erotic event listeners
a digital love poem workshop for beginner website makers and nonpoets
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As users of computational machines we spend minutes if not hours of everyday clicking, swiping, touching the of a webpage. Let’s pretend for a moment that the cursor is my hand, or body, seemingly immaterial, floating. Can a hover state be a gaze, or a click a caress?about
Within capitalist regimes we are told we feel love and pleasure in the wrong ways, and the systems prefer everything to be subject to economies of scarcity. Particularly individuals of intersectionally oppressed identities aren’t seen as belonging with the idea of pleasure at all—doing it in the wrong ways, ways which are stigmatized and also criminalized.And of course there’s all the ways in which the act of writing about love—especially romantic and erotic love—is also seen as an inferior genre to other kinds of writing because of the way these things are gendered.
Writing about love can often invite a kind of discretion, secrecy, for a number of different reasons—think pillow books, innuendos. This recipe is also inspired by modes of secret writing. In the browser, to be literally transparent means to hide away. To be opaque in our expression, means to show all. You might also play with visibility, legibility.
Within the traditions of material and concrete poetics, we might gently resist what this web space might be for.
For instance, here’s an example of digital love letters from 1999, which plays with how the cursor dances across skin:
Who is it for? This recipe is a simple and humble one. It’s aimed at people who are just starting out their understanding with “how the browser is built,” that offers a playful way to think about “touch” and “click” and toggling the appearance of a DOM element.
Making websites from scratch too, can be a radical act of moving away from the nonconsensual transactions, constraints, and terms of service set out by today's software empires.
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When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
—Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic
demo (open in browser)
instructions
Can a hover state be a gaze, or a click a caress?
Write a love poem.
Consider this poem by Audre Lorde, or explore other queer love poems, or browse the net for romantic or erotic poetry.Perhaps you'd like to write to someone you fancy, with whom you want to be discreet. Perhaps this poem is dedicated to yourself, or a part of the body. What do you love about this part of the body?
You can think about erotic love, and think about verbs that you would like to include. Maybe you start every line with a different verb [“touch,” “taste”, “stroke”].
For net-based written inspiration, consider Craigslist Missed Connections (go with discretion...) or erotic Fan Fiction sites...
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“lick your flower bud”,
“taste your mouth”...
]
Leonara de Barros
Unzip the template.zip.
The template.zip should include “index.css,” “index.html,” “script.js.” Open all three files in a text editor of your choice (TextEdit, Atom, or Sublime as suggestions)Beginning in script.js: On line 1, after the equal sign “let desires = …”, replace the data with your own poem. Think about if you want to split it up on every line break, or on every word...
In the code:
On line 16: If you would like, you can change the event listener “click” to other kinds of events. Mouseover, mousedown… HTML DOM Event Object Reference
In index.css: On line 3, change the background image to be the name of your own image file. Maybe it’s something that reminds you about the person/idea you are writing to, or maybe it’s something completely random and meant to disguise the website from your intended audience.
// your action here
});
Month of May
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“I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle.”
—adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism