I like to look at other people's snapshots, don't you? The voyeur in me is titilated by imagining the skeins of love and betrayal between distant people in indifferent photographs. Why are those two, husband and wife according to the caption, sitting so far apart? Why is he looking away? What does that haunted look on the face of the son mean?
I feel the same way walking late at night, watching the dark houses scroll by. Though at the three o' clock in the morning most of them appear darkened, recessive, tucked somewhere into the dimness of nothing, I know there are lives inside, and those lives collide and mesh. There's an anonymity in those black facades I always want to plumb; every house--and every photograph--is an address of sorts, what we would call in netspace a URI, a Universal Resource Locator: they point to pockets yet unexplored.
I mention this in the context of this particular work because one of the most striking things a first-time visitor to Black Holes is likely to noitice is its use of just these sorts of anonymous snapshots. Black Holes makes use of somewhere near two hundred images hosted on the web--images hosted on other servers, referenced within the piece by URL. It gives the falling nodes of meaning a strange, anonymous slant. While Black Holes as a poem is far from any formalism or objectivism that would suppress the flowering of subjectivity--the author's? the poem's?--and does indeed, in literary terms, situate itself wholly in the realm of the Romantic, these faces and places I don't know well up in the cracks between poem-"speaker" and poem-"listener," loosening the cosy notions of identification all-too-often overlooked in Romantic poetry.
The images ARE human-chosen. They come from Google searches on the various Big Themes: love, death, initimacy, father, mother, decay, birth. My choices were at various moments determined by quixotic circumstances: I needed small filesizes (since they were being dynamically loaded into the Flash Player); I needed Jpegs as opposed to GIFs(I'm using an image pane component to hold the images, the skin of which I customized: one can only load jpegs into the component); I took what appealed to me. There are also more personal references in the image selections(searches on the names of people I know, for example). This is what I believe gives the piece it's anonymous cast. The images are holes drilled through us to other lives.
The text consists of over 600 homegrown lines, much of which I wrote at one remove from my own machine. Before my girlfriend Mary and I moved in together, I would often spend mornings at her house connecting through her computer to my own via an application called TightVNC. This is something like an Open Source PCAnywhere, and it allowed me to write and work from Mary's house in the morning after she left for work. I was writing through the network itself in those moments--connected, yes, to something I was already familiar with, the source files for this piece, but, as evidenced by the lag that would sometimes crawl across the screen, also locked out of it, distanced from it. It was a strange experience to have at my fingers on a foreign machine an environment I was so intimate with.
I don't have much of a comment on the style of the texts. It's poetry as I've always written it--except, of course, the piece itself assembles the lines. Therefore, some lines had to be written to run into others, and conceptually it had to be borne in mind that, because of the random nature of the composition, meaning would for a large part be beyond my control (one can argue that this is the case with all language use, really; convention is always beyond our control, and language is such a strange chimerical beast, the skeleton of which is convention but the flesh of which is individual expression). The text is about what all text is really about.
There are bits of text mixed into the main text that is fetched from a list of other sites. These are sites where content updates periodically--blogs and newsites, for the most part. Another foreign body, another unknowing.
Sound is composed by the piece itself too. Sure, there are motives used throughout, themes(the keyboard, by the way, is an onscreen desktop keyboard, an Open Source project called ZynAddSubFX ( ...and no, I'm not completely sure if the work here in question is 'against Jesus Christ')), but the work also uses some field recordings. Mary's sons, Caleb Kay and Jeran Scheuvront, are actually responsible for these. The field recordings are accessed using random offsets--they start at changing intervals throughout the recoding.
But what is a 'networked generative literary object?' Thought you'd never ask! Black Holes is an extremely unstable work, not simply in terms of content, but also in terms of behavior. All onscreen movement, including sound, is determined by intervals of random lengths. Add to this that which is determined by the network itself--loading external content into a work is dependent on one's connection to the network itself, and what you see when you open Black Holes is to a large extent contingent upon factors intrinsic to the network. One cannot display Black Holes properly without an internet connection--it depends on the web for much of its content.
Of course, this piece wouldn't have been possible without Mary, Caleb and Jeran--they fed me in many ways as this was growing. Nor would it be possible without the generous assistence of Joseph and Donna McElroy of Corporate Performance Artists, who are hosting the site on their servers, and for whom I do a lot of web programming. My mother and father are in there somewhere, and the rest of my family. And it also wouldn't exist if you didn't look at it
Lewis LaCook
June 16, 2005