “Face the Facts” by Dan Waber
This poem is built on a two dimensional array with a simple interface that allows people to read the text horizontally and vertically. The position of the pointer (or a contact point on a touchscreen device) triggers which line or column of text is highlighted for readability. Extracted from an ambitious work titled Unbound, this interface illustrates some of the reading strategies necessary for the larger work, which is implemented in a printable form.
Open “REPEATAFTERME” by Jörg Piringer
This is a poem without a text. What Piringer has created is a responsive environment for readers to type their own texts and experience them transformed visually and aurally by the mechanisms he has programmed. As you type each letter, you will be presented with the letter surrounded by an artistic arrangement composed from the letter and a recording of Piringer articulating a sound, which in most cases corresponds with the sound one would associate with that letter.
This poem invents an origin myth for Bratislava (abbreviated BA, hence the title in English), cuts it up and scatters it like seeds into an interface designed to respond to reader interactions. The scattered words are gently drawn to the pointer until a word falls under it, which triggers the whole dispersed line to swiftly arrange itself, brightening into legibility on the canvas, and then dispersing and fading when released. This allows for an exploratory kind of reading, taking in a snippet at a time, as if one is hearing bits and pieces of the story as one travels in Bratislava.