Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
This multimedia work about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti breathes life into the natural disaster by allowing readers to explore the stories of three characters who experienced it. The winner of the 2011 New Media Writing prize in the student category, this is a truly a work that arises from the logic of new media writing, seamlessly integrating elements of comics, narrative, cyberdrama, electronic literature, and videogames.
This award-winning Web documentary about a short-lived mining town in Canada made the 2011 New Media Writing Award shortlist. A masterful, lovingly produced piece is challenging to categorize in terms of genre: is it a video (its interactivity and born-digital ontology make it difficult to label as “film”), memoir, narrative, poem, or an artistic website? As a multimedia work (using audio, video, text, images) that requires multimodal engagement (reading, listening, viewing, interaction) from its audience, it is fittingly multi-generic.
This award winning interactive poem tells the story of a man who has come to the acute realization that he has lost control of his life and potentially the love of his wife and son. The story of his “loss of grasp” is told through six movements, each one presenting texts and environments that respond to readers’ input through mouse and keyboard. Each movement contains an interface that advances the narrative while producing an emotional response in the reader.
This is a new media application of what T. S. Eliot called an objective correlative:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
The situation and chain of events this Prufrockian speaker finds himself in is a powerful enough objective correlative, but Bouchardon extends Eliot’s concept through the tactical deployment of simple interfaces, he creates traversal situations that evoke emotions in readers as they interact in order to read the text.
For example, in the still image above, readers can reveal the image of a woman (the character’s wife) by using formulaic getting acquainted phrases as a kind of brush— a clever visual representation of how shallow an understanding of a person one can get through such interactions. It is not surprising when twenty years later, the speaker gets an ambiguous message from his wife (see image below).
After a slowly scheduled presentation that focuses attention on each line and on how multiple readings arise as we read them in the context of the lines that follow, we are able to display the lines in the original or reversed order depending on where we place the pointer on the screen. The lines of verse read differently depending on the order they are presented in, creating rich interpretive possibilities through syntax and enjambment while maintaining the ambiguity of the question that frames this section. There are no easy answers in this poem, and one needs to read between the lines, sometimes literally (see image below), to experience its emotional impact.
As you navigate this delicately interactive work, consider how Bouchardon has scripted your participation in each section to enhance the speaker’s voice and narrative development throughout the piece. The final movement offers simultaneously the freest and most constrained interactive moment in the poem, directly pitting two voices to accentuate the work’s resolution.
Featured in New Media Writing Prize 2011, ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature
This comic strip narrative in prose and verse reinvents the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but with a character called “Hobo Lobo.” Reimagining the comic strip using Scott McCloud’s notion of the “infinite canvas” the comic goes beyond the traditional implementation of a two-dimensional strip. The innovative aspect is that he uses layers to produce a three dimensional parallax effect when the reader scrolls and rethinks the panel by centering layers on adjacent segments on the strip, as he explains in his Parallaxer tutorial. The effect of these layers and panel transitions enhances narrative continuity in panel transitions by replacing the comics gutter with the more cinematic mise-en-scène.
Enjoy this fun retelling of the folktale in all its layers: politics, images, social issues, technology, media, genre, and more, keeping in mind that you’ll notice different things depending on what angle you view it from.
Featured in New Media Writing Prize 2012
This multimedia poem is a profound meditation on place. Based on photographs and sound recordings taken from the same window over the course of a year, this work seeks to capture a sense of space for readers to enter. Norman directly credits John Cage as an inspiration for this piece— a musician interested in listening to ambient sounds and directing audiences to the same, as he did with his (in)famous 4’33”.
This narrative poem is a fascinating type of hypertext because instead of having five primary nodes from which to follow linear threads it uses a layering interface for navigation. The reader, instead of clicking on links, scrapes away at images to reveal an image beneath, and can continue to scrape away until she reaches the end of that narrative thread. This allows readers to reveal more than one layer at a time, as pictured above in a screenshot of three layers in the introduction.
This poem is about displacement— a fish out of water story about a young woman named Lynne whose imposed migratory patterns are the opposite of what most people choose follow. Lynne’s adventures in New York City all draw attention to people, animals, and things displaced in time and place, the result of immigration, population shifts, fishing, and family visits.
This Webyarn frames an argument between husband and wife about having children. The wife wants to keep trying, while the husband doesn’t seem to want children at all. The piece is structured around a wedding: its imagery (cake, dancing, food), vows, institutions, and symbols. The surface of the text responds to the reader’s mouseovers, rewarding exploration by triggering multiple layers of language and musical phrases in short loops. The circularity of the wedding ring structures the poem as the argument goes round and round the topic, replaying sounds, images, words, and their movements. A small cluster of squares slowly gets colored in a non-linear sequence near the bottom of the window, suggesting the passage of time for this relationship, yet the questions continue throughout. Will this disagreement ever get resolved?
This haunting narrative about a summer vacation turned tragic uses a slim strip of moving images as the background for a stream of language flowing from right to left as a series of voices tell a piece of the story. The sound of waves on the shore serve as a soothing aural backdrop to each character’s whispered voices, perhaps suggestive of what happens when the sea raises its voice. Each character involved with the tragic turn of events brings a different perspective to the situation, yet they are all so involved in their own affairs, much like the ending of Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out.” In the final lines of the poem, as the speaker (whisperer) seeks to tie up the events in a neat little package that can provide closure, we realize that closure eludes all the characters in the story, who must continue to live on haunted by their memories and regrets.
Featured in New Media Writing Prize Shortlist 2010, ELO 2012 Media Art Show
Open “On Lionel Kearns” by Jim Andrews
In this piece, Jim Andrews curates and meditates on a selection of proto-digital poems by Lionel Kearns from the 1960s to the present. Heavily influenced by McLuhan, Kearns intuited that “if one messes around enough with the physical form of language (either spoken or written), eventually you get to the point where it (the language) drops its load of conventional reference” and created works of visual and sound poetry “right on that edge, where language begins to work into either music or visual art.”