Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
This new entry in the PoEMM series was recently published as a free iOS app, following closely a redesigned website and a booklet documenting the series. Designed for touchscreen devices, this poem fills the screen with its lines scrolling from one side to another at different speeds and in different directions. Readers encountering this wall of text may find it a bit overwhelming— too much language at the same time to apprehend.
The first version of the Know app was named after, designed for, and published a single poem: Lewis’ “Buzz Aldrin Doesn’t Know Any Better.” For version 2.0, he commissioned five poets to produce new poems with the authoring system. Here are some noteworthy observations on how they mapped out the app’s parameters.
The structure of a word cloud from which one can pull lines through touch is a remarkably versatile structure and it would benefit from a version that allows readers to explore it with their own texts and controls, as they did with the Speak app.
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“Speak Poems” by Jason Edward Lewis, Bruno Nadeau, Jim Andrews, David Jhave Johnston, J.R. Carpenter, and Aya Karpinska
This suite of poems by several prominent writers in the e-lit community was written using the Speak app, an authoring system developed by Lewis and Nadeau. This is the first in the P.o.E.M.M series (Poems for Excitable Mobile Media), a series of apps designed to explore the expressive, artistic, and publication potential of Apple’s iOS computational environment, Store, and touchscreen devices. The app opens to “What They Speak When They Speak to Me,” Lewis & Nadeau’s original touchscreen poem for large installations. The app offers other poems as well as the option for readers to explore the system by entering texts. Considering the effort that goes into creating computational frameworks for e-lit works, it is a great idea to open them up for further writerly interventions. It is therefore worthwhile to see what four talented writers have done and how their own poetics and thematic concerns are expressed through this framework. The main observable variables are font and lines of text, which readers access in different portions and sequences.
It is worth noting that all five poets (including Lewis) engage the theme of speech, structuring their lines to allow readers to intuit their structure. They help map out the framework’s rhetorical potential.
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This poem is the fourth in the P.o.E.M.M. (Poem for Excitable [Mobile] Media) series, which explores iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) as a creative platform for poetic expression. Each work investigates meaningful interactions with this environment, such as arranging texts on the screen space for readers to discover with touch and dragging gestures (“Speak”), using multitouch capability to pull out a line of poetry from a text cloud (“Know”), and combining the latter with tapping gestures to provoke words out of moving objects (“Migration”). This latest work engages the iOS environment as a market— an important aspect of artistic production.
This poem is mapped onto a nine tile sliding puzzle, the kind that traditionally has a single image that one can scramble or unscramble. The interface for this is the same, but Lewis throws a curve ball in this piece: every time the reader moves a tile— perhaps with the hope of completing the image— the image changes. One set of images is a photograph of Lewis himself, and another is a kind of map, suggesting that if we could complete it, we’d see him or where he’s from. But identity isn’t that simple to put together, particularly in the case of someone with such a diverse ethnic background as Lewis. Keep this idea in mind as you read the text as you attempt to complete the puzzle— will you get closure from this piece by completing the puzzle or is this denied much like easy answers about identity are to Lewis?
Explore more of this theme and his meaningful use of interfaces by clicking on the “Jason Lewis” tag below.
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The theme of migration resonates powerfully through this poem because it can be conceptualized through so many different frames of reference. The most visual one is evoked by sperm-like word clusters swimming in the water-like screen space, a migration that results in death for most and survival through fertilization— which is also a radical transformation. When combined with the notion of human migration through history (and prehistory) that results in genetic and ethnic diversity, this work becomes very personal for Jason Lewis, who describes his ethnicity as “Cherokee, Hawaiian, Samoan, raised in northern California rural mountain redneck culture.” Another perspective on migration occurs as academics go towards employment opportunities and are shaped by the institutions that receive them, as was the case with Lewis joining the faculty of the Design and Computation Arts program at Concordia University in Canada and founding the OBX Laboratory for Experimental Media. From a more media-specific notion of migration, the shift from page to screen, not just of the word, but of individual and community identities echoes with the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace project.
So get the free iOS app, view the video documentation, or go see this work as an installation to experience the flow of objects and words, randomness and direction, rivers and seas, tap and trace, strings and constellations.
