My thesis, Words Birth Worlds, is about trying to program a language that allows me to amplify the meaning and effectiveness of my words, by creating more expressive ways of working with digital text.
My interest in digital text expression is an extension of the work I have been doing with language for over a decade, including as a poet and most recently artist in residence at UC Santa Barbara where I taught a class called “The Poetics of Struggle.”
The issue my project is addressing is that our ability to use language to make ourselves known and make other people feel seen, and our ability to use language to reveal the truth, are neutralized by the great majority of the digital writing tools and apps with digital text. By creating proprietary environments and file formats that are a carbon copy of its analog text predecessor, the majority of existing solutions for working with digital text mute our imagination, and are designed only to reproduce the society that I am interested in transforming.
The current moment we are in demands an urgency to our work and our words. We need to be able to imagine new possibilities and new realities which is difficult because as humans our perception of what is possible is mostly limited by what we have experienced or believe to be possible. Poetry and programming are well equipped to provide us with the tools needed to imagine new words and worlds.
The tool most used currently for any kind of kinetic (moving) text, Adobe AfterEffects, produces in the end what is equivalent to a video file. It is a finished product that can only be viewed. By using only the basic programming languages, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, my solution to animating and choreographing text becomes generative in that all the methods enlisted in its execution can be used individually and outside the scope of my output, which is a poem. All of the animations that occur in the poem are discrete, adjustable, reusable pieces of code that could for example, be used on any other set of words-or any type of digital element, resulting in the same movements and timing as the words in my poem.
And I think, even more excitingly, what I have developed is a system that can be taught and used by anyone at varying degrees of abstraction. For example, other programmers could easily use the method I have developed programmatically in any of their javascript development projects. I would like to continue developing this project by creating a forward facing web-app that allowed users to choreograph and amplify the meaning of their own words using an interactive user interface.
As humans we want to be understood, to be known. We use language to construct shared meaning about the world and to define ourselves as unique individuals within the world we all share. We use our different voices, along with tone, gestures, and eye contact to make the same words that we all share, mean what we want them to mean to express our unique identity and experience. I communicate in a very specific and intentional way, because I believe language has the power to fight the dehumanization of people. The dehumanization of people that allows for them to be kept in cages for example. I want to use language to remind people of their own humanity, and connect them to the humanity of everyone else, including people who are in prison. I need to use language to construct a world without prisons. But currently digital text doesn’t allow for me to imbue my specific meaning, my voice, into the words I use on the computer or phone.
I am trying to express myself in the most courageously vulnerable way I can. To tell as deeply and fully how and who I love. I have tried to craft a poem that is unique-in the way I have learned to use my voice, to tell my story of being a person to other people. In a way you can feel. I am into feelings.
My thesis seeks to imagine how programming languages and digital environments can be used to mediate human liberation. The movement for prison abolition requires us to imagine a world free from prisons. This is part of an overall strategy to imagine into being the end of all oppression. To enact a world free of racism and homophobia, free of patriarchy and violence. Prison abolition centers the most unfree of us. Because imagining a world of freedom for the most unfree is the only way to ensure the creation of a world in which everyone is free. I propose that our technological development should follow this same logic, aiming to give the most people the most access to as many tools of transformation and liberation as possible, including language.