At first glance, the text on this webpage appeared to be formatted like poetry, where short phrases were placed across the page with a lot of white space between them. However, upon moving my cursor across the screen, I noticed that pink text appeared when hovering over them. Otherwise, these selections were white when not hovered over, blending into the white background which made it impossible to view the entire text at once. I decided to read the black text first, then the black and pink together. The pink text was a lot more conversational and personal than the black text. In the beginning, the pink text described seemingly unimportant details, but as the text went on, it started to reveal the extremely disturbing behavior of the man that the author worked with. It appears to encompass all of the unsaid aspects that the author might have left out of real-life conversations, to keep up appearances that everything was fine (as suggested by the title of the piece). These spiralling thoughts gave a lot more insight into the author’s inner conflicts, which stood in stark contrast to the succinct and matter-of-fact statements in black that almost resemble small-talk with an acquaintance. With the simple use of links that change color when hovered over, this piece of Interactive blackout poetry has effectively conveyed the self-censorship that the author had to go through for the sake of their own safety and/or job security.
The format of this piece is reminiscent of those choose your own adventure books, where readers are given the liberty to navigate through the narrative through their own choices. Clicking on any part of the body map image plunges readers right into a section of the writing, usually about a specific part of the body or a specific topic. These paragraphs are occasionally punctuated by links, where we can use to navigate to other pages. As I read these pages, some links became purple, indicating that I have already visited those page before. The author does not directly tell you what clicking the links will lead you to, but gives just enough information for you to make a guess. There seems to be no specific order in which the navigation links are meant to be clicked in this non-linear narrative. The titles of the pages also changed to reflect the contents, such as other bodies, feet, armpits and more. The author described their body as “a great cabinet of curiosities” which is similarly paralleled by the format in which they have presented the writing. Clicking on these links was exactly like finding “slips of paper referring you to other drawers, unlabelled keys (you may despair of finding the locks they fit), and there are drawers within the drawers, behind sliding panels or false bottoms” Sometimes I found myself stuck in a loop, where a page titled “butt” has a single link that lead to “eyelids”, then to “ears” and back again to “eyelids”, much akin to studying something so deeply that you end up going round and round in circles. Although I am unsure if I have read everything in this piece, it was still an enjoyable journey.
This piece seems to be a combination of poetry, artwork information labels and personal diary entries. I am unsure which links I had clicked on, but I first found myself looking at some sort of journal after a few pages with images. Clicking on different lines allows readers to navigate through the pages, with details about the the author’s life and work. The structure of these pages seems to be regular but it is unclear how they are arranged. At the same time, the unfamiliarity of the layout and the personal nature of these writings makes me feel like im rifling through someone’s drawers and reading all their notes to themselves. On the right, “titles” disappeared one by one as the pages progressed, while the months on the left marked the passage of time. The main text can also be clicked, which seemed to skip through to other related notes instead of progressing through the text linearly. I spent some time in this maze of writings before returning to the first page, where I realized that clicking on texts in boxes changes them to another short passage, which seemed to loop back to the beginning. These texts also appeared to cycle through the loop automatically, changing after a set amount of time, divulging snippets of the author’s thoughts. The layout of these texts, in small boxes of different colors stacked on top of one another in a salon-style arrangement, almost alludes to the form of post-it notes that someone left for themselves near a desk or a dresser.
This piece also borrows from the conventions of a choose you own adventure book. However, not all of the presented options are clickable, with some crossed out, indicating that depression might make it impossible for you to choose them. Even though logically, the crossed out options would theoretically help someone with depression, you are stuck with the less-than-ideal options that allow you to progress through the story. I found myself trying to get help for the protagonist, since I assume that the objective is to help them recover. However, the writing made it clear that they will always have some resistance towards it, but ultimately it is not their fault. Polaroid images at the top of the page provide glimpses into the main character’s life, with the animated static (a gif?) overlay alluding to what people call the “depressoin fog”. This is similarly reflected in the backgrounds of the 3 statements at the bottom of the page, summarising the state of the main character. The worse states, such as not being on medication, seem to have a stronger static, which decreases in intensity as you make progress. It was hard to notice at first but I thought this was a nice subtle way to indicate improvement, much like how improvements in real life seem unnoticeable at first. Over time, the 3 statements changed, indicating that the protagonist is starting to recover slowly. At the end of the story, I wondered what would happen if I consistently chose the worst options, but I decided not to go down that route since I did not want to see the protagonist suffer any more than they already had.