interactive poem

Yardley PA, 1997 is an interactive keyboard poem featuring music by composer Christopher Libertino. The reader can play the keys in a certain order, or remix them in whatever order they so choose. An excerpt from Todd's book of interactive poems, Hotwriting.

(Source: WordHack Anthology)

Play the Chinese lottery and see what life was like as a Chinese immigrant to British Columbia.

High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese is an interactive poem, created through an interdisciplinary collaboration of 11 Canadian artists, programmers and community members. The project consists of an interactive website, 8 videos and an interactive gallery installation. 

High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese explores the theme of Chinese immigration to the west coast of Canada – both historical and contemporary – the tensions that exist in and between these narratives.

Góngora Word Toys is a collection of digital poems that explicitly engage with the work of Spanish Baroque poet, Luis de Góngora. The collection includes five interactive poems, each engaging with a different aspect of Góngora's poem Soledades: "Dedicatoria espiral" (Spiral Dedication), "En breve espacio mucha primavera" (A Lot of Spring in a Little Space), "El llanto del peregrino" (The Pilgrim's Cry)," Delicias del Parnaso" (Delicacies of the Parnassus) and "El arte de cetrería" (The Art of Falconry). 

Composed in 1613, Góngora's Soledades is a long silva poem about the wonderings of an anonymous castaway after his ship wrecks in an island. Soledades is paradigmatic for its difficult grammatical structures and the over-abundance of erudite and mythological allusions and references. The poem stresses rhythm, and rejoices in the opacity of Baroque language. Similarly, Gache's digital take on Góngora's work underscores the plasticity of language and its ability to create complex structures. 

The first poem, "Dedicatoria espiral" relocates the rhythm and rhetorical intricacy in Soledades’ dedication to the Duque de Béjar by transforming the verses into a moving spiral that turns clockwise or counterclockwise depending on where the reader places the cursor. The display of the text is altered by reader movements. 

"En breve espacio poca primavera" takes on a hypertextual form where text blossoms like flowers. Every time the reader activates a link, new windows pop up filling up the space on the screen, masking meaning like baroque "culteranismo." 

"Delicias del Parnaso" is a multi-option game poem, where the reader needs to choose between possible verses to complete Góngora's poem. Selection becomes reading technique. 

"El llanto del peregrino" is also a game poem. Along with the avatar, the reader moves around the new environment and walks in between words using the keyboard arrow keys. The poem works like a platform game based on spatial navigation. 

Finally, "El arte de la cetrería" presents eight birds (those appearing in Góngora's poem) all talking through mechanical voice processors. The final cacophony makes listening of the individual voices impossible, again underscoring the overall form of the piece and the mechanics of language and writing.

Author statement: 

En el período barroco, el equilibrado mundo clásico deja lugar a un mundo inestable, descentrado, escondido tras el abigarramiento de los signos. El Góngora de las Soledades ha sido comparado incluso con el astrónomo Kepler y la órbita elíptica de la Tierra con las elipsis gongorinas del lenguaje. Siguiendo su trabajo con los Wordtoys, Belén Gache nos presenta los Gongora Wordtoys (Soledades) basados en la obra del poeta español. Se tratade 5 poemas digitales interactivos (Dedicatoria espiral, En breve espacio mucha primavera, El llanto del peregrino, Delicias del Parnaso y El arte de cetrería), que remiten a un universo barroco de espirales, pliegues y laberintos del lenguaje. 

From the Electronic Literature Directory 

Quantum Collocation is a work of experimental writing designed as an application for mobile digital devices. An interactive erasure of an excerpted page from a foundational essay by preeminent physicist Niels Bohr, Quantum Collocation applies the laws of quantum mechanics to the user’s experience of the work, allowing her to uncover a range of unique poetic possibilities within Bohr’s original text through her positioning and repositioning of the mobile device in space. The work embodies Bohr’s notion of “complementarity,” in which the way an experimental apparatus designed to measure a particle’s properties is configured is crucial to determining precisely which of those particle’s characteristics become determinate at the moment of observation. In Quantum Collocation, Bohr’s words are the particles under observation, and the mobile device is the experimental apparatus through which those observations are made possible; each of the device’s unique positions in space uncover a unique poetic possibility within Bohr’s original writing. Quantum Collocation deploys probability functions that determine how poems become legible to the user, creating a dynamic, non-linear text distributed across space and time. Yet rather than being algorithmically generated, each poem has been carefully crafted by the author, providing a unique series of literary reflections on the philosophical implications of quantum physics and the indeterminate nature of physical reality. (Source: ELO Conference)

Drive a thousand miles from the left/right coasts and you reach the sporadically populated plains, the supposed heart of the United States. But this flatland organ is sick and leaking, the young are fleeing, and consumerism, the addiction to purchase, has replaced the pride of working the land, growing crops and communities. And exploring these small American towns, reaching into the houses and malls and streets, is a modern harvest. This interactive digital poem harvest those objects from the living room gardens, the acres of shopping centers, picks the gaudy attachments of our lived environments. Through five sections, the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the garage and the mall, readers can harvest these modern croplands, the trinkets and objects filling our surroundings. And in the heart of the US, “to purchase” replaces “to create”, a crippling harvest of plastic and ceramic. (Source: GalleryDDDL description)

Launched November 21, 2005.