Robert
Kendall is a composer, writer, photographer, and Web artist. His music has been performed at Bargemusic
in New York City and elsewhere. ConcertoNet has described his music as "masterful,
dextrous,
supremely accomplished,"
going on to say "the sounds were luscious, the melodies were rich and warm-hearted."
His music was included in an interactive art installation
exhibited at Figment Boston 2018.
SoftPoems
by Robert Kendall
It All Comes Down to _______ (1990) and The Clue: A MiniMystery (1991) are kinetic visual poems, or SoftPoems, for the PC. They were written for the DOS operating system and no longer run on modern PCs.
About this Medium
SoftPoetry combines advantages of poetry in both its written and oral incarnations. Exploiting the PC's facility with animation, the SoftPoem presents its text in a graphical choreography that coordinates meaning and movement. The words themselves, as they move and change on screen, become like actors in a theater piece. This gives the SoftPoem much of the dynamism of spoken or sung poetry--a dynamism missing from the printed page. Yet the poem "performed" by the PC sacrifices none of the subtleties of spelling, punctuation, or layout that come through only in the written word, since the written word is still right there on the screen.
In fact, the graphical power of the PC can push the visual impact of the word much further than it could ever go on paper. SoftPoetry builds on the 2,000-year-old tradition of visual (or concrete) poetry, in which the meaning of the poem is enhanced by its visual appearance through unusual typography and layout. Color graphics, animation, and transition effects now augment the visual poet's repertory. SoftPoetry is also a video extension of the traditions of the book as art object--the traditions of calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, and illustrated books.