"Secret"

Kac's "holopoetry" as he calls it, "remote (control) poetry" as I call it, is represented in his piece, "Secret" (http://www.ekac.org/Secret.wrl [Accessed 29 November 1999].) The piece begins with a view of a black screen containing several white dots in the distance that appear to be stars, spread out across the screen, and a control bar at the bottom of the screen that has on it different options, such as Walk, Look, Examine, and Point, that relate to mouse control over the movement of the piece. These options are not intuitive and are not explained. This sort of lack of guidance plays on both the idea that the computer is an impenetrable environment for most people, one that can be physically explored, but not understood, and the conception of the mute lover, in which one has to play around with different techniques to figure out what pleasures, or works. One has to examine this text in order to read it.

To do so, the viewer must work her way through these movement options, moving her mouse to bring the dots, which eventually appear as words made out of geographic forms such as cyclinders and cones, closer to her and facing front so that they are readable. If she moves her mouse too quickly, the words fly by and are lost. Once the words move past the front of the screen, they are very difficult to find again. The work disorients one in space, which seems odd because the reader is always in front of her computer screen.

Theorist Brian Lennon describes the purpose of "Secret" as follows: "It is not mere user participation in an electronic work of art, some valorously 'active' clciking at a mouse, that is being sought here; what is sought is, rather, a reflection of the vital ambiguities of life lived through technologies that change us, and our ways of living and thinking, even as we change them responding to perceived evolutions in our knowledge: a feedback loop linking contemporary cultural forces and instrumental technologies into reciprocal and recombinant relations." (Lennon, Brian. "Screening a Digital Visual Poetics," Manuscript in proof, to appear in _Configurations_ vol. 8 no. 1, 2000, pp. 23-24). What Lennon sees as important in this work, and hypertext in general, is the reader's reaction to it and the resulting changes in both the reader and the work. He sees this work as recombinant, a result of a meshing of previous work(s) and a cultural reaction(s) to it.