Whispering Galleries:
Documenting Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's Interactive Poetry Project

History of the Project

Whispering Galleries by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse is a 2014 site-specific, interactive, multimedia poetry project that uses a reader’s gestures to transform a local diary into erasure poetry on the screen. As readers gesture over the computer, transcriptions from a New Haven shopkeeper’s 1858 diary dissolve as so much digital dust, leaving behind a shimmering poem. Through a webcam, the participant’s shadow emerges behind the words, creating a symbolic link between the viewer and the work. Like the whispering gallery architecture referenced by the title, the project transmits “whispers” from the past across time.

The work was created to honor New Haven’s 375th anniversary as part of Connecticut Humanities’s Connecticut at Work festival, which celebrated the local history of labor, and was commissioned by Site Projects, a nonprofit that supports artistic works. The project was also supported by The New Haven Free Public Library and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Originally displayed at the New Haven Free Public Library on April 26, 2014, it later went on to be exhibited The Institute Library, The International Symposium on Electronic Art at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and “You | I: Interfaces & Reader Experience” at the Paul Watkins Gallery, Winona State University.

Borsuk, an artist and writer, wrote the poetry, while Bouse, a digital artist, coded the JavaScript that yields the digital effects. To create the poems, Borsuk first visited the Yale University’s Manuscripts and Archives to find a diary that might serve as its basis. The diary selected was written by an anonymous woodworker and shopkeeper in 1858-1859. On their website, Borsuk and Bouse describe the diary:

The keeper of this diary worked with his hands: as a woodworker making handles for tools, sawing lumber, and sweeping out the shop; as a violinist making music at intimate gatherings and church occasions; and as a composer, writing pieces for performance at the local school. In daily entries, the author's week is measured out by hand-work.
Others come in and out of his shop and home: customers and friends mentioned in passing, whose presence reveals the way a New England community of the mid-nineteenth century relied on careful manual labor for its members' livelihood and enrichment.

Borsuk transcribed thirty entries from the diaries spanning January 1 through December 31, 1858 and conducted original research to identify references and names mentioned in the diaries. The original diary can be founds as (Miscellaneous) Collection (MS 181, folders 8&9). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

The poetic style is influenced by the genre of erasure poetry, as exemplified in Tom Phillip’s Humument (1966). Erasure poetry creates new art by selectively removing words from an existing manuscript, and in so doing, brings renewed attention to the original. The genre showcases the interdependencies between the past and present and creates a dialog between them. In Whispering Galleries, the past of the diaries is layered beneath, informs and is transformed into Borsuk’s poetry.

The digital art was programmed in JavaScript on a webGL canvas. It makes use of Three.js and shaders to render the text, webcam image of the participant, and virtual “dust.” It uses the LEAP controller with Leap Motion’s JavaScript SDK to track the participant’s gestures.

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