Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers - working draft

This poem is a hypertext made for Brown's 4-walled 3D Cave environment. It uses each wall as a 2D surface, siting the 3D dimension in the discrete activation of each wall. Each line of the poem appears as a flickering vertical stack on a single wall. When a line is clicked, it disappears and the next line appears on a different wall (but sometimes the same wall). The semantics of "front" "right" "left" "floor" ground the rhetorical content of the poem's propositional language. The links between lines are transparent GIFs placed on the same 2D planes as the corresponding lines, though a current bug in the design is that every wall is functioning as a link at all times, when ideally only the wall activated with text should function as a link. Each line of the poem is actually 20 copies of itself, spaced out vertically to fill the wall and timed to flash sequentially and repeat within 1/5th of a second. The flickering color screens are placed just behind the texts and are composed of four PNG squares (yellow, green, pink, blue) timed to flicker and repeat much slower than the text to improve the registration of the colors. The next draft of the poem will have 20 additional text object on each wall, flickering UP to add to the legibility of the current text objects which flicker DOWN. And just to reiterate, do take caution in attempting to read this piece because it uses a stroboscopic light the entire time.

I wrote this poem in Paris after I'd downloaded the Cave Text Editor and couldn't figure out how to get the XML files to visualize in the desktop preview. It takes up certain ethical catastrophes that occur inevitably while (and BECAUSE) we're sitting at our computers, then attempts to offer an answer as to how we might "fight back". I read it in Cork Ireland at the SoundEye International Poetry Festival and it's forthcoming in print in a Yt Communication bulletin (Hackney).

The title references the late 60s anarchist action group Up Against the Wall Mother Fuckers. Among other exploits, they cut open the fences at Woodstock. The phrase Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers was initially the title for a conceptual Cave piece I imagined in which 1000 "workers" would enter the Cave and break through the 4 screens to the tune of Break on Through to the Other Side playing over the positional speaker system and psychedelic colors blaring away on the screens.

Also referenced in the poem is Ed Dorn's epic poem Gunslinger, particularly the opening of "The Cycle", a poem nested within Gunslinger (cf "the broom", the Burger's cheeze", "rush the rack"). Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers is a sequel to an earlier poem of mine, Oxidized Slurp, which was published by Yt Communication in Hick Moth and published as an mp3 online by Jow Lindsay at the Bad Press website [http://badpress.infinology.net/].

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Cave
• Brown
• poem
• 3D
• VR

[LizRichieBand]

zzzzzzzzzzzz

[PAULLONDEN]

Up against the \/\/@|_|_

Fatherfucker./

[needforname]

gay

[dennis9962]

I DID stuff like this on th Amiga computer in the early 80's

[franks2050]

faggy

[MargemontRobinson]

exponentially sharp. (How) do you expect this to manifest in physical performance? also, I loved the pressure of temporal dissonance as a result of stroboscope. I could not find this software. link please?

[Metaphysics24]

wow. welcome to the poetical now.