Poetry 4 U: Pinning poems under/over/through the streets

Introduction

The developments in communications technologies over the past quarter of a century have proceeded at a blistering pace and, along with the developments, our visions of life with communications technologies have evolved and changed. Pfaffenberger proposes that to use technology is to ‘express a social vision’ and, further, it is to ‘engage ourselves in a form of life’ as having ‘social and mythic dimensions’ (1988: 249). Tacchi (2004) argues that ‘In order to explore the uses of new technologies, we need to see how they relate to those “social visions” and “forms of life” and understand the technology’s “social and mythic dimensions”’ (Tacchi, 2004: 92).

The computer has become ubiquitous (Weiser, 1991) and portable, and in the second decade of the 21^st century we are, largely, more concerned with what computing technology devices can do for us. No longer do computers occupy a prime focal point in the office or home as they did in the late 20^th century. Indeed, computing devices such as smartphones have become invisible, as was predicted by Weiser in 1991. Nonetheless, they still have mythic as well as social dimensions. Envisioning how people will engage with new technology, and how technology will alter social life and its rituals, is the domain of designers. However, often technology will be domesticated and used differently from the ways the designers imagined. Users have appropriated a succession of new technologies and put them to their own uses; see for example the discussion by Kline and Pinch (1996) on how US society shaped the automobile. So, how will today’s and tomorrow’s technology users construct de novo mythic frameworks in order to lend meaning to their lives?

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology is an example of a technology with mythic dimensions that is readily linked to surrounding and often larger themes of meaning that engage the public’s imagination. These larger themes have influenced the way artists have utilised GPS. It was initially developed by the military, but was appropriated relatively quickly by media artists who sought to produce work that interrogated the social visions wrought by the existence of GPS and surveillance technologies. The media artists referred to and used practices established in the 1960s by the Situationist Movement artists. Situationists intervened in urban landscapes to provide alternative and resistant readings of the city. A concept central to the Situationists’ understandings and deliberate misunderstandings of place was the idea of psychogeography. Guy Debord, while still with the Letterist International, first recognised the term in 1955, describing it thus:

The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. … The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. (Debord, n.d.)

The idea of ‘psychogeography’ was resurrected at a media art workshop in 2002 (Tuters and Vangelis, 2006) and resulted in the phenomena of locative media, which refer to media that are tied to geographic coordinates and use a networked system.Locative media artists, reworking the old practices of the Situationists, add telecommunications networks and/or wifi technologies to create conceptual or narrative interventions in urban places, often using mobile technologies. Technologies that appeared avant-garde in 2002 are commonplace in 2011.

Over their relatively short history, mobile phones have swiftly evolved into multifunctional computing devices. The latest generation of smartphones has built-in cameras, Internet connectivity and location-based services such as Google Maps. They also make it easy to use and create social media while travelling. In 2007, Google Maps introduced a GPS-like location service that does not require a GPS receiver for Mobile 2.0. This feature works by using the GPS location of the mobile phone and supplementing it with information drawn from known wireless networks and mobile phone tower transmitters. This feature has been taken up by numerous social media applications, including Twitter clients with smartphones.

Social media may be defined as ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content’ (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010: 61). Increasingly, smartphones are being used for social media. According to Kotadia (2010), ‘650 million people worldwide, or 13.4% of mobile subscribers, use the Web via a mobile device at least once a month’, and:

30.8 per cent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser, up 8.3 points from 22.5 per cent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 per cent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-per cent jump. (Kotadia, 2010: np)

Clearly, there has been an immense jump in the quotidian use of social media in conjunction with mobile phones. The rise of social media was enabled by Web 2.0 applications, which require very little technical knowledge. Blogging applications have enabled many creative writers to appropriate the Internet and develop forms such as Flash Fiction (a style of short-form literature), form communities of interlinked blogs, and to publish and publicise online literary magazines through the competent use of social media (see for example, Flash Fiction Chronicles, Tuck Magazine, Prune Juice and Gogyoka Junction). Web 2.0 has provided creative artists with alternative publishing and exhibiting platforms as well as a way to form virtual communities of practice (Rheingold, 2000). Those communities often use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to publicise their presence and generate participation.

