distance makes the heart grow fonder

Distance, created by Tina La Porta in 1999, is an experiment in digital writing that collages web cam photographs with fragments of faux or cliché poetic language such as “interaction is immediate/leaving traces on her screen.” (I feel like I have to make a disclaimer here and say the language leaves a lot to be desired—personally I feel Distance would be a much more interesting image-only work). The images play with shades of light and dark and their power to simultaneously conceal and reveal. In this case though, light and dark are primarily used by La Porta as a means of concealment; the photos contain pieces of bodies, faces that are partially obscured whether that be by shadow, washout, or the physical rupture/fracture of the web cam frame. Also, when whole faces are presented (and often close up to the camera), their expression, accessories (like sun glasses), or posture prevents the viewer from interpreting them. The idea of face as mask in this context of connection and distance is quite interesting actually, and for me, raises two particular questions: “how can one ‘trust’ the body or interpret it correctly?” and “assuming translation errors constantly happen in personal interaction, what’s going to happen with you have this obscuring technological filter (or several filters) situated between you?” Immediately the first frame of the work draws attention to the artificiality of the medium and the difficulty of “connection” where we get the obscured profile of a woman (possibly named Susan) entering a chat room and the words “Ready to make a connection, she logs on” underneath it. At first, the image looks indiscernible, then through whitewash the nude back of a woman, then finally my eye found her hands on a keyboard and the profile suddenly came into view. (Some of these are almost like a magic eye poster where the larger image only comes into view after a certain amount of familiarization). Throughout the piece there’s nothing fast, immediate, or easy about connecting—and even when you think you’ve discovered what the collage hides you’ve got to deal with fragments, both linguistic and imagistic. Plus there’s another layer of complexity: the people in the photos are trying to connect and you’re trying to connect through them, viewing their attempt at connection. There’s something very voyeuristic and inherently intimate about the work especially these more vulnerable moments of nudity—chests, breasts, stomachs, legs etc, where I felt like I was a trespasser. That I think is an interesting dynamic that could have been explored a bit more—what makes someone uncomfortable and why. It’s strange because you can have some kind of real time physical intimacy—chat, reveal yourself on camera etc, but there’s never a consummated touch. Here even when a connection is made so to speak, they’re ultimately left to ask “when will you be on again?” They’re both tied to the technology and isolated by it; they’re only able to wonder what their voices sound like, what their rooms look like.

Eisen's Six Sex Scenes

Adrienne Eisen’s Six Sex Scenes is a hypertext of short anecdotal narratives invested in physicality, rationality, violence, language, and order. I found the first, “The Rap y” to be immediately playful with linguistic manipulation and slippages of meaning. Here therapy becomes “the rap, the rapy, the rape” and “the rapist” simultaneously. I love the self-awareness, the humor at play in these narratives: “He says we're the only couple he sees who hold hands throughout the whole session.” There’s a tension between physicality “the taste” (being irrational and feminine) and reason (the masculine). In this situation, the speaker really has no voice—she’s being dominated (and sociologically raped) from the beginning by this system of therapy created by men, run by men for men to justify their behavior.

The piece “You Suck” also presents the reader with multiple meanings in language. The phrase “you suck” is both commanding oral sex and insulting the “you” by threatening his masculinity. The humor comes from a combination of the campy rhyme scheme aabbcd, the explicit material, and the ambiguous phrase.

I thought that “Sunday Afternoon” was helpful to look at next to “The Rap y.” Again, we have this strange intimate encounter with men that’s both physical and dominating. While the speaker is being spanked by her father she says, “I can tell there's no blood because Dad's hand runs so smoothly up and down my butt, in between my thighs.” This is so disturbing in its sensuality, sexuality; the speaker complains that she’s too old to be spanked—she’s fourteen and pubescent which makes the act all the more perverted and overtly sexual. The speaker describes the climax and ending of the spanking session as “Every time the belt hits, my arms wrap tightly around his thighs and he groans” and “faster and faster and then, he stops.” Here and in other moments throughout the narrative, the speaker uses the language of sex (possibly rape) to describe the encounter in order to complicate and confuse the dynamic between the two and our own perceptions of what is physically happening. Like Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Walz,” we’re left questioning the health of a particular paternal relationship and the reality of that relationship. The piece makes me ask: how do you code this experience properly with language? It’s so bizarre, physical, unique.

One thing that’s really bugging me is that Six Sex Scenes would never be published in print for several reasons. I think that why “Sunday Afternoon” fails as literature is that its ambiguous “sex/punishment/incest” tension is ultimately too overt, in your face so to speak. It’s hard for me not to simply read the piece as a metaphor for incest which is both uninteresting and expected in its simplicity. Mary Capanegro’s “The Daughter’s Lamentation” is a good example of how to write an incest story (if that even happens in the story)—by its conclusion, through ambiguities and multiplicities of meaning, the reader can’t be certain of anything. Similarly, I think why “My Papa’s Waltz” works has to do with both the overt and subtle violence of the language that creates multiple readings/meanings. I’m suspecting that the quality of writing when it comes to digital writing/art suffers in general, although Shelley Jackson breaks this mold, I think.