Exhale

To read this poem - which begins with a description of a corpse - in its entirety, the reader must “breathe life into it". As the reader blows gently into the microphone, the words float around and assemble with the flow of the reader's breath.

FROM DESCRIPTION IN "START HERE": Kruglanski writes interactive poems using Shockwave and also works that are developed specifically as applications for the Palm Pilot. The project was created based on Kruglanski’s past work in interactive poetry and on Paricio’s interest in the relation between perception and interaction. Exhale was designed specifically for the Macintosh and makes use of a noise-canceling microphone. To read the poem in its entirety, the reader must “Breathe life into it”; as the reader blows gently into the microphone, the words float around and assemble with the flow of the reader’s breath. It’s an ingenious idea for an interface, and the content of the poem relates thematically to the process of interacting with the poem. I think that Kruglanski above nails down something that should be at the forefront of any author’s thinking in creating electronic literature: that the interface can and should be understood as a poetic device. I regularly encounter works that suffer either from a) a focus almost exclusively on interface, to the exclusion of the work as a whole (like a car with great bodywork but no engine) or b) a focus exclusively on the text, with the interface treated as a strapped-on afterthought. In the most successful works of e-lit, you might not even notice the interface, because the interface is so tightly interwoven into the work that it is an aspect of the poem, rather than something you need to negotiate in order to access the poem.

NOTE 2013: This was written in Director and only worked on a Mac. The URL was http://www.soymenos.com/respira/exhale/ but as of 2013 it is no longer active.