digital concrete poetry

In the Middle of the Room came about as a live sampling improvisation with composer, vocalist, and poet Elisabeth Blair during a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In my live sampling improvisations, I partner with one or more acoustic musicians and I bring software I created, which cannot make sound on its own: it can only capture sounds from my partner in improvisation, live in the moment of performance, and transform them into something new, to reintroduce to the performance. This highlights the liveness of the listening experience, as the audience recognizes the mediated copy of sounds the human performer just made, at once noticing how the copy lacks aura (after Benjamin) and also adding value, retrospectively, to the original moment now past. Listeners can then hear the sampled sound gain a new aura of its own as it transforms and acts as an independent voice in the improvisation, influencing the performance and the human performer in turn.Elisabeth Blair brought to our improvisation session some notes she had made while interviewing an elderly friend. Elisabeth Blair’s stream-of-consciousness navigation through and about the interview material reflected the scattered thoughts of a lonely, bored, regretful, and nostalgic aging mind that is aware of its own gradual failure—it is here that the creative work separates from a factual biography of the interviewee, instead letting a new abstract character emerge, inspired by fragments of a real life’s recollections and reflections, the dots connected in new ways by our imaginations and artistic intuition.Fascinated by how it developed, I re-entered the improvisation, this time as a performing video artist. I built a rudimentary video titler (so I could perform by typing on the screen) and fed its output to a video feedback engine I have used in previous works, which transforms any image into new abstract forms and the behavior of which is shaped by sound. I typed in real time, in response to the music, words, and the things in between. The text switches among distinct modes of interpreting, reflecting, responding to, and misreading the words I heard. This compounded pattern of chopping and rehashing also led new meanings to form as the sound and the text jumped fluidly from one statement to another.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Blair/blair…

mooon (2015) is the fourth video made by Norwegian poet and artist Ottar Ormstad since 2009. Here again viewers encounter letter-carpets and a yellow y Ormstad identifies with and which he is known for.
Different from the other videos, letter-carpets are not projected on still images, but for the first time on live video footage Ormstad shot on his Samsung S4 during travels in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Vilnius and Berlin in 2014.
The video may be seen as a research for documenting water on the mooon.
Like in his video natyr (2011) he's using a strong sound in the very start for creating a period of silence in the beginning of the work. Other references to his earlier works can also be found: The 'eau-poem' in the first part is closely related to his web-poem svevedikt (2006), and his first video LYMS (2009). Ormstad also continues his multi-lingual project using words from different languages intentionally without translation. It invites viewers for an individual experience of the video and visual poetry that is based upon the viewer's language background.

Poetry, and the imagery found therein, has long been one of the foundations of literature across the globe. Our ability to decipher the imagery and symbols in poetic verse has long been a daunting and rewarding task for those individuals who enjoy reading and hearing verse. Bridle Your Tongue is an animated poem with a concentration on the power and longevity of destructive language. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

the work 'natyr' (may not exist in any language) is based on a painting by knut rumohr (1916-2002) inspired by the nature on the west coast of norway, made in combination with yellow letters and a piano improvisation by ormstad.

An animated translation of a concrete poem in French. The French poem Dentelle by Pierre Albert-Birot appears at the left side of the window; the English translation is on the right.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

Language is corrupt! The subject reignes over the alienated object! Language is the code of power! Therefore "smash the surface" and concrete it in a new way. The concrete_machine™ liberates the language from the dominating code into the pictorial concrete. It was already in the last century that language seemed suspicious to numerous artistic movements. The Cubists and Dadaists collaged text-fragments into pictures. Dada dissolved words into sounds. The Lettrists reduced language which they understood as aesthetically exhausted to the single letter. The concrete poets composed letter-pictures and the utopias of the 70ies tried to convert the ruling code. The concrete_machine™ will go on this road to the very end. Compute the text: give it to the concrete_machine™ and so make a free picure of it.