http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/conference2/zervos/zervos.doc

Getting Engaged

Komninos Zervos

1:

I'd like to cover several areas of 'getting engaged', Firstly I'd like to talk about how I got engaged with computers and specifically the use of computers/software/the web to produce a poetry that could not be published in traditional media, and which explored the poetic potential of the new media.

My involvement with words in 3d spaces began in 1995 as a research for a Masters in Creative Writing, Cyberpoetry - 1995. With a mac lc 630 and specular logomotion and infini-d, drag and drop 3d modelling programs, and adobe premiere and hypercard to put things together. To begin to envisage what poetry might look like in cyberspace one must imagine a poetry in which the words are, not only freed from stanzas and lines, but freed from the flatness of the page also.

A poetry in which words had shape, colour, depth, thickness and they had mobility along a time-line. The motion of words gave them the property of being able to move in and out of the depth of field of an illusionary 3d space, to move about on their axis and to move about in a plane.

The earliest representations were exciting, a new space to play with words.

I had earnt my living as a performance poet, playing with the sound of words, writing them down as performance scripts and inviting the participation of audiences in creating listening-spaces.

I played with words on paper too, concrete poetry, patterned poems, list poems, long rhyming narrative poems, raves, surrealist poems written to formulas.

The earliest experiments in 3d were cliche representations of single words, verbs, in 3d, words did what they said they were going to do.

I then began to incorporate verbs into nouns, by animating nouns, making them act out motions, incorporating the verb in the noun.

I was making a poetry of nouns only, textscapes; scenes, using only nouns.

(http://www.uq.net.au/~zzkozerv/animgif.html)

Adjectives were not needed either, colour, shape, thickness, font face, speed of motion, type of motion, depth of field, introduced a new semiotic system for the reading of poetry.

but was I exlporing new literary devices in this new medium?

or was it merely that I was creating a poetry without grammatical structure? a poetry of nouns.

the words:

water:

wave:

sand:

thong:

crab:

can: ,

when written on a page or even spoken out aloud do not conjure the same feeling as the beach cyberpoem.

The nouns in 3d space were doing the work of phrases or sentences, they make statements.

In poetry on the page and in performance, whilst the definite and indefinite article, conjunctions, prepositions, other joining words, and parts of written language can be dispensed with, and have been dispensed with over the last 30 years, a poetry of nouns alone is difficult outside of cyberspace.

(the beach - sentences)

The early textscapes created were more than just the association between the four or five words they used.

Of course the early textscapes were limited in scope, like landscape poetry of old, this imagery has become passe.

I tried to introduce narrative into the textscapes, sequencing the nouns in to a timeline so that a story could be told, emotions could be expressed and humour could be experienced.

in scripting narratives it was easy to have all the nouns thematically linked, so that a flow developed, as in traditional narrative, but the journeys were always linear and the interpretation was rigid, allowing only minor departures from the author’s intentions.

The scripting of poems containing words that are not usually thematically linked created a parataxis of words. The parataxis or tension created by association of seemingly unrelated words, creates a space which the end-user has to contribute to, to input into the poem to produce other meanings.

I called my experiments with words on the computer and the internet - cyberpoetry.-

I did so, not to prescribe what the name of poetry on the world wide web should be, but to distinguish them from the written poetry(print published), and sounded poetry(spoken word performance).

I am not a programmer of computer languages, but acknowledge that there is poetry in code and I can understand the arguments for internet poetry being a poetry of code.

But I am a drag and drop poet, and I figure that software gives me the power to create in this medium and still make a uniquely computer-dependent poetry, even if it is not always internet dependent.

In the poem 'marriage' the colour of the letters are red and pulsating, fading and slowing to a cool blue. The letter I remains red and begins to shrink within the other letters even though the word is dominant as a whole, the I begins to wriggle uncomfortably within the marriage, it separates from the word marriage even before it has broken away from it. new words form from syllables of the old; mirage; rage; age; and new paratactic confrontations not present in the original word. in the second half of the poem words are split up as in marriage separation.

here is a new sort of syllable and letter parataxis made possible in this medium.

if you are familiar with the work of mez net_wurker or mary ann breeze, then you will be able to see another kind of syllable and letter parataxis. mez's parenthetic(is this a word?) splitting of words, changes the way you first read the word when you rescan it and make a new combination of syllables within the one word.

It's a parataxis of letters and syllables.

The paratactic device of placing separate stand alone phrases in one poetry line, can be found in many poetries.

the paratactic device is best recently exemplified in l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry(langpo) of the seventies and eighties, and fore-shadowed in surreal poetry early last century, and evident in medieval english poetry, and present in much contemporary printed and performance poetry that today would be considered main stream.

Since words are doing the work of phrases or groupings of verbs, adjectives and nouns, then in placing words in paratactic arrangement in 3d, it makes sense that it is possible to create poetry in 3d space which allows interpretation in the association of seemingly unrelated statements. Also the animation allows each word in the text to have relationships with selected words or with each other word, that on a page would be fixed into sentences.

The paratactic device can be seen as a portal to the poetic moment.

Poetry of the moment - randomness and accidental parataxis. (this is a post-structuralist text)

The morphing capabilities of 3d software allowed me to change letters of words over time, the visual word with its associations to another word paratactically opposed to it.

words are made up of composite parts, syllables, and letters of the alphabet.

in my experimentation these composite parts wanted to be statements of their own.

2.

Secondly, I'd like to discuss how the cyberpoetry asks the end-user for a more active involvement. It is an ergodic experience in which the end-user works to make their own pathway through the work. A navigation throufh words in a 3d space rather than scanning a surface. Poem 'intervention' (http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_h.html)

3.

Thirdly I'd l;ike to discuss the individual engagement of the end-user with the cyberpoem - an engagement that encourages the end-user to be the composer as well, without temporal constraints, to spend as much time inside the poem as they like, to write the poem for themselves from inside the poem.

(http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/childhood/index.html)