The History of Wigging

Pollock is a mastodon of modest painting
Chirico a master on modem shaking

Mondrian a mastiff on modish Blaking
Picasso is a mastodon of modest ski baking

They’re tearing at the insides growing in the park
Peculiar in their excess way shaming lemon ark

Gorgeous as a pencil body slim as a limb
Ganging up on anybody looks like him

Making all the standerbys see sky blue
Making all the lubber butts feel bad, too

After all and after all it’s because war
I mean a sudden lullaby to charter this before

Grant this an abstract ballast
To navigate insider balance

The Impercipient, 1994

McKenzie Wark, Dispositions

[Below is a review that was originally published in print journal Verse (Vol. 20, No. 2 & 3). I've been designing Wark's site, ludiccrew.org, a repository of hihs past writings, reviews and interviews, where this review is also (re-)appearing. It's not my best piece of writing by any means, but Dispositions is interesting, especially in light of Wark's follow up, A Hacker Manifesto, which has garnered a fairly appreciative, but often critical review from Terry Eagleton, writing for The Nation.]

McKenzie Wark
Dispositions
Salt Books, 2002

Prolific Australian writer Wark describes himself as a "media junky" in his 1994 cultural studies volume, Virtual Geography, a study of how four specific events - the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, and the "Black Monday" stock market crash of 1987 - played out, aberrantly but tellingly, in the world media. I'll be honest and say that I haven't read all of Virtual Geography - just checked it out of the library to research this review, in fact - but my impression, after reading the introduction and skipping about, is of an imperative on Wark's part to escape genre with the aim of keeping the products of his academic discipline in the world - in his words, "to live and breathe connected to the time and space of current cultural projects" - an imperative that creates an important bridge between his cultural studies projects and this one.

For a writer of academic volumes to turn to "poetry" - though, in fact, Dispositions exists easily, not forcibly, in the rich overlap of journal, essay, prose poem, Cagean koan, conceptual art project and manifesto - is rare enough, but for the writer to transpose his or her interests, and even writing styles, into the new "creative" endeavor is worth remarking on. (I remember, when working on a volume of Asian American poetry, receiving a small group of lyrics by filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh Ha that were as sentimental and vulnerable as her movies and theory were intellectual and demanding.) While Virtual Geography, engaging and accessible as it is, appears to have suffered the same fate of much writing associated with a specialized form of inquiry, which is that it is not greatly read after initial trends have passed (my copy hadn't been checked out since 2000, and before that 1996, at least according to the stamps on the inside cover) his most recent writing suggests that he sees the critical and the "creative" writing projects of a piece. One book could lead backwards to another, even if the critical volumes - he's written three - are not as idiosyncratic as, say, Guide to Kulchur or Content's Dream. (One other major piece of Wark's writing that is neither poetry or criticism, the "Hacker's Manifesto," is available online.)

On a basic level, Dispositions is clearly "poetry," at least by expanded po-mo terms in the present American context. I think of it as an elaboration of the style of Ron Silliman's earlier "new sentence" works such as "Chinese Notebook," which itself was a modification (a softening up) of a style of writing he discovered in Wittgenstein - the kind of stylistic copping that Marjorie Perloff describes in Wittgenstein's Ladder that discarded the heavy meat of the philosophy and the discipline of the methodology, channeling instead the spirit of adventure, the persistent tone of inquiry, and some of the pathos of Wittgenstein's lonesome, even Quixotic, intellectual quest. Both works share an interest in recording the moments of one's awareness of perception - Silliman, after Olson, might have called it "proprioceptive," while Wark, after the new media theorist Theodor H. Nelson, might link it to "fantics" (the interactivity of man and machine in a shared perceptual and cognitive space). They also trouble the very genre in which they are working - in the process questioning what they are doing there in the writing (as gerund) - simply not knowing what the future will hold while being, at least consciously, in the driver's seat.

Many Language writers walk very close to losing a sense of proportion when describing the effects of one's private activities on the world at large, and in relation to the great themes of philosophy. Silliman's great skill as a writer is his manner of rendering complex ideas accessible but interesting, making one feel like he's a farmer matter-of-factly discoursing about how raising corn plays out in the world markets. But when one suspects that he is more interested in how his singular activities -- his own writing of a particular poem -- is impacting society, the distinctly naïve but clinical tone of his queries appears compromised by a confusion over principles we commonly put under the phrase of "the personal is political." For example, did he really think that the "Chinese Notebook" would have an impact on the tradition of Wittgenstein's philosophy when he wrote:

13. That this form has a tradition other than the one I propose, Wittgenstein, etc., I choose not to dispute. But what is its impact on the tradition proposed?