The rise of competence in social media use may be construed as a cultural competence that creates cultural capital through a process where ‘it [social media competence] is inserted into the objective relations between the system of economic production and the system producing the producers’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 186). Social media competencies are an emerging and growing field of critical inquiry (see, for example, Castells et al., 2007; Tacchi, 2004), and are used for both the consumption and production of a wide range of content that may be regarded as cultural capital that influences worldviews including creative arts expressions such as poetry. This article considers the opportunities presented by Web 2.0, in combination with location-based services and smartphones, for creative artists to create and curate a publishing space and system that engages with specific places. It presents a project that is designed to explore what can happen when writers appropriate Web 2.0 applications, location-based services and smartphones in a new form of publishing enabled by the ubiquity of current communication technologies in order to provide readers/users with a different way of both encountering urban places and reading poetry. At the same time, we acknowledge that these technologies are also open to far less optimistic scenarios. The positive view developed below that informed the Poetry 4 U project is necessarily counterbalanced by concerns about potential exploitation of locational data, identity, etc., by the commercial interests that make these new relations possible. However, these concerns lie outside the scope of this article.

The article begins with a discussion of the relationship between poetry and places whereby poetry can intervene in the way people perceive places. It continues by addressing conceptualisations of place and how people feel about occupying them, as well as some of the implications of location-based technologies. It draws connections with similar locative media projects. Next, it situates the project Poetry 4 U within the field of creative arts practice and provides a thick description of the design considerations and challenges encountered as several different technology options were considered. Finally, it argues that the constellation of Web 2.0, smartphones and location-based technologies facilitates the exploration of new media forms, and publication and dissemination systems, as well as collaborative activities.

Poetry in place

Crowded train –

Her business breath

On my shoulder

By Michelle Leber (Rendle-Short et al., 2010: 85)

Poetic expressions can render familiar, taken-for-granted topographies and urbanscapes, which we inhabit and move through on a daily basis, into strange places. They can also contribute to the way we perceive and understand the places we occupy. At the start of the introduction to Topophilia, Tuan asks, ‘What are our views on the physical environment, natural and man-made? How do we perceive, structure and evaluate it?’ (Tuan, 1974: 1). He defines topophilia as the affective relation that exists between people and place. The symbolic importance of places can arise from their emotional associations and the feelings they inspire. Topophilia is at the heart of our desire to create a new city of literature space by adding layers over and through geo-coordinates. The word ‘place’ itself is a meme that has been widely conceptualised and problematised. We found that the theories of Tuan (1974), Lyotard (1989), De Certeau (1984) and Augé (1995) were of particular relevance to our design research towards understanding the ways in which the combination of social and location-based media in general, and our Poetry 4 U project in particular, could influence the ways in which people feel about specific places.

The Poetry 4 U project is concerned with the geographic space that is our planet, where humans have built their own physical environments. It is a locative social media art intervention through the use of invisible electromagnetic signals, which are also present through wireless and telecommunications networks. We drew on Lyotard’s (1989) notion of a landscape to provide a conceptual and aesthetic frame to pin poetry to places. Lyotard’s landscape is a moment of embodied presence, a state of mind where one is completely immersed in one’s surroundings so that the sense of place ordered by knowledge recedes. Put succinctly, landscape is a poetic experience of place.

De Certeau (1984) defines place as a geographic location with coordinates that only becomes a space or a ‘practiced place’ through human activities. He distinguishes between geographic coordinates and social activities. A practiced place or space is defined through the types of human activity that take place within the confines of specific geo-coordinates. Places are colonised or appropriated through human activity. They can be sites of resistance to authoritative control, or sites of submission. Places can be experienced from the perspective of understanding the order of a city through a map or bird’s eye view, or through spatialising practices such as walking through streets or riding on a tram. De Certeau (1984), along with Lyotard (1989), emphasises the importance of perspective or point of view on how one will experience a specific place. Lyotard takes this a step further by adding the idea of defamiliarisation so that ‘there would appear to be a landscape whenever the mind is transported from one sensible matter to another, but retains the sensorial organization appropriate to the first, or at least a memory of it’ (1989: 212). Tuan (1974) defines place as something that comes into existence when humans give meaning to the wider geographic space around our planet and, for him, the process is always embodied, temporal, spatial and affective.

