Yatoo ist ein interaktives audio-visuelles “rollover love poem” des Künstlerduos Ursula Hentschläger (*1963) und Zelko Wiener (1953-2006) alias Zeitgenossen. Dieses in Flash geschriebene Gedicht ist der mittlere Teil der Trilogie Outer Space IP, die durch die Binary Art Site (1999-2001) sowie Phantasma (2003-2006) vervollständigt wird.
Der Rezipient wird zunächst mit einer Animation konfrontiert, in der sich aus einer roten Kugel ein fünfeckiger Stern entwickelt. Fährt man mit der Maus über die Ecken, werden Stimmen hörbar, und schnell stellt sich heraus, dass jede Ecke zweigeteilt ist: Berührt man die eine Hälfte, dann wird eine Frauenstimme aktiviert, bei der anderen eine Männerstimme. Die fünf Ecken ergeben – und zwar unabhängig davon, mit welcher Ecke man beginnt – folgendes Bekenntnis: „I / love / you / so / much“. Der Stern verändert durch den Kontakt seine Form, die Hälften verschieben sich. Klickt man weitere Ecken an, dann treten Variationen der Stimmungslage zutage, die durch die Phrasen „I won't leave you alone / I will suffer from you / I feel close to you / You are the only one / You ain't got no fear / You can't solve my problems / You will come with me / We will survive this moment“ ausgedrückt werden.
Die Verse von Yatoo unterliegen einer formalen Beschränkung: Jeder der 2 x 10 Verse besteht aus fünf Wörtern. Sinnvolle Aussagen kommen nur dann zustande, wenn der Rezipient über eine gewisse Geschicklichkeit im Anklicken der entsprechenden Teile verfügt und es zugleich vermeidet, die anderen Teile zu berühren. Gelingt dies nicht, ergibt sich kein harmonischer Dialog zwischen Frau und Mann, sondern eine unkalkulierbare Abfolge auf unterschiedlichen Versebenen: die Soundfiles überlagern sich, Mann und Frau sprechen unabhängig voneinander, die eingetretene Unkalkulierbarkeit wirkt wie ein Kommentar zur Unbedingtheitserklärung des Titels.
Zeitgenossen were a team of Viennese writers, whose real names are Ursula Hentschläger (*1963) and Zelko Wiener (1953-2006). Yatoo, a piece of so-called ‘audio contact art’, was one of their pilot projects, involving vocalized rather than written language. Yatoo offers no written language at all but rather experiments with the synergies of roll-over graphic animation and de-sequentialized oral love poetry. The online version of this poetry cycle features a stylized, futuristic visual setting reminiscent of the interior of an overdimensional spacecraft. In the foreground, a tiny human creature in a salamander-painted space suit is depicted, who is set against an enormous, sublime landscape featuring digitized, moving geometric constellations. The impression evoked by this visual arrangement may be described as a neo-Romantic cyberspace ‘painting’, or piece of digital art, where the human individual finds himself confronted with an overpowering scenery that combines the phenomenology of virtual reality with a new approach to orally transmitted poetry.
Yatoo is short for ‘you are the only one’. The hypertext toys with phrases like ‘I love you so much’, ‘I won’t leave you alone’, ‘I will suffer from you’, ‘I want you to escape’, read out in turns by a female and a male voice, as the reader activates sound and image simultaneously by rolling the mouse over stars consisting of symmetrically organized geometrical shapes. As the shapes are activated, they change colour and form, releasing one of the above words at a time. There is only one way of triggering the original sequence of words – by hitting identical shapes in a certain order. Therefore, the first reading experience equals a jigsaw, a game, a play on words, augmented by an transmedial interplay of various semiotic systems. The mathematical logic of the geometric shapes diametrically opposes the emotional message delivered by the spoken language in the ‘poems’. Visual material is therefore employed symbolically, as it does not share any semantic features with the other semiotic elements conveyed by the text and, rather than complementing verbally revealed information, undermines the emotive nature of the love poems.
Yatoo has received a thorough review by Roberto Simanowski (“Zeitgenossen: ‘Yatoo’. Audio-visueller Hypertext als Rollover-Lovepoem”, 2002), who follows both the male and the female side through to the end, discovering that, upon the close of each poem, the star closes and starts again from scratch. He further points out that the stars are organized so that the male shapes enclose the female ones, both protectively and restrictively. Linguistically, Simanowski explains that the words of the poems follow the rules of Constraint Poetics, i.e. they are subject to structural restraints as can be found in palindromes and lipograms. In Yatoo, these structural restraints are transferred to the receptive side. As mentioned earlier, the love poems are only traditionally meaningful if the words are activated in a prescribed order.
This entry has been adapted from Astrid Ensslin: Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions. London: Continuum 2007, pp. 100-101.