The Quick Brown Fox is an electronic poem by Alan Bigelow. Through flash player, Bigelow uses a pangram, or a holoalphabetic sentence, to illustrate the poem. Each letter in the phrase The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog, is representative of one line in the poem, and to see each line, you have to run your cursor over each letter. As each letter is highlighted, a line from the poem appears on the screen with different video animations in the background.

The first time I experimented with The Quick Brown Fox, I started somewhere in the middle of the sentence, unaware of the goal of the poem. As I highlighted each letter randomly and individually, I began to piece together the poem. However after I read each line of poem, I realized afterwards that I had possibly read the poem out of order. Unsure of whether the poem was supposed to start at the beginning of the holoalphabetical sentence, I tried it again, starting from the beginning and going in order, all the way through to the end. What I realized was it didn’t particularly matter where the poem started, nor what order each phrase was read in. Each line could stand alone, and could be pieced together in different ways to create the meaning of the poem.

What I find most interesting about The Quick Brown Fox are the ideas of agency and authorship. Bigelow gives some agency to the user by giving the user the choice of what order to view the poem in. This allows for freedom and continuous change; with each use of the artifact, there are countless possibilities for different combinations of the poem. Similar to that of the cut-up method, Bigelow created an electronic version of this writing device. But how much agency can you give a user before calling authorship into question? Am I the author of each poem I generate from The Quick Brown Fox, even if the lines are all laid out for me? Bigelow has created a controlled artifact, and put the artistic process into the hands of the user. The Quick Brown Fox is in a constant state of process, subject to perpetual change, even after the artifact has been created.