|
Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions
of E-Poetry
Click
here to download pdf version.
By Stephanie Strickland
1175 York Avenue 16B
New York, NY 100
212-759-5175
strickla [@] mail [dot] slc [dot] edu
http://stephaniestrickland.com
Keywords
digital poetry, new media poetry, literary
hypermedia, electronic poetry, electronic literature,
Web poem, poetics, reading, virtual, writing
Abstract
Eleven characteristics of networked digital
poetry, a category that encompasses an enormous
variety of work, are discussed and illustrated
with examples. Issues raised include the recalibration
of the writing/reading relationship, the nature
of attachment at the site of interaction, an architectonic
quality of instrument-building that characterizes
many pieces, differing treatments of time and
“place”, the use of recombinant flux,
a performative character displayed by many works,
the omnipresence of both translation and looping,
as well as pervasive references to ruin and hybrid
states of mixed reality.
Introduction
Writing native to the electronic environment
is under continual construction (poiesis) by its
creators and receivers. The neologism poietics
engages this dynamism. Poietic e-writing is characterized
by the following 11, entangled, states:
1. Writing and receiving functions are carried
out by communicative peers;
2. Intense attachment exists at the site of interaction;
3. Time, become active, stratigraphic, and topologic,
is written multiply;
4. An architectonic writing builds “instruments,”
to be “played”;
5. Though reception replaces interpretation,
searching and questing persist in a seductive
environment of archaeologic ruin and erosion;
6. Recombinant flux is produced by writing engines
and generators;
7. Writing and receiving are real-time performative
events with some resemblance to improv and to
traditional oral performance, which depend on
ergodic contributions from their reception-communities;
8. Translation as conversion and transcoding,
as well as translation of intention into code,
are the basis of e-writing; translation toward
a potentially cross-border communication is sometimes
its aim;
9. A bodily-inflected “place” remediates
the current GPS coordinates of refugee, diasporic,
or otherwise multiply-located readers;
10. Various sorts of looping, simple, event-prompted,
and recursive, are fundamental to e-writing;
11. Soft ephemeral space in any number of dimensions
is created and disassembled or dispersed inside
an overall default situation of hybrid states
of mixed reality.
Entangled states of e-poetry are inflected by
the “dual patterning” of human language:
a layer of sounds and a layer of words, heard
together but not the same. Sounds are few, 40
to 50 phonemes, but they combine to produce an
almost infinite number of words. Double patterning
works for writing as well, written words without
end from a handful of letters.
When we focus on the alphabet-like, we are using
a recombinant unit. Such a procedure lies at the
heart of electronic computation and genetic bio-information.
When we focus on the sound stream, or on gesture,
we are using continuity. Speech sounds are not
just distinct phonemes — speech consists
of overlapping flows, like dancing. As you take
one step, you are already preparing for the next.
Poietic hypermedia juggle the alphabetic digital
and the gestural continuous, keeping them both
in motion.
Lacking any definition or criteria for a “hypermedia”
unit or for a “hypermedia” whole,
ordinary forms of criticism are stymied. What
applies generally to the entangled states is a
character of instability, of dynamic complexity,
of ever-changing composition. E-poetry runs directly
into the unrepeatable, through algorithmic reach
and through live feeds from dispersed networks.
This situation is interesting, valuable, and riveting
— as well as exhausting, confusing, and
opaque.
One: Communicative Peers
Writing and reading relations and behaviors
are changed: “writing” has addressed
itself to producing behavior (executable code),
and “reading” has evolved to receive
and participate in dynamic hypermedia. A practice
of viewing, sampling, playing, participating,
decoding, and receiving among communicative peers
is being developed. These peers are not equally
powerful. Earlier rhetoric about literary hypertext
inappropriately suggested an equivalence or interchangeability
of reader and writer. It is rather the case that
at least three agents (writer-coder, machine processor-network,
player-reader) hold veto power over communication.
Unless all are engaged, nothing is happening.
A poietic representation of the key three agents
is featured in Bradford Paley’s CodeProfiles
[1], his contribution to the CODeDOC show at the
Whitney. It reads — and displays itself
reading — its own code. An amber point traces
a human (linear) read-through; a silver, developmental
order, how Paley broke it up as he composed it;
and a green, the rhythm of machine reading, how
the routines call each other, passing control
back and forth. Color-coded paths march, figure-skate,
and vibrate over sensitive spots, creating beautiful
overlaid trails, a pattern that can be supplemented
by the viewer’s own mouseover reading of
the code.
CodeProfiles profiles itself, presenting a sketch
(profile), and “profiling” a suspect.
What is suspect, here, is the impression of revelation.
For every bit of revealed code, there exist further
layers, levels, and protocols of unrevealed code
which cannot be seen while it is running. Another
contributor to the CODeDOC show, in a renga-like
move, responded to CodeProfiles with a remix that
profiled Paley’s program profiling itself,
focusing on the parallel operations occurring
at any moment, rather than the sequential order
Paley had traced.
An equally active, but much more unmoored, reception
context is explored by Giselle Beiguelman in Poetrica
[2]. In a world where the border between art and
communication is blurred by textual image, visual
text, and motion graphics; where reception occurs
on a large variety of devices, including PDAs,
DVDs, movie trailers, cell phones, electronic
panels, the Web, plotters, and digital prints,
Beiguelman wants to sever the ties between verbal
and visual that concrete poetry presupposed and
created. To this end she composed, by algebraic
operations, a series of visual Nomadic Poems (no-poems)
with non-alphabetic fonts. She wants to drive
home the radical disconnect between “the
same information” and the material support
on which it is displayed, emphasizing unlinking
information from its place of production and transmission,
releasing it into logical space.
The unlinking she emphasizes is brought about
equally by the fact that separate representational
and inscription media are sucked up together into
one computer “metamedium [3].” Filters
and effects (reverb, blur, etc.) are applied independently
of any physical situation in which they might
originate. These cross-applications, no less than
output to a variety of supports, are responsible
for the nomadic immaterial quality of the digital
interface that Beiguelman seeks to convey.
