These variable couplets are composed of language collected from multiple ship’s logs recording a storm in the North Atlantic 6 February 1870. The logs were consulted at the National Meteorological Library and Archive at the Met Office in Exeter, UK.
A Twitterbot remix of "This is a Picture of Wind: A Weather Poem for Phones” by J. R. Carpenter.
The sky clears its schedule. Gentle breezes. Lavender in need of attention. The river brings along a novel. #thisisapictureofwind
Late summer thunder. Heat rising out of nowhere. Elegiac, but we’ll take it. #thisisapictureofwind
This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather in all its written forms.
Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.
This work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text was added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker was published in December 2018.
This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA: DATA, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Initial research for this project was made possible by a Dot Award for Digital Literature, from if:book and the New Media Writing Prize.
Winner of the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition People's Choice Award 2018
Shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Digital Literature 2018
Shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018
(Source: Author's Description)
January.
Mists make dangerous travel. The air loaded with freezing particles. Attached to fixed objects. A blade of grass. Some garden shrubs. Spreading tufts of crystals. Gigantic specimens of snow-white coral. An elegant fringe. The rime falls. Transparent. In heaps beneath the trees.
February.
It’s still raining. It has always rained. We are silt dwellers, tide chasers, puddles, floods, mud. The river runs brown topsoil down and out to sea. From a fir erupts a murmur of starlings. By fir I also mean fur. A pelt of needles, hackles raised. Gale force ten at the river mouth. The scale goes up to twelve. After that the sky breaks. The fir comes down and takes two eucalyptus with it.
This video poem is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s “Tree at My Window” with its treatment of internal and external weather. The speaker of the poem is experiencing a metaphorical winter of the soul, exploring the idea poetically, visually, and musically (using “Hymn” by Moby). The scheduling of textual elements and their movement and duration onscreen focuses the reader’s attention on the idea expressed in each line, creating a sequence of ideas that change over time. This allows for turns, shifts, reversals, and re-imaginings, much like the layering of images used by Williams in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” but in time rather than in space. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
STRUTS is an algorithmic narrative collage created from a collection of fragments of facts and fictions pertaining to a place and its people, history, geography and storm events. Narrative resonates in the spaces between the texts horizontally scrolling across the screen, the flickering updating of monthly tide gauge averages, the occasional appearance of live weather weather warnings pulled in by RSS feed and the animated set of photographs of the ends of the struts that support the seawall that protectsa portion of foreshore from the rising tides of the Northumberland Strait. The photographs were taken on May 23, 2011 the second day of a five-week stint as Open Studio Artist in Residence at Struts Gallery and Faucet Media Lab, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, May 22 – June 26, 2011. The Saxby Gale of 1869 is the storm we compare all possible storms to. The tide gauge data represents the monthly tide gauge averages for Shediac Bay from the month I was born to the month I moved from Canada to England. The gauge that measured these averages was destroyed in the same storm surge that damaged the struts in the photographs, onl the night of 21 December 2010. The Tantramar Marsh text is excerpted from Writing Coastlines: The Operation of Estuaries, Islands and Beaches as Liminal Spaces in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop, a paper written in residence at Struts and presented at "It Must Be Nova Scotia: Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop" which took place at University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, June 10-12, 2011.
"These struts support the seawall that protects the foreshore in front of Linda Rae Dornan’s cottage from the Northumberland strait. The seawall was severely damaged 21 December 2010 during the third nor'easter in as many weeks. It was a full moon, and a lunar eclipse. Winds gusted to 100 kilometres an hour. The tide gauge at Charlottetown showed 3.494 metres above chart datum at 21:40. The tide gauge at Shediac was destroyed by the surge. Many STRUTS in Linda’s seawall were torn out or twisted. The holes were filled with stones. A rug was laid, covered with rip-rap and new soil, and seeded with grass. Boulders on the beach support the seawall now, thousands of dollars worth. The wall itself and the struts that support it are no longer visible."
STRUTS. STRUCTURAL MEMBERS, AS IN TRUSSES, PRIMARILY INTENDED TO RESIST LONGITUDINAL COMPRESSION. EMBANKMENTS MEANT TO PREVENT EROSION OF SHORELINES. BRACE OR SUPPORT BY MEANS OF STRUTS OR SPURS. SPURS. OBLIQUE REINFORCING PROPS OR STAYS OF TIMBER OR MASONRY. ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT. ON IMPULSE. SPURS TO ACTION. STRUTS. WALKS WITH HEAD ERECT AND CHEST THROWN OUT, AS IF EXPECTING TO IMPRESS OBSERVERS. WITH PROUD BEARING. PARADES, FLOURISHES. STRUTS AND SWAGGERS. STRUTS GALLERY. SUPPORTS BY MEANS OF STRUTS. STRUCTURAL MEMBERS SPUR STRUTS TO ART ACTION. WALKS WITH HEAD ERECT ALONG LONGITUDINAL EMBANKMENTS. SEAWALLS BRACED BY SPURS. STAYS. PREVENT EROSION. OF MOMENTS. OBLIQUELY.
STRUTS is composed in HTML, CSS and javascript. It is best viewed full screen. It requires an internet connection to run as one page element contains an RSS feed called by the Google API.