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

A Poem Floats
by Pascalle Burton

How much can you say using only thirteen words? What if you could animate those thirteen words across 793 frames? Contributing to the long tradition of works that blur the boundary between literary and visual art, the words that make up A Poem Floats do not move at random, but in patterns, combining and recombining.

Pascalle Burton’s poem-in-a-gif-file takes time to fully realise its texts and requires active engagement from the reader to make meaning from its playful approach to language. In its coiling and uncoiling spirals, A Poem Floats piece makes reference to 2005 work deadsee by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau, a work that suspended a spiral raft of watermelons in the Dead Sea.

It packs a lot into those thirteen words.

https://pascalleburton.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/gif-poem-a-poem-floats-published-in-photodust/

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

Our Cupidity Coda

by Mez Breeze

To read through the text of this VR poem by Mez Breeze takes only minutes, but it would be a mistake to think of this work as slight or even brief. Our Cupidity Coda is deceptively simple, using the VR environment as an extension of a text that already carries heavy emotional resonance charting the course of a relationship from spellbound beginning to bittersweet end. The imagery experienced early in the piece gives away to arresting majesty and even moments of fear.

Press Image for “Our Cupidity Coda”: VR Literature

Created in and intended to be experienced as VR, this piece avoids the pitfalls of its technology. It emphasises emotional and intellectual immersion over the pure sensory experience and rewards multiple viewings. It was recently shortlisted for the QUT Digital Literature Award.

http://mezbreezedesign.com/vr-literature/our-cupidity-coda/

Origins

The Poetry Map has its origins in a feature on Facebook’s homepage by which users could list countries they had visited and see these appear as pins on a map. While this was a good way of ‘showing off’, it also got me thinking about the places I had lived in the course of a peripatetic teaching career. Google Maps was in its infancy at this time, and people had just begun creating their own maps with details of campsites in Cornwall and the like. I created my own Google Map, dropping pins into places where a poem was composed or set (often one and the same) and then typing the poem into the ‘information box’ which opened and became readable when the cursor hovered above it.

These poems tended to be orphans left over from my first collection, Boxing the Compass (itself arranged by compass point) and they weren’t always complete. By dint of the Google Map format, the poems did not follow any sequence. You moved the mouse and a poem appeared. You would often read the same poem twice. Some poems (and pins) were lost behind others. It was impossible to enter prose poems as there was no right-hand justification. The font was uniform. There was no bold or italic option. However, this map-page became a portable journal in which I could revise and develop these poems. After a while, it held about 45 poems.

There was a counter built into the program, and I was amazed to see that the page clocked up 6,000 hits in no time at all. This far exceeded the readership of most collections. The potential to reach new international audiences by making my poetry available through this channel was clear when I saw that most of the hits came from Canada and China. Some poems were set in Toronto, and I had previously translated poetry by the Taiwanese poet Yao Yun, but apart from these two facts, I cannot explain why those two countries, in particular, took an interest.

An early version of the Poetry Map

So I approached Jon Munson II, a programmer from Maryland. He found a way to link one poem to another, and for the page to refresh rather than opening a new window for each poem. By trial and error, we honed the user experience. To start with, we threw the kitchen sink at the text. There were accompanying videos, occasionally unrelated, such as my performance of a song on guitar at the site of one of the poems. This was evidently both distracting and indulgent, so we pared back to a minimal accompaniment. What was, and is, important for me about the map is the poetry first; the interface is there to augment the experience. Having said that, where relevant I included things culled from other projects. For example, the video accompanying the reading of ‘The Westbury Horse’ was made for Creative Wiltshire in 2014. As we progressed, I decided to incorporate work from two pamphlets-in-progress: a sequence of poems set in Poland and the Czech Republic, with a short diversion to Germany, tentatively entitled Ahoj! (this became the third path, Czech Film); and a sheaf of teaching poems I had compiled over the years (which became path two, A Discipline). Normally, I would not have trusted so much writing to the internet, preferring hard-copy publishing channels, but I came to trust the interface we developed.

