Jason Nelsons     “With Love from a Failed Planet” 

Description:

With Love from a Failed Planet is a series of subversive and capricious micro-fictions embedded within a circling mass of logos from a compilation of large corporations from around the world.  Each logo reveals a cutting and humorous micro-fiction detailing the demise of one of the 45 major corporations listed, inviting the reader to laugh and displace any hint of sympathy that one might otherwise feel for the failing corporations.  With an overlay of ominous yet playful music, Nelson invokes a sense of whimsy to the reader, common to many of his works.

Commentary:

N. Katherine Hayles is an expert in the emerging field of E-Literature.  In her essay “Print is Flat; Code is Deep: The Importance of Media Specific Analysis” she guides us through the framework needed to understand E-Literature within it’s own context.  Using her analysis we can create our own framework to peel back the layers of With Love from a Failed Planet.   “The materiality of those embodiments [medium-specific constraints and possibilities shape texts] interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practices to create the effects we call literature” (Hayles).
Using Hayles’ idea that the materiality of the medium creates our concept of Literature, or in our case E-Lit, as a frame to understand the dynamics of With Love from a Failed Planet, we can begin to see that it is not just the micro-fictions themselves that create the experience, but the aesthetic of the piece as well as the modality is what produces our full experience with it.   For instance, the anti-capitalist, subversive content of Jason’s micro-fictions is intended to subvert our own preconceptions of an apocalyptic end to our planet through capitalism. Colorful and brazen against a depressive stark grey background, Nelson specifically chose recognizable, powerful logos and brands in order to draw the eye and make the fictions accessible through them.  The interface in which we experience each story evokes a certain sense of macabre and apocalyptic foreshadowing which adds to the piece: hovering above the distant grey backdrop the swirling, ghost-like logos parade their stories for the viewer to ensnare within their mouse click.  The interface is a spinning globe representative of the world one consumes and relates to, with a mass of brightly coloured, orbiting logos, each a portal to how they themselves came to an end or contributed to the failing of the planet as a whole.  But again, under this aesthetic lies the intention to subvert and subvert again! There is cold, techno-like music playing in the background, which is tying the sense of macabre together, however all of this sense of grim portent is deposed by the humorous nature of the fiction, the bold color of the logos and whimsical nature of the music.

Author Bio:

Jason Nelson is an avant garde digital and hypermedia poet and artist. He is a lecturer on Cyberstudies, digital art and creative writing, digital writing and creative practice at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He is best known for his artistic flash games such as Game, Game, Game and Again Game, and This is How You Will Die.

Nelson’s style of Web art merges various genres and technologies, focusing on collages of poetry, image, sound, movement and interaction. He currently lives in Gold Coast, Australia

Work Cited:

Hayles, K. Print is Flat; Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis. 2004. 21 March 2013.

Nelson, J. With Love from a Failed Planet. n.d.

Simon, N. The Wilderness in the Corner: A Discusson with Jason Nelson. 2007.