Electronic Literature Collection Musings

While perusing the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection I came across two pieces that interested me particularily, one that I viewed as a sort of video poem and the other as a narrative without words. As a quick side note I viewed all of these without reading the author or site comments, so don't shoot me if it says right there something it took me twenty minutes to discover.

Urbanalities was a really wild flash presentation that poetically displayed various aspects of urban social life. Each little chapter gave an abstract vision of a different aspect, ranging from mad progress to suspicion of neighbors. I am normally not a humongous fan of poetry per say, but the addition of music and video as well as the removal of all but key words and phrases really peaked my interest. The fact that most of the text, while pertaining to the subject, managed to be randomly generated was really cool as well. This piece is something that I expected electronic literature to be, a combination of various media forms to create something more than just words. Not to say that there is anything wrong with words, but images and sounds can have just as much meaning, if not more in certain ways.

Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, while creepy as hell, was another piece that interested me. It is a narrative fiction based on real facts without any actual words. At all. Even before I read the little summary afterwards I could sort of tell what was going on both based on the title and what occurred afterwards. The fact that it was interactive to some degree allowed me to feel like I was somehow driving or at least an active part of the story. I only have two issues with this piece. Firstly it would be a little hard to get across the exact story you want without the context of that little history writeup, which sort of ruins the whole no text thing. Secondly, a lot of the interactive stuff, while kind of interesting and musical in its own way, never amounted to anything at all. Most of those creepy plants led to nothing but strange patterns on the screen, and there were a lot of the same ones over and over. A minor gripe I suppose.

I have to say that the Electronic Literature Collection is a great place for people to get into this genre of writing, as it offers a nice array of different kinds of media for consumption. While some of the pieces were not so awesome in my opinion, there are an equal number of excellent ones to keep my interest. There is a lot of stuff here for everyone to enjoy.