P.o.E.M.M.  Poems for Excitable [Mobile] Media

Poems for Excitable [Mobile] Media is a series of poems written and designed to be read on touch devices, from large-scale exhibition surfaces to mobile screens.

P.o.E.M.M. project by
Jason E. Lewis and Bruno Nadeau

The phrase “you’ve got no choice about the terminology” comes from an article in the New York Times describing an old-school ice cream parlor manager who insisted that things be called by their proper names. ‘A a scoop of ice-cream with topping on it is a sundae.’ Coming from a household in which ice-cream was taken very seriously indeed, and often struggling with what terminology to use to describe my ethnicity (Cherokee, Hawaiian, Samoan, raised in northern California rural mountain redneck culture), and my profession (artist? poet? software developer? educator? designer?), and recognizing both the danger and seduction of neat categorizations, the line inspired a series of text playing with categories, definitions and the idea that, though we might have some choice about our terminology, we have no choice about our ontology.

The exhibition version of You’ve Got No Choice About the Terminology employs a 42” two-point touch surface + a 60" x 60" digital print text-image.

Smooth Second Bastard is a meditation on the difference between being asked “where ya from” and being asked “are you from around here?” Growing up where and how I did, I tend to see insider-outsider dynamics before I see prejudice. Such a viewpoint can be gracious or naïve, and I sometimes find it difficult to tell which.

Smooth Second Bastard was commissioned by the imagineNATIVE Festival for the Vital to the General Public Welfare exhibition. The exhibition version consists of a triptych with 42" two-point touch surface + a 122" x 13" digital print + a 40" x 24" digital print.

The Great Migration is a poem about leaving, about the excitement of heading out into a great unknown. It's also a poem about expulsion, about diaspora, about being forced to from home, in some sense about my emigration to Canada. Yet it's also a poem about surrendering to the excitement and the compulsion, about the reluctant realization that perhaps fundamental change is needed to keep on living.

The exhibition version of The Great Migration is a diptych consisting of a 42" two-point touch surface +  a 60" x 168" digital print text-image. The work was developed for the Words on an Empty Beach solo exhibition, presented  as part of the Objet Indirect Object project.

Buzz Aldrin Doesn't Know Any Better is a conversation with an old intralocutor, Pretty Jesus, about the contents of a pawn shop street-side display window in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.
It was written to be read through touch interaction with the FoFA gallery street-side display window, creating a contextual resonance between the original event and the installed work.  The poem formed the central panel of the large-scale print + touchscreen triptych Things You've Said Before But We Never Heard. 

What They Speak When They Speak to Me is a poem about mistaken identity and the confusion—amusing and alarming—that happens when people believe you are somebody you are not. Written in the middle of many a travelling adventure, it attempts to capture both the beauty and the difficulty of communicating without much of a common language.

What They Speak When They Speak to Me for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch is the mobile version of an exhibition poem first published in 2007.