Last night I put some finishing touches on Vipassanā in Certain Conditions, a collaboration in electronic poetry by poet Casey Clague and myself. We had been talking about doing something like this for a couple years now, and Casey’s final project in a seminar taught by Daniel Borzutsky at UIC was the right prompt to get one done.

“Vipassanā In Certain Conditions” consists of two sets of lines written by Casey during a trip to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand which included a meditation retreat.

We jointly conceived a reader experience of randomly paired stanzas, which are generated dynamically when the reader takes an action. I created the visual experience and interactivity with HTML, CSS and JavaScript hosted on Github.

The lines appear like thoughts that arise unbidden during meditation, some recurring and nagging. As those are dismissed, new ones appear after an interval.

The slowly shifting background gradient and quiet visual composition are meant to complement and guide the reader experience to an introspective and receptive modality, and also offset the sometimes dissonant and jagged impression of the words themselves.

Casey and I are planning some future experiments of this type. It’s a really interesting challenge and creative modality to look at another expression of what poetry and new media have to do with each other, and what electronic documents can be beyond a reproduction of prior, static models from non-electronic media.