Swarm Rhetoric
Link: https://dpoetry.com/dataface/interbase/swarm/
Artists: Jason Nelson
Description: Teaching digital writing is often as re-combinatory and non-linear and multi-modal as the digital works themselves. Swarm Rhetoric emulates this experience through swarms of creatures that pull apart and then rethink and rebuild a short-short story about the creative writing classroom. Ants, when swarming, remove texts and carry them to the screen’s edges. Robots, when swarming, carry those texts back to the story, depositing them in new places, reforming the story into poetry.
Artist Statement: Teaching digital writing is often as re-combinatory and non-linear and multi-modal as the digital works themselves. Swarm Rhetoric emulates this experience through swarms of creatures that pull apart and then rethink and rebuild a short-short story about the creative writing classroom. Ants, when swarming, remove texts and carry them to the screen’s edges. Robots, when swarming, carry those texts back to the story, depositing them in new places, reforming the story into poetry.
The story from the work:
The classroom unlocked, a blue screen light, the low computer hum, and a row of empty chairs scattered. On desks thin black slabs, asleep, lids closed. When students arrive, they wake the screens, cursors wait. They write about their journey to class, document the path and its intersecting stories. All begin by outlining, breaking apart their experiences, listing landmarks in sequence. The students then deviate, roughly falling into three groups. Some paste their rough notes into a small window and press enter, waiting for a voice to respond. Others begin writing, building their story from memory, grammar and analysis. The last group appears to bounce between two windows, writing, asking, rewriting, responding. On sharing their writing, the differences are seasons, wide shifts between temperatures and atmosphere. But it’s the details of experience, cars awkwardly parked, trees eating into fences, crows on an abandoned couch, that make the writing alive.
Bio: Jason Nelson is a digital poet, professor at the university of bergen, PI in the Center for Digital Narrative. He's been building digital creatures for far too many years.
