video poem

Big Data is a term used to describe, in general, the gathering of vast amounts of digital information and its subsequent processing, through sophisticated computational techniques, with the purpose of obtaining knowledge. In the case of Big Data, the poem, the term refers to the massive collection of personal information communicated online and its processing for commercial purposes, especially for-profit endeavors related to a persuasion achieved through the detailed knowledge of individuals, a persuasion aimed to be invisible. The poem is not situated in the present but in the near future, when the collection of personal information will be achieved by individual activities online, by the contributions carried out by other people and by sensors that are part of the Internet of things. The personal data, aggregated, will be processed at very high speeds with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The combination between the massive collection of personal data and its subsequent statistical processing, with that emphasis on inferential statistics to achieve persuasive objectives, will lead to a terrible reality. In general, the logic of statistics will be used to define human existence individually and socially in a deterministic way. Big Data's resulting knowledge, the poem suggests, is equivalent to the omniscience generally attributed to deities.

While the advertising industry heralds the use of digital communication technologies as a form of individual empowerment and self-efficacy, people’s interactions with their devices are proving to also have significant negative effects on society. The poem is situated in the near future, when the collection of personal information will be achieved by individual activities online, by the contributions carried out by other people, and through sensors that are part of the Internet of Things. The personal data, aggregated, will be processed at very high speeds with the assistance of artificial intelligence. As it happens in this generative video poem, unique pieces of audiovisual media will be created on-the-fly to achieve persuasive objectives based on individual profiles. The combination between the massive collection of personal data and its subsequent statistical processing, aimed at achieving persuasive objectives, will push us towards a terrible reality. Ultimately, the logic of statistics will be used to define human existence individually and socially in a deterministic way and, unfortunately, it will be guided mostly by commercial interests.

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…

A comparative presentation of a digital poem and a video poem, both composed as complementary translations and interpretations of Rilke’s 8th Duino elegy. The digital poem moves across English, French, Italian and German, while the video poem moves between live action and the paintings of Kate Walters. If anyone would like to volunteer to translate these lines into Portuguese, and to correspond with me about their translation, I’d be truly delighted. The exploration of plagiotropy is partly to be found in the movement across languages, and partly in tracking tropes across natural languages, programmed language movements and the paintings. I have only recently returned to video poetry, but you will be able to see Doaryte Pentreath from the 1980s on my website by late January. I will send the link. This work develops out of my ongoing collaboration with John Cayley. The element of direct translation will be of the following fiveand-a-half opening lines: Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang. Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers Antlitz allein; […] (Creatures see with their entire gaze wide open space. Our eyes alone seem trapped in reverse, focused on self, sealed without escape. Through animals’ faces only, we sense What exists beyond […])

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

This work creates an interactive drag-and-drop interface to perform keyword searches in Twitter and produce a manipulable visual mapping of the results. The hashtag/keywords used by Villegas are related to poetry, music, and suffering, which when selected produce a snapshot of recent tweets on the subject. Combining keywords narrows the search, offering more thematically focused results. Part of the fun of this work is in how it arranges the results into moveable lines, so readers can experience them in different sequences, placing the tweets in conversation as they form a kind of line constellation. The limits placed on the search, along with the juxtaposition of lines, and a design that responds to the reader’s clicking and dragging motions, results in a focused authorial poetic experience, though drawn from the endlessly vast and ever-changing Twitter stream. (Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=poetuiteame)

Channel of the North is a collaborative project by Jan Baeke and Alfred Marseille that combines data visualization, poetry, and telepresence through a series of poems that expand and contract based on the ebb and flow of the tides located in the Westerschelde river at the Dutch-Belgian border. Although a user may access this kinetic poetry anywhere in the world, the geological temporality of the poem is always rooted in a particular space and time in a way that sits in a tradition of artwork such as David Bowen’s tele-present water and tele-present wind. While the dissemination of text is not typically indexed to a physical referent, Channel of the North offers a contemplative moment when poetry becomes a vehicle for exploring the relationship between the flow of geological processes, the flow of networked computation, and the flow of language. Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network charts the long relationship between water and networked communication based on how the subterranean network of private undersea cables are connected to a history of empire, colonialism, and geopolitical conflict and commerce. These undersea undulations between channels of water and data find poetic expression in Baeke and Marseille’s work as the Westerschelde is made to flow through an interconnected network of oceanic and electric currents.

(Source: ELC 3)

Projected on a grid of particles that at times seem ordered, while sometimes chaotic and always in flux, Ormstad's constructed language poetry is exposed and read by the author while performing to Mashtalir's pulsating music and Vojjov's atmospheric scapes in the first two works LONG RONG SONG and NAVN NOME NAME. The first is based on Ormstad's language research project from his second book of concrete poetry from 2004. Here he creates words that may exist or not in any language, and this is related to Vojjov's creation of numbers, geometric forms and abstract shapes. The second work is made from Ormstad's collection of poetic family names used in Oslo, Norway, also here accompanied by Vojjov's world of cosmic shapes. The last track, kakaoase, is based on a printed picture by Ormstad, made of sound poetry where he's playing with the Norwegian language. Most of the words have no – or almost no – meaning, and here Mashtalir's music makes this an exceptional possibility for participating and dancing to concrete poetry! 3 CONCRETE are the first works of a collection created by the Norwegian–Russian duo OTTARAS (Ottar Ormstad and Taras Mashtalir). Alexander Vojjov has created the two first videos. The tracks exists in different versions made for screening and live performance. Raising awareness of electronic poetry and sonic ecology, attracting new audiences to a potent yet to come genre is the inspiration for this collaboration. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

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)

"Aurelia: Our dreams are a Second Life" is one of the videopoems by Belén Gache from the series "Lecturas" (Readings). Some of the videopoems of this series were proyected in the exhibition "El video como zona de cruce" ("Video as a Crossroad", in Centro Cultural de España, Montevideo, September 2007. In this videopoem the author walks around Second Life reading fragments of a text by Gérard de Nerval. She walks over the planets and walks through Paris streets. The reader listens to the author. She appears in the middle of the ocean accompanied by relaxing music and then suddenly she is in the middle of a disco surrounded by people dressed up as cybergoths. The video finished with the author walking over the Milky Way, this avatar of the author who is a reader at the same time does not pay attention to the places where she goes or the people she finds she is only interested in her reading.