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- Title
TUNNEL VISION: A CYBERTEXTUAL INTERPRETATION OF MARK STRAND'S THE TUNNEL.
- Authors
Gruber, David; Rieder, David M.
- Abstract
Fear of the digital is a persistent theme in scholarship, fiction, art, and popular culture. We fear the ways in which technoculture blurs cultural boundaries, skews perception, augments (read: exagerates) our capabilities, and insinuates us into psycho-social relations with a technologized Other whom we don't recognize. With this fear in mind, Mark Strand's poem, The Tunnel, which depicts a protagonists' failed attempts to escape his psychological other, was our opportunity to dramatize the cultural fear of our techno-Others. As users shift from side to side and gesture in front of the piece in order to read Strand's poem, they perform some of the same gestures of fear depicted in the poem. Based technically on a webcam and Flash AS3 programming, which included a creative application of Justin Windle's "AS3 Webcam Motion Tracking" library, a user's image and movements are augmented, skewed, and insinuated into the presentation on the screen in such a way as to capture an implicit performance of techno-fear in which many of us engage at various points along the digital journey of our lives. From a distance, watching partcipants move around in front of the piece in order to read the poem--their heads bobbing and weaving, their hands up and waving--is our chance to experience the protagonists' fear in the poem extended into both the museum space and the digital space in which the participants are insinuated. That double extension of selves is an example of the paradoxical play that contributes to our fears of our technologized Other.
- Subjects
DIGITAL video; DIGITAL technology; POPULAR culture; TUNNEL, The (Poem); STRAND, Mark, 1934-2014; DIGITAL image processing; WEBCAMS; TECHNO culture
- Publication
Hyperrhiz, 2012, Issue 9, p5
- ISSN
1555-9351
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.20415/hyp/009.e03