Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
Reagan Library might be best described as exploratory hypertext fiction. In this work, Stuart Montfort has created an eerie world, reminiscent of the game Myst and its sequels, which seems to require a particular state of mind, a suspension of disbelief, and a total immersion into a new and unexplored universe.
Talan Memmott’s 2003 work Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] situates itself within an art historical context by presumably introducing the reader to self-portraits of artists from between 1756 to 1954, allowing the reader to simply click through what might conventionally pass for a mundane educational presentation.
In “RedRidinghood,” Donna Leishman retells the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Using Flash in a similar way to “Deviant” (previously reviewed here), Leishman offers a modern reading of the traditional tale, which acknowledges its indebtedness to Angela Carter (thanked in the credits as the person who initiated it all). In this interactive narrative, Red Riding Hood sets out on her way to her grandmother’s house. In the woods, she meets a boy-wolf who will eventually seduce her, but also experiences the forest itself before falling asleep and dreaming.
Shelley Jackson’s My Body – A Wunderkammer is a 1997 hypertext that allows the reader to explore a fragmented recounting of the narrator’s relation to their own body, and to the memoirs and accounts produced by the nature of this embodiment, whether textual, linguistic, social or physical. The text opens onto the image of a female body that is subdivided into sections of the body and the reader simply has to click on the relevant section that interests them to read an anecdote involving that section of the narrator’s body, which then includes further links to other anecdotes or body parts which are often only tangentially related to earlier sections.
“Galatea” is a piece of interactive fiction with a single non-playing character (NPC) in a single room. The narrative is loosely inspired by the Pygmalion story, for this reason Galatea, dressed in green, stands on a pedestal as part of an exhibit.
“Galatea” is a conversational program, descended from early pieces like ELIZA, that imitates the language of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Notably, the whole concept of “Galatea” makes reference to ELIZA, which was named after the character of Eliza Doolittle in the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Instead of imitating the language of therapists as ELIZA does, “Galatea” tells a narrative. However, “Galatea” is a multilinear narrative: it does not just tell one story, but many alternative stories that can develop into infinite permutations. “Galatea” was created using the Z-machine, a 1979 virtual machine originally used for the development of adventure games.
Imagine working on a screen space of 40 columns x 24 rows of pixels and using a programming language that was so simple that it invited play. Welcome to the world of the Apple IIe (circa 1983), a personal computer and operating system (AppleSoft Basic) that gave you such simple resources, along with the ability to easily manipulate them, that it inspired poets such as Geof Huth and bpNichol to make words dance on the screen.
This collection of minimalist poems maximize the potential of the Apple IIe screen and are mesmerizing. Don’t look away for a moment or you might miss something super cool.
Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.
Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1: A Retrospect
Upon completing my reading of the poetry in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 (tagged as ELC1 in this blog), some numbers and reflection on the works within is in order.
The ELC1 contains 60 works of e-literature, 38 of which are classifiable as poetry. Some of these works are certainly on the margins of what one might consider poetry, but I chose to include rather than exclude when in doubt. The authoring software distribution for these works is as follows:
Open “I, You, We” by Dan Waber and Jason Pimble
This piece places you (as the “I”) in the middle of a vast cube made up of words in rows. Whether you wish to control the rotation of the cube or allow the program to rotate it along different axes for you, you are in for a dizzyingly fascinating ride. Choose lines to read along horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or inward planes or focus on the phrases that emerge from the combinations of I, you, we and different verbs and the combinations of the phrases. You could spend a very long time inside this cube, losing yourself in its spaces and exploring its visually arranged permutations, and it would be time well spent.
Featured in The Electronic Collection, Volume 1.
This amazing work by Waber makes handwriting dance by using Flash to treat it as a piece of string: elastic, plastic, and so graceful! What we witness in this suite of short works of kinetic concrete poetry is not exactly a disembodied hand inscribing on the blank canvas of the page. We are looking through a window into a larger space, one in which little dramas are taking place, sometimes outside of our view. From the tug of war of the first “argument,” to the flirtation of a “no” morphing into a “maybe,” these pieces have a bounce and a rhythm to them that fill these manuscripts with life.
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.
Open “Tao” by Reiner Strasser and Alan Sondheim
With this brief piece, Strasser and Sonheim show us that the path to great multimedia poetry lies in simplicity. The way they’ve chosen to juxtapose the two short films and provide an interface that allows us to change their angle. Because the videos are of the view from a moving car, those positions can combine to change directions, produce a sense of openness, or drive towards a vanishing point. Its music, pacing, and brevity are evocative of the haiku, while the jagged graphic that rotates in the films suggest explosive violence. That combined with the year of publication (2004) and the use of the word Baghdad, makes for a powerful statement on the Iraq war.
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.