Dirty
Milk is a recombinant poem sequence for the Internet, using your
computer's microphone as a catalyst for transformation. My goal was to
create a unique reading environment for the texts; it is my hope that
the hypermedia elements (events triggered by microphone levels and keyboard
presses) make Dirty Milk a literary experience unlike any other. There are nearly a hundred poems in this piece,
encompassing a variety of forms--prose poems, lineation, one-line meditations,
varying combinations of these methods--all closely bound together, and
all written specifically with this platform in mind. There's a significant
degree of stochastic transformation as well; simply blow into your microphone
as Dirty Milk is running, and watch the poems reasssemble themselves
across the screen. This ensures that your participation in the text will
yield unique readings. The "themes" in Dirty Milk are
the same ghosts that always haunt me: a rootlessness, a disembodiment
quite appropriate to the work's form, pervades the whole. The poems veer
between stark autobiography (quotidian jottings, dreamtime declarations,
the mythos of the personal past) and a concern with desire, embodied in
an alchemy of the sensual at many levels(perception is examined, the weather
is noted, the phenomenal play of language tweaked). These are words in
search of a character; characters in search of an author. Because you,
the reader/user, are also a participant in Dirty Milk's manifestation,
like all literature ultimately you provide the body for this experience;
you are Dirty Milk's memory; you are Dirty Milk's hands. Much of the technical inspiration for this work
came from the open source Flash archive levitated.net.Many
thanks as well to Christophe Bruno, who provided invaluable advice in
Dirty Milk's creation. To use Dirty Milk, simply open the piece
after ensuring that your system's microphone is enabled. In Windows, this
may require a trip to your Volume Control/audio properties dialogue. Find
your audio properties (this can usually be found by double clicking the
volume icon in your system tray), select OPTIONS, select PROPERTIES, then
check the RECORDING radio button. This should bring up a list of properties
you can enable. Check the box next to Microphone and click okay. You may also download Dirty Milk as an
e-book, either in Adobe .pdf format
or as a Palm DOC (for reading
on the Palm Pilot). |