However, in Poetrica, concurrent with breaking
one set of connections, Beiguelman has simultaneously
arranged for another set to arise through tele-intervention
by the public. For the Poetrica project, anyone
could compose visual messages (up to 52 characters)
and send them, by Web or SMS, to three commercial
electronic billboards in downtown São Paulo.
Poetrica demonstrates that reception context governs,
that the interconnection of network-reader-reception
device is independent of and replaces the verbal-visual
connection emphasized in concrete poetry, emblems,
and icons. As she says of nomadic literature:
“…being hybrid and unlinked to support,
it dematerializes the medium, and the interface
construes itself as the message [4].” Works
like CodeProfiles show that the amount left “unrevealed”
at the interface remains enormous.
An amusing and somewhat bereft commentary on
the exploitation of social codes that becomes
possible in this context, a simulated classic
e-mail scam, is the Young-Hae Chang and Marc Vogt
piece, Subject: Hello [5].
Two: Intense Attachment
E-media can become magically addictive,
its loss accompanied by withdrawal symptoms. An
Empyre list participant [6] says: “I’ve
spent countless nights in front of my three machines,
lost in what I'm doing, and the next day, I can't
remember whether the conversations I had were
in person, on the phone, or in real life. And
then you look at the harder-core game-players;
they are so easily lost ‘in the zone’,
a definitely meditative experience, where even
the game becomes transparent and you run entirely
on subconsious reflex.”
Gregory Ulmer in print [7] has theorized this
intense attachment to e-media as “conductance”
of desire best formed through the creation of
“my-stories.” Talan Memmott extends
the investigation in a suite of six poietic hypermedia
works [8]. He contends [9] that it is only within
the rich semiotic potentials of hypermedia work
that his and Ulmer’s ideas find their true
habitat. Accounting for them in print has an awkward,
reverse-engineered feel.
Lexia to Perplexia [10], the best-known of Memmott’s
pieces, is specifically concerned with network
attachment, worlds on either side of the Alice-looking-glass
screen involving each other in a not quite Narcissan
way. Importantly, the “arguments”
of the piece are lodged in its interfacial affordances,
as much as in any of its text, its surface design,
or its choreography, thereby demanding “attachment”
from the reader.
Regina Célia Pinto’s Viewing Axolotls
[11] takes a more dramatic approach to attachment.
It is based on Julio Cortazar’s story, Axolotl,
which tells of a man so hypnotized by the golden,
neotenic, amphibious creatures in an aquarium
that one day he finds himself inside the tank,
gazing out at the man who comes to gaze at him.
In Viewing Axolotls, Pinto provides many opportunities
for the reader to engage simultaneously with her
constructs and their meaning: with virtuality,
with “the eye” and “the I,”
with the desire for participation in the life
of an alien being. Readers can read the Cortazar
story (in English and Portuguese translation),
view the now-female avatar protagonist enter the
aquarium, or play a textual game in which the
object is to properly manifest the words “view,”
“fog,” and “understanding.”
Other segments of the piece include a manipulable
ax-box virtual-reality interface, a virtual-real
chimeric Escher lizard, a sand woman wishing to
bi-locate, and an opportunity to construct an
animation onsite. Avatar, player, reader, and
axolotl are all found to form behind the glass
of the computer screen on a grid of electronic
co-ordinates.
Intense public intimacy, carried out via PDAs,
cell phones, and the Web, is a social context
for the poietic. Not only does the network locate
us “in-between” the worlds of viewer
and viewed, mesmerized and mesmerizer, it also
affects our experience of time.
Three: Time
Online sociality pushes toward “in-between
times” reading engaged during a work break
or on the move. The user’s “no-time”
in the gravitational world translates to multiple
interstitial times in the e-world. Many small
fast works exist to serve these fleeting times.
But equally, online poeietic work may be very
slow, a web-cam watching weather, a slowly developing
set of algorithmic mutations, or the transliterating
process in a John Cayley poem. Cayley describes
his work-in-progress, Overboard [12], as “an
example of literal art in digital media that demonstrates
an ‘ambient’ time-based poetics. There
is a stable text underlying its continuously changing
display and this text may occasionally rise to
the surface of normal legibility in its entirety.
However, Overboard is installed as a dynamic linguistic
‘wall-hanging,’ an ever-moving ‘language
painting.’”
Whether works are as slow as paintings, or as
fast as Brian Kim Stefans’ setting of Creeley’s
poem I Know a Man, letter by letter [13], they
have no inherent time. As Adrian Miles points
out [14], with regard to interactive video as
an e-poietic form, one video clip can last two
seconds or 20 minutes, each track separately scriptable
as to speed, direction of play, mobility, or presence.
The non-indexical character of time online is
a very strong difference in digital aesthetics
from the aesthetics of print or photography.
The times involved in any poietic production
include machine speed, time for the code to read
itself, real time, clock time, coded speed, network
lags, device delays, and overlaid simultaneous
rhythms of unfolding. The co-presence of neighboring
moments opens to a kind of shift that is neither
simple oscillation nor simple progression. Even
as there is no canonical hypermedia unit, there
is no privileged “time” unit or moment.
In V: Vniverse [15], an e- poem I made with Cynthia
Lawson, time-tuning is directed toward bringing
internal timings of the piece into resonance with
each other and with machine-time, network-time,
and the timings of perception-cognition. V: Vniverse
is a part of a larger work V, distributed across
an invertible print volume [16] and two online
locations[17]. V analogizes nomadic peoples of
the Ice Age to nomadic peoples of the Information
Age. As Ice Age nomads lived on a grid of stars,
patterns they invented to be clock, calendar,
and map, the Vniverse Web reader, facing a “night
sky,” must inaugurate time by sweeping her
hand, causing fleeting images to appear—diagrams
and outlines that disappear back into the darkness.
Lingering on a star, single-clicking, or double-clicking
provoke different text behaviors, creating spatial
micro-textures and cadences unavailable in “the
same” print. Reading assembled texts proceeds
in tandem with scanning disappearing tercets.
Clicking ‘next’ activates many time-scales
at once: the time of break-up, the time of emergence,
and the time of cross-layer existence between
dissolving and emerging texts co-exist with the
time of reading forward in the same constellation.
The iterative play-read process overwhelms individual
differences in sampling, just as years of Ice
Age sky observation yielded recognizable repetitions
or significant conjunctions. Extinction, as much
as production, is to be read.
This highly recursive Director piece never leaves
its original frame which helps give the illusion
of words moving directly in and out of the sky.
All of the time resources go toward responsiveness
and the production of language, rather than visual
display. The stars await — each a standpoint
and a center — and they are more active
than the constellations, though the visual impression
is the reverse. Here space is used to amplify
the sense of resonance that internal timings create.
Four: Instruments
John Cayley was one of the first to refer
to poietic systems as similar to musical instruments.
Cayley also analogizes e-writing to the child’s
Mystic Writing Pad evoked by Freud [18]: “If
you program your system and its screen to behave
like a Mystic Writing-Pad, then your writing and
your atoms of writing become time-based….
Just as we have to watch the whole process of
writing and erasing in order to appreciate the
Mystic Pad…we must read the entire duration
of a literal [letter-producing] automaton, observing…the
particular way in which it is written; the particular
manner, means, and duration of its persistence;
and the particular mode of its destruction.”
Cayley’s riverIsland is just such a Writing-Pad
and poietic instrument. Two loops, figured onscreen
as river location strips, are Quicktime movies
that can be dragged by the mouse. The horizontal
river moves along a loop of poems from an ancient
Chinese sequence, while the vertical river scene
moves through 16 variant translations of one of
the poems, including phonetic sounding of the
Chinese, and a shift from literal to graphic representation,
as the word “kong” (empty) morphs
through Xu Bing’s square writing to an actual
Chinese character.
A navigation device at screen right allows one
to move point by point along the loops. This point
by point moving involves the performance of a
kind of translation Cayley calls transliteration;
that is, the source text and the target translated
text are set up as two arrays with rules for shifting
each source letter to its target letter that involve
the letter’s sound and its speed of arrival.
An entire continuum is evoked which moves in and
out of comprehensibility, but never out of legibility.
What is overlaid on this motion of translation
is a set of voices reading the poem in many languages
and the sound of water from the implied and visualized
river.
In Cayley’s riverIsland [19], the interface
does not construe itself as message, but as a
sensitive control, a set of lute-like strings
to pluck. The poietic poet builds an instrument
to hear the tune in his head, as Theremin did
the Theremin, Ives the Humanophone, Partch the
Cloud-Chamber bowls, or Raymond Scott the Electronium,
designed, he said, “for the instantaneous
composition-performance of music heard only once,
then left to echo in its solitary orbit [20].”
Other notable e-poietic instruments include Diana
Reed Slattery’s Glide [21] and LiveGlide
[22], Jim Andrews’s Nio [23], and Jim Rosenberg’s
Diagram Poems [24], where grammar itself is put
into play as an instrument.
Five: Ruin
Poietic objects are in general not exhaustible
through any kind of closure, and thus are not
subject to definitive interpretation. However
questing and searching, being seduced and led
on, being intrigued and in search of emergent
understanding, are part of interacting with them.
Ragnhild Tronstad [25] has analyzed the reading/behavior
of those who play quest adventure games in a Mud.
Players do not feel they have exhausted a text
space simply because they understand how it leads
to a “solution.” It is independently
important to them to acquire combat points, quest
points, and “explore” points. Quests
are driven as much by evasion of closure, as by
its accomplishment, as in any seduction. One might
even say that quests want to be continued more
than they want to be stopped, that the fear of
collapse into final meaning is what drives them
onward.
Archaelogic ruin leads to the pursuit of seductive
clues and private inferences, as in Ulmer’s
heuretics. Sites are probed and mined with especial
attention to gateways between layers and alertness
to era as manifested by technical standards.
Christina McPhee [26] limns a vision of the electronic
universe as a ruined aphasic brain: “The
fugue-like recursions of speech in persons who
suffer stroke or trauma signal the condition of
aphasia, characterized by perseverance, that is,
the sufferer perseveres in repeating loops of
sound and syntax….” She probes the
intersection of cyborg and aphasic perseverance.
Epitaphic poietic works abound online. Migrating
Memories [27] gives us 47 accounts of refugees
re-located to Northern Europe who were able to
bring one remnant, or shard, from the ruins of
their prior lives. Mark Napier’s King Kong
[28] has proven to be the single most affecting
9/11 memorial piece for my students. Though the
title says King Kong, and its appearance suggests
the standing Empire State Building, the overwhelming
ease of tearing down this springy wireframe form,
over and over, against a red background that turns
increasingly smudged and smoky gray-black with
tracks of its fall, registers as appalling in
the 9/11 context.
Donna Leishman’s Deviant: The Possession
of Christian Shaw [29] deals in yet a different
way with life amid the ruins of history and meaning.
Her prior projects, Red Riding Hood and Bloody
Chamber (Bluebeard), reconfigure the female protagonist
against the foil of known fairytale narratives.
Deviant, by contrast, alludes to an historical
narrative unknown to nearly all, and one goal
of the reading is to discover what you do not
know exists, to sense yourself as a lone —
and lonely — explorer having much in common
with the young girl Christian.
Christian is trapped by Leishman in a “dormant”
structure: “one prescribed landscape in
which things click on, grow, retract…a series
of…frozen moments in which narrative events
can be drawn out by coaxing interactions…
[30].” The moves which will advance through
the piece’s linear structure are all hidden,
and there is no turning back once you have moved
from one tableau to the next. This rigid structure
looks part Reformation Scotland and part 21st-century
techno-zone designed down to the pixel level.
Visual reference is made to teenage Goth, sci-fi,
and popular culture.
Leishman claims that her “project is intentionally
frustrating, reflecting the notion that events
are…trapped in historical texts.”
Christian Shaw is entrapped in such a text as
a “demonically possessed” 11-year-old
who implicated six adults as witches, all subsequently
burned in 1697. Not only are the 17th- and 21st-century
interpretations of this child strongly divergent,
but the account itself, as recently discovered
via feminist research, is anonymous, possibly
influenced by Salem witch trial narratives from
1692. The persistent or lucky reader eventually
arrives at a page which tells this story and links
to traces of Christian’s legacy today. The
spare, unattractive document, so full of explanatory
force — in overly many directions —
lives at odds with the visual richness of Christian’s
portrayal. The sense of wrong or threat that pervades
the site ultimately trickles down, in Leishman’s
view, from the deceptive anonymity of the tale,
or as she says: “The founding text supremely
tainted how generations perceived Christian.”
Leishman’s goal is to prompt re-readings.
For her, “conclusion” consists of
performing a set of re-readings with no clear
payoff. Repetition, linearity, and a feeling of
being trapped in history are both the state of
the female subject and the architecture of this
particular project. Within Deviant, the participant
cannot alter the narrative sequence, even though
there is a high level of interaction with the
environment. Any compulsion to exhaust the coded
world (win the game, or finish the story) is rebuffed.
We instead collect the equivalent of game-quest
points, exploring a devious/deviant world, pixel
by pixel, petal by petal.
Six: Recombinant Flux
By contrast, the impulse to exhaust all
occasions, or at least to capture them at the
level of the algorithm, makes itself known in
works of recombinant flux. A, by now mainstream,
cultural impulse to dismember and remix is clear
in all works inflected by DJ or VJ or genome-project
techniques. In literary hypermedia this impulse
produces highly distinct poietic objects.
An effect of perpetual prolongation is seen in
Florian Cramer’s Here Comes Everybody: A
Continuarration of/on Finnegans Wake [31]. Blocks
of text from the Wake are presented to the reader
who clicks on a syllable. The program extracts
all sentences containing that syllable from the
entire text of the Wake, breaks those sentences
into syllables, and then recombines them based
on the likelihood of one syllable following another,
thus generating new sentences and new portmanteau
words for the Continuarrated Wake. New creations
are fed back into the text database and the process
continues.
Neil Hennessy’s Jabber Engine [32] starts
with the alphabet, not with syllables from a precursor
text, but aims similarly to create unknown but
sonically plausible portmanteau words. Rather
than basing itself on literary history, it analogizes
itself to chemical bonding. The “chemical”
rules, in this case, are highly linguistic, based
on probabilistic “laws of good combination”
for letters in English derived from inspection
of the present English lexicon. Jabber and the
Continuarration produce words that “sound
right” but are not meant to convey familiar
meaning. They might be said to be enriching the
language with plausible words to create or be
used in an unknown future.
By contrast, Jim Andrews and Pauline Masurel’s
Blue Hyacinth [33] text does engage understandable
meaning. Masurel uses Andrews’s stir fry
mechanism to transform four short vignettes, each
always available to the reader in its own shade
of blue. The texts have been cut into 30 “combinable”
bits, phrases to sentences, and can combine in
430 (1,152,921,504,606,846,976) ways as you mouse
over the twelve or so lines displayed, creating
a blue-rag rug of a text, semantically clear,
syntactically fluid. The substitutions occur shiveringly
fast, and one is torn between several of Janez
Strehovec’s reading strategies [see Section
Ten of this paper].
Another recombinant literary system focused on
message is Geniwate’s visually sophisticated
Concatenation [34]. It addresses the situation
of detention camps run by the Australian government.
She cites the Oulipo and Burroughs’s cut-up
strategy as influencing her, but adds: “Of
course, it’s not as random as a cut-up;
there are heaps of rules determining what gets
generated. I’m not so much interested in
the surreal aspect of the cut-up principle, but
in the performative aspect.”
“Authoring” has either moved from
the text to the system or been enlarged so as
to include a fluctuating system of re-combinant
generation and presentation. The effect of reading
such poietic objects is neither that of encountering
a single unvarying (print) instance, nor of encountering
the infinite potential and philosophical resonance
of a rule: “draw a line and follow it.”
Rather, the range of emerging events is large,
limited, and fluctuating. Fluctuation arises because
electronic works are part of a dynamic network.
In this, they resemble art on the walls of caves,
where what you can see, or not, of such art fluctuates
hourly according to temperature, humidity, the
flickering of your lamp, and your motion as you
approach and move around it. Thus, in both parietal
and electronic art, there is a shift from sender-intended
to whatever comes out after ambient noise is included.
There is a shift toward an engaging real-time
performance of communication.
Seven: Performative Events
Poetry that performs in order to mirror, address,
or engage the world means performance characterized
by complexity, emergence, genetic algorithms,
and neural networks. Randomness and noise are
understood to have a productive role.
Many Flash, Shockwave, Java, and Processing works
look as if they are based on a complexity paradigm,
as Manovich [35] argues. The algorithms behind
such works are often taken directly from the scientific
literature on complexity or cellular automata.
An example is the Doublecell [36] site which describes
itself as “an online enclosure of responsive
ecologies” with a focus on “dyads…diptychs…symbionts,
palindromes, mirror-images…predator-prey,
and parent-child systems.” Singlecell, precursor
to Doublecell, is a “bestiary of online
life-forms reared by a diverse group of computation
artists and designers.” An important poietic
connection between art and science exists in this
practice. Though these Cell sites use text rarely,
there is no reason why they should not. In particular
the gateway interface for Doublecell, Jared Schiffman’s
Honey, begs for image-text elaboration. The motivation
for its design was “to create a new kind
of primitive shape [… that would be] unlike
a static circle, square, [or] triangle; [a] shape
[that] could be aware of its neighbors and respond
to its environment.” For an electronic poet,
the idea that textual elements could ongoingly
be “aware of neighbors,” and change
as they changed, is as exciting as the sonnet
at its inception.
Performative works of e-poetry are not always
based on complexity or bio-complexity algorithms.
The joy of seeing text perform gravitationally
was expressed by one of my students when introduced
to an installation of Camille Utterback and Romy
Achituv’s Text Rain [37]. He said, “The
raining letters…allowed me to feel like
I was actually catching [them] and forming words.
I had a direct physical impact on the poetry….
My…position in space caused poetry to form
out of something that was already there, but it
needed to be unlocked by my movements. It made
me want to dance in front of the projection screen,
so I did. I did a little salsa and some break
and pop dance. The letters moved wherever I moved
and formed words.”
There are significant similarities between oral
poetry performance, as described by John Foley
[38], and contemporary electronic poems. In both
cases, there is no felt need to experience them
“in order”; things happen in pieces,
but recurrently; rhythm and cadence are key; and
older forms are reactivated to create newer meaning.
As in an online work, the “past” of
oral epic is a state of mind in the present. The
past only exists as relocated to a present performance.
Works of e-poetry are prescient with regard to
the way contemporary memory is formed and re-mapped
into networks. Memory is carried one way by code,
another by human cognition, and yet another way
by human groups.
The virtuosity of Brian Kim Stefans’s 11-minute
Flash performance, The Dreamlife of Letters [39],
shows the way history and memory are both concentrated
and diffused in an online poem. Assigned to respond
to a short “opaque” paper by Rachel
Blau DuPlessis, he did so by alphabetizing its
words and chopping them up into 36 segments. Feeling
dissatisfied with this “sort of antique
‘concrete’ mode,” he then set
the words and letters free in a choreographed
extravaganza more satisfying and provocative than
any of its precursor texts, an intellectual exchange
on sexuality and gender becoming a witty performance.
Another practitioner of Flash performance, Ana
Maria Uribe, began as a Concrete “typewriter”
poet in Buenos Aires in 1968. At that time Venezuelan
Jésus Rafael Soto was making optically
vibrant paintings with hanging elements that he
called Escrituras (Writings), and the Noigandres
group of Concrete poets in São Paulo were
making ideogrammic structures with explicit reference
to European sources. In fact, it was said, “If
there is such a thing as a worldwide movement
in the art of poetry, Concrete is it [40].”
At the same time a Neo-Concrete movement in Rio
de Janiero emphasized “happenings,”
use of the body, interpenetration of genres, and
participation of the spectator.
Uribe was internationally oriented, worked as
a translator, and was part of a mail art network
in the 70s and 80s. Yet, if we look at an early
typewriter poem, From Parmenides to J. P. Sartre,
which says, in plant-shape, “It is very
strange to be an agapanthus and not a philodendron,”
that is, an African lily and not a house plant,
we can read a Neo-concrete reference to South
American culture as combining indigenous and African,
as well as European sources.
Uribe moved from typewriter poems to digital
poems in 1997. Her graphic animations integrated
values of the Concrete and Neo-concrete positions.
Her subjects were the everyday (ladders, zippers,
trains) and creatures between worlds, which she
called Halfties. Some of her later poems were
called “Sirens” or Mermaids. She may
have had in mind Kafka’s story, The Silence
of the Sirens, in which we learn that “The
Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their
song, namely their silence…. And when Ulysses
approached them, the potent songstresses actually
did not sing…. But Ulysses, if one may so
express it, did not hear their silence…
[41].” We do hear sound in A Shoal of Sirens
[42] and More Mermaids 2 [43], but it is the sound
of ocean, matrix, background element. The expressive
bodies of the letters, of the Sirens, the mermaids,
have a silence an explorer bent on interpretation
may not hear.
Deseo-Desejo-Desire: Three Erotic Anipoems (2002)
[44] is the final Uribe (d. 2004) work. Deseo
performs—visually, sonically, musically,
lettristically—the differences of the word
“desire” in Spanish, in Portuguese,
and in English. Here we see local and global together—the
native tongue, the neighbor tongue, the tongue
of Empire—referencing equally a network
that binds us all, the extreme specificity of
linguistic bodies, and the invested bodies of
the spectators who play the animations.
Eight: Translation
Is there a language without any native
speakers, an all-border-crossing language? Some
would argue for mathematical, visual, or programming
languages to fill that role.
John Cayley reminds us that the atomic structure
of written language differs “in the two
centers of ‘language and civilization,’”
and that “these differences are translated
to digital media because linguistic structure
itself…is transcribed by the entire historical
process of digitization, taken to include the
design of computing systems and data structures….”
Cayley says: “I remain sharply aware that
I am complicit with a privileged symbolic structure…recognizing
that digitization could have been very different,
commensurate with characters rather than letters
[45].”
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a website
of text movies by a writing duo based in Seoul,
Korea. They express a complex relation to media
elements: “Our Web art tries to express
the essence of the Internet: information and disinformation.
Strip away the interactivity, the graphics, the
design, the photos, the illustrations, the banners,
the colors, the fonts and the rest, and what’s
left? The text [46].” They state that “[d]istance,
homelessness, anonymity, and insignificance are
all part of the Internet literary voice…
[47],” and they make a political choice
of default language: “To write, read, and
chat in English on the Internet is to implicitly
justify a certain history. Certain governments
don’t ban or burn books anymore, they prevent
access to the Web, meaning they justify a different
history than the one [we do] by using English.
So the choice of language is probably the biggest
historical influence on our work [48].”
Although English is the default language of their
pieces, most are available in at least one other
language, and their site includes translations
into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, French,
German, and Spanish. Each seems to require something
different of the not-so-Spartan means that they
do allow themselves: Flash animation, superb pirated
jazz, the Monaco font, and text written with savvy
and humor.
In considering three versions of the manifesto,
Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect
Artistic Web Site, the first in strongly accented,
strongly phrased English; the next in smoothly
gliding, mono-tonal, densely run-together French;
and the last in swift and excited Spanish, we
might ask whether the settings — the acute
considerations of scale, movement, sequential
relations, and timing that produced them —
are a particular kind of translation pointed toward
conveying, say, the Spanish-ness of Spanish, or
whether they enact stereotypic notions of historic
cultures.
Poietic works engage translation in many ways,
including biological forms of performative translation.
Eduardo Kac’s Genesis [49] constructs a
collaborative inter-species translation. Kac created
a synthetic gene by translating a sentence from
the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code and
converting the signs and spacings of Morse Code
into the four DNA base pairs. The sentence, chosen
for its suspect imperial stance, originally read,
“Let man have dominion over the fish of
the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over
every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
The Genesis gene, incorporated into E. Coli, appeared
in a gallery installation where people onsite
and over the Web could shower it with ultraviolet
light, causing real, biological mutations in the
bacteria thus changing the biblical DNA/sentence
[50]. Kac says, “In the context of the work,
the ability to change the sentence is a symbolic
gesture: it means that we do not accept its meaning
in the form we inherited it, and that new meanings
emerge as we seek to change it [51].”
Nine: “Place”
“As Turkish guest workers in Germany
watch Turkish films in their German flats, as
Koreans in Philadelphia watch the…Olympics
in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and
as Pakistani cab drivers in Chicago listen to
cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan
or Iran, we see moving images meet de-territorialized
viewers. These create diasporic public spheres…,”
says Arjun Appadurai [52]. Is the mediated info-environment
a noxious “global” monoculture, the
site of partisan enclaves, or does it provide
a needed means to deal with global eco-crisis
and to meet a yearning for worldwide engagement
of peoples, languages, and cultural legacies to
generate hybrid energy?
Anna Barros [53], basing herself on Edward Casey’s
The Fate of Place, argues for a concept of “place”
as mobile event, inflected and caused by living
bodies and accommodated to them. Such a body-based
sense of place may be deeply saturated with sexual
history. Poietic body-based constructions of “place”
range from Char Davies’s fully enveloping
virtual environments, such as Osmose, to Stelarc’s
insertion of his nervous system into the network
for performed telematic input, to milder forms
of engagement such as online role-playing games,
literary CAVE environments, or interactive reading.
Digital artists constantly cross borders between
specific local realities of language and situation
— their own and others — and three
global limits: the imperial or default language,
English (or Chinese); commercial Web interfaces
propagated through generic browsers and stereotypic
site design; and a set of shared technical specifications
and coding languages, the bricks of information
architecture. One response of digital poets to
this hybrid language arena is to have the interface
and its interactivity carry as much of the information
transfer as possible.
Regina Célia Pinto, a lifelong resident
of Rio de Janeiro, has chosen a particularly literal
architectural metaphor for her site, the Museum
of the Essential and Beyond That, which hosts
a huge range of work by others, including essays
on “frontiers today,” gallery shows,
and a set of “bathrooms” contributed
by other writers. The Library of Marvels within
the Museum is where her five “books”
are found.
In The Newest Song of Exile: Sabiá Virtuality
[54], Pinto gives us three (scattered or diasporic)
versions of “the same” text: a printed
artist’s book, an interactive CD-ROM, and
the interactive website. She brings together Mexican
and Brazilian culture, using Frieda Kahlo images
and the poem Canção do Exílio
(Song of Exile, 1843) by Brazilian poet Gonçalves
Dias. The sabiá-bird, a traditional Rio
de Janeiro symbol of home, becomes here a marker
for exile-in-place. Here, the multicultural and
multiracial citizen of Rio seeks renewal as drugs
and poverty destroy the urban environment and
only the Samba dance schools can deflect this
harsh reality. The site links audio clips of poems
from many decades which can be heard one by one,
or moused over in unison. The viewer is invited
to construct a new “place,” to electronically
re-paint the picture of Brazil.
Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries’s The
Last Day of Betty Nkomo [55] crosses and hybridizes
a number of borders. Breaking from their trademark
hectoring style, the authors create a dramatic
situation featuring an ill woman with an African
name. The background music is no longer sophisticated
urban jazz but something closer to keening Asian
folk music. The situation will sustain many readings,
but among them one of an African woman with AIDS
who has been abandoned within her society, her
mourning relegated to Web readers.
On the Web, space appears as a verb requiring
constant activation, becoming “place”
as it is received. We are immersed. No account
from outside is available. No single account from
within constitutes an adequate description. Lisa
Jevbratt’s 1:1 project (1999 and 2001 update)
[56] maps this non-geographic space, the uncapturable
extent of the Internet itself. She offers a view
of a public location, which we cannot otherwise
survey, by using a time-series of interactive
images—a technique also used to chart other
dynamic entities such as financial markets and
weather—and designing different clickable
image-maps, or interfaces, to show us the sampled,
never repeatable results.
To make her maps, Jevbratt programmed a crawler
to search selected samples of all IP addresses.
Her results are a “snapshot” of the
Web, a whole image with a low resolution. 1:1’s
title is a play on the idea that these maps have
a 1:1 relation to what they map—for these
maps are not only guides, or address books, for
the Internet; what the crawler finds is indeed
the only there “there”; the only “locations”
or “places” possible for the temporal
informational entities they chart.
Ten: Recursion and Looping
Travel, in a computer, is the illusion
of travel. Travel, on a computer, means to stop
interacting with this object and start interacting
with that one. To travel in an e-poietic object
means to travel in a loop.
Loops may be navigable merry-go-rounds such as
the St. Paul’s clockface in Cape, Cayley,
Perring, and Waite’s What We Will [57].
Loops may be temporally repeated cycles, at any
scale. Loops may be recursive or iterated actions.
Loops may be to-and-fro (fort/da) gestures, which
mouse movement always is as the hand returns to
“home” position. Loops may be temporally
concurrent yet appear spatially orthogonal. Beautiful
loop-trajectories for draggable objects that disappear
stage left and reappear stage right (or vice-versa)
on the screen can be seen in Nicolaus Clauss and
Jean-Jacques Birgé’s Dervish Flowers
[58].
Though often unaffected by viewer input, or programmed
so that they always respond the same way to reader
input, loops may also be feedback loops in which
the results of user action (or randomization)
affect the outcome irretrievably, enabling it
to produce unforeseen results. Since they have
no end, loops have no inherent duration. They
refer forward and backward in time, implying a
need to hang around to take it all in, or a need
to come back, or a need to sample and decide.
Loops allow for travel around sites of breakdown:
a linear path is interruptible, but a looped one
can twist and meet up with itself.
The poietic object What We Will was initiated
by Perring who wanted to do something with the
whispering gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral
in London. Describing the goal of the work, Cayley
said [59], “At any one time, [the sound]
should blend together when you move from one loop
to the next. [Perring] has actually done properly
musical pieces where you are listening to a piece
of music which has an overall time schedule. You
can move around and hear different segments of
that music, as it were, and at any one point it
still sounds correct. It still sounds like you
are listening to this overall piece. That whole
challenge — the challenge of doing that
— seems to be a major part of the rhetoric
of new media.”
Being a poet, Cayley at first resisted the dramatic
narrative Perring and the photographer wanted,
but then came up with a loop structure keyed to
the loop of time on the Cathedral clock. Clicking
on an hour takes you to a scene that supposedly
occurred at that time. You hear dialogue upon
entering a scene, but after you’ve heard
it once through, it may randomize. The language
is constructed such that every sentence refers
forward and backwards in time. There are also
envelopes which, if clicked, take you to the whispering
gallery, or some space where secrets are being
whispered. Cayley says, “you can piece it
together.” It also suggests a detective
story, since it is about secrets and relationships,
and it is certainly “about” integration
of temporal change in the written layer.
Janez Strehovec, in his presentation at Melbourne
DAC 2003 [60], lists 10 kinds of “mobile”
reading skills needed when loops replace traditional
lines: 1. Jumpiness, glimpsing forward, glancing
backward; 2. Viewing words as 3-D objects; 3.
Tracking visual units anticipating their next
appearance; 4. Zooming and entering textual objects;
5. Mousing over or clicking to link or activate
a program; 6. Decoding by reading software; 7.
Gestalt or snapshot-like perception; 8. Listening
to the audio soundscape; 9. Navigating spatial
patterns and animations; 10. Taking an aesthetic
attitude toward the textscape as an object that
stimulates the senses.
Eleven: Mixed Reality
“Places,” inhabited events,
are one kind of poem, soft e-e-spaces (electronic-ephemeral)
that present what cannot be seen elsewhere, either
because they visualize mathematics of a higher
dimension or because they enact fantasy. A fantastic
origami of spaces ever recontextualized: can you
navigate through it or does it move around you?
Both.
In Screen, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Josh Carroll,
Shawn Greenlee, and Andrew McClain created a piece
for a CAVE [61], a room with one open side into
which one walks with special goggles and pointer
in order to activate virtual reality displays.
In Screen, all walls are covered with narrative
text which starts to peel off at a certain point
and seem to fall toward the reader, who discovers
she can bat the words back at the walls, where
they land on the nearest open wall space, thereby
creating neologisms and new text arrangements.
When enough words have left the wall, without
being batted back, all the rest come off at once,
flock around the reader and fall to the floor.
The CAVE reader’s “reality”
includes a sense of standing in the physical CAVE
while maintaining, through the open front wall
and open ceiling, a sense of the outer room, all
the while absorbed in reading, warding off, or
repelling a snowstorm of text. And if the glasses
shift, slip, slightly malfunction? To what sliding
world does the vestibular system respond? Brain
sensors are stimulated equally by word and thing.
Using virtual space to change physical space
is a poietic and political task. Poetrica aims
to build a community for the commuter based on
non-semantic language. Christina McPhee and Henry
Warwick, by contrast, in Slipstreamkonza, create
a sonic topology from a “source text”
that is a datastream, the carbon absorption-and-release
data from the tall grass prairie, “as if
to recreate the breathing of the planet during
global climate change [62].” Their focus
is to let physical space change virtual space,
to let the earth write to us in a way that will
engage us bodily, instead of us marking the earth.
Such a shift in focus turns us back to an aboriginal
idea of listening to the land. Aboriginal listening
was entirely biophysical, whereas listening today
is via a ring of surveillance satellites. The
data received from these is read one way by the
receiving machines and another way by the scientists
charged with one or another type of interpretation,
but it remains under-read by poietic artists.
To achieve effective listening, we will need to
achieve affective listening, and the cyberpoets
of mixed reality are beginning to address themselves
to this task, one that far exceeds the old mandate
of an analytic “scientific visualization”
which Lev Manovich suggests aims at reduced, “anti-sublime”
representation [63].
By contrast, Lisa Jevbratt [64] suggests that
“‘images’ of the data landscape
are not high resolution enough for an aesthetic
decision to be made…In the task of visualizing
huge datasets this means that we need to avoid
making assumptions about the meaning of the data
in order to allow meaning to find an opportunity
to occur.” Jevbratt suggests that “our
ability to perceive meaning [may be] numbed by
the loudness of it.” We can be sensitive
to “least speech,” in Muriel Rukeyser’s
phrase. As with the Morelli method for painting
identification, best accomplished by considering
the way painters paint earlobes or fingernails,
it turns out that the distinctive arises most
clearly where intention and effort retire.
The virtuality of e-poetry in all its forms,
its constantly shifting eventfulness, can provide
us with the mindset and perception-set needed
to listen to the earth, to process huge datasets
that are sublimely overwhelming, in that we cannot
take them in and understand them rationally, but
nonetheless might “hear” and be affected
in our bodies through indirect and “least”
speech, if present to us with high enough resolution
in a poietically resonant interface.
References and Notes
1. http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/paley.shtml
2. http://www.poetrica.net/english/index.htm
3. Lev Manovich, “Abstraction and Complexity,”
catalog essay for the exhibition Abstraction Now
http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/abstraction_complexity.doc
4. http://www.poetrica.net/english/about.htm
5. http://www.yhchang.com/SUBJECT_HELLO.html
6. Glen Murphy http://glenmurphy.com
7. Gregory Ulmer, The Heuretics of Invention,
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
8. Delivery Machine 01, A Machicolated Body,
Reasoned Metagoria, Lexia to Perplexia, Delimited
Meshings, and Translucidity, available at http://memmott.org/talan
9. Talan Memmott, “On Herminutia: Digital
Rhetoric and Network Phenomenology,” CyberText
Yearbook, 2002-2003, Markku Eskelinen and Raine
Koskimaa (eds.).
10. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan_memmott/
11. http://arteonline.arq.br/viewing_axolotls/index.html
12. http://www.shadoof.net/in/
13. http://horselesspress.com/stefans/i_know_index.htm
14. Adrian Miles, “Soft Videography,”
CyberText Yearbook, 2002-2003, Markku Eskelinen
and Raine Koskimaa (eds.).
15. http://vniverse.com
16. V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una (Penguin,
2002).
17. http://vniverse.com and http://califia.us/Errand/title1a.htm
18. Cayley, John, Inner Workings: Code and Representations
of Interiority in New Media Poetics www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-cayley.htm
19. http://www.shadoof.net/in/
20. Janet Holmes, Humanophone (University of
Notre Dame Press, 2001).
21. http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/portal.html
22. http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/liveglide/prepare_to_land_web.mov
23. http://www.turbulence.org/Works/Nio/
24. http://www.well.com/user/jer/d5/d5_Intro.html
25. Ragnhild Tronstad, “A Matter of Insignificance:
The Mud Puzzle Quest as Seductive Discourse,”
in CyberText Yearbook, 2002-2003, Markku Eskelinen
and Raine Koskimaa (eds.).
26. Christina McPhee, Aphasia + Parrhesia: Code
And Speech In The Neural Topologies of the Net
http://www.cosignconference.org/cosign2003/papers/McPhee.pdf.
27. http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/mime/mime.htm
28. http://potatoland.org/solid/kingkong/index.html
29. http://www.6amhoover.com/index_flash.html
30. Private communication with Donna Leishman.
31. http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/permutations/hce/hce_about.cgi
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/permutations/n-8/aleph.cgi?&q=river&i=w
32. http://www.ubu.com/papers/ol/hennessy02.html
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hennessey/data/jabber/index.html
33. http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts/bluehyacinth3.html
34. http://www.idaspoetics.com.au/generative/generative.html
35. Lev Manovich, “Abstraction and Complexity,”
catalog essay for the exhibition Abstraction Now
http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/abstraction_complexity.doc
36. http://www.singlecell.org/
37. http://www.camilleutterback.com/textrain.html
38. John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem
(University of Illinois Press, 2002).
39. http://www.ubu.com/contemp/stefans/dream/index.html
40. Jonathan Williams, quoted in the Foreward
in Emmett Williams (ed.), Anthology of Concrete
Poetry, (Something Else Press, Inc., 1967) p.
vii.
41. http://www.bradcolbourne.com/silence.txt
42. http://vispo.com/uribe/shoal.html
43. http://vispo.com/uribe/2000/newmer2.html
44. http://vispo.com/uribe/deseo2/deseo.html
45. From Byte to Inscription, an interview with
John Cayley by Brian Kim Stefans
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/cayley/#
46. http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/shortlist.cfm#02
47. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/younghae/young_hae_chang_heavy_industries.html#
48. http://www.mediamatic.net/article-200.6303.html
49. http://www.ekac.org/geninfo.html
50. http://www.ekac.org/genseries.html
51. http://www.ekac.org/gensumm.html
52. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 4,
http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/dcrawford/appadurai.pdf
53. Anna Barros, Body, Place-Time and New Media,
2003 http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_17/faf_v17_n11/reviews/barros.html
54. http://arteonline.arq.br/virtualidade/
55. http://poemsthatgo.com/gallery/winter2004/YHCHI/index.htm
56. http://spike.sjsu.edu/~jevbratt/c5/onetoone/
; http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/1_to_1/index_ng.html
57. http://www.z360.com/what/index1nn.htm
58. http://www.flyingpuppet.com/shock/dervish.htm
59. At Technopoetry Festival 2002, Georgia Institute
of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. Transcripts available
from the author.
60. Janez Strehovec, “Text as Loop/On the
Digital Poetry” MelbourneDAC, 2003
61. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/cave/screen_hifi.mov;
http://hyperfiction.org/screen/
62. http://34n118w.net/UCHRI/
63. Manovich, Lev, “The Anti-Sublime Ideal
in Data Art” http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art.doc
64. Lisa Jevbratt, “The Prospect of the
Sublime in Data Visualizations,” YLEM Vol.
24 No. 8, July/August 2004
Author Biography
Stephanie Strickland is both a print
and digital hypermedia poet. Her Poem V is an
intermedial work consisting of a double poetry
book from Penguin(V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una),
a Web component cited at book center(Vniverse,
http://vniverse.com, created with Cynthia Lawson),
and a supplementary interactive Flash poem (Errand
Upon Which We Came, created with M.D. Coverley,
http://califia.hispeed.com/Errand/title1a.htm).
Strickland’s poems True North, http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/TrueNorth.html,
and The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/,
have won simultaneous awards in both print and
electronic forms.
Strickland’s essays about electronic literature
appear online in ebr (Electronic Book Review)
and in collections from MIT Press and Intellect
Press (England). As the McEver Chair in Writing
at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she created
and produced TechnoPoetry Festival 2002. She has
taught hypermedia literature as part of experimental
poetry at many universities and serves on the
board of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Citation reference for this Leonardo
Electronic Almanac Essay
MLA Style
Strickland, Stephanie. "Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of
E-Poetry." "New Media Poetry and Poetics" Special Issue, Leonardo
Electronic Almanac Vol 14, No. 5 - 6 (2006). 25 Sep. 2006
<http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/sstrickland.asp>.
APA Style
Strickland, S. (Sep. 2006) "Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of
E-Poetry," "New Media Poetry and Poetics" Special Issue, Leonardo
Electronic Almanac Vol 14, No. 5 - 6 (2006). Retrieved 25 Sep. 2006
from
<http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/sstrickland.asp>.
|
