Section III: "Faith" by Robert Kendall
Robert Kendall's “Faith” is a synesthetic poem that combines textual animation with motion, sound, and color. The poem is an example of born-digital art and illustrates how form, design, visualization, and text can collaboratively create meaning. At the very beginning of the poem, the audience can see the strength of Faith as Faith is capitalized and remains static and logic hits Faith and falls off and vanishes. The falling off of “logic” is suggestive of the inner conflict of the speaker whose strong Faith disregards logic at the beginning. However, the conflict between logic and Faith becomes stronger as the poem advances. Kendall captures the inner turmoil of the speaker by using textual animation when various words appear on screen and move each other to make a space for new letters to create new words replacing previous words. This replacement of one word by another illustrates the continuous struggle between faith and doubt in the speaker’s mind. The doubt is further illustrated by various words, such as theory, consummate, logic, bend, etc.
Kendall allows the audience to visualize the motion related to certain words; for example, when “button-presses” appears on screen, the words flashes illustrating the motion of pressing a button; when the word “leave-taking” appears on screen, the word once moves from its space to exemplify the motion of leaving a space; when the “red winking neon” appears on screen, the words flashes in a way that exemplifies a wink. On the fourth slide, the poem looks like a print-based poem with linear sentence. However, reader’s experience of reading a linear poem is instantly disrupted; first, a group of words deviate from the linear line, and then the word “leap” appears, grows bigger, becomes small again, and takes a solitary space at the end of the poem. In the fifth and final slide, all the words fall off and at the end Faith also falls off. However, the meaning of the final fall of Faith remains ambiguous, because unlike the other words, Faith remains straight; thus it can also be inferred that Faith reigns on the ruins of doubt.
The poem has two versions: one with music and another without music. According to the introduction by Kendell, “the gradual textual unfolding is choreographed to music.”
This poem exemplifies how digital intervention can make the experience of reading a poem an immersive experience. What fascinates me as an audience is the visual meta-poetic quality of this poem. While the form, motion, color, and animation are used to convey the theme of eternal conflict between doubt and faith in human consciousness, the way the poem builds up in front of the audience, shows the process of poetic creation. As the audience interacts with the interface, they are taken into the mind of the poet- they can see how an idea gradually becomes a poem - how words are interwoven, how ideas develop, and how various organizations change meaning. Also, Kendall engages the audience as a co-creator of meaning. The introduction is very brief and Kendall refrains from explaining the meaning or the process of interacting with this poem.
A detailed analysis of "Faith" by Dr. Dene Grigar can be found here.
