Ingrid Ankerson & Megan Sapnar Ankerson

Megan Sapnar Ankerson and Ingrid Ankerson co-founded the digital arts and poetry journal Poems that Go (2000-2005), which remains online as an archive. Megan is an assistant professor in Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She received a PhD in media and cultural studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ingrid is a graphic designer and full-time faculty in the Digital Media Arts Department of Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She received her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Publication Design from the University of Baltimore. They currently reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan with their two children.

To learn more about Ingrid and Megan’s work, visit: http://www.poemsthatgo.com

On one level, “Cruising” is an excited oral recitation of a teenager’s favorite pastime in small town Wisconsin, pacing up and down the main drag of Main Street looking to make connections, wanting love. But by merging the linear aspect of the sound recording with an interactive component that demands a degree of control, “Cruising” reinforces the spatial and temporal themes of the poem by requiring the user to learn how to “drive” the text. A new user must first struggle with gaining control of the speed, the direction, and the scale in order to follow the textual path of the narrative. When the text on the screen and the spoken words are made to coincide, the rush of the image sequence is reduced to a slow ongoing loop of still frames. The viewer moves between reading text and experiencing a filmic flow of images — but cannot exactly have both at the same time. In this way, the work seeks to highlight the materiality of text, film, and interface.