Hypertext Poem
Kathi Inman Berens and Alicia Cohen
BEGIN POEM
RestOration is a hypertext poem about a villa in Bergen, an e-waste dump in Ghana, and what takes us from here to there.
At the installation here at the University of Bergen in Norway, readers engage the hypertext near an e-waste sculpture evoking Narcissus' pool. The screens-- some dark, some active --reflect and implace the reader. The monitors have been de-commissioned and await disposal.
To hear Echo, touch the playlist on this page. Open the hypertext poem in a new tab to toggle between voice recordings and poem.
Hypertext is beautifully suited to connect disparate phenomena and suggest how they interoperate in the world.
Bergen’s mindfully slow pace and petroleum-funded socialism, the care economy, accelerating cycles of tech obsolescence, drought in India and California: what happens in one affects the others.
Apple tells us: “it just works.”
For whom? At what cost?
Alicia Cohen wrote the poems. Kathi Inman Berens wrote the prose or culled it, and designed and wrote the hypertext.
