Exactitude Tie In

Dawn by Reiner Strasser and Alan Sondheim is a mutli-modal poem/story that employs text, images, audio, and movement to tell a story that is larger than the sum of its parts. Cumulatively these media merge into one work where before a work would at best be able to employ an image and text. Furthermore these media combine to form a meta-media, that is that of a video, as the work resists interaction and plays on a loop as a video would. A simple non-elit text could not work on such a varied spectrum simultaneously.

As new media become part of the canon of literature the use of more than one mode of representation will refine its uses, but this particular work shows an efficacious complimentary rather than supplementary use of what Hayles calls a major characteristic of elit; elit ‘tends to be multimodal.’