Forgotten Nights is a really beautiful elit work which combing audio and visual perfectly.
I like the simplicity of the page design: black night sky background, the moon in the middle, so many stars around the moon spread out on the page. There are four buttons at the bottom of the page: Another Night, Reveal Stars, About, Stop. As a casual person, every time I read elit, I don’t read the About or Guidance first, but explore in my own way. Only after I’ve figured out the rules on my own will I check the About to make sure I’m on track.
“This is a breaking memory…, this is an aftermath memory…, this is a lamplight memory… ” Every time I click on a star it disappears, thus constituting another night, leading to another audio mini-poem. When I click on a blank space, a new star may or may not appear. Clicking on the ANOTHER NIGHT button changes the entire order of the stars. Overall, each time the night sky changes, the corresponding poem changes. I love the concept it reflects: each night’s starry sky is unique, and so are the memories.
The most surprising thing for me was the REVEAL STARS button. I didn’t notice any change in the starry sky when I clicked it at first. Later, when I long pressed it, countless darker stars (the stars that were previously erased) all appeared in the night sky, which is stunning. I tried to think about the meaning of the author’s design of this button, as it did not seem to have the function to connect with the poem. I think these stars are all memories. Whether they are memories that we want to erase or memories that we want to keep, their existance is beautiful. They make up the whole of us.
I always read the author’s statement before I make a choice on which ELit piece I want to read. And Forgotten Nights immediately stuck out to me. Spoken word poetry is one of my favorite forms of poetry. I also love anything to do with astronomy. I instantly knew this was the piece that I was going to dive into for this week.
At first, I was a bit confused as to how this piece worked. I figured out that the poem started with one star, and it allowed you to add stars as you read the poem. I played around with it by manipulate the night sky to control the poem. The author laid out the words and it was up to the reader to choose the words and how the poem flowed. I thought that this was a great concept.I thought this piece was a great example of creating a new piece of art from the materials provided. The concept is simple yet profound. I appreciated the minimalistic aspect of this piece compared to other pieces that we have reviewed
I thought the word choices and the message was very well written. I liked the tone of the speaker’s voice. It was almost monotone, but it still had feeling and depth. I think the speaker’s voice was a great choice for this piece, and it added another layer.
As a writer and artist, myself, I enjoy combining two different art forms to make a creative piece. I think the author did a great job of that with this piece. It offered the reader the experience to manipulate their own poem journey. I like how technology has changed the way we view art and poetry.
Letters to X was a fun and sentimental read. At first I was sort of expecting to read letters to an actual ex from one writer. But before reading I read the preview of what the Elit would actually be centered around and it grabbed my attention. Knowing that these were all collections of letters to someone, anyone was fun to read. Most of the time my mind wanted to think these letters were romantic. But the more that I read, the more I saw that wasn’t the case. Some of these letters didn’t all seem romantic even though they mentioned the word love. Some of them I assumed were letters to friends, mom or dad, siblings, and partners.
When I first started to read, I realized there was the handwritten version as well as the typed version. Which I am happy about. It’s not that I can’t read in cursive but the messy text almost made it kind of harder to read. Then I noticed there were blank lines through the text. At first I thought things were gone in order to maybe protect the privacy of the person writing the letter. It wasn’t towards half way reading the letters I got curious to see if the blank spaces did anything. I moved my mouse over the spaces and saw nothing, so I clicked the spaces to then find out I could type in the blanks. So I went back to reading the letters again. I read them slowly and carefully as I placed my own words in the blank to create the same or now a new version of the letter.
I enjoyed this piece because it was sentimental and cute in my opinion. And I liked how I was kind of able to also create my own letter to X. Here’s what I did.
I am really getting into this Electronic Literature! At first I was a little thrown off, as I am more traditional when it comes to my reading style. I enjoy being able to open a book ( especially a hard cover), get a great wif of the smell of a new book, and dive in. I enjoy placing a book mark, or anything I can find to stick their to hold my place, but this is honestly turning out to be quite exciting. I was nervous because I tend to distract myself on the computer and phone, so to use it to read felt a little like a set up for me. I must say those these last few weeks I have really dived in to the E-Lit readings and have found myself engaged and fascinated with them.
