Tramway (digital poem)

Digital poem by Alexandra Saemmer

Tramway Author| Alexandra Saemmer

|

Language| French
Genres| Digital poetry, Electronic literature

Publication date

| 2000, revised 2009
Publication place| France
Media type| Web

Tramway is a combinatorial and interactive poem by Alexandra Saemmer, first published in 2000 and recreated in 2009.[1] Its central theme is the act of closing the eyes of her father on his death.[2] Tramway, by Alexandra Saemmer is a multimedia hypertext work based on her experiences with her father's death. This work is a notable use of Flash as a transitory medium and the content was designed to degrade as computing power increased. It is written in French.

## Interactivity and form

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Tramway presents the text in the form of text boxes resembling old PC browser windows.[3] By closing a text window, multiple other text windows appear, which means it's not possible to read all the text windows displayed on the screen, as closing a text box removes all boxes from the screen and produces new ones. The narration does not follow a temporal organization; the reader must find their own path. Bouchardon relates in his review that that this is an interactive story where the reader's gestures and choices create different pathways and journeys through the text.[4]

Tramway plays upon the lability, or constant change,[1] that is inherent to the digital computer by adapting the speed with which the work performs to the processing speed of the reader's computer. Faster computers will make the work almost impossible to read. This has been compared to the way that William Gibson's digital poem Agrippa (1992) is intentionally impossible to read.

Leonardo Flores featured this work in I Love Epoetry. Flores compares the content of the work as a commentary on the fragility of human bodies with the fragility of the work's media as well. The work's timing depends on a computer processor speed, so faster computers render the work illegible. Further the Flash software is now deprecated. As Flores explains, "This mechanism of memory wants to disappear in time, like William Gibson’s “Agrippa,” perhaps because memories fade and make room for peace."[5]

## Publication and reception

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Tramway was published in March, 2009 in Issue 2 of bleuOrange as a Flash Art piece. Washington State University's Electronic Literature Lab translated this work into Conifer, a preservation program in 2021. This work is currently available through The NEXT: Museum, Library and Preservation Space.[6]

Tramway was featured in ALNNT2 Laboratoire de recherche sur les arts et les litteratures numeriques.[7] This work is noted in European Electronic Literature.

Tramway was published in the French-Canadian journal BleuOrange: revue de littérature hypermédiatique[8] and in the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.[9] It has also been taught in French high schools.[10]

In his keynote for the Electronic Literature Organization conference in 2018, Serge Bouchardon used Tramway as a prime example of artists addressing technological obsolescence by re-writing and re-imagining the artwork again.[11] The work has also been analysed by Lydia Tuan.[12]

## References

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1. ^ a b Bouchardon, Serge (2019-05-05). "Mind the gap! 10 gaps for Digital Literature?". Electronic Book Review. doi:10.7273/J3W2-H969. Retrieved 2023-09-30.
2. ^ "Tramway | ELMCIP". elmcip.net. Retrieved 2023-10-29.
3. ^ Tuan, Lydia (2016-12-09). "Virtual Playgrounds: Electronic Literature's Challenge to Authorship". FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts (23). doi:10.2218/forum.23.1712. ISSN 1749-9771. S2CID 64239362. Retrieved 2023-09-30.
4. ^ Bouchardon, Serge (2020-04-25). "The Digital Subject: From Narrative Identity to Poetic Identity?". Electronic book review. doi:10.7273/53th-r785. Retrieved 2023-09-30. "However, if you read a contemporary digital fiction, such as Streetcar (Tramway) by Alexandra Saemmer, you will look in vain for such a well-organized representation of a life path. The chapters, the events of life are not successive but accumulative, and appear like different windows of thought at the same time. You do not follow a temporal flow arranged in advance towards an end, you are just stuck in the unknown, your attention is divided between multiple stimuli of texts, images and sounds. Moreover, you can play with the story. It is not written in advance, your gestures and choices expressed by the clicks open up different adventures, so that the journey can draw many new and puzzling roads."
5. ^ Flores, LEonardo (February 7, 2013). ""Tramway" by Alexandra Saemmer". I love E-Poetry.
6. ^ "Tramway". The NEXT. Retrieved 2023-10-29.
7. ^ "Tramway | ALN | NT2". nt2.uqam.ca. Retrieved 2023-10-29.
8. ^ "Tramway". revuebleuorange.org (in French). Retrieved 2023-09-30.
9. ^ Engberg, Maria; Memmott, Talan; Prater, David, eds. (2013). The ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature. Blekinge.
10. ^ Brunel, Magali; Quet, François (2018-06-01). "À lecture et les ressources numériques: état des lieux des pratiques d'enseignement dans le secondaire en France" (PDF). Revue de recherches en littératie médiatique multimodale. 5. doi:10.7202/1046903ar. ISSN 2368-9242. S2CID 151513246. Retrieved 2023-09-30. "Dans le questionnaire, les enseignants ne citent pas précisément les textes qu'ils étudient, sauf si ce sont des œuvres numériques ou ayant fait l'objet d'enrichissement numérique. Ces œuvres — multimodales ou numériques — n'apparaissant que de manière minoritaire (6 %). Il semble que l'on assiste à une grande stabilité des corpus étudiés en classe, même si ceux-ci sont vidéoprojetés. On trouve tout de même quelques références aux œuvres enrichies, notamment aux ressources proposées par la BNF, comme le Candide de Voltaire ou Le livre des Merveilles, de Marco Polo (Q003, Q072, Q065, Q057). Certains enseignants indiquent qu'ils proposent la lecture d'ebooks (Q014, Q057). D'autres présentent des œuvres numériques, comme les cinépoèmes de Alfieri (Q033), ou le récit Tramway, de Saemmer (Q088)."
11. ^ Bouchardon, Serge (2018). "Mind the gap! 10 gaps for Digital Literature?". Electronic Literature Organization, conference proceedings.
12. ^ Tuan, Lydia (2016-12-09). "Virtual Playgrounds: Electronic Literature's Challenge to Authorship". FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts (23). doi:10.2218/forum.23.1712. ISSN 1749-9771.

## External links

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* In ELMCIP Knowledge Base for Electronic Literature[1]

* In the NEXT.[2]

Authority control databases |

* ELMCIP

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1. ^ "Tramway | ELMCIP". elmcip.net. Retrieved 2023-09-30.
2. ^ "Tramway". The NEXT. Retrieved 2023-09-30.