(Photo by Christopher & Amy Funkhouser)

“Eat Your Tits and Puppets” is a poem by Claire Donato digitally mediated by Ian Hatcher using JavaScript. The poem unfolds across a digitally rendered opening, its enculturated materiality implicit in the recto-verso book layout that appears on-screen. The digitally rendered opening remains static—the pages never turn—and the recto of the leaf whose verso appears is permanently concealed. Much of the poem's language is appropriated from issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and the Brooklyn Museum's Global Feminisms exhibit (2007), and the kinetic properties of the piece are meant to challenge readerly expectations, along with the necessarily gendered power structures inherent in writing.

When the physical book’s opening is signaled, the viewer’s expectation may be that the poem’s text will appear digitally as it would inside of a physical book: that the poem will unfold in what J. David Bolter describes as “sedate rows of linear text.” However, the text unfolds non-linearly and becomes entrapped in and across the digitally rendered rectoverso book layout. As with a physical book object’s opening, the reader’s eyes focus only on one leaf at a time, even as text simultaneously unfolds and disappears on both sides of the opening. Furthermore, by employing grey tones that fade in and out (and around, beyond, against, within—) the poem’s text, passages of and freezes in the poem’s body are also signaled.

We first presented “Eat Your Tits and Puppets” as a live, rehearsed, and collaborative performance for two voices at ELO_AI (Brown University).

Click here to view "Eat Your Tits and Puppets."