Whistles and Bells

In the Poetry Map, digital accompaniments come in the form of clickable ‘Magic Tickets,’ bonuses to be opened as one progresses through the poems. One of the concerns of A Discipline (path two) is the different languages with which we communicate. So the magic ticket in ‘Half Term’ reveals a Polish saying about recovering from the common cold, while ‘Preston’ is written in Phonetic Script (an aid for teaching pronunciation) only to be rendered into conventional English with a click of the magic ticket. However, the photos detailed in ‘Group Portrait’ and ‘Two Photos’ actually detracted from the poems. So they had to go. The only remaining photo is accompanied by a newspaper article whose headline provides the last line of a poem (‘Leanings’).

An example of a Magic Ticket

The poem appears

The ticket is visible

The ticket reveals something linked to the poem

Choice of Content

As we worked on the map, improving sequence and interface and dividing the poems into four distinct paths, the sheer number of times I re-read the poems allowed me to hone them into better shape and create an order strong enough to withstand the leap from place to place. Strangely, once the project had become a ‘publication’ in my mind – and I had decided that these poems would never be published together in hard-copy – I found I could not add newer, perhaps stronger, work to them. There was a specific type of poem which worked on the screen. A poem had to read ‘fast’ – not lay too many roadblocks in the reader’s way requiring re-reading and unpuzzling. Where there was a sequence (‘Entries’), each section is revealed with a click, so the reader only entertains one section at a time, rather than seeing the full poem and perhaps being dissuaded from persevering. Jon and any other programmer I spoke to felt that the interface should display as much white space as possible around the words, but I disagreed. I felt that the frame of the map, often telling in itself, created an atmosphere for the poems.

‘Imagine a Forest’ screenshot

Not just this, but (with three exceptions) no poem was visible as a whole. The text screen is a visor, keeping the reader in the immediate present of the current section of a poem. This makes the experience interactive. The poem hasn’t already happened, it has to be unfurled.

Each path was arranged to be readable in one sitting. If it became over-extended, the tautness was lost and a reader might be tempted to check their mail or see what was happening in the outside world. Jon added flags in the top-right of the screen and a map in the bottom left-hand corner locating each poem’s position in its country.

Weirdly, despite all our best efforts, the map is not a static thing, but subject to changes in Google’s map technology. In this way, the woozy out-of-focus shots of the Czech Republic streets have been sadly lost through an upgrade. No doubt, as cliffs erode and shorelines advance, this will also be recorded on the map. The viewing experience is dependent on device and screen-size, determining whether you see, say, the Westbury Horse appear improbably white against its background before the text window opens over it with a poem of the same name. As David Lynch said about TV – everything is wrong with the medium: adverts interrupt you, you have no control over screen definition, a thousand interruptions incur. But despite everything…

Sequencing

The sequencing of poems required even more scrutiny than in the compilation of a book, where poems can immediately ‘sit right’ on a page beside each other. The singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett describes a road trip listening to her new album in ten or fifteen different orders ‘until it felt right.’ This was the approach we took. With online distractions one tap away, the sequence had to be compelling.

Reading it now, I can draw a link between each poem and explain it logically, though I doubt these reasons were explicit when I ordered them. For example, the first path begins with a poem about finding a dead deer. This is followed by a poem about the delivery of dead lambs from a dead sheep, which is then followed by a poem in which umbilical cords and afterbirth are visible in the grass. The next two poems deal with depictions of life – one of the Wiltshire white horses carved into the chalk hillside, and a life-drawing class. There follows the burial of a pet cat, before a number of poems featuring a life-line of some kind – a safety harness hung from a helicopter lifting people from a flash flood in Boscastle, a Rayburn at the heart of a house, a pilot light leading the cyclist safely home along a canal path in darkness, and a statue of a harvest maiden in Warminster. Continuing the theme of life, ‘lungs of water’ crossed by cattle lead to a swimming pool, which leads to poems considering ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, claims and possessions and finally letting go of a relationship.

I thought carefully about the beginning and end of each path. The second path is concerned with teaching, and the poems occupy the liminal spaces familiar to many teachers – a college hallway after dark, squash courts serving as classrooms – not to mention encounters with students of different nationalities. It opens with a non-teaching poem in which a drunk teenager stumbles behind a car and relieves herself. I had in mind a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which this physical action serves to draw a line between past and present, so it seemed apt to use it as a sequence-opener. It also touches upon the teacher’s vantage into private lives. Some of the poems are quite ‘minor’ (‘An Acquaintance’) – things scribbled on buses – but together they add up to a sense of glimpsed faces. The poems jump from Bath to Greenwich to Wandsworth before ending up in Exeter where I was a student myself.

