Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
Open: “Wotclock” by John Cayley
Like “Translation” and other works by Cayley, this poem can be described as an installation piece: it is designed to run indefinitely. “Wotclock” uses texts and images from What We Will combined with speaking clock algorithms designed by Cayley in Hypercard since 1995. (For an early visual poem which informs this piece, see “The Speaking Clock.”)
Open: “Windsound” by John Cayley
This award-winning long poem by Cayley shifts in and out of intelligibility as it morphs from one stanza to the next, one group of letters at a time. Yet even when the traditional meanings of words are left behind, the generated words gesture towards meaning, especially as the synthesized voices read them aloud.
Este galardonado poema largo de Cayley cambia dentro y fuera de la inteligibilidad a medida que se transforma de una estrofa a otra, un grupo de letras a la vez. Sin embargo, incluso cuando los significados tradicionales de las palabras se dejan atrás, las palabras generadas se dirigen hacia el significado, especialmente cuando las voces sintetizadas las leen en voz alta.
Open “Translation” by John Cayley
This mesmerizing work by Cayley (with music by Giles Perring) invites the reader to look at this poem for a long time, searching for something to read, particularly if you cannot read French or German. Those patient enough are rewarded by words, phrases, lines, stanzas, and insight on the transformation of ideas when translated from one language to another, and the transmediation from an image of text into a digital text. Stare at the left column for long enough, and you’ll realize how much OCR (optical character recognition) we do when we read. Stare at the right, and you’ll realize how much we desire recognizing words, more than finding constellations in the stars.
Like the night sky, there is no end to this work. It ends with the reader’s aporia (that’s-it-I’m-done!) or epiphany (aha!)— which Espen Aarseth describes as “the dialectic between searching and finding” (91-2). If you become impatient, press Shift-E for about 5 seconds and the English translation will emerge. But don’t rush to understanding, or you might miss the point…
Work Cited
Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.
Open “Jean-Pierre Balpe ou les Lettres Dérangées” by Patrick-Henri Burgaud
This tribute to the work of Jean Pierre Balpe is challenging because the reader must figure out the poem’s logic in order for them to progress through this e-poem. I can imagine many readers will not reach the end of this work, particularly if they cannot read French, and that’s okay, because this piece responds to what Philippe Bootz calls “l’esthétique de la frustration” —the aesthetics of frustration (link).
To enter the space of this poem with the goal to traverse it to the end is to enter into a game with Patrick Burgaud— or the logic and intentions he programmed into his poem. And there are both pleasures and frustrations in this game. Bonne chance!
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.
Open “The Set of U” by Philippe Bootz and Marcel Frémiot
This excerpt from Passage, an ambitious work by two e-poetry pioneers, is both theoretically interesting and aesthetically pleasing. As a generated text designed to never be displayed the same way, it cannot be reread the way one can do so with a printed text. At the same time, one can only intuit the logic of its mutability by rereading it with an eye for its variations. And because it is programmed in Director and published as a Shockwave file, we have no access to its source code.
No worries, though: its animation, music, and language combinations are delicately nuanced and intellectually stimulating. There is much pleasure to be found in its variations.
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.
Open: “Urbanalities” by Babel vs. Escha
This “short story-poem-comic strip-musical” by Chris Joseph and María Colino consists of 10 highly stylized Flash pieces in the Dada and Constructivist traditions. Two particularly arresting poems are “River” and “Sex/Conception” (see images above) because of how they use their images and randomly generated texts.
Open “Cruising” by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar
The simple yet unexplained interface for this sexy Flash poem is a metaphor for the subject of the poem—kids who barely know how to drive (or interact romantically) cruising in a small town in Wisconsin— because the reader is also a novice on how to read and navigate this poem.
The guitar music and clear voice delivering the aural version of the poem, presented simultaneously with the visual text the reader must learn to traverse in order to read, and the pictures of cars, streets, and neon signs combine well to deliver an immersive, and very hip, experience.
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, Poems That GO.
Abrir “Cruising” by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar
El simple pero inexplicado interfaz para este sensual poema Flash es una metáfora para el sujeto del poema—jóvenes que apenas conocen como guiar (or interactuar románticamente) conduciendo en un pueblo pequeño en Wisconsin— porque el lector también es un novato en cómo leer y navegar este poema.
La música de la guitarra y la voz clara enunciando la versión auditiva del poema, presentados simultáneamente con el texto visual que reta al lector a aprender a atravesar el poem para poder leerlo, mientras las fotos de los carros, las calles, y los rótulos de color neón combinan bien para emitir una experiencia inmersiva y muy hip.
Exhibido en The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, Poems That GO.
Traducido por Julianna Canabal-Rodríguez
Open “Stir Fry Texts” by Jim Andrews
With this series of collaborative e-poems, Andrews uses the cut up, an important technique in his poetics that aligns him with the work of William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Raymond Queneau, and Surrealism. His ingredients include e-mails, quotes, concrete poetry, and essay like writing, lovingly sliced with DHTML programming tools. Jim Andrews and his collaborators prep the texts for stir frying, cutting and linking where they see fit. The computer provides the energy to run the scripts and heat up the surface on which the texts are displayed. The reader’s hand, by way of the mouse and its virtual pointer on the screen’s surface, stirs the texts, cooking them up into new combinations and possibilities for his/her consumption.
For more on the Stir Fry Texts and a close reading of “Spastext” read “Cut Up, Heat, Stir” in my dissertation (pgs. 184-205).
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.