Clues for keyboard performances are in their design. Each performance uses a standard keyboard interface as the framework to atomise the poem into individual keystrokes, and makes the following simple yet deliberate connections:

What makes each performance unique – apart from the titles, colour schemes and keystroke styles – is the range and repetition of keystrokes in the poem. Where letters are repeated, layered keystrokes create further nonuniform markings in the two-dimensional digital image, suggesting density. Winkler imagines repetition in spelled-forms as three-dimensional (p. 39)1 and I feel the same way about repetition in keyboard performances.

In contemplating how Lori Emerson (2014) relates the procedural capabilities of digital media to labour, keyboard performance takes a labour-oriented task like word-processing – often seen as feminised work due to its repetitious and clerical nature (Chun, 2011, p. 29, p. 35)2 – and transforms it into a literary subject experimenting with form. The inclination to perform poems written by women challenges the presumption that any feminised work is necessarily obedient, subservient or invisible.

A keyboard performance now redefines the feminised space of word-processing as a creative and abstract endeavour. Now the keyboard becomes a labour-making device, duplicated on-screen as part of the canvas, just as the labour-saving functions of Photoshop, such as layers, are consciously manipulated in the process (Emerson, 2014, p. 65 and p. 123; 3 Kirschenbaum, 2016, pp. 24–25 4). These visual poems — and their mode of performance or cartography — aim to contribute to the field of poetry by expanding notions of simulacra and translation-as-concept. Additionally, they might draw the viewer’s attention to how ‘elusive keystrokes can be captured and reused’ (University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 1)5.