New Work: Dirty Milk: ...a rootlessness, a disembodiment...

http://www.lewislacook.com/DirtyMilk/
Dirty Milkfor Renee
Dirty Milk is a recombinant poem sequence for the Internet, using your computer's microphone as a catalyst for transformation. My goal was to create a unique reading environment for the texts; it is my hope that the hypermedia elements (events triggered by microphone levels and keyboard presses) make Dirty Milk a literary experience unlike any other.


There are nearly a hundred poems in this piece, encompassing a variety of forms–prose poems, lineation, one-line meditations, varying combinations of these methods–all closely bound together, and all written specifically with this platform in mind. There's a significant degree of stochastic transformation as well; simply blow into your microphone as Dirty Milk is running, and watch the poems reasssemble themselves across the screen. This ensures that your participation in the text will yield unique readings.


The "themes" in Dirty Milk are the same ghosts that always haunt me: a rootlessness, a disembodiment quite appropriate to the work's form, pervades the whole. The poems veer between stark autobiography (quotidian jottings, dreamtime declarations, the mythos of the personal past) and a concern with desire, embodied in an alchemy of the sensual at many levels(perception is examined, the weather is noted, the phenomenal play of language tweaked). These are words in search of a character; characters in search of an author. Because you, the reader/user, are also a participant in Dirty Milk's manifestation, like all literature ultimately you provide the body for this experience; you are Dirty Milk's memory; you are Dirty Milk's hands.


Much of the technical inspiration for this work came from the open source Flash archive levitated.net.Many thanks as well to Christophe Bruno, who provided invaluable advice in Dirty Milk's creation.


To use Dirty Milk, simply open the piece after ensuring that your system's microphone is enabled. In Windows, this may require a trip to your Volume Control/audio properties dialogue. Find your audio properties (this can usually be found by double clicking the volume icon in your system tray), select OPTIONS, select PROPERTIES, then check the RECORDING radio button. This should bring up a list of properties you can enable. Check the box next to Microphone and click okay.


You may also download Dirty Milk as an e-book, either in Adobe .pdf format or as a Palm DOC (for reading on the Palm Pilot).

bliss
l






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