Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
This Twitter character came to life in the “Reality: Being @spenserpratt” netprov, was christened “Tempspence” by Pratt’s followers (as a “temporary” Spencer), and lives on in this Twitter account, along with a community called The Tempspence poets. Their symbiotic existence was sustained by social media interactions of a group of people that came together through this netprov, and extended the life of the performance beyond its metaphorical covers.
This Twitter fiction netprov is based on a simple enough premise: reality star Spencer Pratt lost his his cellphone while in London for Celebrity Big Brother, and it was found by a struggling poet who began to use it in whimsical ways to promote poetry. During the three-week performance, the poet prompted Pratt’s followers to write poems based on constraint he provided, was outed as an impostor, dubbed as Tempspence, continued to develop a relationship with his readers as he shared details of his life, and eventually migrated (reborn?) to a new account, @Tempspence, as Pratt regained control of the account.
Occupy MLA is back!
But don’t be alarmed just yet, since this resurgence of the controversial netprov, takes the shape of a published archive (linked to in this entry’s title). This documentation is exemplary, including a 3-minute introductory video, a link to an artists’ statement at The Chronicle of Higher Education (with a fascinating comment thread), an indexed and color-coded archive of the tweets, and an Excel file with the raw data from the four Twitter accounts that form the heart of this work. With this resource, you can read most of this timely performance that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, satire and activism, and virtual and embodied spaces.
This next generation hypertext fiction and game shortlisted for the 2012 New Media Writing Prize is a wonderful example of how contemporary HTML and JavaScript can bring in multiple nodes into the same page to produce a seamless new document— a testament to the paths taken by the reader. Powered by two JavaScript libraries, Undum and JQuery, this work uses a scoring system to reward and punish the choices made by the reader/player who controls a character in the story, presumably with the goal of getting the most money. All this, conceptually framed by the structure and language of a legal document— a last will and testament— provides a genre through which a deceased character with an aptly Victorian name, E. R. Millhouse, can address his living heirs.
This geolocative work about a fictional flood that affects Los Angeles, California describes itself as “a Rashomon-style multi-POV narrative experience that unfolds across LA, spilling over our cast of characters and the participants. The Flood dredges to the surface the unspoken laws and logic of the city. It reveals hidden boundaries even as it spills over them.”
This poetic hypertext novella was developed using an authoring system called Literatronic. Developed by Juan Gutierrez, this adaptive system is designed to generate a coherent immersive experience for readers of hypertext works (read his description for more details). By recommending “pages” that connect with key words in the current reading page, remembering reader’s choices, the system avoids repetition and navigational loops that frustrate so many readers of hypertext works, allowing them to achieve a sense of closure or at least completion of the work.
This Twitter based netprov collected under a title headed by the word “ballad” provokes thought on the relation between this fictional piece and this ancient poetic form. The ballad, a form rooted in oral tradition, was often about sensational, comic, and tragic events and served as a conduit for stories from one region or time to another. With the invention of print, the broadside ballad reinforced the tradition of spreading news in poetic form.
How does one read this clever piece, which touches on so many genres, such as poetry, fiction, game, theory, game manual, and codework? It claims to be a manual for an absent game, a bottomless pit, and a labyrinth for readers to get lost, wondering if indeed the game has already begun. The reader inhabits a character from the outset, a 35 year old married man, who can take on different roles in games belonging to popular RPG and videogame genres: science fiction, spy thriller, fantasy, and labyrinth exploration. Most of the writing is in the tradition of game manual for these types of games (here’s an old favorite) which at their best help immerse the readers into the world of the game and can be more fun than the game itself. In the case of tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons, the game is the rulebooks, and all it requires is players and some dice for the necessary randomizations— making them good recipients of the label “cardboard computers,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has used for tabletop wargames.
Open “Stravinsky’s Muse” by Mark C. Marino
This hypertext narrative poem about a love triangle is structured by words arranged on concentric circles. Each circle contains two or three words that are either binary opposites or aspects in a relationship, or two as this case seems to be. An important circle is created by three ancient words that denote different kinds of love— Eros, Agape, and Platonic— each of which is progressively less physical and increasingly ideal. As Marino starts placing “wheels within wheels” (teacher and student, wife and friend, she and her), he encourages readers to explore the combinations of these elements and how they reveal the story. One of the pleasures of this poem can be found in the top left hand square, where definitions of the words are displayed. These sometimes hilarious definitions, real or inventive, offer constructive juxtapositions with the overall narrative and with texts displayed in the other spaces of the poem.
Open “What the Nightwoman Texted” by Mark Marino
This poem is a multimedia mashup of poems by Mary Mackey, Tulip Temple, and Carmen Firan, along with paintings by Amy Bernays brought together on a presentation tool called Prezi. Marino takes advantage of this tool’s capacity for positioning, layering, scaling, and zooming path creation to arrange these visual and textual materials in a way that truly remixes them into a new poetic experience. By juxtaposing texts from disparate sources in different formatting, he places their voices in conversation. At least one of these is already in conversation with T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” By arranging them within paintings (with zooming that highlights their brushed materiality) he adds a sense of place to these voices.
A successful mashup leaves its audience feeling like it has experienced something fresh, bursting with original energy as it re-envisions other people’s material. Go full screen with this piece and follow the path Marino has traced through this landscape to discover an act of writing that required very little typing from him but feels like something greater than the sum of its parts.
