Chris Messenger achieves a rare convergence of elite and popular cultural criticism by doing for The Godfather (and its spinoffs) what previous critics have done for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Attending to the subcultural textures, the white noise of the ongoing process (processes of both development and devolution of langague and meaning) of a literary locus -- "poetic activity" rather than "poetry" per se -- reveals its values, its sociality, its -- to use a phrase from a bygone poltical and cultural era -- relevance to everyday life. So, in addressing e-poetic culture, I'm decisively not trying to establish an alternative canon but rather attending to writing processes, and to wrting that emobidies a "space-taking" or "world-making" postliterary vision.
Considerations of performativity, diasproa, fragmentation, identity, and access, all issues that preoccupy me, are central to Internet poetics.
"Canyonlands" is a web-based, interactive project that blends text and video imagery on a vast, scrolling environment. Following in the footsteps of the novelist and essayist, Edward Abbey, users navigate paths through a desert landscape that is being overturned through dam-building, road-building, mining, and industrial tourism. The project combines maps, photos, archival films, original video, and many other elements on a scrolling, virtual landscape suggestive of the Colorado River, its canyon lands, and the deserts of Utah, Arizona and California. Users arrive in a desert American West in the 1950s. The work incorporates nonfiction materials in an artistic environment to offer an interdisciplinary blend of art, writing, and scholarship. Recorded in the deserts of Utah, Arizona and California.
(Source: Author's description in the Electronic Literature Directory)
On May 25, 1869, you join the crew of one-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell along with eight other fellow veterans, hunters and trappers, in an attempt to be the first to navigate the Colorado River through the vast unmapped maze of canyons in the heart of the Great American Desert. Playing the role of one of the crew members, you are well aware that no European-American has boated the formidable Colorado River -- not, at least, and written about it. Turning inward... this is, perhaps, the final American frontier, a terra incognita. This Flash-based interactive work is constructed using an innovative, sequentially loading horizontally scrolling format in which users travel across fiction and documentary artifact. You will travel across writing modes as well as spaces. Knowledge may lie in traveling among such modes. First comes the adventure, then comes its representation. Much later, comes critical examination, and, perhaps, as a whole, re-invention... The work uses the interactive format to bridge genres and modes of expression.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