Augé (1995), also an anthropologist, separates place according to how we stand in regard to a particular place in terms of our sense of ourselves in that place. We belong in some places and not in others. Augé sets up a binary opposition in his theorisation of place between traditional anthropological places and non-places. Non-places are associated with transit. They are designed as places one passes through on the way to somewhere else. Airports and shopping malls are examples of non-places. On the other hand, anthropological places according to Augé (1995) are configured through inscriptions of identity, local references and knowledge of tacit rules governing interaction. They evolve through their relationship with residents and users. Not only may places be mapped according to geo-coordinates, they can also be mapped according to social practices, individual and cultural memories, and social practices. His binary opposition is problematic because places such as airports, shopping malls and railway stations can also be places associated with belonging, depending on one’s standpoint and place-making intentions. Further, he does not consider that place is also perceptual – that what may be a non-place to one is an anthropological place to someone else.

Thus, our Poetry 4 U project involves mapping and augmenting places in the city with aesthetic expressions in the form of poems. We turned our attention to the city as a meme. We are operating in the postmodern world that is driven by discourses of globalisation, consumerism and commodification. In a conversation with Anders Stephanson (1989), Jameson discusses the spatiality of postmodernism, claiming that ‘the notion of spatialization replacing temporalization leads back to architecture and new experiences of space which I think are very different from any previous moments of the space of the city’, in reference to new urban areas in Paris and the Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. In other words, these spaces are designed to emphasise the spatial over the temporal. They set up a new set of relations with the experiencing subject. Postmodern architecture often disrupts our sense of place because it appropriates temporality and transforms it into cartoons – often through signage – which are juxtaposed almost arbitrarily, creating mise en abymes of ‘information facades’ (Sadin, 2007: 70), which in turn induce disorientation and a search for a non-existent centre.

The spatiality of postmodernity is fragmented, disorienting users and inhabitants, thus making submission to authoritative controls attractive in order to increase feelings of comfort. This gives rise to an aporia in the sense used by Derrida (1994), where the contradictions and dislocation experienced in postmodern cities create incongruence between imaginings of a postmodern city and the blocked pathways caused by the lack of a centre. Tuan notes, ‘the city dweller seems to have a psychological need to possess an image of the total environment in order to place his own neighbourhood’ (Tuan, 1974: 192). Postmodern cities, according to Soja (1989), are decentred inversions of more traditional conceptualisations of a city. If we accept the message of postmodernism that there is no centre, there is no place that can be defined as a city centre in relation to one’s own neighbourhood. The challenge, then, is how to re-establish a sense of place in a city that has no centre. Following Tuan, we propose that a sense of place remains critical to our existential well-being in urban environments. The way we feel about places in terms of perception influences the ways in which we structure and evaluate places. Further, our perceptions influence our sense of belonging in specific places. Given the fragmentation of postmodern spaces, we felt that a locative social media art intervention using smartphone technologies could provide people with a visceral connection to Melbourne as a city of literature, through an inside perspective where people encounter poems pinned to places through mobile devices.

Being in places with mobile phones

The way in which we imagine places underpins our research project, where we pin poetry to geographical places using smartphones, satellite technology and the Internet. We are using the very technologies that improve our comfort in urban spaces. Place-making activities that create a sense of belonging in transitional places are commonplace. Ito et al. (2007) define mobile phones as a form of ‘cocooning’ or place-making technology because they enable users to experience a personalised media ecology that is carried around by the person rather than being attached to a physical place. Perhaps in our desire to create landscapes that enhance connections with places, we are guilty of a Utopian impulse to break free of an uncomfortable present where we feel displaced in our urbanscapes by colonising them with place-making tactics. Poetry 4 U may well be construed as a place-making tactic. However, we argue that it is a place-making tactic designed to enhance the sense of being in a place, unlike the use of headphones and computer games, for example, which push a specific place into the background of perceptions (Turkle, 2010).