He then asks: "14. Is Wittgenstein's contribution strictly formal?," conveniently blurring the definition of "form" to mean both the superficial numbering of paragraphs and tone and pace of their execution with the Philosophical Investigations' inquiry into the form of the "language game" and philosophy itself. There is precedent, of course; certainly Eliot thought a pastiche of Donne or Pope would effect how these "masterpieces" were understood, ineluctably changing what they mean, a belief he describes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Cross-genre analogies, however, are more heady, and must have been terribly intoxicating to young, disaffiliated American poets in the seventies, not unlike, earlier, Robert Duncan's channeling of the breadth of Pound's Cantos into his own more approachable poetry. But one wonders if the game, becoming central to a tradition at all, even an untested one, becomes revealed too early. I admire the bravado of asking for this test - later, he writes:

149. What is it that allows me to identify this as a poem, Wittgenstein to identify his work as technical philosophy, Brockman's Afterwords to be seen as Esalen-oriented metaphysics, and Kenner's piece on Zukofsky literary criticism?

This kind of full frontal questioning of genre, along with the play-by-play assessment of the effects one's own writing in the inquiry - "Hey, look at me, I'm on the edge!" - has either fallen out of favor, or reached a questionable apotheosis in works such as Claudia Rankine's novel-poem Plot. I'm only engaging in this digression, however, not merely to mention one of my favorite works of Silliman's (one long out of print) but to note that Wark, coming from the left field of cultural studies and the other side of the world (he presently lives in Williamsburg and teaches at SUNY Albany), has written an excellent book that builds on a tendency or "vector" (one of his own key terms) that he was probably not aware of, or if so, not concerned with.

Structurally, Dispositions is a series of prose poems ranging in length from one to four pages (most are two), arranged chronologically (the first is dated January 29, 2001; the last is the only one written after 9/11) and headed by a curious series of data: the time (not always Eastern Standard), his elevation, his coordinates according to a global positioning device and the "accuracy" of the GPS reading. The global positioning device itself, called the Etrex, appears in his poem like the donkey in Robert Lewis Stevenson's travelogues (no, he doesn't discover it's a female in the end), and it is this basic diad - wanderer and Etrex - human and machine - sullied participant of cultural contingencies and recalcitrant tabula rasa of the memory-less device - that illustrates to the very binary that is collapsing in Wark's view of the world: that the globe itself, overlaid with a series of imaginary but persistent grids and numbers and circled by satellites, is itself something between animal and machine:

West zero, zero zero - a hair's breadth from the Prime Meridian. Close to the place where placeless space was made. Seventy three degrees East of home, and a smudge to the North. The Etrex takes its time finding these foreign bearings, so far from its last look at the subdivisions of the sky. Foreign here is just a question of degree.

As this verse paragraph suggests - rarely are they much longer - Dispositions is very effective in creating a sense of looming horizon beyond which lies an unmapped geography, a sort of "dark continent" effect, out of the very territories that Wark would claim are already completely mapped, not only by satellites but the spectacular system of the media. Since Dispositions is, relative to his discursive works, fragmented - an assemblage of telling "luminous detail" (a phrase of Pound's) - this horizon expands to include matters of the mental interior, the realm of subjective associations that is the psychological novelist's bread and butter.

His thoughts when looking at art, for example, are condensed into five line paragraphs before skipping over to another, perhaps entirely unrelated, topic, or continuing its way but after suffering a lethal, signature slant, hence withholding the generosity of the discursive green lawns of his cultural studies prose. Each dated entry, and within it each short paragraph, then becomes a thought "vector," a directional thrust that might serve to circumscribe a set of themes but will decidedly not bother closing the gaps. This effect might be heightened by the reader's knowledge that Wark is aware that his poetry, unlike his academic publications, is not likely to play out significantly in his field of scholarship - it's the extinct cultural critic who picks up a book of poetry to illustrate a point - nor is it likely to be critiqued as a syllogistically constructed argument. This allows Wark to suggest a field of potential thinking rather than follow-through every assertion with a respectful appeal to the reader's intelligence; his propensity for phrases like the opening line, "The sun shines out of my ass," are shots across the prow in this regard. This suggests Symbolist critic Remy de Gourmont's practice of "dissociative" thinking - the active dissociation of two ideas, such as "duty" and "patriotism," that are held to be nearly one idea in the popular mind but are entirely distinct ("democracy" and "capitalism" might be two such ideas today) - as an informing component of Wark's project, since, more than most poets and writers that I have read, Wark appears to have mastered the idea of knowing what his thoughts are - they can range from the bodily/vulgar to the lofty/cosmopolitan - and then contextualizing them both culturally and within the memory of his sense impressions.

I think it's time for an extended quote:

Not for nothing do they call it train of thought... The chatter of the wheels on rails and the clatter of the mind on skids. Books and magazines and music for distractions.

The folly and the danger, both personal and political, of too optimistic a view of the malleability of nature, including human nature. All those tedious improvers, from militants to therapists. All their purges. They can't accept the impurity in the gut.

That radical pessimism, of Chamfort, of Leopardi. Just because one thinks the worst of one's kind does not mean one believes they deserve even less. One might not suffer another's pride, yet takes no pride in another's suffering.

The pessimist's wager: No matter how low an opinion one may form of what is, to view its absence as something short of an improvement.

The effort to retreat from human folly. To participate knowingly in all human dispositions. To neither kiss nor kill the reigning idols. The measured use of illusion to forestall mania. Between Semtex and utopia.

The affirmation of one thing at least can be overcome. The tyranny of boredom. Which may not sound like much, but it is at least not nothing. What is tyranny if not boredom?

The revolutions of 1989, that great revolt against boredom and tyranny. In Prague, in Budapest, in Berlin. In Beijing, in Taipei, and in Seoul. In Manilla and Pretoria. Revolutions against boredom, not all of which succeeded. The best of them took precautions against installing boredom all over again.

Two cheers for the revolution! The revolution of the pessimists. Pessimists, to whom nothing deserves that third, fanatic cheer.

(The easy intellectualism, coupled with a pessimism that is entirely unallied with class snobbery, reminds me of his late compatriot, the poet Martin Johnston, whose novel Cicada Gambit is an extended meditation on this idea of a sort of futuristic, cosmopolitan cultural ambition - it was meant to be the antipodean Ulysses - without the crown of the "fanatic cheer." It also reminds me of the Thirties poet, American Kenneth Fearing, a Marxist whose sense of humor got in the way of anything like enthusiasm for the revolution, and whose cadences - never insistent or explosive, but with a lively surface - are comparable to those of Dispositions.)

The only table of contents Dispositions provides is a sort of bibliography, or list of sources, for each entry at the end. The excerpt above lists the Brecht Forum, bell hooks, a New York Times book review, and a Benjamin Moore Color Preview - a bit of Dada playfulness? - as among the elements instigating the entry, not Shakespeare, Schopenhauer and Guy Debord as one might have expected. Because there are no page numbers, this forces the reader to navigate the book via this convex index -- a klugey circuit that enhances the main theme of the book: finding a determinate sense of place and time entirely dependent on seemingly spurious systems, the "invented" numerical system of coordinates versus the "organic" development of place names. It also makes the book "interactive" - or let's say "ergodic," from Espen Aarseth's terminology, to avoid that overused term - in that some terribly active book handling has to occur before honing in on one's chosen location, alienating the very reflexive act of citation. But this activity is probably not more unusual than trying to negotiate New York, Sydney, or Guatemala by trusting the oracle of numbers on a small, hand-held and battery-operated device (or negotiating the Alps with a map of Paris, as the Situationists suggested).

I don't want, however, to pile on too many polysyllables to recommend this book, which of course will not be for everyone. It is much better written than a lot of literature attempting to describe a new sensibility in the wake the initial blasts of the "digital revolution," much of which is jargon heavy, sentimental or humorless, and belongs on that small shelf of "poetry" that tries to access this spirit at all. Like Gourmont a century ago, Wark could be quietly setting the stage for a fecund, polyvalent new aesthetics; that Wark doesn't beat the drum for an "avant-garde," post or dystopic, sets his temperament right with our times, in which there is a sense of exhaustion about the Futurist or Dada affect. If there is any strong argument for writing that cross genres, it is that a strong media and political theorist can stumble, headlong and spiritedly, into the traditions of poetry.

For Hilda Morley

Moon.
Gotcha!

For Wyndham Lewis

Poems should stop after twenty.

For J.H. Prynne

Who knows what these are?
They came in the mail.

For Arthur Rimbaud

I really don't have to do anything.
Remember?

For W.S. Graham II

I am still. And I hear the words
are still also, but I can't tell.

Books for Sale

The publisher (in one case re-publisher) of my last two full length books of poems has sort of folded. Sort of absconded with the millions of dollars I've made for him. Sort of disappeared. Actually, I'm not sure what the state of Harry Tankoos is -- what I do know is that I have a box of books in my closet and no real idea of what to do with them.

If you wanna, I can send you a copy for a mere $6.50 each -- that's about $5 for the book itself, and then about $1.50 for shipping. Or if you buy two, make it $11 even. (I can also cut deals, if you are writing about one of them or something equally inadvisable.)

Gulf is available as a .pdf download at ubu.com/ubu. But for those of you who fetishize the mimeo revolution of yore, I've created this one for you, which is to say, it looks much better in its original form and design, which I put much love into (the cover is from a Japanese newspaper). It's also rather long, 144 pages or so, so you save yourself some paper this way (it's two-sided, of course).

Just click contact at the left here and drop an email to Ague the Fish. Be sure to put one of the book titles in the subject line, otherwise I'll accidentally banish you to spamland (which would be a bad thing since I want these birds to fly!).

Angry Penguins, 2000

Gulf, 1998/2000

Interview for Albanian magazine

This is a short interview on digital poetry I did for a friend, Erica Weitzman, living in Kosovo. Please don't translate it into Albanian before its publication.

I would venture to say that most people still see an inherent contradiction between computer technology and poetry. Why do you think this is, and what led you to bring these two things together?

I was programming at a pretty young age, around 11 or so, and spent a whole lot of time in my room making video games in BASIC. I think I wanted to be an illustrator of science fiction books or something but really have no skill at drawing or painting, so the computer was a way for me to be creative. But it certainly didn't put me in touch with people, rather kept me in my shell, exiled indoors.

Poetry really took over my life when I was 15 or so, but initially I wrote in very formal ways, down to the syllable, and very concisely (Pound was my teacher in all of this), I guess as a hangover from being a programmer on a computer that had all of 16k memory. But of course I wanted to spill my heart out (I wanted to write songs for a band also, but I was too shy to perform).

In any case, spurred by the blossoming of new media arts, and angered in a way by the phony sounding theory that sprung up around it, I decided to see what I could do as a programmer again, and naturally I created works that were text heavy (because I still can't draw), though perhaps not "poetry" proper.

There really shouldn't be a contradiction between poetry and computers if one doesn't think of poetry in purely Romantic terms, as some overflowing of the emotions, something close to "nature." People reacted negatively at first to poems that were typed -- Jarrell has that famous quip about a poem looking like it was written on a typewriter by a typewriter -- but now it seems even romantic to use one of those -- Dylan wrote his Chronicles on a typewriter, as nearly every reviewer rushes to remind us.

People have always tried to make words look good, also, and technical innovation has always been there also, from Gutenburg to Blake, who invented his own form of copper etching, right to now.

What do you see as the fundamental difference between cyberpoetry and other forms of poetry? What constitutes cyberpoetry, exactly, if not the mere act of putting something online?

I use the word "cyberpoetry" with scare quotes -- I don't really know that there is such a thing, just as Eliot (my model in that cyberpoetry essay in Fashionable Noise) didn't believe there was such a thing as vers libre.

But imagining there is such a thing, it can certainly exist off-line -- things distributed on CDs or projected on walls in public places can be cyberpoetry. And certainly all poems put online are not "cyberpoetry," though they, like all digital texts, are vulnerable to becoming part of someone else's idea of a "cyberpoem."

I think of "digital text" as being that text that is vulnerable to computer processes, such as loops: sorting, searches, all that stuff, is due to loops and variables. So any poetry that somehow benefits from this, whether it be a poem written with the aid of a computer to a poem that is animated, would be "cyberpoetry" of a sort. It's really quite wide open. The real question is when it is "poetry" and when it is just digital art that uses text very nicely and unusually.

