a tree with managers and jittery boats
multi-level menu poem
A new digital poetry experiment. Multi-level menus as poetry generator.
I’ve been working, for my soon to be finished PhD, on various digital poetry interfaces.
A few factors I’m playing with, and would appreciate thoughts on: 1. the menu fade away timing (more or less?) 2. the mixing of various level depths 3. should I have only one first entry, that extends to dozens of depths? 4. how else might this be used? 5. Rollover or On Press to trigger? and other thoughts.
title: a tree with managers and jittery boats
url: http://www.secrettechnology.com/tree/
cheers, Jason Nelson
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5 Responses to “a tree with managers and jittery boats”.
menus are interesting, i agree. here are a couple of pieces that centrally involve menus .
http://vispo.com/animisms/enigman/meaning.html
http://vispo.com/wfs4/documentation/tutorials/WFS.htm
Jason I love that you’re exploring poetry interfaces – to me that is what determines whether a digital poem grabs me by the collar or not. Working against the menu as an interface is a great idea – but I confess I have a hankering to see it get dirtier – what about dozens of different depths in levels that can all be open at the same time to create a kind of layer effect? like transparencies laid over each other? But what do I know! I’m still grabbed by how it is right now -
Lori,
Yeah I totally agree with the messy. I’m toying with having the dozens of layers extending over a much larger screen space…..and as I type that I’m wondering why I didnt start there……damnit.
Jason
I really like this. The more functional scripts, widgets, etc. appropriated for poetic uses the better! To answer your questions, Jason, I think the timing is about right, I like the way they linger and I like the way the various level depths become fused/confused. I like that this version has multiple entry points and that the column of entries can be read ‘straight’ (although interestingly that didn’t occur to me until after reading the whole thing for the second time) but it would be interesting to see a version/another poem that starts with just one entry. I also like your idea of extending dozens of layers over a larger screen space. Are you thinking of horizontal scrolling too? In which case, you would probably lose the connection with the staircase image, both literally and metaphorically, but it would be ‘messy’ in a different direction, threatening to lose it’s way, even becoming/seeming untethered perhaps. I like rollovers because they lack the stability and certainty of the click, so if you were to use On Press, it would be a very different poem I think. That would also be interesting to see.
Just one quibble – the text is rather small but my browser zoom (latest Firefox on Mac OSX) doesn’t work on ‘a tree with…’. Don’t know if it’s possible to fix that.
I like the colours: that rich terracotta, cool corporate blue-green and burnt sienna. The contrast between the menu and the background-image works very well – they’re held together, as Christine says, by the fact that they’re both types of staircase, but there’s also a nice contrast in that the menu-staircase seems to lead us downwards and to the right all the time, whereas the photograph-staircase is central and leads upwards. The photograph-staircase also picks up the word “jittery” from the title, and its rough-and-ready real-world feel makes another contrast, of course, with the smooth virtual design values of the drop-down menus. My one criticism about the design is that if you open up three submenus, the right-hand edge of the last one finishes rather too precisely on the right-hand edge of the staircase-picture. An obvious overlap would have been nicer, I think.
If you read the words in your head, you get a very strong staircasing effect in your mental intonation – which is to say that your “inner voice” seems to go down a semitone or something with every step you take down-and-to-the-right. If you read through the whole piece this effect becomes more and more pronounced. This is the main limitation of the format as a vehicle for text-poetry, I think: it gets repetitious. I do get a strong feeling, however, that the text is more of an engine for carrying our eye through the exploration of space which the menu-structure spreads out for us than anything else. If you were to take the text out of its menu-containers and put it on a printed page I think it would probably strike us quite differently. The real poetry of this piece, it seems to me, is in its design and structure rather than in what the text says. If the text was actually about staircases, or about menus, or about hierarchies, I wonder if we’d get an appropriateness-of-form frisson out of it? Or would it just make the piece seem laboured?
I suppose the other thing about the text is that because of the menu-layout it has a definite time-sequence to it: this piece of text comes before that piece, and this other piece comes after both of those. This is the “parent” text and this is the “child”. A lot of new media poetry deconstructs traditional text layout and floats text-fragments alongside each other in a simultaneous space, leaving the reader to decide what order to look at them in. This piece also deconstructs traditional text layout, but in a different way – making the sequence hierarchical rather than linear.
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