The effects of mobile phones on social interactions in public spaces, the pressures of being constantly networked (Castells et al., 2007; Ling, 2004) as well as how mobile phones impact on notions of identity (Hjorth, 2009) have served as a locus for numerous research investigations. Much research has been conducted into the implications of mobile phones for communication and staying in touch (Inkinen, 2010). Scholars (Berry and Hamilton, 2010a; Castells et al., 2007; Crawford and Goggin, 2009; Hjorth, 2009; Ito et al., 2007; Ling, 2004) have observed that mobile phones have changed the way we perceive and socially interact in public spaces. People have become disconnected from the physical world in favour of being constantly connected through networks to family, friends and work. We frequently encounter people talking on mobiles oblivious to their surroundings. Plant (2002) describes this phenomenon as being both ‘here and elsewhere’, in that people are physically present yet not engaged with their immediate physical surroundings. The use of mobile phones has become associated with a disconnection from physical environs because the significance of being in specific places recedes into the background as people use mobiles to connect with others who are elsewhere, or to engage in place-making activities such as playing games or other forms of entertainment. Yet, our relationships to places are key to our identity, belonging and sense of community (Augé, 1995; Tuan, 1974).

Clearly, the city is a mediated place within which place-making arises from the desire to construct meaning and, increasingly, technology provides the means by which mediation takes place. Kluitenberg identifies the city as ‘a space in which the public is reconfigured by a multitude of media and communication networks interwoven into the social and political functions of space to form a “hybrid space”’ (Kluitenberg, 2006: 8). In his paper theorising on ‘augmented spaces’, Manovich (2006: 221) poses a question: ‘How is our experience of a spatial form affected when the form is filled in with dynamic and rich multimedia information?’. Our sense of place is changing because of mobile communications infrastructure (Jassem, 2010) as well as the spatialities of postmodernity (Soja, 1989). Places are laid over with invisible networks. Castells et al. (2007) refer to these invisible networks as the ‘space of flows’ which is ‘the material organization of simultaneous social interaction at a distance by networking communication, with the technological support of telecommunications, interactive communication systems, and fast transportation technologies’ (Castells et al., 2007: 171). The space of flows has geographical coordinates and is configured according to communication network infrastructures. Furthermore, a new generation of smartphones, social software and GPS technologies offers the ability to create new cultural spaces, as Udell observes:

In the very near future, billions of people will be roaming the planet with GPS devices. Clouds of network connectivity are forming over our major cities and will inevitably coalesce. The geo-aware web isn’t a product we buy; it’s an environment we colonize. (Udell, 2005: np)

The space of flows (Castells et al., 2007) then represents new spaces and new frontiers to be explored and colonised; however, the colonisation of these new worlds does not involve the displacement and disenfranchisement of original inhabitants. Rather, the colonisation is more about placing information in new spaces overlaying places in our urban environments.

Augmented or hybrid spaces can be conceived as Big Brother panopticons holding the inhabitants under perpetual surveillance (Marx, 2002; Norris et al., 2004). On the other hand, locative media technologies can turn cities into anthropologocentric places where individuals can readily find stories, memories and communities: a sense of what lies beneath the surface. Smartphone applications can bring archival images, stories and sounds into the street using GPS to create an augmented reality. Crang and Graham (2007: 789) suggest ‘artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience’. There is a growing body of research around the use of wireless networks for conceptual art and new media projects that explore relationships between communities, local and global identity and social activities, which are referred to as locative media. Mobile technologies allow us to digitally superimpose information on the physical world. This, in turn, allows the re-imagining of places and identity, and reinvigorates our sense of place (Augé, 1995; Tuan, 1974). We are re-imagining Melbourne as a City of Literature where people walking or travelling around Melbourne can view site-specific community-generated poetry to provide a layer of narrative, which may alter the readers’ perceptions of their immediate surroundings.

