This suite of 28 early animated poems from 1995-1997 were created as animated GIFs but are really powered by a vibrant enthusiasm over the ability of computers to write kinetic language. In this suite, we see words morph into other words and into objects, words whose movements evoke their meanings, words used to build landscapes full of objects (a decade before WordWorld), and phrases reconfiguring and reshaping themselves into new ones— as is the case with “she left” (above). This poem is very economical with its language resources, yet so effective in describing the psychological process of a breakup in a relationship. These poems are little gems worth exploring, though the poet doesn’t necessarily make it easy for us.
Komninos Zervos is a brilliant prankster when it comes to interface: the poems are made accessible through a list of links in a narrow frame on the left side of the page, but through the simple trick of not closing the header tag on each link, each one is larger than the one before until they reach sizes of monstrous proportions, quickly becoming illegible in the frame provided without having to do a lot of inconvenient scrolling. To make things worse, there’s a very campy synthesized “Bohemian Rhapsody” audio clip looping eternally until you finally reach for the mute button. If you become impatient, I suggest you look at the source code and find the links to the GIFs within.
