Supplementary Events

Digital Poetry: Boyden Gallery

http://www.stephaniestrickland.com

Stephanie Strickland was the speaker for the Voices reading. She started off by reading some of her poetic work, both from printed selections, and from her newly published book Dragon Logic. She showed the audience the computer program meant to mesh Emily Dickinson’s work with the work of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. She then segwayed into her Digital poetry by reading verses akin to ‘technology is seduction.’ The digital poetry was represented by pictures of water combined with stanzas of poetry meant to appear and disappear as the pixels of the videos of water moved. 

(This is a screenshot of the Melville/Dickinson) Digital Poetry Project

Her works tries to harmonize the natural world with the digital world, define digital poetry, and  connect the digital world to literature.

The idea of digital poetry was very interesting. To combine digital art with poetry, while also making a computer formula that will work with the timing of the images in conjunction to the movement of the poetry stanzas was fascinating. The only thing I had an issue with was the fluidity of the images. I felt the text should have changed it's shape more to match the digital images of the water.

Here's a couple of articles where she discusses her electronic literature, art, and writing:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/182942

http://www.stephaniestrickland.com/essays

What I think is particularly awesome about her work is that artists could use this idea of Digital Poetry and bring it too a new level. What if you created a work of public art that allowed viewers to manipulate the water and watched how the stanzas matched what they did? What if you did this with, instead of poetry, music. There are so many possibilities to do with this idea. Overall, I loved the presentation in Boyden Gallery, and I want to try my own spin on Digital Poetry!