Situating the Poetry 4 U project

The object of our research, which we need to contextualise within a field of enquiry, sits between disciplinary boundaries. We bring together affective geography, which may be regarded as a subset of contemporary cultural geography, creative writing, creative arts practices, urban studies and pervasive computing in the form of Web 2.0 and mobile media in the Poetry 4 U project. Bal, in a discussion of her own inter-disciplinary research practices, states:

The field of cultural analysis is not delimited because the traditional delimitations must be suspended; by selecting an object, you question a field. Nor are its methods sitting in a toolbox waiting to be applied; they, too, are part of the exploration. You do not conduct a method: you conduct a meeting between several, a meeting in which the object participates so that, together, object and methods can become a new, not firmly delineated, field. (2009: 13)

Our methodology is practice-based research (Smith and Dean, 2009) where our process or method has a web-like structure and has attributes of a Deleuzian rhizome structure with ‘multiple entryways and exits’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25). Our research method is cyclical rather than linear and does include ‘travelling’ concepts (Bal, 2009) such as place, creative practice, design and new media. Our creative concept, Poetry 4 U (the current incarnation), has travelled through several iterations, incarnations and events and, once again, is now on the threshold of becoming another as it follows the trajectory of developments in social and locative media. Poetry 4 U has always been, and remains, grounded in place and is site-specific, yet, at the same time, hypothetically it is portable in the sense that it is applicable to other sites. The current incarnation of Poetry 4 U is attached to Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the Second UNESCO City of Literature.

Our research questions centre on creative arts practice and new media technologies. We deconstructed ideas of places and cities in order to expose possible relationships between the virtual imagined city and the geographic city, and how they could be interconnected through cartography using existing social and mobile media technologies. Our central research question asked: how can creative artefacts, specifically poems, become a part of city landscape? Our second research question is of a more pragmatic nature: how can mobile media be used to engage creative writers and readers of literature with Melbourne’s profile as a City of Literature? We addressed this question through a design process where we experimented with different new media platforms in order to create a space where we could exercise a curatorial role.

Some connections with other location-based technologies

Geocaching is a concept where the public can share, store and retrieve data that is tied to geographic coordinates. Each unit of input by the user is accompanied by an address, a time-stamped latitude and longitude coordinate where the content was uploaded. This content can then be made to appear on the map at that location. Hikers first used geocaching in order to put down virtual signposts as a boon for fellow travellers. The hikers sometimes mark interesting spots on the terrain as well. Geocaching allows users to create annotated cartographies of geographic places that may be of interest or use to other users.

Poetry 4 U embraces the rapid uptake of contemporary location-based social media services, as suggested by popular applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. Foursquare was reported to have reached 4 million registered members in October 2010. These applications allow users to insert geocaches in the form of written material, track their friends and unlock achievements as they use it. In addition, they also allow users to use Twitter and text messaging through the application interface.

There are certain drawbacks to tracking the movements of people. Foucault (1975) used the concept of the panopticon to specifically refer to the move towards the increasingly stringent observation of the public. According to Foucault, Jeremy Bentham first introduced the term panopticon as a prison design where all the prisoners (pan) knew they would be observed (opticon) without their realising whether or not they were under direct surveillance at any given time. Increasingly, urbanscapes are also panopticons with the increased use of CCTV. Location-based mobile phone applications enabled by GPS technology may be construed as part of a panopticon by which any individual’s movement through an urban place may be tracked. However, it appears that the benefits of having real-time maps, such as those provided through Google Maps, outweigh people’s reluctance to be visible in an otherwise invisible panopticon.

The Poetry 4 U project is designed with an approach towards people’s engagement with place as well as their curiosity about geo-cached content. It has a connection with MyStory, initiated by Matt Blackwood, which maps the laneways of Melbourne with a curated set of stories by Barry Dickens, Cate Kennedy, Tony Birch and Matt Blackwood; and also with Sydney’s Sidetracks: History Where It Happened, a history site which pins archival stories and images to an interactive map of Sydney. Our project also has similarities to the London Riots Google Maps, which used the concept of pinning verified content about the riots drawn from social media, specifically Twitter feeds and Facebook, to specific locations around London.

Stories Unbound (http://www.storiesunbound.com/) is an application commissioned by the Melbourne Writers’ Festival that allows anyone to read and write stories about anything they choose, and tag them with GPS coordinates. Locations are the places where the writer/participant happens to be located geographically. Connections between stories and place happen accidentally. Stories Unbound does not create a curated space for literature.

Poetry 4 U differentiates itself from these projects because it has a specific focus to empower poets and writing communities to exploit developments in social media and smartphone technologies to generate new poetic writing forms through experimental performances. It also retains artistic and curatorial control, thus engaging with creative industry practices in regard to writing as an artistic pursuit.

The human computer interactivity model for applications such as these and Poetry 4 U suggests a human cursor effect, where the users themselves are replacing the mouse pointer (in the case of a conventional program). In other words, humans are navigating the physical world in order to uncover or contribute all manner of invisible content. This is reflected in the design of Poetry 4 U, where users can move along the length of Swanston Street to discover new poems.

Chronology of the design and development of the Poetry 4 U project

Twitter poetry 2009–2010

The poetics of new media is an emerging field of intellectual enquiry, whereas literary studies are well-established in academic circles. Raley (2009), in a paper presented to the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, confronts this debate to argue that a robust concept of reading needs to include mobile communication technologies as well as print. Raley also cited our 2009 Twitter poetry competition as evidence that new media are, indeed, being taken up by creative writers as a new publishing platform for their work.

Twitter is a dynamic social media application in the form of mediated communication that places strictures on the length of messages but allows links and keyboard symbols. Tweets are limited to 140 characters or keystrokes including spaces and punctuation. Succinctness has again become paramount, as it was in the age of telegrams, and has resulted in shorthand forms of writing. Twitter has much in common with SMS forms of communication; however, there is one very important difference: Twitter tends to be an asymmetric one-to-many medium rather than one-to-one. It has its own terminology referring to specific actions. For example, the term ‘follow’ refers to those people you have subscribed to so that you can see their status updates appear in your timeline or stream. ‘Followers’ refer to people who have subscribed to you and have your updates appear in their stream. ‘Tweet’ refers to a status update; ‘retweet’ refers to a status update being forwarded by a follower. ‘Stream’ refers to a timeline where tweets appear. The stream can be organised into threads according to topics, similar to a discussion forum. To distinguish between various post threads, hash tags (#) are used. These operate in a similar way to keywords in search engines and are used within Twitter to structure content according to categories or threads. Its 140 character restriction creates challenges whilst its instant messaging enables poets to access audiences across the borders of time and space. We used the hash tag #Poetry4U.

The initial competition in 2009 was motivated by the team’s hunch that Twitter was an ideal medium for poetry. We were not alone in this perception. In 2007, Tom Watson noticed that Twitter posts used language in way that suggested poetry. He received the following tweet from Steve Bowrick:

Driving down to West Cork used to be a quiet pleasure.

Now it’s a melancholy chore.

Still, the sky is absolutely full of stars.

He used tweets as found objects to construct this poem:

One

Pouring another cup of coffee and trying to get motivated

Revelling in playing the Clash at inappropriate levels of volume

Napping is seriously heaven.

Rip, mix, burn. (Watson, 2007)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Poems in the streets.

Twitterature, where the authors Aciman and Rensin (2009) present condensed versions of canonical literature in sequences of tweets, is another example of the potential of new media such as Twitter for innovative writing. Their introduction (xvi) concludes with an invitation:

And allow us now to open

The eternal aperture

To the brilliant soul of common man:

We now present you … Twitterature

Clearly, new social media provide a myriad of opportunities for creative writers and artists. As stated earlier, our research focus is the intersection between location-based technology, social media and geographical place – Melbourne as a City of Literature.

