The only thing I don’t like about simply7 is that there is a slight glitch when clicking on the button to play the Flash piece. When I see a button, I’m accustomed to being able to click once on it, quickly. When I clicked on the button in this piece, it turned color, but nothing happened until I held the mouse button down for a couple of seconds. This feature may be intentional, since new media pieces often deliberately introduce elements that are challenging to the user’s ability to navigate the interface. In this instance, if it is intentional, it seems unwise to me. After all, most people won’t even wait longer than 10 seconds for a page to download, and they won’t even click more than three times to get to the content they want within a website. New media is not popular with the public. It’s unlikely that most visitors would have had the patience to keep on trying to make something happen, as I did.

Even so, once I got past this initial annoyance, I enjoyed simply7. It reminded me of a dream I once had, in which all my words were constantly evolving and interacting, and there was no such thing as a static word in my speech or writing. There were actually morphing runes coming out of my mouth. It was like the runes really fit the nature of reality. I woke up wondering if aliens on some planet might experience their whole language in this way, taking it completely for granted. Maybe one of these times, I’ll attempt to reproduce this dream in Flash.

Browse all the entries under Hypermedia Poetry, Writing.

Making art from spam isn’t the only way you can get creative with it. You can also make poetry with it. That’s what Kristin Thomas does. She writes poetry using nothing but the subject lines of hundreds of spam emails. It’s actually quite good. It’s like a close-up snapshot of our wartier fears and fantasies. I say “our”, because most of us worry about looks and finances at least sometimes. It makes you pay attention to the psychological buttons that are being pushed by spam, which is something we all normally tend to filter out automatically, just as we’re trained to close pop-up windows as soon as they open. Here’s a sample:

Size Matters, Baby!

Little Girl,
Big Feet,
Enormous savings
Tremendous growth potential
tiny secrets,
wee-est sleepers
medium build
bigger smile
wider ass than the Hoover Damn!

Little Girl,
Big Feet,
Larger manhood
elephantine change in size
smaller interest
fractional cost
huge drain
Fat savings
smaller payments than ever before!

Little Girl,
Big Feet,
Keep your secrets,
Baby keep your secrets.

You know, if some of this stuff is preserved, twenty years later or so, it might say something about the underbelly of the electronic life of the mind in our time. Sometimes, the things we ignore because they’re so common really say something about our culture. Hey, it might even be fun to make a personal online scrapbook and look back at it some time. I started to do that during the Y2K bug craze. Some day, I intend to go back and make a composite of all the stuff I collected, memorializing a crazy time in a crazy place, a time that was forgotten just as soon as it was anti-climactically over. Remember it? It seemed at the time as if apocalyptic fervor had been channeled into fears about technology and had finally died on the vine. Yet, now we see that was not to be. In 2006, the Armageddoners are just as full of passionate intensity as they could be. The Y2K bug scare was forgotten way before 9/11 happened, but now that we’re living in a post-9/11 world, it seems quaint to look back at it, doesn’t it? It makes me feel nostalgic for a time when people feared something that was so easy to laugh at. But I digress. The point is, the Y2K phase was a slice of life and history – and so are spam emails, believe it or not. Okay, everything is a slice of life and history, but some slices are more telling than others, especially in the hands of an artist or poet, no?

Browse all the entries under Flash, Hypermedia Poetry.