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- The nature of the reader, or the role that one is cast in while viewing this piece, depends on how one interprets the way in which the information is presented, which changes throughout the presentation.
- From the start, the screen changes in greyscale from black to white, replicating a sort of "curtain" convention, signalling to the audience to pay close attention, and creating a dynamic more like a stage presentation (as if an orator were to walk onto a stage and begin the following poetic monologue).
- Thus this is not a simple video of text, in which the viewer is invisible or unacknowledged. Instead, there is a predicated relationship in which the audience is necessary for the dialogue to follow, or is being directed towards the audience (which is visually corroborated by the text often enlarging or shrinking, creating the illusion of coming at the audience or moving away.
- In the same way, the audience is also asked to be silent, to take the role of listener.
- Conventionally, all the text within the presentation is bolded, capitalized, and at times fills the entire screen, creating a sense of shouting in various degrees. This might create a sort of antagonistic dialogue, or at least one in which the audience is not only asked to be silent, but to be submissive.
- This is what makes this presentation so interesting. As a poem, laid out before a reader on a page, the language, terseness, accusatory tone, and use of incomplete, interrupting thoughts, would render an experience that gave some of the same impressions of bitterness, rage, and regret. However, by placing the words within this medium, although visually not far removed from black ink on a white page, allows the author to add an extra layer of interpretation to his piece. Not only do we have tone, diction, fractured thought, but changing size, lighting, and a drum beat to keep time and deliver a further sense of frenzy.
- Another interesting this explored through this medium is the audience's sense of scope. With a paper poem, the audience is able to see the entirety of the piece as they read. They are allowed to scan, skip, or contemplate/interact/make notes on any given line. In this presentation, the author has full control of the pace at which the piece is read. He also is able to confine the text in ways that simple enjambment or line breaks can't. Here words or sentences stand on their own, but the author also controls how much time each one is allowed to be viewed. At times one word (like the burp or weeds) is lingered on, perhaps beyond the sense of the reader's comfort, the author draws attention to words that might have appeared trivial in a traditional reading. At other times large amounts of information pass in less than the blink of an eye, allowing only fragments of the text to be captured with each viewing, which is perhaps another thematic element/tone the author is setting entirely with the medium.
- This is what made this piece so bewildering for me. At times the text was appearing and disappearing at a rate faster than my eye could take the information in efficiently, at times creating a blur (somewhat like scanning I suppose) of text washing over my senses. This is perhaps part of the purpose of this medium, to inform the reader of their loss of control, to make it keenly felt by keeping information just out of the mind's most comfortable grasp. This lends itself to a sense of fragmentation and chaos that the author is trying to convey.