We found that the restriction of space encouraged poets to find innovative ways to encapsulate their idea, with links, symbols and keyboard strokes being used to evoke thought in the reader, as in the example below Netwurker Mez aka Mary Ann Breeze submitted to the 2009 competition:

viEw[W!] Lacement.

[p]Lacement wakes

from a s[d(L)]o[Ll]iLED aeS[yn]thetic_scape.

sHe bleeds_heat_like_So[A]rr(as)ow[s].

@netwurker

Popular applications and websites that make it easy to add symbols into Twitter and SMS messages include Emjoi, TwitterKeys and CopyPasteCharacter as well as keystroke symbols commonly used as an SMS shorthand such as <3 to represent a heart, and :) as a smile. We expect to see more of these used in future submissions.

After the success of the initial Twitter poetry competition in 2009, the team set up the 2010 Poetry 4 U project, which connected to a Twitter poetry competition run by RMIT Union Arts to coincide with the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in 2010. We received more than 600 entries, indicative of the popularity of Twitter amongst poets. We used four modes of disseminating the winning entries. First, the winning entries were fed out at regular intervals through a Twitter hash tag. Second, selected poems were pasted onto advertising columns in Melbourne’s Central Business District (CBD) as posters.

Third, city screens were integrated into the project. During the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in 2010, selected poems were streamed along the tickers on the East Shard of Federation Square. This added a public art dimension to the project. We also produced a small print anthology of the collected winning entries.

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Figure 2.

Poems over the streets.

We approached a multimedia developer with a design brief to build an application where the user would walk along Swanston Street with the application switched on. The user would see the poem appear as an overlay directly over the streetscape through the iPhone’s camera along a specific route. At various intervals the poems would change. The application would use the phone’s built-in GPS to determine which poem to float onto the screen. The user would be able to share the poem through social software such as Twitter and Facebook.

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Figure 3.

Proposed iPhone application mock-up.

We chose Swanston Street between Victoria Street and Federation Square in Melbourne’s CBD because it forms an axis through the city. It is a busy street filled with shops, cafes and bars, and trams run regularly up and down. To pin the poetry to our route we used Google Maps. Each pin on the map (see Figure 4) has GPS coordinates that feed into the application. The Google map will provide another way to access the poetry and gain a sense of places and stories along the route.

In a blog entry documenting the process of pinning the selected poems to the map one of the researchers stated:

I have started pinning the winning entries from the Poetry 4 U competition to Swanston Street. At first I thought I would pin the poems with explicit references to specific spots. This seemed to be a straightforward thing but it did not turn out quite that way. Some poems ‘spoke’ to other poems. I wondered if this was anything to do with the Twitter stream that was there when the poets contributed their poems to the stream? So, I thought about this. Can I recreate the sense of poetry Twitter stream within the interaction of the iPhone app? This is my design and curatorial challenge now.

Once the researcher had completed pinning the poems to places, she observed on her blog:

I have pinned the poems to Swanston Street using Google maps. This increases our options with the application because it means that people not actually present in the street can read the poems. I have decided that this is appropriate in the spirit of universal access.

At the same time, another researcher on the team was designing a distinctive visual identity for the application and the Poetry 4 U project. The design concept centred on a ‘P’ for poetry or poem as well as place, which would also represent a pin. We now had material ready for conversion to an iPhone application.

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Figure 4.

Annotated Google Map with Poetry 4 U identity.

The question of universal access led the team to re-evaluate the necessity to build an iPhone application to achieve the objective of creating a curated publishing space for poetry that has a direct relationship to Melbourne as a city. Apple updates their operating systems frequently through iTunes. This means applications also need frequent updates. This would require the ongoing services of a technical developer. We wanted to be able to update the space we would create with new poems without having to go through the process and expense of updating the content within an application. The experience of pinning the poems to a Google map and the process of creating a unique visual identity for the project meant that we could mark the open source Google map with our unmistakable presence. In addition, we wanted the poems and places to be the focus. What seemed to be a good idea was shelved in favour of a simpler design solution: we would use current Web 2.0 technology to create a publishing space we could curate. This also meant that anyone with a smartphone could see our annotated cartography of Melbourne, not just people with the iPhone app. Our creative project entered a new design and dissemination phase following the rhizome structure of practice-led research.

