Cruising

• CreatorIngrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar Ankerson
• Year Published2001
• Originally Published InPoems That Go

Originally published in the journal the authors co-founded and edited in 2001, Poems That Go, "Cruising" was republished in 2006 in the ELO's Electronic Literature Collection 1. It is described as "an excited oral recitation of a teenager's favorite pastime in small town Wisconsin, racing up and down the main drag of Main Street looking to make connections, wanting love. But by merging the linear aspect of the sound recording with an interactive component that demands a degree of control, 'Cruising' reinforces the spatial and temporal themes of the poem by requiring the user to learn how to "drive" the text. A new user must first struggle with gaining control of the speed, the direction, and the scale in order to follow the textual path of the narrative. When the text on the screen and the spoken words are made to coincide, the rush of the image sequence is reduced to a slow ongoing loop of still frames. The viewer moves between reading text and experiencing a filmic flow of images but cannot exactly have both at the same time. In this way, the work seeks to highlight the materiality of text, film, and interface." -- From Electronic Literature Collection 1