By : Daniel Hershel Silber-Baker

LANGUAGE AS AN INTERVENTION IN REALITY

PRISON ABOLITION

because someone I love is being held in a cage

When I was most helpless, caught within the violence in our community and the violence done to our community by the criminal justice system When all I wanted most desperately was for people to know and understand how this was happening to real people For me Came poetry | wanted to be able to use language to explain the impossible story of how we got here, and to try and make clear, what I know to be true, which is that humans, no matter what they have done, do not belong in cages. I communicate in a very specific and intentional way, because I believe language has the power to shape the world, and for me this in particular means using my words to fight the dehumanization of people. And to make everyone feel known and seen. what I require of langauge is difficult. I need my words to do some heavy lifting and the options I had for writing poetry, or for giving presentations, or even just writing messages to friends were far too limited compared to the possibilities I saw for how we could communicate with difital text

THE ISSUE

Process

1. RESEARCH

2. IDEATION

3. DEVELOPMENT

4. PROTOTYPE

5. USER TESTING

6. ITERATION

Typography

Animation

Behavior

WORDS BIRTH WORLDS DIGITAL TEXT TOOLKIT

What you are seeing here is a brief demonstration of a web environment I built and would like to continue to develop, where users can explore different ways of coreographing and amplifying their own digital text. By using only the basic programming languages, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, my solution to working with digital text is an active and generative engagement with langauge. The animations you see here in the demo are examples taken from other work I have done as part of my thesis, including the poems I programmed, and this presentation, and these animations are then being programattically applied to the text I typed into the input box on the page. All of the animations and interactions that I have developed as part of Words Birth Worlds are discrete, adjustable, reusable pieces of code that can be used on any other set of words-or any type of digital element, resulting in the same movements and timing. Because it is non-propriatary, open, and written in a langauge that can be shared and built upon, other programmers could easily use the method I have developed programmatically in any of their javascript development projects.

So over the course of the past 3 months and my entire life, I have developed this programmtic toolkit for working with digital text. And I am genuinely exhillarated by the possibilities I see for human expressing with digital text. And I have a very particular need to program digital text, because I have been struggling, obssively working to answer this question 'how does a poem get someone out of prison'... And so I wrote a poem and programmed a poem, which delves further into my story of language and prison Abolition. And continues my work around the question of how does a poem get someone out of prison. The poem is clocking in at a smooth 9 minutes, so I can only show a short clip of it, but it is an incredibly important part of my thesis project and my life project and so I hope you will watch it on the web at www.danielsilber-baker.com/wordsbirthWorlds. Full website coming soon.

For me, the opportunity to do this thesis process has been a gift. In many ways, but none more important then the way it gave me and a Hollis a project to work on together. It gave us a chance to talk and give voice, to enact some agency amidst the hopelessness and helplessness of the prison industrial and criminal Justice complex. We were exchanging letters about the project, both excited to be working on something together. And then I did it hear back from him for a couple weeks. And then I found out that he had been stabbed, in prison, and then hospitalized, and then put in solitary confinement. Not being able to protect someone you love, and not being able to be by their side when they are hurt, these are human things I hope. And in trying to bring forth the human even more, and in following Chris's instructions I have applied some of my digital text methods to each of Chris and I's most recent letters to each other. I designed and programmed each animation to be reflectice and representative of the way that each of us write and receive each other's letters.

Me writing to Hollis

Hollis writing to Me

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE HERE AND ANYONE WATCHING

Particularly loud and or loving shout out to:

Thesis Advisor: Benedetta the Goddess

Dan Shiffman: For unlocking the empowering magic of javacript with me

Peer Thesis Advisor: Francesca Rodriguez Sawaya

First Year Thesis Advisor: Sejo Vega-Cebrián

Ace/Roll Dogg: Annie the Goodfriend

And artistIntellectually all of this work has been shaped and co created in particular with

Edward McWilliams

Noelle De La Paz

Lauren Whitehead

Ruby-Beth Buitekant