Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales

In Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales, Edward Falco presents images created by mixing chemicals in a dark room with a flashlight in order to create new meanings from the poetry that he has pre-written into the webpage. Falco uses one central “landscape” in this piece, and upon clicking different colors within the blue-to-green ombré background, a new image along with a new piece of poetry appears for several seconds before fading away and reverting the screen to showing the central landscape once again. Each poem is much too long to be read within the time before it disappears, requiring the reader to click on the particular color of the poem multiple times before being able to fully read it. This repetition adds a unique element to traditional literature: the reader can choose how much effort they desire to put into reading each poem, and this piece allows them to jump between many poems, creating a different experience for every reader.

Each color of the main landscape contains its own poem, so the entire piece has several poems and beautiful images for the reader to enjoy. Each poem contrasts starkly with traditional poetry; the longest semantically sensible sections of these poems are descriptive phrases only a few words long. Moreover, phrases within these poems are often bisected by seemingly random interjections of colors in the poems’ background images, adding an element that would be impossible to replicate in traditional literature. Falco often interjects other visual words such as “dream” or “storm” within the poems that act as recurring motifs, which help to unify the many poems. Besides these unique examples of imagery, the poems consist almost entirely of vividly descriptive words that describe landscapes or other scenes of their own, referring back to the title. Overall, Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales creates an unparalleled, colorful experience that could not be recreated by traditional poetry composed of entirely words.

The use of visual imagery and elements that can be only achieved using technology such as hyperlinks and fadeaways allows for the reader to produce their own individual experience, which is an essential component to pieces of electronic literature.