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Figure 5.

Poems pinned to places.

Pinning the city 2011

The latest iteration of Poetry 4 U is a website through which we seek submissions for inclusion on our poetry maps of Melbourne. The next map to be pinned with poetry is the City Circle tram route. This decision again demonstrates the rhizome nature of practice-based research. The new map is an extension of the Bluetooth City Circle Route prototype created with a Bluetooth server (Berry and Hamilton, 2010b).

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Figure 6.

City Circle poems pinned over tram route.

The website was created using free open source Web 2.0 technology in the form of WordPress and Google Maps for content management. Thus, a new space for literature was created.

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Figure 7.

The Poetry 4 U website design.

The project is ongoing as we continue to pin poems publicly sourced through our website about specific geographic places in Melbourne to Google Maps, thereby creating new experiences for readers.

Framing the Poetry 4 U website – concluding remarks

The Poetry 4 U website engages with a wider international trend in publishing and disseminating literary works. There is an abundance of devices and platforms that have come onto the market recently, including iPads, iPhones, Android phones and Kindle, all of which disrupt and expand established traditional publishing models. The use of social media for literary expression is a deviation from the more traditional print forms, and challenges the older paradigms of dissemination and publication. Additionally, publication trends have changed significantly with e-books gaining popularity. Soares (2011) notes that in the USA:

E-books grew a dramatic +164.8 per cent in December 2010 versus the previous year ($49.5m vs $18.7m). In the AAP’s ninth year of tracking this category, E-books, once again, increased significantly on an annual basis, up +164.4 per cent for 2010 vs 2009 ($441.3m vs $166.9m). E-book sales represented 8.32 per cent of the trade book market in 2010 vs 3.20 per cent the previous year. (np)

Further, more Web 2.0 technologies have resulted in an explosion of blogging and various interest communities. For example, there has been an exponential growth in poetry community websites such as dVersePoets and online literary journals as a form of publication. Some of these websites, such as American Tanka, RiverLit and Tuck Magazine, offer peer-reviewed or curated spaces. Indeed, there are even sites that aggregate what they consider to be the best online literary magazines and journals, for example, the Every Writer’s Resource website compiles a list of the best 50 on a regular basis (Every Writer’s Resource, Literary Magazines, n.d.). The development of these virtual communities (Rheingold, 2000) of creative writers is an extension of the second wave of electronic media (Jankowski, 2006), which builds social capital based on ‘interpersonal trust, social norms and association membership’ (Jankowski, 2006: 64). Creative writers are driving quality control because of the changed landscape. No longer is it left to the editors of major publishing houses or universities with MFA programs to determine what is worthy of publication.

We have conceptualised Poetry 4 U as a curated space and a way of publishing creative content with a reputation for quality to connect with established communities of practice that provide ‘the overall conditions and basis for interpreting and making sense of activities and events’ (Jankowski, 2006: 64). Clearly, the constellation of Web 2.0, smartphones and location-based technologies has huge implications for creative arts practices. Established communities of creative writers have adopted them in various configurations to create new media forms as well as publication and dissemination systems. They have also facilitated collaborative activities, which are global as well as local.

Our design process sought to address how we could use mobile media to engage both readers and creative writers with Melbourne as a City of Literature. Through this process we found a way of pinning creative artefacts, in the form of Twitter-length poems, to a city landscape in a way that is accessible globally as well as locally.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 8.

Visceral and virtual City of Literature.

We envisage that our next steps towards the creation of a visceral as well as virtual city of literature space will include commissioning poets and artists in residence to interpret the city as both a space of social flows as well as a geographical place, to produce new works where human cursors pin poetry to their special places.