Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries presents a piece of Flash-based poetry that is guaranteed to challenge the minds of its readers, or rather viewers, while simultaneously providing elements of aesthetic pleasure. Dakota, the digital poem, uses a combination of jazz music, Flash animation and a Monaco font to exhibit a unique adaptation of literary modernism, as it is a form of exploratory media. Although it requires the viewers utmost attention and is considered to be non-interactive, the unity of the audio with the kinetics of the text help amplify the effect of the narrative, providing the viewer with both thrill and challenge. As though told in one breath, with a “stream of consciousness” – type element, Dakota describes a debaucherous adventure, which is deemed realistic when presented to the reader with both audio and visual elements; the poem itself runs at a pace in which the viewer is constantly expecting the true climax.

As the world of electronic literature expands and develops, works such as Dakota gain recognition as not only a form of new aesthetic, but also as a form of new media. As described in Eugen Grominger’s “From Line To Constellation”, poetry has acquired new characteristics with time, however simplification has remained its true essence, regardless of the form which new poetry is presented in. Grominger also discusses that the new, minimalistic approach to poetry does not necessarily equal the death of poetry, but in fact the emergence of a new and improved genre of literature. The digital age has altered the way in which poetry is presented to us, as regular written poems have undergone “remediation”, the product of which can be seen in Dakota. It can be described as multimodal, which in essence means a combination of text, sound and kinetic elements are present in order to enhance the viewing experience.

Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries is a web-art duet composed of Marc Voge and Young-hae Chang, formed in 1999. Their Flash-based, musically-synchronized work is presented in over 20 languages, which varies in speed and genre. YHCHI is often referred to as digital literature, or sometimes net art, as the text in their works can be classified as poetry, but the kinetics and the audio aspects suggest a form of cinematic art. All the videos found in the YHCHI archive start with a countdown, similar to those in old films, and are synchronized with a fast paced jazz piece.

Works Cited:

Eugen Gomringer. “From Line to Constellation,” in Concrete Poetry: A World View, Mary Ellen Solt, ed. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1968

Wikipedia. “Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries”. 16 MARCH 2013. WEB. 22 MARCH 2013.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. “Dakota”. Seoul, Korea. 2002. WEB. 22 MARCH 2013.