My brother (AKA official source of digital tidings) showed me The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive video set to the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait.” The project is composed of filmic threads that occur in separate windows. Though the images function individually, thematic and visual content ends up bleeding between the frames of the tabs, osmosis-like. It’s interactive: the viewer enters her childhood address and, lo and behold, (spoiler alert!) a Google Map Street View -style lens focuses on the childhood home from above. I think the video is super neat, but does such personalized storytelling challenge the constraints of traditional storytelling?
Google Map’s limited capability is a downfall. My own childhood address doesn’t “contain enough Street-View and/or Google Maps data,” and so I went about entering various addresses willy-nilly (I guess I’ve spent a lot of time off The Map) until I ended up viewing some urban wasteland under the BQE, a far cry from the tidy lawns and bright windows of my hometown. A more successful interactive feature involved creating my own drawing. From my mouse-drawn line sprouted varicose veins, so the finished version was a beautified and stylized version, a collaboration between the creator and the viewer of the work.
Are we heading towards a more collaborative literature? What if poems in second person really were written to you? (ie. The sky was void of clouds and grit, clean as/ your teeth after last week’s dental appointment with Dr. Gold). This is newer, even more personalized, than the interactivity touted by hypertext poetry and fiction, electronic literature that became popular in the late ’80s and 90s. The hypertext fiction I’ve seen involves many different sequences based on the reader’s mouse-clicks. You select the word ‘apple,’ let’s say, and that brings you on a whole other hyperlinked journey than if you’d clicked ‘orange.’
Hypertext poetry and fiction is already a collaboration between author and reader, but contemporary technology could bring it to a new level. I don’t know if this is a good thing. Competing for my attention on Gmail and Facebook are a number of advertisements catered to my own interests based on the content of emails and messages. It feels a bit Big Brothery.
Who knows what can happen in this digital wilderness? Though ‘personalized writing’ could have fascinating perks, I think some power resides in literature’s relative universality. But The Wilderness Downtown makes me think about the collaboration between writers and readers that’s necessary in non-digital media.
Take one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets, One Art by Elizabeth Bishop.
The poem is about loss, something you’ve experienced if you’re human. At first, the losses Bishop lists are general enough– “lost door keys, the hour badly spent.” Then come Bishop’s exclusive losses: her mother’s watch, cities, a distinctly private and personal ‘you’. As readers, we leap to understand and empathize. It becomes personal through no digital ploys of any sort, but through that regular, old, non-digital, shared sense of humanity.