code poems

I Dream of Canute (& The Sea is Rising) stretches our perception of time by creating a literary artwork that is formally linked to our planets rising sea levels. This self-destructive poem will play out over the next 100 years, a time period in which it is highly likely that we will experience at least one metre of sea level rise (see Some Notes on Sea Level Rise at: http://stevieronnie.com/idreamofcanute/aboutcanute.html ). As we enter each year, one line of the poem will disappear. Each line therefore represents one centimetre of sea level rise. The poem has been composed in such a way that it can still hang together as a literary artefact, albeit a permanently shifting one, as it shrinks over time.

Wish4[0] takes as its inspiration the perpetual tugging at a user’s consciousness by the digital. Each work takes as its immediate inspiration a headline (or item) drawn from the electronic news cycle of that specific day. The resulting block of poetic works: 1) Act as a digital and creative “literary snapshot” of a specific period. 2) Highlight the accelerated nature of an electronic/networked-based news cycle. 3) Illustrate the discrepancies – and perhaps similarities - between how a digital audience responds to items deemed newsworthy and creative responses to such items. 4) Echo (and partially emulate) elements of digital culture that have become seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives (including programs such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Vine, Snapchat and Instagram). This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.