My Paris Year: The Second Life & Machinima Manifestations: Karen Head
Title: Only at Home as a Stranger: Creating Digital Poetry as
Expatriate
My Paris Year: The Second Life & Machinima Manifestations
As a poet and scholar of contemporary American poetry, I explore the connections between traditional text-based poetry and digitally-enhanced poetry. Currently, my project group is designing a Machinima representation of my third book for a Second Life Platform. In Second Life, I will be able to build a “virtual Paris” that allows anyone with web access to “visit” and experience my poems in ways that will expand their understanding of my traditional “page poetry.” The project extends current research in location-based poetry by replacing physical location with the virtual and posing the following questions:
- How does a 3D virtual environment in location-based poetry affect audience experience?
- What effect does a 3D virtual environment have on audience identification with digital poetry?
- Is there a significant relationship between virtual location experiences in poetry and in MMORPGs?
This project is well underway and will debut in August 2008. The created experiences, what I call “readings,” will allow my words to “come to life.” Readers will be able to navigate through my poems in a way similar to how tourists navigate an unfamiliar city. However, instead of merely visiting sites, the locations will be imbued with poetic significance. Doing this expands the capability of metaphor to create meaning. This digital experience is also different because it allows readers to experience a “text” in a non-linear fashion, giving them a great deal of power regarding how they “read” the poems. Machinima also allows the mixing of both live action and virtual reality; in other words, the “films” will have live people and avatars interacting. The most original aspect of this project is the ability to connect a number of usually disconnected constituencies. Rarely can writer and reader be joined so directly. In augmented reality, artists can create a poetic experience that includes concrete visual representations, human interaction, virtual character/avatar interaction, and location-based experiences that are impossible in a traditional “reading” experience.
In my research, I have discovered that poets tend to be either traditional or digital in their approaches; rarely do poets attempt to bridge these sub-genres, especially in the U.S., which is one reason I spend as much time as possible engaging with European scholars and artists. The benefit to my integrated approach is that it encourages scholars, artists, and readers from the otherwise isolated sub-genres to make transitions and explore other formats. Ultimately, I want to encourage an aesthetic dialogue about what poetry in the 21st century can be, and use technology to transcend all imaginable boundaries.
More generally I will be happy to discuss how my association with the Digital Poetry Initiative in the Wesley Center for New Media at Georgia Tech explores a broad range of practices in the mediation of the poetic experience. These practices include: poetic readings enhanced with digital video or digitally produced music, poetic performances in virtual or augmented environments, real-time interactive poems, and location-based poetry that is delivered through phones or other mobile devices.
Presentation needs:
A projector that is Macintosh compatible.
Wireless or Ethernet Internet connection.