M.D. Coverley and Stephanie Strickland

Errand Upon Which We Came

This poem is about our changed reading experiences. It reflects them and reflects on them, both in its text and in its making. It is a hypertext, with two types of access by links, for instance; but it is also a Flash movie, a movie that can be stopped: we use a Nabokov butterfly from the Zembla website to allow the reader to stop motion by pinning it to the screen. Errand's backgrounds are based in Barry Smylie's digitized slides of his acrylic garden paintings, made into still frames of video posted to the Web, then manipulated by Coverley to echo the "error" effects of incompatible browser technologies. The poem text quotes Simone Weil, an activist philosopher who died in WWII, most of whose work did not appear in print in her lifetime. Here again, it is not in print, recalling rather a long history of listening and folktales. The soundtrack evokes an even older world, where what we read were the sights and sounds of animals—yet these particular sounds in Errand come from no one location, but rather a global soundspace, perhaps the only space left to them on this unbalancing planet.

http://califia.hispeed.com/Errand
(requires Flash plug-in.)