“Entropic Texts” by Alinta Krauth, Jason Nelson

Title:

Entropic Texts

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2015

Medium:

Experimental digital poetry

Artist Statement:

Entropic Texts is an experimental digital poem using text, image, and an interactive interface to explore the notion of entropy. Entropy is nature’s tendency towards decay. Thus, it is entropy that predicts the arrow of time and the length of the life of all things – living and material. As you scroll through this artwork, you are led into a world where the “force” of decay gets slowly stronger, to the point where text, images, and moving image, become glitched and decayed beyond recognition. This imaginary world of quickening decay is represented by the junkyard. What we often call junkyards are spaces that were once collections of adored or useful items that have succumbed to entropy; thus, they are both clear metaphorical and physical spaces of decay. Using a combination of the artists’ own poetry written while visiting junkyards and generated text, we seek to experiment with the life and decay of digital data. This work is intended to be read both ways. Once the end is reached – 99% decay force, the piece can then be scrolled back through, reversing the arrow of time, and thus reversing entropy. The act of creating a digital interactive poem feels a lot like fighting with the forces of entropy – as an artist you are creating a work that is constantly attempting to break itself. Sometimes a large portion of the artist’s role is to resurrect broken data. This process of creation and destruction of data, while central to our theme, was also self evident in the creation of the work itself.