French

This e-poem describes a historical event during the winter of 1945 in which German families who lived in Brno were forcibly evacuated and marched 40 miles to the Austrian border, resulting in many deaths. A descendant of survivors from that march, Saemmer draws on those experiences and through her poem evokes the difficulty of grasping and reconstructing this traumatic portion of family history by writing, positioning, and mapping a way through a spatially arranged text using a presentation software called Prezi. Prezi is a spatial presentation tool, which allows for placement, scaling, and visual navigation of textual and other objects on an “infinite” canvas. Saemmer uses it to place a textual layer over a video of a march in Winter with thunder-like sounds of war in the background. The arranged texts can be explored as the reader desires, but to better appreciate Saemmer’s vision use the autoplay function on full screen.

petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction" (small brush to dust off fiction) is a generative piece written in French. A scene of thriller is generated at each time you run the program or ask for a new scene. This scene explores different possibilities of a scenario. But the reader must continually "dust" a picture that covers the text while reading. The text is a pastiche: the scene is located at a time in a single location. Some features happen out of this room, they are computed by  the program but not expressed into the narrative. The piece begins with some "adapted" poems by Jean de La Fontaine.

(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show.)

Correspondences is a translation into sound and image of the timbre of Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondances." The work is not a reading, per se, but it follows the structure of Baudelaire's sonnet closely, pivoting around the white space of the dash in the first tercet. In this experimental video + computer music work the gesture of Baudelaire's poetry serves as a scaffolding for an exploration of mutable time and memory. Correspondences is an invocation to the memory of something read, half-remembered perhaps, connected through a dream logic.