I don't have an answer to that, but I usually point people to Young-Hae Chang's Flash works (http://www.yhchang.com/) and ask, well, if they're not poems what are they? Poetry has become the catch-all for text projects that don't fit elsewhere, which is fine by me (usually).

I like your line in Proverbs of Hell (Dos and Donts): "The cyberpoem that doesn't "stare back" the more it is stared at is not a good text, not a good app, and not very polite; the cyberpoem that stares back too sweetly devolves into the nirvana of neurobuddhist hype." What does it mean, to you, for a poem to "stare back" enough, yet not "too sweetly"?

I think of what Bruce Naumann says about the "interactivity" of his installation works, such as the one in which there are four video cameras and televisions positioned around a square column, in such a way that you are only ever to look at yourself turning a corner from behind. He says that he doesn't want the viewer to "make their own art piece" out of his art piece, that there must be a limit to the interaction. This makes you an actor in his minimal theater, and I think good interactivity is predicated on the theater in which you interact being good.

I think there is a valuation of interactive art pieces based on how much the user is able to do him or herself with it -- the more you can do the, the logic goes, the better it is. But usually, these are art pieces that are demos for the possibilities of computers to one day be at the core of good art, not good art in itself. If it's trying too hard to impress, it's probably not confident in itself as a statement about the world, or in favor of another world entirely.

How do you come up with an idea for a new work? Where (or from whom) do you draw your inspiration, and how does a work develop once started?

Quite often, it is just by chance -- having the time to work on a new piece, having something around suitable for it, and convincing myself that the context or time was right. I rarely plan much ahead, partly out of laziness, partly out of the fact that, once you get your mind rolling about a computer piece, it could take months to learn what you have to learn to make it happen, by which time you feel trapped by the project. I do my learning first, come up with a piece later.

Sometimes I have a text that I don't think would work successfully as a page poem, but which I think has some core that can be exploited via computers. The "Dreamlife of Letters" text, for example, was not something I would have put my name next to on a page, but it had a neat movement to it, and there were all sorts of puns, repetitions, sound and visual plays, etc., that I thought could be usefully annoying as an animation.

My "Vaneigem" group of New York Times detournements were all done in the last minutes of a work day -- I would just flip through a Word file of Raoul Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life, find a group of quotes and put them into whatever Times story most aggravated me that day. "The Truth Interview" was a way to get a lot of Kim Rosenfield's text online and exploit qualities of her writing that I think can get lost in her books.

That's usually how it goes -- several facets coming together, rather unplanned.

What do you think are the most exciting developments in poetry today? The most depressing?

I think for all of the electronic communication that we have, a lot of younger poets in different countries are not in fact in touch with each other. I love meeting people in England and Canada that I just hadn't heard about who are doing great things that couldn't be done in New York because we are all caught up in our sense of "tradition," Beat, New York School or otherwise.

I think the most exciting thing that could happen -- certainly hasn't yet -- would be some of these younger writes having well distributed books out, with the right reviewers making them known. I'd like people to argue knowledgably about the merits of new poems, rather than the dithering that happens on, say, Silliman's Blog.

But I don't see any grand "great developments" that I can point to, mostly just individuals who are working on good poems. I'm glad that the era of high theory has finally passed, though I'm not sure that the reactionary neo-Romanticism that I see around is such a great thing (it's always been there, of course).

I think people are trying to write more book reviews, taking them very seriously as ways to make obscure (or soon to be obscure) work available to readers. Aaron Kunin and Andrea Brady stand out to me as exemplary poet reviewers -- they take ideas seriously, but they are not simply writing to fill in some void in a thesis paper. They do research, and write concisely and publicly about their enthusiasms -- can't go wrong that way.

There's so much distrust about poetry, within and outside of the various circles, and I think decent prose about poetry could help create a healthier atmosphere for the exchange of ideas about, and appreciation of, the art.

One of the current received ideas about art is that we are living in an anything goes culture, i.e., that post-modernism is precisely the potential assimilation of all art forms and the subsequent exhaustion of the avant garde. Is there still a purpose to avant-gardism? What do you see as the possibilities or potential uses of formal innovation in poetry?

"Formal innovation" and "avant-gardism" are not necessarily synonymous, and I don't really care much for the latter term, thought the former seems to me the crux of the whole game. I.e. find the forms that are most exciting to exploit in our own time, regardless of whether they have that ironic or utopian or constructivist sheen that mark them out as being of the "advanced" guard. Certainly, the innovators behind musical trends such as reggae or techno (in their respective times) were aiming to create something exciting and unheard of before, not to figure out how to advance the theories of Schoenberg or Cage.

I think poets who consider themselves avant-garde these days are just fooling themselves, frankly. Mostly, they are creating things that fit quite snugly into an historicized perspective of twentieth century innovation, and are not opening up new territories for the appreciators of art. The most avant-garde of our American poets were quite often trying to do something they thought was very natural -- Williams in getting the "American grain" into his poems, or Pound trying to preserve the best of world culture in his images and meters. It seems to me that the formula for true "avant-gardism" is not available to us anymore -- the conservative side of things gets lost in an effort to make something that feels "postmodern."

But postmodernism is dead anyway, it's been replaced by "new media," which doesn't have much of a theory for itself either. But now I'm getting ahead of myself...

Can you say something about the idea of authorship in terms of your use of borrowed texts, collaboration, etc.?

I don't have any very strict ideas about this. I think some of the best things I've done online have relied almost entirely on bringing together elements that I didn't create.

I bet I could write great poems that way too, but I confess that I would feel a little fraudulent doing so. Even when I assemble poems out of scraps of my own writing (I used to do this quite often when I didn't have much in the tank) I feel a little fraudulent -- must be the last dregs of my own brand of Romanticism, wanting to have the final poem kicking around in the first draft that I wrote in an "inspired" state, rather than undercutting inspiration by collage editing.

As for collaboration, I've had some success doing it, but unlike in movies or rock bands, where each player has a special skill that they contribute, I'm not often in the situation where it makes much sense to work with other people. Usually, I take someone else's text and create a piece out of it with some input from the writer, but I haven't yet written something collaboratively and then set it collaboratively.

How did your Circulars project develop, and what do you see as its role in terms of the current cultural lanscape?

Circulars has been dormant for a long time now, so I don't think it has any role in the present landscape.

At the time, I was hoping that it would ride a wave of intensifying dissent in the country and somehow catalogue it, while at the same time offering a new way for poets to situate themselves culturally in terms of protesting the war -- those panels at St. Mark's for example seemed a little dated to me rhetorically and otherwise.

The project was just something that I thought of during a night of insomnia -- I don't work in groups very well, so I contacted a number of poets to contribute to the site, but in fact I did all of the programming, and the majority of the content. It did grow over time, and certain people really made contributions that skewed it very nicely, but it was too much for one person.

What projects are you currently working on?

A longish series called "A Book of Poems," which is 32 digital poems (including video, Flash pieces, some straight text pieces, etc) which I hope to get done by May. I'm hoping this could be a didactic piece, also, which addresses some of the issues you raise above.

Also editing down all of my critical writing over the past decade for a book to be published by Salt. I've been learning video production here at Brown, and also taking up playwriting -- I guess the goal would be to shoot some sort of inexpensive feature.

What do you know about Albanian poetry, or Albania in general?

Very little about either I'm afraid to say. I've just Googled it to see if there was anything that would touch off any associations, but none are coming to mind. But certainly I'd like to visit!

For W.S. Graham

We stare at words
naked as breath or vegetables,

an awkward pose,
like the prose of intellectuals.

Flash Polaroids on Turbulence.org

Dudes, the Flash Polaroids are on the homepage of turbulence.org:

The Flash Polaroids occupy a middle ground between an experimental film/video aesthetic - particularly the works that use the single frame as the unit of composition - and interactive installation video works. The earlier "Studies" involve loops of digital photographs taken in "burst mode" - in quick succession - and were partly inspired by David Crawford's Stop Motion Studies. The "Portraits" involve several views of the same subject in juxtaposition, and could be compared to a Warholian take on the portrait - a moving image that essentially sits still, or a still image that moves only slightly over time. The "Micro-narratives" introduce "stories" to the Flash Polaroids, especially "Guy Cat Pan," which, like a metaphysical painting of De Chirico's, gets its charge by placing disparate, enigmatic objects on the same stage. The "Interactive" set pushes outward toward the user, and demonstrate what could be done with this simple use of Flash and digital photographs as projections in an installation setting.