Poemas no meio do caminho, written in Portuguese, is a poetry project that offers the reader different reading possibilities, depending on her navigational decisions. There are two available versions: the horizontal and the vertical. The horizontal version is a 3D panorama including video that the reader can drag; the vertical version uses html to allow the reader to read and play with the texts in a more conventional and simple way. One of the key aspects of Poemas no meio do caminho is that the reader can decide whether she wants to keep her reading path - that is, keep her poems in the middle of her road. Automatically, then, the poem that every reader has created has a stabilized form in a blog where other readers can share and debate the collection of poems.
Author description: Poemas no meio do caminho (Poems in the middle of the road) is a set of combinatory texts programmed in a way that allows the reader to dynamically change the paradigms that feed the original syntax of the poems. The sound is also randomly generated, live-mixing voices and sound textures from a given database. Besides altering the poems, the reader can also save his/her versions on a weblog on the Internet. Used Software and Programming Languages: Flash Panorama Player, Actionscript 3.0, perl, XML, WordPress.
Instructions: Requires Flash plugin, web browser with active JavaScript and an Internet connection, SoundSpeakers, and some patience.
Previous publication: This work received the 4th Premi Internacional "Ciutat de Vinaròs Digital Literature Award" in 2009. Additional authors include Nuno F. Ferreira (programming), Luís Aly (sound), Nuno M. Cardoso (voice) and Luís Carlos Petry (3D images).
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
The Electronic Literature Lab could not preserve this Flash work with Ruffle in February 2021. We do plan to preserve it with Conifer at a later date.