lettrist

This suite of two responsive visual poems are inspired by typography and phonetics, and the poetics of Concretism and Lettrism. “Vowel Submission” seeks to discover letters physically discoverable by breaking off portions of vowels. The interface leads readers to probe the space of the poem searching for triggers that will break the rotating vowels into the consonants that lie within. “Typespeak” is the more interesting piece because it vocalizes the sounds of each letter without combining them into words. In other words, one can type a word, but it will play as a simultaneous set of individual sounds. He turns the computer’s keyboard into an instrument that plays verbal notes from Madsen’s vocal apparatus. The random placement of brief letter animations on the screen also resists any attempts at writing words, a very Lettrist move because it subverts attempts at creating meaning.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

A dynamic interactive environment for typographic hyperpoetry. Four poems and an open system to create your own.

This suite of Letterist sound poems for the iOS platform offers several environments and behaviors for the letters that inhabit them.The interfaces go from simple to complex, and Piringer uses phrases with the verbs “draw, control, build, create, and connect” to guide the reader to interact and play with the letters and tools offered. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is a sound toy, a performance tool and an art work in its own right. You can play with the letter-creatures and watch and listen how they interact with each other or use them to produce soundscapes like you would with an electronic musical instrument. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz blends art, biology, fun and physics to create a unique, dynamic and interactive sound ecology.This app is the result of joerg piringer's ongoing research of vocal sounds and their relation to dynamic typography in the form of performance, video and software art.

(Source: Author's description)

An intermedia elegy, animated in Flash created to mark the passing of Brazilian poet, Philadelpho Menezes (1960-2000). As aND explains in the piece, "I was harvesting the seeds of False Blue Indigo (Baptisia Australis) the day I received news Philadelpho had died." The work reveals a series of letters and words formed from seeds to music.

"svevedikt" ("poetry floating in the air") consists of seven parts, each in a loop. Every poem is created out of Norwegian words, fixed in the same position all through the animation, but exposed in different degrees. Each poem starts up exposing a few letters. The number of letters is increasing until all of them are seen. Then the number of letters is reduced in a new way. The words are selected in a non-semantic way, and each viewer will experience this differently. Both the images and the sound of the letters when read are important for the experience. The positions of the words have much in common with how the poet made concrete poetry in the sixties.

(Source: Author's description)

In “svevedikt” he [Ormstad] goes further on with an animation of a poem that moves continuously and will never stay still for its reader. In her extensive catalogtext on “svevedikt” Karen Wagner presents the poem in context of Ormstads authorship. (Source: Hans Kristian Rustad, ELINOR)

“OCO” explores the three-dimensional architecture of the letters O, C, and I, and the multiple meanings (in Portuguese) that emerge when the letter I rhythmically appears and disappears. These meanings emerge through the cognitive associations made by the viewer as well as the perceived spatial relationships between the letters. Originally presented in 1985 as an interactive holopoem (lost), “OCO” was recreated in 1990 as an interactive digital poem.

Piringer's work is made for live performance, integrating a vocal performance by the author which controls and interfaces with the movement of letters on the screen, patterned by programmed agents.

The author's description from his site is "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is an audiovisual voice performance. image and sound are created in real-time through custom written software that analyzes and captures the sound of my voice to create animated abstract visual text/sound-compositions. the autonomous movement and behaviour of visual element on the screen again influence the sound which creates an audiovisual feedback loop or an autopoetic live performance system.using my voice as the interface and medium in a dynamic electronic environment takes the ideas of the early avantgarde sound and visual poets a step further: my custom written software makes it possible to generate unforeseen and vanishing abstract text/sound-compositions that are created on the spot while performing and are not meant to last.as a dynamic and reactive system abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz interacts with the performer by taking the voice as an input to various flexible modules that produce output. the mapping of the input signal to the actual output that can be seen and heard by the performer and the audience is determined by algorithms taken from non-literary fields like physics, biology and mathematics.textual and sound particles for example interact with each other controlled by the law of simulated newtonian physics, so when they collide they sound, get destroyed or reflected."

In the video lyms (which is a non-semantic word), I have solved the question of translation in a special way: words in different languages like spanish, french, german, english and scandinavian are put together.  None of them have the same meaning, the viewer may just taste on the words.  In the first part of the video all the words are starting with f.  In the beginning the f's are exposed in a way they constitute different pictures. The system of the expositions are based on how I made concrete poetry in the sixties. Instead of repeating them differently line by line, the new technology allows me to expose them differently through time.  Then more and more letters are shown, until all the words are exposed.

Each viewer will have a different experience dependent upon their language background, and the ability to enjoy the poetic combination of the words and the visuality together with the music.  

The second part is different.   Here I use a combination of photos and pictures I have made just out of letters.  (I’ve done the photowork in the darkroom, and then scanned). Some of the letter-pictures are from an exhibition of digital prints I’ve had in Oslo.  Most of them are just made out of the sounds and the visual aspect, some are meaningful in a way, like the page with spanish words starting with a.

Duration: 7:40

(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI)