In anticipation of Matthew Kirkpatrick’s visit to class, I completed the assigned homework of navigating his two works A Moment Ago and The Silent Numbers. I began with A Moment Ago. Ever-changing, this piece randomly collects text from various online news sources. Once the user tries to click on, or even hover the mouse over, a part of the linked text, another stream of text appears. The constant evolution of A Moment Ago at first overwhelms the user, but eventually she becomes familiar with the onslaught of information and settles into her role as a player, a reader, and an observer. Kirkpatrick’s second work is more guided; The Silent Numbers invites the player along as the game reveals various developments to the player. These reveals, however, are accompanied by audio that existed as legitimate radio transmissions. Thus, as the player goes through the piece she is reading Kirkpatrick’s words as she listens to the spoken numbers. This combination elevates the material because, similar to A Moment Ago, the authenticity of the audio components (the news content for A Moment Ago) grounds Kirkpatrick’s textual and stylistic additions.
Kirkpatrick’s visit as well as his work led me to further consider how creators incorporate real-world activity into art. I have also been thinking about the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, especially in regard to contemporary realistic literature. From there, I think of the line between personal experience and imagined situations— I predict there to be fewer differences in terms of plausibility between the two than one might initially expect. Interesting that even his novel The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art adopts a form that blends the established line between print and electronic literature. Both A Moment Ago and The Silent Numbers reminded me of the proximity that communication allows, and seeing that proximity develop in the two pieces forced me to consider the implications of genre distinctions and other distinctions in general; it’s more similar than we’d think.