Sleep when exhausted is a looping visual poem. It is composed of over five-hundred lines, and it takes from twenty seconds to three minutes to complete a cycle. I created this as an installation to counter the science fair–like booths all around me at an undergraduate research fair I had been invited to.1 The technical content of Sleep when exhausted, to anyone viewing its page source, is not by any means impressive and is crudely constructed. Still, as a product I would label foremost as poetry, I will offer here that the amateurish build quality adds to the final product. In addition to this, I will discuss my process, my poetic concerns, and my reading list.
My process translated into a human-readable JavaScript file that recorded my coming to the web browser as an outsider. I spoke colloquially with the browser in a language that it understands, rather than compromise my own mental processes in favour of its advanced ability to calculate at my command. And so, I created much unnecessary work for myself and often had to backtrack. This is a contemplative act in the same way that prayer is a contemplative act: instead of humbling yourself in the greatness and nonhumanness of x, you approach x as though x wanted to be spoken to as if it were humanlike. As far as I understand them, the only communicative benefits that can be observed from an act of prayer are in oneself, as x's involvement in the conversation is not observable.
A practiced web designer could quickly find more efficient ways of creating Sleep when exhausted. Instead of inputting each state2 by hand, I could have created a computer-readable collection that would grab any input data and automate the output with simple keywords. Instead I chose to approach the JavaScript like I do any analogue writing project, in which I
I do not mean to say that conventional web development cannot be a contemplative or transcendental act; I only mean to distinguish between conventional web development, which I know little about, and my emulation of web development as a poet in a culture of poetry steeped in printed matter.3 I also understand that many web designers, programmers, students, and other creatives work in a similar albeit unhealthy way, regardless of the product they intend to create.
Because the reader generates details as they navigate the speaker's world, Sleep when exhausted could be examined in close comparison to Choose Your Own Adventure-style gamebooks or other branching narrative systems, graphical point-and-click adventure games, visual novels, or whatever. The major difference would be that Sleep when exhausted excludes actual choice, plot, and gameness.4 Readers might view themselves as "players" when interacting with this work, but more than usual, their choices have no effect on its outcome. Readers pick the details that they pick, and details unveil further details as I have prescribed them. The continuity is not narrative, or, because it is looping, chronological. It is just a visual artifact of the speaker's consciousness, much like other poems.
In avoiding gameness, I knew that my project would withdraw further into poetry territory—a region that for many reasons excludes the majority, and even the majority of writers. I still wanted cater to readers with short attention spans, to gamers, to nonreaders, and to whoever. But I did not want to alienate the "average reader,"5 any more than usual and decided to make Sleep when exhausted seem book-like, in an attempt to trick them into reading it.6 If I ever wanted an imaginary general audience to enjoy, let alone finish, my work, it would need to be completable in under a minute and absorptive enough to invite readers interested in the work for another read.
There is a girl seated in front of me, sitting next to her mother. She is twenty-threeish years old. Our flight attendant passes her a glass of water. I watch her watch Jeremy Renner fight a wolf with his bare hands. I've already seen this movie, but it seems different when I am left wondering what has already occurred, without audio, filtered through the crack between two airline seats; when I am left attempting to measure someone else's pleasure, filtered through her blond, shoulder-length hair. Our flight attendant passes me a glass of orange juice with ice in it. It takes a few minutes, but I finally find the dimmer to turn off my own in-flight multimedia station. I admit there is something about watching a movie you have no intention of finishing because the duration of your flight just isn't long enough, and I admit there is something about watching a television show you might never see another episode of, but today I want to just on this airplane and do nothing. On another flight, I watched Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which is about an airborne flu virus that spreads worldwide. At one point, there is a shot of an airplane taking off, most likely bearing the virus. Maybe that was the reason I was paranoid about physical contact all of that day, or maybe the movie does that to everyone equally. This refunctioning made it more difficult to half-pay attention.
As web browsers are perpetually modernized, support for Sleep when exhausted will likely drop, at least partially. This type of problem affects all digital works and will decimate our ability to interact with content as it was intended. At least until content creators adopt plain text as the standard method of digitally storing and/or documenting human-readable information7 or move back to paper. This poem will also become visually obsolete as it ages, and is probably ugly already. That said, I do not intend to continue support for this work, and I welcome any obsolescence gratefully.
This work was developed for and funded by the Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards program at the University of Victoria. This project would not have been as cool without the support and encouragement of Tim Lilburn and Karolinka Zuzalek, with special thanks to Patrick Close, Matthew Hooton, Megan Jones, David Leach, Courtney Løberg, Garth Martens, Helen Marzolf, Jordan Soles, Valerie Tenning, and UVic's personal web space.
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