Of the World, 2020
Custom generated software
Visit at https://camilleivywong.github.io/oftheworld/
Of the World is a collaboration with writer Jordan Jace. Described as a poem about hereditary-- inheriting trauma, inheriting knowledge, inheriting our material conditions. If history can be thought of as a progression of couplets, where one event begets another, the structure of this poem echoes the disorder of time and of the world.
The couplets below examine the meaning of the word cell:
“As its constituents, ultimately it answers to us. It is also our fiber, our cell,
and our cells. Cell in the Medieval Latin sense of “small
monastery, subordinate monastery” in that history is a network,
is provincial, and reflects the smallness of our experience, and also
the bigness of our interiors, as reflected in space
that faith carves for whatever one might pray to, for”
A cell can represent the prison industrial system, a measurement of biological length, a physiological building block, and an individual unit. This site is built in a way where each “cell” divides itself in two, the subsequent cell containing the following word in the poem. This continues until eventually the text becomes illegible and nearly invisible to the user, reflecting how the Black body becomes flattened, ignored, or entirely erased from digital spaces.
To see the complete poem:
[Mac] right-click or Ctrl+click (chrome firefox, safari)
[PC] right-click or Ctrl+Shift+i (chrome, firefox), F12 (edge)
Select “View Page Source” and scroll to <script>