relationship

Limerence is the private blog of Clarice Mahon. Huge part of the blogposts evolves around how she feels about her boyfriend and how their relationship changes.

see/saw is an interactive installation in which visitors’ manipulations of a real see-saw control the fluctuation of power and emotion in the story of an intimate relationship. A pair of words are projected on the walls behind the people on the see-saw—one word from each pair on the wall behind each person. As visitors see-saw up and down, new pairs fade in and out based on the angle of the see-saw. Participants’ motion also causes an audio track heard through speakers embedded in the see-saw to advance. When participants stop moving, the audio fragments into an ‘up’ and ‘down’ segment heard by the ‘up’ and ‘down’ participant respectively. The audio clips relate to the projected word that each person can see, and the ‘up’ or ‘down’ position in the narrated relationship. This piece, along with Come to Pieces—an interactive video portrait, were created during Chapman and Utterback’s month long residency at Grand Central Art Center in 2001.

(Source: author website)

This poem interweaves voices, images, words, and narrative threads to capture some of the emotional intensity of three characters in a relationship that seems to have ended. As an image-driven hypertext, the reader can click on different links usually associated with different characters to explore their thoughts. Each node has its own input cues and responds to mouse movements, mouseovers, and clicks differently, so explore the possibilities of each before clicking on too hastily or you might miss important lines in the poem. Some of the images take some interpretation and are not always clear in what they represent, enriching the experience by suggesting rather than showing. The use of handwriting and drawings also enhances a sense of the personal, and occasionally adds a layer of visual ambiguity (does she use the word “connections” or “corrections?”). The handwriting also masks a number of typos which are difficult to correct when processed as an animated image in Flash (an issue addressed in Jhave’s “Typeoms”).

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This emotional poem about heartache and the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” particularly in the aftermath of a failed relationship. Lew takes the metaphor of emotional pain as being related to the heart and extends it to the realm of medicine, by referring to the speaker as “the subject” and creating an interface that suggests experimentation on or examination of that test subject. The image of bubbles (or are blood clots?) floating around the screen, is an interface for scheduled stanza sequences activated by a mouse click. The sound of a heart beating in the background and the poem that unfolds as you click on the bubble/clots (with 1 to 5 bubbles, which can be read sequentially or not) suggest that heart-stopping moment when one encounters a greeting card from a departed loved one.

This poem is reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Medlars and Sorb-Apples,” because it examines the same phenomenon, though Lawrence comes to a different conclusion when he says “wonderful are the hellish experiences.”

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This suite of 28 early animated poems from 1995-1997 were created as animated GIFs but are really powered by a vibrant enthusiasm over the ability of computers to write kinetic language. In this suite, we see words morph into other words and into objects, words whose movements evoke their meanings, words used to build landscapes full of objects (a decade before WordWorld), and phrases reconfiguring and reshaping themselves into new ones— as is the case with “she left” (above). This poem is very economical with its language resources, yet so effective in describing the psychological process of a breakup in a relationship. These poems are little gems worth exploring, though the poet doesn’t necessarily make it easy for us. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

[theHouse] is a digital poetry piece which takes the form of computer-based spatialized organism.world. Through the process of enacting texts within, alongside, and outside of the text of computational code, this autobiographical work is regulated by the computational process of the sine wave. Here, the text is written upon "rooms," and these rooms emerge to create "houses" next to and among the intermingling text. As in much of electronic literature, the experience of the work as an intimate, interactive, screen-based piece is essential to understanding and appreciating it. Indeed, the work is only realized through user interaction and navigation. How does everyday spatial practice bring into focus the relationship between code, language, and relationships? What are the key characteristics of digital relationships as seen through this light? Does the recurring emphasis on process, chance, and interactivity also function as an indicator of larger questions about the chance writing of the text? The poem presented is autobiographical in nature yet engages the conceptualization of both language and embodiment as the text creates its own types of organism.

(Source: Author description, ELC 1.)