This week the first E-Lit piece was called Letter to X. By the name alone I knew this was going to be something in journal style, which I truly enjoy. It’s something about reading something personal to someone that makes you feel more connected to the author. As I read the authors statement I then leaned that he had friends of his produce the letters we would be reading which then made me more interested. The fact that he told them it would be anonymous also gave the hint that they would write whatever their heart desired and hold nothing back.
Once you open the piece you see the letters have blanks, again it’s the aspect that you are able to connect with the author by being able to manipulate something within the piece gives it this fun interact trait. It is a deep think piece though. As you go through them it makes you think about who you would be saying this too, and why have you not taken the opportunity to say this yet, or even if that person is gone why didn’t you say it sooner. Giving it this interactive method really helps the reader to be connected to to it and it something of their own. These are also inspirations for great journal writing ideas, creating letters and maybe even filling in some of the blanks later. Overall the them of this piece was concise, yet each page gave it’s own uniqueness with a different topic, or story to tell ( letter to write). I loved the idea that he also used the original handwriting of those who wrote it, making it more authentic with keeping in touch with those who helped to make this think piece come to life.
my Grandmother recently just passed away and the funeral was on Tuesday of this week. I’m numb when it comes to topic like this because I try to keep myself in a happy mood because that’s what others like out of me. This actually helped me to think about the feelings and place them somewhere, instead of just keeping them inside and saying the words “I’m fine”
Never !
The next work was called Forgotten Nights and this one was another think piece. I don’t think the people who chose these for their presentations even knew they would be doing almost two similar pieces, when it comes to the attitude and feelings it gets out of the reader, for this week on purpose. it worked out beautifully.
The idea of the sky at night, with the simplicity and beauty of the stars accompanied by the moon, is something a lot of us have taken for granted. Stars have always stuck with me since I was little girl. My dad use to tell me all the time he named a star after me and every night on our way home we would play a game of following it and it always led us home. I never knew if it was the same star, and I knew it really wasn’t my star, but it was such a special gift for me.
This author made different stars tell a different tale which is so becoming. Looking at the night sky for some is relaxing, because they tend to make up what they see the stars forming, similar to cloud gazing as well. This was a unique twist on something that everyone can possibly relate too. Even the fact that some of the stars didn’t tell a story was a great idea, because as you look in the night sky not all stars shine as bright as the other, but still helps to show the bigger picture being presented.
I felt connected to this piece as it brought me back to my childhood which I liked. I could see how some may find this a bit distracted or could click on the stars and could possibly become disinterested when they don’t find the stars with the stories, so him having the button revealing the stars that tell stories was a great idea to some of us who may be in a bit of a hurry to get to the content. I would have liked to hear some type of melody or white sound in the back as well to accompany the great pieces. Again, I thoroughly enjoyed both of these pictures this week.
Starting with Letters to X, I really enjoyed it. After reading the work summary, I thought it was interesting and looked forward to diving into it. When I started clicking around, I immediately thought of Mad Libs. I loved how it gave that nostalgic feeling and allowed us to make the letter our own. My favorite letter was the love one, but I’m a sucker for love. I also love letters, which is why I enjoyed this work so much.
Now here are my questions about this piece. What was the significance of allowing the letters to be layered? Why could we only fill in the blanks for the letters in the second column? The summary discusses how this catalyzes a “new” social media for people to speak about topics they wouldn’t usually email, text, or post. However, I didn’t get that from this piece. Though the topics were more unconventional than typical social media topics, saying it’s a catalyst for a “new” social media seems like a stretch to me. Lastly, what did the new project feature do? Not sure if it was just me and my computer, but the new project feature brought me to a blank page, and there was nothing to type or click on. I was so confused since I was looking forward to seeing what it did. All in all, this was a delightful piece to explore.
The official class site for Dr. Mia Zamora’s Fall 2022 Electronic Literature course.
