wittenoom: speculative shell and cancerous breeze

Exploratory work using various digital poetry interfaces.

Digital poetry should surround the reader, to encompass them in the experience, to entice their hands and eyes to move with the language and explore the interface. It’s critical for digital writers to see the interface, visuals, sounds, and movements as poetic/fiction elements. ….. Multimedia and interface components are not just navigational holiday lights to pretty up the place, they add/change/expand the artwork. Within this work, I designed a responsive creatures as both fun to play and allow the reader to jump between texts, to read in their own ordering, to non-linearly explore the inherently non-linear nature of poetry. Layering is also of prime importance, as creating a sense of thematic and visual depth, embeds the poetry in a larger world, a more complex poetic.

In Western Australia the ex mining town of Wittenoom that once was home to thousands is now empty. The town and the surrounding region’s air is literally cancerous. After years of prosperous asbestos mining and dozens of hill sized tailings piles open to the area’s powerful winds, signs warn anyone entering the region of the tiny lung lesion fibers. Like a much smaller Chernobyl, Wittenoom represents the quick riches and fast ignorance of industry, leaving empty houses and playgrounds intact and unused. To explore these themes, Wittenoom (my digital poem) uses a variety of interactive depth and spatially dynamic interfaces as homes for recombinatory poetic lines.

Another example of a combination digital poem is The Bomar Gene.(http://www.heliozoa.com/gene/bomargene.htm ): Within every human there is a singular gene, unique only to that individual. And with that gene comes a singular ability, a rare, mostly never realized capacity for interacting with the world. The Bomar Gene explores this mythical gene, through a series of ficto-biographies, with each story being retranslated and spatialized through interactive interfaces and embodied animations. Each section opens up to such questions as: How are we defined by our genetic code? What does it mean to be an individual, to be unique? What are the implications of a society obsessed with rare abilities and super-powers?