Diana and I sat down to write some collaborative poetry last night, and the experience turned out to be really fun! When I write creatively rather than critically, which is semi-regularly at best, it is a highly private process. I write by myself, without any outside deadlines, and don’t even share some of my writing with my husband, let alone a public audience. I was a little nervous that writing together using material sourced from the computer would either be an uncomfortable experience or might simply not work. For our final project, Diana and I set out to write five poems with material gathered from automatedbeacon.net as an extension of our Makey Makey project. Each line in the first two poems would consist of a search query captured from Beacon. To gather material for the poems, Diana and I each pressed one key responsible for executing a screenshot.

For the first poem, we talked throughout the gathering process, and for the second poem, we did our best to choose queries in silence. It was surprising how much pressure I felt in the selection process—I didn’t want to miss “good” queries, especially if Diana agreed that they were valuable for our poem. The speed of Beacon upped the ante, so that we had to make decisions quickly. We had decided on poems of ten lines, so when we had chosen eight or so queries, the pressure mounted even more; I wanted the last lines to fit the poem, to sum it up somehow, but I didn’t know what would come through Beacon next, so I was unsure about passing up queries that we were on the fence about. For the second pair of poems, we gathered ten lines of material in communication and then each took the lines home to individually construct a poem out of—the only rule being that we couldn’t delete any words or entire queries from our finished products. My experiencing creating this poem at home felt a little bit like a revision of a draft of one of my personal poems. I did a lot of reordering of the lines. I felt a tension between wanting to contextualize the queries by adding words or phrases and wanting to somehow make the queries to stand out on their own.

For our final poem, Diana and I wanted to add another layer of collaboration, so we ended up asking a friendly stranger if he would be willing to select queries from Beacon to be used in a poem constructed by Diana and I together. I was quite surprised that he agreed right away. While he was choosing queries, he remarked about one he passed over, “I should’ve done that just to fuck with you guys,” and about another, “I really want that one back but it’s never coming back.” This latter remark totally fits into our thinking about permanence and impermanence in terms of Beacon and digital technology in general. Once our volunteer, whose name we learned is Matthew, had chosen ten queries, Diana wrote them down and he had some time to reflect with us on his experience. He said he “didn’t want to make it too easy on” us, and that he “want[s] partial authorship” of the poem. We then delightedly explained that our project was largely about interrogating the idea of authorship and offered to include his name on the poem. At that point, interestingly, he insisted, “I really don’t care” and wouldn’t give us a yes or no on using his name. At that point, Diana and I took our leave to construct the poem, and ended up coming up with what we humbly thought was a pretty thought-provoking piece having to do with themes of neoliberalism, reproductive rights, and normativity. We packed up for the night after showing Matthew the poem (he was enthusiastic about the outcome and told us that as a conductor and composer, he had worked on collaborative performances with musicians and artists in the past) and agreeing that we would add him on Facebook to let him know how the project turned out.