LL:One thing I've noticed, in going from poetry to "new media" is this time thing you mention. With a poem, I can have something pretty decent in half an hour or so; with hypermedia, with net art, it can take months.
ES:Well I used to write poetry, I have a second book coming out soon actually. So I can relate to the poetry question pretty well, because I've always found that the less time you spend with poetry the better it comes out. I kind of realized that if I just sat on a street corner and wrote one sentence about everyone passing by, and what actions they were doing, I'd end up with a really nice poem. Just bare observation, like miniature documentaries. I really consider all of my work as documentaries. But the difference really is the time it takes for us to come up with words- which is really an instant process; for me anyway. I mean it's one way to make everything very beautiful, is to look at it and state what it is, without any sort of baggage associated. "There is a tree, and a breeze is rustling its leaves to the ground." I mean that, to me, is an entire poem. Or, like, "A small girl carries a giant violin case." Which is probably why I've seen my visual work compared to Haiku on a couple of occasions.
With net.art though, the language you are using is visual. Which is why, at first, I favored a lot of photographs- The Salvaggio Museum of Modern Living is all about the photographs, there's nothing else allowed, really. I used to kind of think of art in terms how little you could mess around with something, how the object itself was art and the representation was a bastardization of it. But there's a whole language to visuals that I am learning, and the switch came when I was