Developing a Teaching Resource

When I received e-mails from teachers telling me that the map had been used on World Poetry Day in California and Taunton, I immediately became gravely concerned. It seemed so naked. Not just that, the poems mentioned labia, condoms, and dead lambs. So I developed a downloadable teacher’s guide (including a recommended age-range) and downloadable student worksheets, while Jon made improvements to the navigation (including a drop-down menu of poems on completion of each path). In the worksheets, I used the classic pedagogic trick of creating an information gap and putting students in the position of detectives on a trail. Some responded to the fact that the resource was online, and so in a sense were encouraged to read poetry by stealth. I saw immersion in the map as a way for students to learn to navigate ‘negative capability’, a skill required by the GCSE English Literature ‘Unseen Poem’ section. To my mind, one of the strengths of the sequences is that since the poems weren’t written with teenagers in mind, they don’t pander or patronize. The downside of this is that the poems can’t be used as an introduction to specific forms (such as sonnets and sestinas) as they are generally in free verse.

I imagine the site as something to be stumbled upon, like a map in an old desk. As long as people are drawn to the promise of a way to navigate, and rise to the challenge of cracking a code, then the Poetry Map will be relevant and the poems will mean something to someone somewhere. At least, that’s my hope.

Syringes And Walls And Foundations

It’s December, midway through my Fulbright year in Bergen, Norway. My wife, digital artist Alinta Krauth and I live on the third floor of a mansion. It’s a stately building landed on a high hump between mountains and waterways and owned by the University of Bergen.  The building is, like the rest of Norway’s confusedly beautiful world, a place of contrasts, fast swinging leaps between aesthetics and care.

Much of Bergen is held straight against the slopes by rock walls, and these collections of stones, boulders and gravity are fascinating and disturbing in equal measure. Walking beneath them feels dangerous, you are relying on luck to keep the misshapen structures from falling into the street.

Behind our mansion home is such a wall, and in the brief December afternoon I am experimenting with projected text, aiming light on the varied surfaces to create a cartography of moss and poetry.

Experimenting with projection and natural surfaces in the mountains

Our backyard rock wall is the perfect place for geometric text placement. As I sweep across the irregular stones I notice an unexpected glistening, evidence of treasures between. Exploring closer I realise the objects reflecting light are syringes.  As if following a drug derived algorithm, there are a dozen carefully placed injecting devices, every third rock up and fourth rock down. And with each, the needle points inwards, markers for some past mystery buried in the crevasses.

The junkies of Bergen are careful with their dangerous refuge.

And it was these stories, this layering of experience we attempted to recreate in our projected and animated poetry. The magic trick is to create textual wonders that engage with the physical surface of a rock wall, or a pile of leaves, adjusting the colours and textures of the artwork to contrast with the natural tones and irregular intersections. And also to write content that adds to those historical layers, reveals some future/past or fictional/poetic other-land.

An animated poem projected brightly on the dark steel of a dumpster has quite a different meaning than the same pome projected on the tall white door of a gothic church.

Animated digital poetry on a concrete structure on the University of Bergen campus

Animated digital poetry on a gothic church in Bergen, Norway

Weather And Mountains And Electrical Cords

We are rushing through the city centre, pulling suitcases filled with electric bits, projectors, cords, computers and gadgets. Nothing about our route is smooth or straight, between a network of puddles and disagreeable sidewalks, we arrive at the funicular station body sore under a sky of deep, low clouds.  Ever since arriving in September during the season of 2am sunlight my goal has been to project giant poetic text from Mt. Floyen’s summit, large enough for those meandering in town to notice, squint and ponder.

Projecting poetry from the summit of Mt. Floyen

I use poles cut from found wood, and shower curtains with weather holes, tied together and then loosely to the railings to make up a haphazard projection screen overlooking Bergen city.  Nearly a quarter kilometre of power cords snake to my projector, held barely safe on a plastic table. I’ve finished testing and am ready to send two word messages to the evening traffic below, when it starts to snow.

Building poetic creatures within the safe walls and for the expected audience of a gallery is an aseptic experience.  Technology generally works, walls are predictably sterile and the didactic panel screams meaning to creations untethered from the world.  However, projecting poetry from a mountain cliff, overlooking a historic city, while heavy snow builds around you with a broken umbrella shielding the light shooting electrics  is an adventure into intersecting sensory trajectories. The power of projecting through the mountain snow makes even simple texts seem more beautiful than they deserve.

