Text as loop: on visual and kinetic textuality

Afterimage, July-August, 2003 by Janez Strehovec

Visual language has become mainstream in today's culture. However, this claim does not tell enough. It held true only up until the mid-1990s, for in recent years we have become contemporaries of the mutation of visual into kinetic visual, the time sequence-based visual organized as film. We no longer experience film only in cinema and on TV, but in fact seek to experience the film mode in everyday life, by switching from everyday points-of-view to film-like modes of representation as often as possible. It seems that considering the space syntax of trendy mediascapes does not suffice, thus further extension towards time syntax needs to occur.

One of the new media which clearly displays this turn towards a film-like mode of representation is digital kinetic poetry, based on animated word-image-bodies. This essay focuses mainly on kinetic and animated web-based poetry pieces that are often developed in distinct time sequences and are usually programmed in Java script, Shockwave, or Flash. Text is organized as a film, where it interacts with sound and image components, so it can be said that the genre is reminiscent of music videos, but in this case, the digital text is a medium which is "staged" in a trendy and attractive fashion. The kinetic poetry pieces in question are designed as densely as possible. Their saturation is the result of a bold juxtaposition of various items that demands complex perception. The question is how to approach this kind of textuality--how to make profound sense of these fast changes and transformations of both the visual and the verbal, how to understand the animated digital textuality, and where to pigeonhole it. It has already been noted that these pieces are digital poems (often web-based, a new genre all its own), incorporating kinetic/animated poetry, code poetry, interactive poetry, digital sound poetry, digital "textscapes" with poetry features, and poetry generators. It is important that this genre applies expanded concepts of language based on the screen-displayed interactions of netspeak, and scripting and programming languages. This means that the language of zeros and ones, and of ASCII and HTML characters is involved in new poetic structures with striking visual, animated, and tactile features.

This genre intersects the literary avant-garde, visual and concrete poetry, text-based installations, net art, software art, and netspeak. The basic component of this kind of textuality is the word-image-virtual body, understood as a software construct and an interface (which can activate a computer program or establish a link), and, due to its digital nature, is also "malleable" (L.P. Glazier's term from his Digital Poetics) as an instant signifier. New generations of digital poems are usually not hypertext-based; they are closer to net art and textual electronic installations. Movement is also an important feature of such poetry projects, where the text is divided in time units on the move, and thus the similarities with film narrative are self-evident. Designed in Flash and accessible on the Internet, Thomas Swiss's The Genius, Claire Dinsmore's The Dazzle as a Question, and Brian Kim Stefans's The Dream Life of Letters are representative of the genre. These are short minimalistic pieces that flash before the reader/listener/viewer's eyes/ears in a matter of a few minutes. The Genius, for example, is only one minute and 18 seconds long and The Dazzle as a Question is a mere two minutes and 47 seconds long. What is essential here are fast, very intense rhythmical movements of verbal objects, organized in the form of a loop. And, when the text-film ends, it actually returns to the initial position so that the reader/listener/viewer is immediately offered a replay. This form is characteristic of the main stream technoculture, where information is available to the user in database form so that material can be scrolled through back and forth, resembling the "replay" mode. The latter is also a basic component of another trendy activity: the play. Because it is not a novel or a drama theater, one can repeat the play endlessly. Many players often pursue only one play in an attempt to master it. The genre of play is, in its ontologic presuppositions, quite close to digital kinetic poetry.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There are various kinds of plays; an interesting classification of them can be found in Roger Caillois's Les jeux et les hommes (1958). A play is takes place on a playground cut off from the "non-play world" and is defined by would-be reality. What is essential to its philosophical definition is motion in its purest, even dry-run form, which can be most authentically experienced within the playing/gaming. One of the theoreticians who described the nature of the play as a sense of a motion was Hans-Georg Gadamer, who wrote in his The Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975): "The movement backwards and forwards is obviously so central for the definition of a game that it is not important who or what performs this movement" (93); and also, "play obviously represents an order in which the to-and-fro motion of play follows of itself. It is part of play that the movement is not only without goal or purpose but also without effort. It happens, as it were, by itself" (94). Gadamer's views of play imply effortless movement which is constantly renewing, and which occurs somewhere between here and there. Such movement is therefore freed of all purpose, rules, or barriers. The to-and-fro motion is soft and easy, machine-like, and hardly ever faced with sharp-edged bound-aries.