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El tema de la migración resuena con fuerza a través de este poema porque puede conceptualizarse a través de tantos marcos de referencia diferentes. El más visual es evocado por grupos de palabras parecidas a espermatozoides nadando en el espacio de la pantalla como el agua, una migración que resulta en la muerte para la mayoría y la supervivencia a través de la fertilización, que también es una transformación radical. Cuando se combina con la noción de migración humana a través de la historia (y prehistoria) que resulta en diversidad genética y étnica, este trabajo se vuelve muy personal para Jason Lewis, quien describe su etnicidad como “cherokee, hawaiano, samoano, criado en el sureño campesino sureño de California rural cultura .” Otra perspectiva sobre la migración ocurre cuando los académicos se dirigen a las oportunidades de empleo y son moldeados por las instituciones que los reciben, como Lewis se unió a la facultad del programa de Diseño y Computación de la Universidad Concordia en Canadá y fundó el Laboratorio OBX para Medios Experimentales. Desde una noción de migración más específica para los medios, el cambio de página a pantalla, no solo de la palabra, sino de las identidades individuales y comunitarias se hace eco del proyecto Territorios Aborígenes en el Ciberespacio.
Así que obtenga la aplicación gratuita de iOS, vea la documentación del video, o vaya a ver este trabajo como una instalación para experimentar el flujo de objetos y palabras, aleatoriedad y dirección, ríos y mares, toque y trace, cadenas y constelaciones.
Presentado en ELO 2013: Chercher le Texte Virtual Gallery
Traducido por Reina Santiago
This poem evokes the attempt to make sense out of a conversation with a rambling street person in San Francisco, and its design and interface both contribute to that effect.
Lewis breaks up the line into words clustered together in a large font size to form a word cloud. The superposition of the gently rotating words create a dense, white, unreadable mass, which only makes sense around the edges as words are able to briefly break free into a space with better contrast. But just because you can’t read a word doesn’t mean it isn’t there: touching a word on the screen makes it appear along with the rest of the words in the line, by changing the font color to purple. One word in each line is a softer shade of purple and will follow your fingertip on the surface of the touchscreen.
The lines that emerge in this poem make sense in oblique ways and are held together more by physical proximity than by its non sequitur logic, yet they succeed in creating the voice of a character, one whose stream of consciousness patter can barely be guided by simply bringing up a word in their own speech.
With its word constellations, this second poem in Lewis’ P.o.E.M.M. project seems to be informed by a Concrete Poetry aesthetic, while the atomic deconstruction of the lines in “What They Speak When They Speak to Me” can be aligned with the Lettriste tradition.
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Este poema evoca el intento de dar sentido a una conversación con una persona de la calle divagante en San Francisco, y su diseño e interfaz contribuyen a ese efecto.
Lewis divide la línea en palabras agrupadas en un tamaño de letra grande para formar una nube de palabras. La superposición de las palabras suavemente rotatorias crea una masa densa, blanca e ilegible, que solo tiene sentido en los bordes, ya que las palabras pueden liberarse brevemente en un espacio con mejor contraste. Pero solo porque no pueda leer una palabra no significa que no esté allí: al tocar una palabra en la pantalla aparece junto con el resto de las palabras en la línea, al cambiar el color de la fuente a púrpura. Una palabra en cada línea tiene un tono más suave de púrpura y seguirá la punta del dedo en la superficie de la pantalla táctil.
Las líneas que emergen en este poema tienen sentido de manera oblicua y se mantienen más unidas por la proximidad física que por su lógica non sequitur, sin embargo, logran crear la voz de un personaje, cuya secuencia de patrones de conciencia apenas puede ser guiada por sacando una palabra en su propio discurso.
Con sus constelaciones de palabras, este segundo poema en Lewis P.O.E.M.M. El proyecto parece estar basado en una estética de poesía concreta, mientras que la deconstrucción atómica de las líneas en “What They Speak When They Speak to Me” puede alinearse con la tradición Lettriste.
Presentado en ELO 2013: Chercher le Texte Virtual Gallery
Traducido por Reina Santiago
Originally produced as an installation piece for large touchscreen monitors in 2007, this poem is now available as a free iOS App. This is the first of a series of poems that explore the expressive potential of touchscreen interfaces, called the P.o.E.M.M. project (Poems for Excitable [Mobile] Media). The Speak app features “What They Speak When They Speak to Me,” along with poems by Jim Andrews, J.R. Carpenter, David Jhave Johnston, and Aya Karpinska – each of which successfully capture each poet’s voice and poetics.
The Speak app turns all the letters of the poems into a kind of letter cloud or constellation but with the letters hovering over their relative position. When you touch the screen and drag your fingertip across it, the poetic line is reconstituted from that point onwards, following the trail left by your finger’s movement, and fading back into the cloud when you lift your finger. This allows for readers to experience incomplete lines and incomplete words, depending on where you’ve touched in the sentence. Lewis engages this computational structure in his poem thematically, because it is about miscommunication across language, culture, and identity. The snippets of comprehension one gets when hearing speech in different languages are echoed in the poem’s structure.
Here’s a suggestion for reading the poem somewhat systematically: after reading each line (or partial line), find a spot in the surface and make a little loop with your finger over it to concentrate the letters and allow you to visually clear the field, reducing repetition and providing a sense of completion, if not necessarily closure.
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