Projecting in the snow and cold on the summit of Mt. Floyen

Abandoned Factories, Closed Doors, And The Loneliest Exhibition

Prior to my Fulbright year in Norway, I coveted inclusion in the annual Piksel Festival in Bergen. When my work was accepted, I imagined droves of Norwegians standing in lines waiting to explore my work in some beautiful and yet slightly gritty location. So, after the nine-month process of peer-reviews, forms, interviews, judgements and testing and background exploring was over and I was officially offered the fellowship, one of my first tasks was to apply for Piksel.

After both Alinta and I had work accepted into the Festival, we excitedly prepared and spent giant sums in shipping our installations across the world. As the exhibition date grew close our excitement grew as the venue was a multi-story industrial warehouse perched at the edge of the bay, reached by a charming old ferry boat for participants and visitors.

That excitement dimmed daily during the days and weeks of installation, the exhibition and then de-install.  Curiously, while the venue oozed industrial charm, the organization of the exhibition was oddly lacking. It was common for us to arrive during the exhibition’s opening hours and all the doors were closed and locked.  And most days we took on the unofficial responsibility of finding a maintenance worker to open the building.

My digital poetry work, The Impossible Box, looked amazing in a large industrial room four stories up, it’s just that few people could reach it.

The Impossibly Box, interactive Digital Poem, at the Piksel Festival

Norway is dotted with these strange contradictions. There is funding and support for the arts. There are beautiful venues and overflowing opportunities for showing/sharing and creating digital art.  And yet some of these exhibitions that look amazing in documentation photos were also seemingly uninterested in attracting readers/users/visitors. Or, as in the case of Piksel, they spent considerable time and money promoting the event, but then forgot to direct someone to open the doors to even enter the building.

Norwegian Librarians, Hovering Glass Boxes And Aud

Discussing digital projects with those whose experience with electronic art extends no further than a screen saver is an exercise in translation. Digital writers speak languages, use terminologies, even understand the spatial screen/landscape quite divergently from others. And as such communicating the how and what and why of a proposed digital creature is often hindered by language gaps.

Combine that with native tongue differences and simply starting a new project is a long and awkward conversation.  To make these discussions easier, digital writers have a cheat-sheet in the back of their brain, a long list of synonyms, analogies and metaphors, used to explain the magic of the artistic electric.

Luckily, when negotiating with the University of Bergen Library, we had an Aud. An Aud is a librarian who is tri-lingual. She speaks English, Norwegian and Digital Artist/Writer. So as we built our large artwork in the glass box hovering over the library foyer, Aud translated our needs, desires and requests to the university bureaucracy. And then, knowing we wouldn’t understand Nowergian Librarian speak, translated the bureaucratic demands and forms and requirements back to us. And almost always did that with a cinnamon roll and instant coffee.

Above the university library’s foyer with students collapsed into chairs, over tables, submerged into couches warmer than the wintery outside, is a glass boxed room. On the windows we’ve taped as many translucent shower curtains as could be delivered via the post. Behind them are aging projectors, offered to us from the back room of a university warehouse where coma-soon technology goes to never wake.

The artworks we create, projected on a 20-metre surface, split over a right angle, are designed to change and adjust over time.  As the library is our host, and all those who enter are in search of ideas and stories and information (and warmth during the winter), our creations are all derived from library materials.  My digital poetry, comprised of texts which build and grow, then fall away to build again to form short poems, are poetic narratives inspired by items from their collection. The hope is someone can watch our creations, fall asleep on a couch and awake a few hours later to a new digital artwork/poem.

A few months later we discovered something kind-of wonderful. The library extended the duration of our giant glass box works from a month to 45 days to over two months.  And evidently during this time our digital writing morphed from a background display to a living creature, an alive experience students and staff expected to see and absorb daily. So when we finally took down the screens, unplugged the computers and projectors, there was a palpable concern.  Many expressed remorse at the hole in their ambient existence. The artwork had become a kind of companion, a moving and dynamically changing counterpart to the heavy institutional architecture surrounding them.

Our digital artworks and poems were no longer owned by us, the artist and writer was dissolved. And instead the artwork and its electric light, its handmade aesthetic and borrowed and ramshackle tech, was born into the world, an entity unto itself.