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.
This is a true story about the untimely death of someone close to the speaker, who seeks to reconstruct the story of her death in a way that can provide closure and hopefully justice. It is also a reflection on analog and digital storytelling and the objects that hold these stories.
This generative poem app for mobile devices was originally designed for iOS, but upon being rejected for inclusion in the Apple Store was adapted to Android and successfully published in the Google Play store. Its primary interest lies in the different kinds of input it is able to process in its generating algorithms, such as address books, location, WiFi hotspots. Its title and description are indicative of its goals and strategies.
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 generative work produces narratives about a mythical sea voyage undertaken by two characters, an owl and a girl. Framed over the gorgeous image an old sea map, each iteration of the story unfolds in a text that lasts 40 seconds before being generated anew, which is sufficient time for most readers to get to the end, but without being distracted by links. Readers that follow links to the shifting islands found in Wikipedia to get information about some of the story’s contexts are likely to return to a different story, in which the information gleaned may no longer be relevant. This disorientation resonates with the owl and girl’s journey, who aided by various navigational and communication technologies, travel beyond the edges of the known, leaving behind some incomplete records of their adventure.
As you read the stories— and I recommend reading multiple iterations to better appreciate its variations on the theme— keep an eye out for some of the textual undercurrents that slowly begin to manifest themselves in different parts of the map. A peek at the source code (right click on a non-image part of the screen and select view source) starting on line 129, reveals a series of five marquees (named “bay,” “rip,” “journal,” “wecoast,” and “morse”) each of which slowly reveals a poetic text, one line at a time. The only one without line breaks is the last one, displayed on the screen almost as the undulations of waves at sea, is actually a written in morse code:
– —- / —- .-. —. .- -. .. —.. . / .. … / – —- / .-. . -.-. —- —. -. .. —.. . —..— / – —- / -.- -. —- .— / – …. .- – / .. -. / .- -. / . -. -.. .-.. . … … / ..- -. -.- -. —- .— -. / … . .- / – ……-. . / .. … / —- -. . / .. … .-.. .- -. -.. / ..- .—. —- -. / .— …. .. -.-. …. / -.— —- ..- / …. .- …- . / … . – / ..-. —- —- – / -… . ..-. —- .-. .
I will not translate the encoded coda for this work, but you can copy and paste the sequence into a decoder, which will allow you to listen to it and read it in English. Its message leads to reflection upon the work as a whole that may lead to further exploration of its narrative geography.
The boundaries of this work are as leaky as some of the ships and cartographic knowledge of the seas referenced in this piece. In addition to the links to Wikipedia, most of the references for the images and marquees are credited in the notes, with the exception of coda referenced above, quoted from a work represented in the following URL: …. – – .—. —-… -..-. -..-. . -. .-.-.- .— .. -.- .. .—. . -.. .. .- .-.-.- —- .-. —. -..-. .— .. -.- .. -..-. -… —- .-. -.…-. .-.. .. -…-. … (encoded to avoid “spoiler” effect). There are flows from other works by Carpenter, such as a QR code in “The Broadside of a Yarn” that brings up a web page with the story generator. It also contains lines from her poem “up from the deep,” published in Jason Lewis’ iOS “Know” app.
She spins a sturdy yarn from these fibers.
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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 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 haunting soothing work is made of equal parts narrative, game, and poem. Its different “play modes”— wordless, whispers, story, and feeds—allow audiences to experience it (respectively) as an interactive ambient musical art piece, a kinetic concrete poem, a story, or an artistic interface for Twitter. Except for the last, each mode is layered on the previous one, which helps train readers to successfully navigate the work. The added incentive of unlocking achievements through the Game Center, encourages readers to continue exploring the work by providing a sense of progress and a roadmap of curiosity and expectation.
This narrative poem is arranged on a darkly atmospheric virtual world designed to both creep you out and pull you in through curiosity. Like the proverbial moth, the reader’s attention is drawn towards the brightest things around: white words float in the air, static or rotating. And the lines of mezangelle verse both heighten the dread by telling fragments of a ghostly narrative prefigured by the bus crash site the reader finds herself in and soften the tone with hints about the interface that nudge the fourth wall.