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As you explore and read this disorienting work, consider how the use of links, mouseovers, animated GIFs, and multiple languages challenge expectations. Take pleasure in its headlines, juxtapositions, and the brief scheduled displays of even more visually charged images of language. Is the persistent background image of a cassette tape meant to be personified? Is this what happens when media stops being the passive recipient of our gaze and starts staring back?
This poem is a textbook example of hypermediacy that follows an early Web aesthetic but constructed with more modern CSS, HTML, and JavaScript than was used in the 1990s (compare this work with “Weave” by Thomas Bell for an example of similar screen renderings using older Web technologies). In both cases, the texts are constructed to frustrate conventional design and readability principles, though Jacobs’ is working with more sophisticated code materials. Take a look at the source code (right click and select from menu) to note how all the elements are so readable, organized, and deliberately formatted and positioned on the screen. This is a different representation of the text from what we see on the screen: the instructions for display rather than the result of a browser following those instructions. Is reading this code somehow cheating by circumventing the author’s designed interface?
Consider that the poem’s title translates literally to “The Resocialist International” and its placement and language choices frame the page as a socialist art journal. As you read its slogan-like lines (formatted as headlines) which advocate a revolutionary avant garde poetics, think about the extent you might be following deeply ingrained reading practices and how this work pushes you to become re-socialized. Is reading the screen rendering alone an implicit acceptance of an unspoken Web EULA?
Featured in ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature
