Text taken on 30/11/08 from: Becoming Involved: Dialogism and Materiality in the development of E-Rhetorics

by Gavin Stewart  http://www.gavinstewart.net/essays/becoming.htm

Significantly, animation programs like Macromedia Flash also allow for the temporal structuring of a text, as well. For example,.., Peter Howard makes use of time to create an ironic effect in his flash work The Rainbow Factory ( Howard 2000).

This short piece begins with a title that displays the ‘traditional’, storybook image of the rainbow (bright, primary colours etc.). This image is then replaced with the image of a set of black factory gates (and a sound effect of heavy-metallic gates opening) in a sort of temporal juxtaposition. The text then displayed reads “Making Rainbow’s is a Business” but then after about one second an extra piece of text is then inserted into the above to make it read “Making Rainbow’s is a Dirty Business”. This piece of temporal structuring creates an effect like a qualifying aside. It dramatizes the meaning of its text.

Animated temporal structuring is used to great effect. ……The text scrolled at such a speed on my machine that it was not possible to read it all (even after a few attempts). I found myself grabbing at his personal details as they flowed by. To read this section of the text required the rapid eye movements of an experienced computer video game player. This experience is significant for my reading of this text because in this section the reader-participant briefly experiences the state that the author-participant is describing. We are engaged by the conditions that have formed the narrator’s mindset.

 

 

 

 

A Quick Buzz around the Universe of Electronic Poetry

by Deena Larsen

Taken on 11/30/08 from: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/buzz.html

Poetry that switches genres

Just as e-poets are blending text, imagery, and sound, they are also mixing genres. As we whirl round the digital universe, we note that there are no neat bookshelves–no easy Dewey Decimal classifying system for electronic literature and particularly for e-poetry. Part of the reason for the absence of clear genre lines is that classifications are much easier to break when we are merging different media. Each new art piece is so unique that it deserves its own classification–so a one-to-one map or classification system really isn’t that useful.

 

E-poetry first stretches traditional poetical conventions such as line breaks, sound structures, capitalization, and stanzas. E-poetry then often merges sound, imagery, fiction, parody, and other forms of statement to the point that the “poem” kernel can no longer be readily identified. Often, … poetry is hidden under an elaborate game or even a political statement.

 

To get a sense of these boundary breakers, let’s stop at Peter Howard’s The Rainbow Factory. As we enter, the rusty gates clang open and we see a two-story factory. We can be good little tourists and click on the clean upper story reserved for visitors, or we can sneak downstairs to find out the real score. Words are embodied in the factory along with animated scenes of rainbows being designed and manufactured, which give us the story. The story is a delightful satire on software development on one level while on another level the poem invites us to ponder the “violet scrapings from the corners of dreams.” For example, in an upper story window we can see rainbows being stamped out in a regular assembly line. In the corresponding lower story window, the same assembly line appears–only every so often a squalling mass of lines comes out, goes through the assembly line, and is sucked up on the other side. In this particular set of windows, there are no words. Yet this scene of perfection and imperfection is vital to the meaning of the words elsewhere.

 

Is this then a piece of art or a piece of poetry? I would submit that the “or” here is the problem. Poetry is integrated so seamlessly into The Rainbow Factory that we cannot separate the hues and clearly delineate what is art and what is poetry. And The Rainbow Factoryis a small indication of the headaches that lie ahead for librarians, word-sellers, scholars and anyone else who relies on classifying and genres. In the next decade, there will likely be so many blended-genre works that for these works we may have to drop the academic classification system in favor of something much more complex–something like smart virtual bookshelves so each book nook can become its own category with a metadescription of each work; such bookshelves would necessitate their own ingenious searching and indexing system.