Woah. Electronic Lit keeps getting more mysterious; every time I begin a new piece, it’s like I’m uncovering a realm I never knew existed.
I was surprised by the piece. As I entered the room, I noticed the pitch-black background; it made me think of Shariff Ezzat’s Electronic Lit piece, “Like Stars in the Clear Night Sky,” however that piece was more magical with stars hovering over the black screen. Toupe; was different; I almost got an eerie feeling, like whatever the author was going to reveal next was going to be dark and severe. There, dead center, I saw an audio piece; it was eight minutes and forty-eight seconds. So rationally, I skimmed it, just to see what was next. And nothing…
Nothing was next. That was it, and I was worried I was doing something wrong. So I went back to the homepage and tried it again and once again, to my surprise, nothing! So this time, I stayed and listened to the audio. I begin to enjoy the experience of just listening. I started counting the poems to keep track; I heard two poems and then just a one-liner, “I’m not going to the dentist until the apocalypse comes.” What in the world did that mean? And then I heard, “When my gums began to bleed, and my teeth fall out,” not once, but twice. Once with a clear voice and the second time, it was muffled and whispered. At this point, I started to feel anticipation; I was awaiting an apocalypse. Then I finally heard what it would probably sound like if the world were ending, it felt like a movie scene when a character is dying, and then the director cues the sad, almost cryptic music to make the viewer feel some type of way. That’s precisely the sense I got; I could be wrong. And then, in the end, I got a hint that maybe someone survived? So freaking dystopian, I freaking enjoyed it, is that bad, even though it was a bit creepy.
Now on to BOTS! This was a cool concept, bots autogeneration content on to twitter on a set schedule. How futuristic! Both pieces seem very futuristic. I begin with “Tiny Star Feilds” because it resembled the black background in “Like Stars in the Clear Night Sky,” once again. It took me straight to the twitter feed, which consisted of clusters of stars. I was fascinated to see how many followers the page had, 125.1k, holy crap! Looking at the tweets was like looking at a smaller picture of what I would see out in the night-sky down by the mountains.
The second piece I stumbled upon was tiny crosswords; I found this was exciting. A bot generates a tiny three world puzzle every day around noon. This twitter account only had 165 followers, like what? I might just tweet them and promote them because this is a unique, intriguing concept and saves me money on sudoku books. But I am not even going to put up a front; the puzzels were super hard!
To come back to the concept of bots, I am, to say the least, fascinated. I follow Rupi Kaur and Rumi on Twitter, and now I am sure they also use bots to post autogenerated pieces, only 140 characters of their poems. How cool is that? I thought the authors were on the writing pieces of their poems every day, how silly was I!
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