Text as loop: on visual and kinetic textuality

Afterimage, July-August, 2003 by Janez Strehovec

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The loop form of text is found also in the poetry of John Cayley, one of the pioneers of kinetic e-poetry. In the accompanying statement to his Riverisland, he describes his project as a navigational text-movie, which intertwines transliterary and literary graphic morphs. Cayley's project is actually a research process directed towards the transformation of text in time. The sequence of 16 poems constituting Riverisland is designed in horizontal loops and intersected by poetic texts in vertical loops. In this way, a complex mixture of times and their hybridization is made possible.

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Poetry is always connected with the whiteness, the absent, the untold. Hidden text units--units not yet displayed on screen--usually keep the readers in suspense. In the case of horizontal loops, only a small part of the text is in screen focus and there is no telling whether or not all the letters and words will appear in the foreground. The loop may rotate only a half or a quarter of a turn, which invites the reader to take a deterritorialized position somewhere behind the front string of words. The loop is also found in Thomas Swiss's and Sky Giordano's digital poem Genius (http://www.drunkenboat.com/db2/s-g/s-g.html) which includes multimedia images and sound poetry. Thematically, the poem focuses on a fragment taken from the protagonist's life and tries to present it in a highly condensed language. The loop develops around "you don't have to become a genius," and is based on to-and-fro movements between past and future, actual and possible; between given reality and TV images of mediated reality. The animated poems from Dan Waber's Strings series (http://vispo.com/guests/DanWaber/index.html) are also worth mentioning. Here the focus is on a writing hand, but what is most important is that the viewer cannot, for most of the duration of the piece, see what the hand has written. The writing is going on in the background, and with this the author is trying to keep the reader in suspense, mostly due to the uncertainty concerning what is going to be written outside the viewer's field of vision. Again we are confronted by the to-and-fro mode manifesting itself in the alternation between seen and unseen, between already-written and not-yet-written.

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In concluding this discussion about kinetic or animated e-poetry (which usually runs in loops and is articulated in a language owing much to film and music video syntax, e.g.: suspense. short-cuts, digital compositing), I should stress that it is also possible to find and explore loop principles in the relationship between the text-films and the viewers/readers/listeners. What is meant here is that there exists a series of loops, or loopings, which serves as a basis for communication in the process of decoding meaning, established by a string of text-generated addresses on the one hand and "reader-constructed" replies on the other. Even the perception (seen as hybrid reading/watching/listening) of such pieces includes playful back and forth motions where the users are challenged not to choose a linear path between two extremes, but instead encouraged to try the most elegant loop because only in this case they will be able to catch most of the hidden, non-displayed text. After all, isn't this often the key point of those text-films that seek to fulfill the demands of new media aesthetics?