Zone : Zero
Stephanie Strickland
An author’s statement in seven questions
Q: What are poems?
Poems are words that take you through three kinds of doors: closed doors, secret doors, and doors you don’t know are there.
Q: What are digital, or born-digital, poems?
Poems made with software that cannot be read without software running (or executing) in real-time on a computer.
Any printed poem in 2008 has been digitized, either in word-processing-software or software used to set the book or to post the work online. Such poems stay still, whether viewed on a page or onscreen; whether consisting of text alone, or text made of calligraphic letters, or text associated with an image. They are not born-digital; they are not what the Electronic Literature Organization would call electronic literature.
Born-digital poems may appear on a screen or as part of a gallery installation or in a CAVE (acronym for Cave automated virtual environment). They may operate like movies or games or incorporate interactivity for purposes of navigation within the poem, or for much more complex purposes of involvement. They are often networked and change in real time with differing input. They sometimes use generative or genetic algorithms, based on behaviors in the biochemical world.
Q: What are poems, again?
Poems are words, or code, that take you through three kinds of doors: closed doors, secret doors, and doors you don’t know are there.
Q: Can the same poem be electronic and not?
The same poetic material can be treated as electronic literature and as print literature.
I have made six such poems, either alone or with collaborators. Two of these are included in Zone : Zero, both in their print form and as electronic poems on the CD. The resulting poems are very different, and just how they are different is a matter of great interest to me.
Q: What is of interest to you?
Tensions arise among the meaning-mobilizing acts of seeing an image, watching a movement, and reading a word; and insofar as works also employ cursor-activated elements, between touching and reading.
In the digital “slippingglimpse,” for instance, my collaborator and I are especially interested in what it means not only to do image-watching while text-reading, but to do simultaneous, or oscillating, image-reading while text-watching. We also explore what it is to read in concert with a non-human reader, the water. Patterns-of-movement (chreods) in the Atlantic off Maine were captured by our videographer, who has spent years in the environmental movement, observing. He then processed the files to further bring out the chreodic patterns. A kind of meta-reading that opens up is reading—or reading yourself reading—the water reading [this is roughly the position of the scientist]. As well, for each person there will be reader-specific multiple perceptions of moving vs. static text (in scroll-text mode), a new space for poetic experience.
Q: What has the electronic work let you discover that you didn’t know you would?
In “slippingglimpse,” the print poem allows me both to write and to gather a great number of texts that reflect each other across the boxes that contain them, and across the midline that divides each box. It is easy to flip back and forth between pages. Given the print notes to the poem available in Zone : Zero, one could even pursue the sources of this poem in a manner akin to research.
By contrast, in electronic “slippingglimpse,” we are able to explore a notion of what listening to the water, and the water forms (chreods), would be like: how they might “read”; how text behaves when it is submerged in water the same way grasses and flies and other living things are; how it is read by these larger modes of movement as opposed to being specifically delivered to us as the only readers, us with our presuppositions and ignorance of what we don’t know is there.
The computer becomes another reader in electronic works, one that must be respected with great strictness. Working collaboratively also always means there is another primary reader of any work done. What then becomes appropriate is a round-robin of listening, and a chance to discover how the experience of moving between modes leads to differing understandings.
Q: Can a poem be made of chemicals?
Definitely something to explore.
