Eduardo Kac, Watch, 1993, looping digital poem, 3 min, color, sound

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This animation is a digital poem composed of discrete areas that segment the screen surface while the verbal units (words and sentence fragments) swirl around, like thoughts coalescing. In so doing, they render themselves both readable and unreadable. Given the nature of the movement, the reader is unable to parse the verbal material in its entirety at once and instead develops personal reading strategies. The hesitations of the gaze between impermanence and indelibility, at the boundary of legibility and illegibility, suspend meaning and open the poem to multiple interpretations. The dynamic visual patterns generated by the movement of the words and sentence fragments contribute to the unique lyrical atmosphere of the poem.