Screenshots: Core Values

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Core Values
by Benjamin Laird

Shortlisted for the QUT Digital Literature Award, Core Values is a response to the iconic Australian poem My Country, by Dorothea Mackellar. Updating the original text, it uses technology to not only animate language but transform the experience of the poem itself. The formality of the original poem is replicated, but also cut apart and interspersed with dehumanising jargon, map coordinates, GIS data, and technobabble made to scroll endlessly within a three-dimensional box, lined by historical maps of the nation.

It’s a poem and a representation of an Australia in which you are quite literally trapped, a prison. The poem’s ‘stereoscopic mode’ for viewing in a simple VR device only accentuates the feeling of being closed in, a confronting and powerful match between text and technology.

https://poetry.codetext.net/core-values/