Hello, Komninos,
I've always wanted a place at the beach, but still don't have one,
so it was nice to visit your space of a beach. I really enjoyed the
effect of word-waves rolling toward me as they were being read by me,
accompanied by the sound of the surf and the gulls cawing overhead.
After awhile I went and checked out your "Adventures of i," which
seemed very witty--a sort of narcissist's version of The Dot and the
Line (if you're old enough to remember that classic?), with its end
point of "everything is not mine" a logical consequence of "everything
is not me" and all those prior Piagetian developmental stages you take
little i through. The toilet-training sequence seemed an especially
brilliant single frame, while the progression from rocking (cradle)
through rolling (pram) to strolling (stroller) is a beautifully
sequenced series (IMHO).
You asked elsewhere (and about different works on your sites, I
realize) if this is poetry, and, much as I enjoyed both works, which
did both _work_ on and for me, I'd have to say no, not poetry. I don't
know what to call what you do--and so brilliantly!--but it doesn't work
the same way poetry does for me (not a value judgment, but a sense of
difference). I think it's because the imagery is pictorial rather than
textual, so I respond to it less as a reader than as a film viewer. For
me, poetry is something to be read or heard rather than watched, but
that's just me--what I'm used to--and maybe others have a different
experience of poetry and/or the kinds of works you create or maybe I
just need more exposure to what you do, some training in its reading
perhaps.
What your works made me realize is that I'm more drawn to hypertexts
and cyberpoetry that engage texts in the process of creating new ones,
such as Jennifer Ley's knockout of a hypertext in Snakeskin where the
dynamic (the hyper part) is the interaction between science and art
that her text sets in motion--but it's motion I can read as I would a
still text, and that seems to make all the difference. An example of
cyberpoetry to which I'm very drawn--again as a _reader_--is Sarah
Law's beautiful (and beautifully intelligent) Mudlark chapbook, The
Baptism of the Neophytes. These poetic meditations on medieval and
Renaissance paintings she studied in Florence and Venice take the
form of miniatures as a result (Law says in a note) of her having
brought home postcards of these paintings to use as she wrote her
poems. She didn't do anything so obvious as construct postcard like
frames or boxes for her poems, though--their genius is in the small
scale of the verbal ground that constitutes each poem in the series.
Both Ley and Law are engaging their poetry's subjects as reading
writers (or vice versa), and it's the quality of mind they bring to
each subject that makes their readings of them so brilliant and so
inviting to their own readers ultimately. I don't have much patience
with or interest in hypertexts or cyberpoetry based on shallow or
stupid or just plain goofy readings of (especially for me, as a
medievalist) medieval and Renaissance texts, such as are often found
in e-zines these days, no matter how ingenious the hyper/cyber aspect
of such works may be. A bad reading is a bad reading....
Candice
>>Landscape?
>yeah, poetry that makes you think you are looking at a vista, or a panorama.
>i have made some 3d landscape poems, eg. 'beach', using the words
>water(blue), sand(yellow), wave(light blue), crab(orange), thong(pink), and
>can(silver). the sand is staionary, the water moves, the wave comes up and
>down over the sand, the crab scuttles out of the water into the word sand,
>two thongs cross the screen, and finally a can is washed up by the wave.
>some seagulls squalking as a soundtrack and there you have it a poem, a
>poem in a digital format, in a 3d environment where motion is a semiotic
>device, and which is landscape poetry.
>http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/~komninos/beach0.html
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