Reactive Media MEETS e-poetry

"The Web is a dynamic, interactive, nonlinear, global, distributed, digital media system -- just to use a few Internet-related buzzwords. Aren't there enough adjectives to describe this technology? Why insist on the significance of yet another?

This issue of Poems that Go focuses on 'reactive' media, text or images that responds in real time to the direct actions of the viewer. Experimental graphics designer John Maeda, who programmed computer images to react immediately to viewer input, pioneered the computing method associated with 'reactive graphics.' His 1995 work, The Reactive Square, was a book with accompanying floppy disk (later editions included CD-ROM) for the Macintosh which consisted of a graphical square that visually responded to sound-- singing, shouting or talking to the image on the computer screen yielded distinct visual responses (that is, as long as viewers had a microphone plugged into their Mac)." -- from Reactive Media MEETS e-poetry, Poems that GO, Winter 2003