Chris Roper On stage in Cape Town
The intersection between art and technology is a fruitful place to observe variance in the way art can be produced and consumed. This intersection normally takes place at the level of art forms such as music, narratives or performances. You certainly wouldn’t expect poetry, the old codger of the cultural family, to be trundling around in the slick, fast and furious world of CD-ROM games.
Yes, this is a hackneyed formulation, which does a disservice to poetry in all its myriad forms – what could be more relevant, exciting and technologically marvellous than the poetry of hip hop, for example?
It does less of a disservice to CD-ROM games, which are almost always orgiastic, misogynist displays of technological violence with crappy dialogue. Good fun, certainly, but existing only to fuel a thousand Cultural Studies theses on Babes with Guns.
With Mike Cope’s new interactive graphic novel, Rain, we have a “state of the art” game (and the last word in that hoary clich finally means what it’s supposed to) which can provide material for study in the increasingly marginalised cousin of Cultural Studies, English Literature. Trainspotters will be enthralled to discover that noted cultural critic Tony Morphet has lent his craggy, umbrous features to the principal character of detective Richard Graham. Rain is a detective story, with graphics and text in verse, written to be read on a computer. Set in the cold wet heart of Cape Town in the winter of 1986, Rain deals with a Red Mercury scam, and with the grit of urban life. In the spirit of bricolage that produced this collision between poetry and technology,
Rain is also a theatrical event. If you don’t have a computer, you can experience Readings from Rain, a performance at the Top Floor Theatre in Cape Town. The show combines selected extracts from the work, performed by Cope, with music specially composed and played live by Chris Wildman. Wildman has been composing and playing jazz for about thirty years, and he has composed for many media, including television and theatre.
A third element of performance will be provided by projections from computer screens, which are an integral part of the show given the visual nature of the game itself. I use the word “game” loosely here. Rain has elements of a conventional CD-ROM game, but it certainly doesn’t have the usual rationale driving it. You don’t get to kill anyone, and your quest is linked more to ethical and aesthetic discovery than to material goals.
Cope says that his impetus was to write “a huge poem so that the verses could be linked in different ways.” Hypertext, the favoured toy of postmodern novelists, provided him with the structure to do so. Jeweller, poet and novelist Mike Cope has been working on Rain for over two years. His previous literary works include a novel, Spiral of Fire, and a book of poems, Scenes and Visions, He has been performing poetry for decades, and has also worked for eight years as a computer programmer.
This confluence means that he is able to bring an unusual insight into his melding of the two structurally demanding forms of language. One imagines the restraints of binary code influencing the truncated metre of Cope’s description of Adderley St: `The town’s main drag/ on a cold wet night/ is dimly lit/ by electric light. The rear lights are red/ and the headlamps bright: / red on the left and white to the right’. According to Cope, Rain requires a slightly different way of reading to conventional poetry.
“It demands immersion, because you have to think like the detective to even get out of his house. It forces you to do things you might not want to, like smoke or take a piss.” Readings from Rain will provide an intriguing, enjoyable sample of the riches that lie in wait when the CD-ROM is released.
Readings from Rain will run from July 22 to 25 at the Coffee Lounge, 76 Church St., Cape Town. Tickets cost R20. Booking at (021) 24 6784