Stefan+CAP


 * William Poundstone, "3 Proposals for Bottle Imps"**
 * Overview:**

In his essay, “3 Proposals for Bottle Imps,” William Poundstone discusses the origin of, purpose for, and concerns with creating the digital piece which shares the essay’s title. Noticing a trend in current digital literature, particularly that: “Most Web-based poetry is not strongly narrative,” Poundstone set out to create a digital work which displayed content which the audience would be able to read and think about as the text is “moving and morphing and other things are happening onscreen at the same time” (245). Unfortunately, because of the lack of strong narrative examples in digital literature, he opted to Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel, //Locus Solus//.

In the novel, a “gentlemen artist, Canterel” has “created a group of absurd machines on his estate in Paris” (245). Among them are the bottle imps, a futuristic version of the more familiar Cartesian devils, which are gas-filled figurines which ascend and descend in a bottle of water depending on the pressure within it. In the novel, these figurines (and other machines on the premises, apparently) are used to act out stories as “multimedia devices incorporating motion, sound, and text” (245). As he considered the roles of bottle imps, Poundstone realized that new media literature is similar to them, even noting that they “enact narratives that loop endlessly, similar to banner ads on the Web” (245). Further, he notes that Roussel’s concept of multimedia differs from that of Wagner; while Wagner was concerned that multimedia would provide the exact same sensory experience for everyone who witnessed it, Roussel’s bottle imps were “more agents of mystification than clarity” (246). Accordingly, Canterel’s guests are taken in with the visual magic of the bottle imp stories, but often required an explanation as to what they had just seen.

With his “3 Proposals for Bottle Imps,” Poundstone proceeds to tell stories which could be made into bottle imp narratives, often providing exact instructions as to the parts of the stories to use and how to go about creating the scene. Because of the inclusion of text, he becomes concerned with the reading pace of viewers, and the wariness of constant text animation: “How much moving text can you have without it becoming boring? How do you deal with the fact that not everyone reads at the same pace?” (247) Returning to the example of movie titles, he notes that text can go by too quickly for the audience to perceive, and notes that perceptual studies show that “you can flash a single word for one-twenty-fourth of a second, and viewers get it, consciously or unconsciously” (247). He notes that in this piece, there are examples of text that remains and text that rushes by, content that audiences will get the gist of the faster moving text.

In the final two paragraphs, Poundstone notes that he had performed the duties of writing, designing, and coding himself, which he considers paramount since form and content are so closely related here. However, he does acknowledge that he “got most of the site’s sound off the Web,” from sites where “talented people post sounds and loops they’ve made as linkware or freeware” (248). He notes that adding sound to a digital literature piece is less like composing a film score and more like acting as a hip-hop producer, since the goal is to create a collage of “preexisting elements to get an effect that is different from those elements in isolation” (248). At the time of writing the article, Poundstone was pleased with his freedom in adding sound, as there was little consensus about how sound should function in digital literature. He notes that it is a recursive process, since he can emphasize words or phrases with sounds, despite concerns of overmanipulation, although he may change his mind in six months (248).


 * Commentary:**

It’s interesting that Poundstone is considering many issues that the class has discussed in the past. Of particular note is his concern with constructing a poetic narrative, an issue that many of us have likely dropped since our discussions of nonlinear (or possibly anti-linear) digital literature have led us to consider other elements above narrative. It is curious that he has decided to go to a source that was only a decade or so shy of a century old in order to derive inspiration for a digital literature piece which combines multimedia elements, although it does seem clear that he has a particularly specific idea of multimedia literariness. Even though his piece was developed in 2002, it seems like there are plenty of examples of narrative, video, and audio web designs, but his vision is more or less a concert of all these elements. However, without Roussel’s novel to inspire the form, he also would not have influenced the content, since all of the stories lead up to a design suggestion for bottle imp dramas. In terms of design, he also voices concerns over reading speed and comprehension which we had visited in some form or another, although as swiftly as he addresses these concerns, he rebuffs them. Although I agree that the gist of each narrative could be grasped in one viewing even without comprehending every line of text, he does fail to mention that the piece will simply replay and any viewer can pay closer attention to those parts that they missed a first time through (it’s also exceedingly clever that the audience is forced to relive the experience if they fail to click the menu icon for the brief time it is onscreen). Finally, his concern with sound mixing still does little to answer to the superfluous quality of many digital literature sounds. That he hopes to create a confluence of sounds which is greater than their whole is a valuable insight, but other than emphasizing specific elements, the sound qualities of these pieces range somewhere between forgettable and annoying. Quite frankly, he candor in announcing that these sounds are added whimsically and his attitude may change in the future is the closest to an honest answer on sound inclusion that I have seen.


 * Questions to consider:**

1.) This is not the first piece where text occasionally moved too quickly to be read; did this frustrate anyone when there is an actual narrative in play, or did “getting the gist” of the story quell any lingering doubts? 2.) Since we viewed the piece for class, did his transition from telling a story to providing instructions for a bottle imp seem jarring? Was it always clear when he had made this transition? 3.) He briefly discusses the role of sound in his piece; does his explanation of sound elements influence your interpretation of these elements? Do you recall the role of sound in his piece?

Poundstone, William. "3 Proposals for Bottle Imps." New Media Poetics. Eds. Morris, Adalaide and Thomas Swiss. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. In print.
 * Works Cited:**

Poundstone, William. 2002. "3 Proposals for Bottle Imps." [] (accessed April 2, 2012).