Artist's Statement
My twine poem combines two important elements to form a style of media driven by the remixing of existing elements.
1) The Poem
I chose "To Marguerite: Continued" by Matthew Arnold as my source material. Initially it was the poem I immediately jumped to because it just so happens to be my favorite poem. Then as I recited the poem in my head, I realized that there were places in the poems I naturally separated that could lend itself well to the twine format of text existing on different pages. These separations were sometimes words, lines, or stanzas, or several stanzas. It was just how I read the poem personally, with a certain pacing that I wanted to reflect in how I chose to divide the poem.
When I formatted it for Twine, I was more interested in using the clicking function to control the pace of the poem rather than to offer the audience choices like a traditional Twine game. By choosing how to divide the poem, whether or not to include additional elements like images or sound, I could further enhance the mood and tone of the poem. This is essential to remixing. Artists remix to provide new information or interpretation of an existing text. Often this includes both adding to the text and deconstructing it. For this assignment, I had to really deconstruct the source material before I could create something out of it. As I figured out how to break up the text, I realized a component of the poem that I love so much is the sensory descriptions. I knew I needed to pair a visual element to the poem to take it further. So we now have an element of changing the pace and breaks in the poem, making it digital and more cross-temporal, and now it was time to bring in added material.
2) The Images
I initially tried including stock images with the text but found that it didn't work. It made the text flat instead of dynamic. As I was searching for an image that would visualize loneliness, I suddenly remembered a painting by my favorite artist, Rene Magritte. Magritte's paintings often feature self-portraits that obscure his face in some way, distancing himself from the viewer. I thought of a particular painting where he faces away from the viewer underneath a crescent moon. Loneliness. As I continued to read and re-read the poem, I recalled several Magritte paintings that nicely complemented Arnold's work. Arnold's poem is about people as islands, desiring connection but separated by the sea, and an anger at the God that designed this. There are similar themes in Magritte's work, I think particularly of his work "The Lovers" which feature a couple kissing, but they have cloth over their faces and are unable to really touch. Arnold's poem predates Magritte's work by a hundred years, which further adds a cross-temporal element to my remix. This cross-temporal quality extends from Arnold, to Magritte, to myself, to the reader. While Arnold wrote the text, Magritte did the paintings, and I arranged and ordered them, the user/reader plays a part in taking in the text and images, deciding when to click, and ultimately deciding duration of experience and the meaning of the work. The time that separates all these contributing individuals, is in some ways like the sea that separates islands in Arnold's poem. We are connected through this art, through the universality of its theme, but can only really experience a trace of each other. There is no real inter-personal interactions, just traces of ourselves left in our work that call out like the bird's song.
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