In a series of twelve interactive haikus, Datum was brought to life over a span of twenty-one days by gathering information off the internet’s community sites, with Hamish Lambert and Ben Swinden being the creators. Datum is a piece of information, so it makes since that it would be a creation made from information. However, instead of being some boring information log, it is treated more as living creature that interacts with the users of the internet to illustrate life. When entering this “interactive haiku,” the user is met with three light musical chime, pastel colors, a list, and explanations. However, there is no haiku to be found in the work only informational sentences and singular words.
As an “interactive haiku,” it gives the illusion that the user gets to make the choices of what major life events would be experience for Datum. As easy as one life event can be clicked, it can easily be un-clicked, leaving a void in the piece giving the sense of imperfection. The idea of being in control of one’s life is often communicated in fantasy games. This can always allow for different outcomes, a sense of power, and even a sense of adventure. Using this idea, elevates the traditional poem allowing for a playful platform with interesting content but it hardly qualifies as a haiku. A haiku is a form of poetry originating from Japan. It is based off a five seven five syllable system that consist of three lines, as seen in the example below.
“An old silent pond…
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.”
-Basho Matsuo
While going through the whole piece, there was never a haiku that could be identified. It has no structure of the three sentences, or the five seven five syllable system that is the very definition of a haiku. The work is an abstraction based off traditional poetry creating a flowing imagery with notes of sounds and one-word lists. The explanation at the beginning dulls the effect of the poetic notes and imagery. Thus, not accurately being able to distinguish a poetic justice for a haiku.
Below the floating words, DATUM, is the informational sentence, “A participative and collective experience that evolved for 21 days to the rhythm of your choices. You can now see Datum’s life album. Continue.” Once past the explanation of the work, the user is left up to exploring the left side list. This list consists of twenty-one simplified life choices that may occur during a human’s life cycle, starting from Baby to Death. Each option is paired with the its own unique abstract illustration that one can associate with the word and a light chime. If the user goes down the list in order, it appears as if the illustrations grows off each other to produce a living organism. The fact that it consists of abstract shapes, colors, and animations to depict human mile stones in life may be the creator’s way to better represent the vast amount of information gathered and to cover the many experiences of each individual. If the creators tried to depict a literal meaning of each life event, then the effect would not be as successful the events would fill expected and boring.
The abstractness of the illustration and animations bring more character and whimsicalness to the creature, creating a unique curiosity to continue through the list. A temptation arises, because of this, to spend more time carefully clicking through each list item to fully grasp and understand how the word associates with the illustration. For example, “Death” is symbolized by this triangular shape that has animated half oblong that cut into it and moves in an upper wards motion. It is the most contrasting of the life events, in real life and in the imagery since it is the only one illustrated in a rich black color. One could make the connection or argument that it is descending into heaven or an afterlife due to the upward moving animation. The sounds that are paired with the pressing of a word, or button resembles the sound of a xylophone. Unlike the imagery where the meaning of the word is associated with a unique image the sounds, does not seemed to be paired with just one image it seems to be going off a rhythmical system where every two clicks it switches to a different key.
The imagery is the most important thing, as it is placed in the center of the web page and takes up the majority of the screen. It is the big unveiling behind the words. The pastel colored mountain scene shares the explorative nature that the whole piece is expressing. The use of the predominately white to pastel gradient has an eye-catching effect that really brings the focus to the hill top shapes. To further drive home the importance of the imagery, there is the little animations that are on a loop that really bring to life this living creature. The imagery conveys a poetic calmness as the pieces come together and arguably serves as the poem itself. There are no structural words that form anything near a poem and the sounds reinforce the importance of the imagery. As each click is accompanied with adding or subtracting of the image, it is stimulating the visual and auditory sensory. As stated in the opening sentences, “You can now see Datum’s life album.” The addition and subtraction of the images act as flipping through a photo album with one image per page. Just as going through a photo album, people can observe the growth and evolution of the object or the person.
Using the website as the medium further challenges the idea of what is a poem. Many things can identify with having poetic like qualities, but when does the essences of the poem start to be lost and become something new? In Datum, it has all the characteristics that carries itself as a piece of poetic work. However, it specifically describes itself as an interactive haiku. This is where it falls short as a haiku. As discussed before, it relays on a five-seven-five syllable system and since the website allows the user to interact with the work it is nearly impossible to follow the structure of the haiku system. Even if the words were enough to create a jumble of five-seven-five syllables, it would then imply that everyone that comes across Datum knows exactly what a haiku is. The interactiveness takes away from the haiku, but gives more to the user to create a more dynamic interactive narrative. These narratives can vary from nothing at all, to all the images revealed with only the word(s) associated with it. The narrative is based off what the user demes important and dangles the curiosity of what is going to be reveal next; similar to life. Human lives, like data, are often looked backed at in the form of images and can be categorized down to what the big achievements were in their lives. This is where Datum is successful at using the photo album to construct a poetic narrative but not a haiku.
If they could have created a simulation that somehow incorporated the explanation with the structure of a proper haiku, then this website would have fit better with the other interactive haikus. The layers of imagery and sound coexisting with each other, along with the seemingly endless different pairings, could only exist on the internet medium. The internet is where Datum lives, communicates, and shares with the user it’s content of major life events it has experienced.
