Training Missions

"Training missions" employs a tabular-format, three-part poem as a gateway to discussion-demonstration of three online activities, so defined: imagining, imaging, and logging. Through the use of relatively simple graphics and a few carefully chosen links, the piece lampoons the functional overkill that often under- (and over-!) writes the wholesale use of imagining and imaging technologies. The final section, "logging," begins by foregrounding many of the semantic and syntactic disparities latent in our word processing age---an age in which grammatical niceties are often taken for granted---and concludes by exploring the more seductive implications of media (televisual and Hollywood) culture via a Flash sequence of loglines (with voiceover).

One aim of the work is to draw reader attention back to the title poem, with the hope that readers might spend more time with initial conditions (i.e., the tabular poem that serves as gateway to the piece) in order to think through the conceptual and often conflicting aspects of media work.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)