This multimedia poem is an assault on the senses— visually, kinetically, and aurally— it bombards the reader with so much information, color, sound, and stimulus that it is difficult to process, much less read. The text is handwritten and moves, spins, changes around some boxes the reader can manipulate, moving each whirling cluster to a spot in the window where it might be legible. The music, noise, and speech loop loudly but barely understandably, much like the handwritten text. Even in the menu page the typed text is so skewed that it is barely legible. How does one approach this piece? Well, as it turns out Lewis LaCook has been a member of WebArtery for years, so one way to get some insight is by seeing what he may have said about the piece in this online community.
there were many inspirations behind [Jeffrey]===one was the discussions on representation/non-representation we’ve been bc-ing about (which is why the piece is called jeffrey==these discussions were foremost in my mind)===another was jason nelson’s sex project, wherein one drags shards of a poem around===another too was the visual work of john m. bennett, whose print mag LOST AND FOUND TIMES is full of this “re-introduction of the body”=== all of these went into this piece===i was concerned primarily with the texture different layers of chicken scratch would make===& ALSO was quite enamored of some of the flash animation i’ve seen=== [links added] (“undeserved praise”).
This piece was named after of the members with whom LaCook was corresponding with, Jeffrey Jullich, who praised the work for approaching the boundary of the “representational limit” without falling into asemy. So this piece is about that edge between meaning and meaninglessness, legible writing and visual art, audible but barely discernible speech. It reinserts the body into digital media through handwriting, speech, and interactivity and the result is messy, full of noise and, perhaps, meaning. Note: There is a broken link to a page called “Hackoo,” and I’ve linked to an captured image in the Internet Archives captured around the time the work was published.

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