David Knoebel's Click Poetry
Let me say firstly that I know very little about VRML, the language that David Knoebel constructed these word machines in. I know VRML is an acronym for "Virtual Reality Modelling Language"; Knoebel's notes tell me as much. I know of the inimitable Lev Manovich's discussion of Virtual Reality itself in his book The Language of New Media; I know Manovich finds VR mythic at best, at worst a misnomer (in reality, Lev's argument goes, one is not such a prisoner of the screen or viewfinder as one is in these new technological landscapes; many philosophers would argue about this and indeed have been, since long before the screen was the illuminated electric face almost ubiquitous now). I know that there is perhaps a GREAT distinction between VRML and VR in its ideal form. And I know-experentially-that these Click Poems here could just as easily been done in Flash.
Indeed, as Flash is the only tool I use currently that could produce these 3-D interactive poems, I wonder while clicking through Knoebel's haiku-like compositions if these works were produced from scratch, coded from beginning to end, or whether Knoebel uses an IDE (Integrated Desktop Environment--in this case, like Flash, an authoring tool, wherein the computer doesn't need to be told explicity by the user EVERYTHING the user wants it to do; a drag 'n' drop interface). The works on his site are divided into three sections: Words In Space, Words, and Click Poetry. The Words in Space section is divided into two subsections: 3D (the VRML poems, wherein words seem to occupy space fully, swinging behemoth machines of words sliding across the pane of the screen...and yes, it feels at times as if you could crawl into them). One of my favorites is A Fine View, in which a beautifully short poem about workers taking a break on a beam discuss a coworker who lost his footing and fell from the scaffolding. Cheesy midi music aside, the piece is fine in terms of its interactivity (it's the user who opens the poem by clicking on the pane; and the user's further clicks open the poem further, drawing the lines closer and closer to the eyes) and Indoor/Outdoor, a series of installations
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