This conceptual poem exists as an enigmatic electronic object and a record of an online performance. To best appreciate the event and its record, one should be aware of several contexts:
- Marcel Duchamp’s piece titled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (a.k.a. The Large Glass). (In French: La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même)
- The now defunct Modern Bride.com website.
- The Defib Interview space: an IRC chatroom hosted by Webartery.com (now 404), an online artists collective created and curated by Jim Andrews as an extension of the Webartery Yahoo Group (still active).
As can be seen in the piece, Warnell created a mashup of the first two conceptual spaces, and invited the Webartery community to view the page and participate (here’s an
invitation) in a performance of the piece.
During the chat, Warnell— using his identity PBN (Poem by Nari)— posted a sequence of 180 lines of code poetry (plus a “title” at the beginning and end) inspired by
IRC commands. The
participants reacted and responded to the lines as they appeared during the chat, numbered in a countdown from 180, as well as to Duchamp’s puzzling artwork.
Was Warnell echoing Duchamp’s piece on the Web using Poem by Nari’s enigmatic lines as the Bride and the Webartery participants as the Bachelors?
Featured in Cauldron & Net.
