Twine Poetry

interTwine'd

InterTwine'd is a Twine-based poem grappling with different forms of expression to process the complicated experience of memory repression. My own limited understanding of the Twine platform directed InterTwine'd's aesthetic into a very unique world; I could control pacing. The timing of the piece--the poetry breaks, the highlighted words, and the direction of the hyperlinks--created InterTwine'd's main aesthetic experience.

The poem starts faster; the frames are as glancing to the player as the thoughts are to the poem's consciousness. The content may be dark and somewhat disturbing, but the words aren't given any special attention. They exist in their own stilted reality. The player can read them in moments and move on to the next frame of the story without engaging, experiencing, or truly understanding their meaning.

And then the pacing changes.

The player gets stuck in a contemplation of the words "Repetitive growls." At first, the words seem as darkly inconsequential as the preceding phrases, and yet the consciousness sticks to it. Mulls on it. Warps it. Strips the words of the softness of vowels, leaving only cold percussive consonants.

The next frame is the largest block of text in the poem, with three potential links. Each link leads to a different surrealist representation of the female body. The player sits stuck in the frame until they have clicked all the options, forcing the player to engage with the information in the frame. and then all the options again. The second time around, the pictures are different. Warped. Inverted, blurred, made terrifying and indistinct. And yet the player is stuck with the images. with the text. with the memories made vibrant by a new air of violation. This pacing aesthetic forces the player to revisit unsettling imagery until the consciousness's memory has run its course, and an escape route presents itself.

And then the player faces Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory warping herself into a facsimile of normal. The piece returns to the glancing treatment of text, accompanied by a new blatantly modified copse of images. Shaking fragments of dream flicker over a visceral representation of more warped memories. A non-confrontational banana held gingerly in front of a woman's onesie. A pair of identical faces repeated but distorted. A woman's torso, arm, and leg thinned out. Wrong, somehow, with a clumsy black swipe across sexualizing features. Once more, the reader is stuck in contemplation. Coming out of the vortex of varied memories, the reader sees this one photo repeated. Again. And again. Replaced by black, and then disappeared all together.

In retrospect, I should have utilized Twine's hyperlink function more cohesively into the narrative. The process of memory suppression is complicated and cyclical enough to work well with complex hyperlink paths, but I didn't take advantage of that in the narrative. Additionally, Audio would have contributed to the piece more effectively than the pirated photos I used. My knowledge of photo imbedding outweighed my knowledge of audio integration, however, so I stuck with the photos. Using an unfamiliar medium to create an immersive user experience proved more difficult than imagined, but the pacing and visual aesthetic elements of Twine helped me translate my piece more effectively.