Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers

The poem is an abstract rendition of the rotten silk that fetters us people to these our awful screens. The graphics were generated in the CAVE writing text editor, by taking an ill-performing video screen capture of a spectral tube of "O"s in the editor's desktop preview mode. The audio was separately generated by improvisations into a Max/MSP patch. The title is after the late 60s anarchist affinity group, Up Against the Wall Mother Fuckers. I was inspired by their dramatic final exploit: cutting open the fences at Woodstock. The phrase Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers started as the title for a CAVE piece, in which one thousand units of the people would enter the CAVE and break through its 4 screens to the vestibule holding the mirrors behind it.

The poem was composed between Paris and Cork, 1-5 July 2007. The media was generated at Brown University, October 2007 to June 2008. First screened in Providence at Couscous, organized by Mairéad Byrne

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)