Technotexts and Virtual Words

I thought that the Anipoems, by Ana María Uribe, were completely fantastic! My favorite one was probably the "Gym 3" where the P's change into R's, which looks like humans working out by kicking out their leg. I thought it was a very creative idea. I thought the whole site of anipoems was really quite cool, but I did not really believe these were "poems." They were cool animations, but poems? "Oh, come on!" I thought.

However, when reading The Dreamlife of Letters, by Brian Kim Stefans, I realized, when he said that poetry should be interactive, that this is another one of those subjects that challenge traditional connotations(which makes Honors 353 a great thinking and debate class). Anipoems, and especially Stefans' The Dreamlife of Letters, challenges what a poem really is, or in other words, my preconceived notions of poetry. I used to think of it as non-mobile words that make sentences that elicit deep emotions from humans. However, mobile text can elicit greater emotions from humans; there are less limitations when it comes to mobile-text-- so why should mobile text not be poetic? That is right, mobile text is extremely poetic! There were a lot of interesting interpretations that can be made by watching Stefan's anipoem-- for example, one part I liked was "Pride" that started at the top of the screen then dropped. I take it to mean that someone lost their pride because something bad happened in their life. I think the "flashyness" of anipoems just threw me off at first. When I see flashy, I generally think movies or cartoon, not poems.

I also find it interesting that these anipoems could not exist as printed material, although making them into a flipbook might work. I do agree with Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer on page 38 that print tradition does not create more masterful pieces of literature than electronic means can. They are certainly different, but this does not make one better than another. Additionally, digitization is still fairly new so I do not think it should be judged quite yet against Shakespeare and the like. The last thing I want to comment on is the general topic Hayles writes about: the similarities between code and writing/speech and why code should matter to us. I am not sure if code in the basic sense really matters that much-- I took a class on Python and let me tell you, it was not fun. But in the more abstract sense, yes, I think it matters. We did not have to read the beginning of the book, but I did anyways to figure out exactly what Hayles was getting at, and she makes an interesting point-- just like the motherboard of a computer runs everything in our computers and eventually connects to cyberspace, "Mother Nature" controls our world. It is a scary analogy, really, because it is like we live in a type of cyberspace or something. Basically, code represents a complex world (Hayles notes this around page 41), like our world, although code itself is not so complex. We should care about code because it models our real lives. It is also similar to writing/speech because just like a little change in code can change something big in the computer process, a little change in my semantics would change the meaning of my sentences as well.