White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a JavaScript investigation of literary variants with a new text generated every ten seconds. Its goals are as follows. (1) To present a poetic evocation of the images, vocabulary, and sights of Costa Rica's language and natural ecosystems though poetic text and visuals. (2) To investigate the potential of literary variants. Thinking of poems where authors have vacillated between variant lines, Bromeliads offers two alternatives for each line of text thus, for an 8 line poem, offering 512 possible variants, exploring the multi-textual possibilities of literary variants. (3) It explores the richness of multiple languages. (4) It mines the possibilities of translation, code, and shifting digital textuality. Having variants regenerate every ten seconds provides poems that are not static, but dynamic; indeed one never finishes reading the same poem one began reading. This re-defines the concept of the literary object and offers a more challenging reading, both for the reader and for the writer in performance, than a static poem. The idea is to be able to read as if surfing across multiple textual possibilities. Such regeneration allows traces of different languages to overwrite each other, providing a linguistic and cultural richness. (Source: Author description, ELC, Vol. 1)
From first glance, "White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares" is described as a piece of E-lit that stands to meld the gap between spanish and english as languages into one. That in itself is very true and evident as you first click on the work and see spanish numbers, starting with uno of course, that bring you to a new section each time. From the ELD http://directory.eliterature.org/node/3940
