my electronic literature collection interaction

birds singing other birds' songs

The piece from the Electronic Literature Collection that I dug the most was "Bird Singing Other Birds' Songs" by Maria Mencia, an interactive, glowing experience involving the relationship between sound and text and image. Human singers interpret transcribed bird calls, and the audience of the piece can click and layer as many of the 12 sound-image meshes as they choose. I loved being able to watch 12 very different interpretations of flying, gliding, and dissolving birds made out of the text of their calls while listening to the click-chirp human voices accompanying each one. Being able to arrange them was fun and a dee-light. For a real wild ride I had them all going at once, "za-wee chick chock" saturation of sounds and juxtaposition of sights. The background is a mesmerizing fluffy cloudscape.

This piece was close to the epitome of what I desire from Electronic Literature. Sometimes I get bored if things don't get too mixed up or don't ask me to participate in some way. I really, really love the twists and turns and angles of letters, especially when they're disassociated from the words they can create (with a few of the text-bird creations of this piece you can't tell what the bird-call they're made up of is supposed to say... the letters float around or are too far jumbled to tell). The art of the sound and the act of interpreting text of another animal's call into human voice reminds me of the beauty you to bee found using a free-translator program on the internet; taking a phrase and going back and forth between languages with it, you find end up finding something poetic, semi-random, and very different from the original. You learn to look at the phrase with a freer mind and wonder all about its infinite implications. Hearing the poetry of sing-song human voices acting as birds reminds us not to overly define anythings existence, but to think about how we construct ideas about realities.

I expected Electronic Literature to be what it is: work that expands the concept of "literature" to include our real present existence as creatures in a realm of multimedia, where our analog selves have started to merge with our newer, digital surroundings.
Art is always expanding --- I think that in the future "Electronic Literature" will just become "literature".