Hyperrhiz 28
Elegy
Richard Snyder
Northwest University
Citation: Snyder, Richard. “Elegy.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 28, 2025. doi:10.20415/hyp/028.g01
Abstract: In 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially declared the extinction of 21 different species. A multimodal web poem giving voice to the departed, the text of Elegy is designed to evoke the permanence of biodiversity loss and the urgency of the issue as it continues to unfold in our world. Words and illustrations disappear in stages, leaving newly created poems, with each sparser than the last. Ultimately, the piece slips entirely and irreversibly through the reader’s fingers in a short matter of time as its ambient soundscape fades to silence.
Keywords: web, poetry, net art, extinction, self-destruction.
Artist’s Statement - rdsnyder
On October 16th, 2023, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service delisted no fewer than twenty-one species from The Endangered Species Act. The cause for this delisting was extinction. Habitat loss, hunting pressures, and climate change account for most of the losses.
Elegy is an attempt to capture the futility of a too-late reckoning with this news, both personal and societal. The headline struck me like a lightning bolt. How strangely cruel was it that I should come to know these creatures only through hearing of their passing from this Earth? In mulling over a poem on the topic, I kept thinking of Lycidas, perhaps as much for the self-serving nature of Milton’s endeavor as for its exemplary craft.
It followed that at some point in the composition process, it struck me as necessary to revise away from the centering of my own mourning experience. The hubris of the entire affair drove me toward the concept of giving the voice to those species themselves, as echoes. The poem now floats along the wind, haunted by their final, damning verbal shadows. It isn’t a perfect solution, since I am still speaking for them, but I wanted to attempt to center their experiences. I had the idea to make a poem that would be unrecoverable, to capture the stark tragedy of this loss by depriving the reader of the reading experience just at the edge of the poem’s initial apprehension.
Elegy is made to slip away quickly – that is, in fact, what I named its main function, “slipAway,” which removes a few selected words at a time, creating unique stages or “moments” of the poem that persist only for ten seconds before they are replaced. I built the project in HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, as is my preference for stability and lifespan.
For most readers, the poem’s pace of change should be slow enough to get an initial impression of the language, but fast enough to constantly prompt a sense of urgency and impending loss in the deep reading process.
Early transitions between moments only bring minor changes, but soon the reading experience has changed dramatically, and you are really looking at something completely different, an erasure poem. Secondary and tertiary echoes never return with the richness of the first.
In the early color palette, I looked to earth tones and the saturation values of the 90s web, with its bold freedom of expression. The variety of creatures delisted ranges from a species of giant bat, the Little Mariana Fruit Bat of Guam, to several colorful Hawai’ian species of bird, to a number of fish and mussels. Several of these species appear in the background as rough illustrations – for some, it required significant research to track down their last remaining photographs as reference.
With each passing moment, illustrations of the delisted creatures disappear as well, and the color fades over time. Sounds decrease in volume.
The poem’s effect rests on the simulated permanence of these changes. As slipAway tracks the poem’s states, it registers each with the browser. Attempting to retrieve the poem with a refresh of the page – a habit of mind that has, like the digital “undo” feature, become deeply ingrained – does not avail the reader. Instead, one is always returned to the last stage previously witnessed, and the momentum leads ever onward to total loss. Closing the browser, restarting the machine…none of these actions will restore the lines of this poem. Emptied of language, illustration, and sound, the page simply reports the stark truth with its one remaining word: they are “gone.” Devoid of color and all sound, Elegy is now simply a shell for the poem that was.
It is my view that we should continue to think of e-poems that can work as well on mobile as they do on desktop, or perhaps even better. I designed Elegy to be mobile-first, hence its dimensions and the large amount of negative space when viewed on a desktop machine. One difference, however, is the impact of the poem’s final, nearly empty white frame when viewed on desktop instead of mobile. I find that it has slightly more impact on the larger screen, especially when one is attempting to refresh the page in futility to retrieve the lost lines.
I struggled with a need for accessibility to this work, thinking of those with vision difficulties or non-native English speakers. For some folks, the standard pace would make it nearly impossible to read much of the poem at all, where it is meant to have a balance between reading and the sense of slipping away. Ultimately, I offer an accessible option with 30 seconds between each stage on the “about” page to ameliorate this issue, at least to a degree.
With the ramp-up in spending on data centers and power that has accompanied recent developments in generative AI, we are regaining the ability to see – though who knows for how long – the true cost of digital materiality(ies) tailor-made by Big Software to feel ephemeral. I find it ever more important in these times to work toward slow, small digital projects that move our hearts and minds toward stewardship and justice.
– October, 2024
Kirkland, WA