Performance

Extending the investigation of the form, the work explores the act of writing, literally. The frame, as in Sympathies of War, is frozen, "mummyfied": it is the close-up the VTR, the lens focused on the moving needle of the audio level meter, as the video of Sympathies of War is playing. The sound is the sound from the video. A 3"x5" tear-off writing pad is underneath the meter. Lines are written on the pad, torn off, new lines are written; it is a performance in real time. Words are written, parts crossed out to form new words, new contexts.

The poetry here is the revelation of the live writing juxtaposed with the "mummyfied" version of the original poem, a video playing on a machine.

[Taken from http://www.amproductions.com/videos/artsandsci/videopoetry/videopoetry… ]

My first videopoem, Sympathies Of War, was essentially a poetry performance recorded by a video camera by Richard Elson at the Galerie Vehicule Art in Montreal. One objective was to prevent the performance from being identified as a “poetry reading” (as organizer of the Vehicule Art Gallery’s 1978 poetry reading series, I had been videotaping a great many readings) – I would avoid facing the camera, sitting behind a rear-projection screen, onto which was projected a series of slides I had made of the interior of a STOP sign.

[Words by author, from http://www.poetry-quebec.com/pq/history/article_100.shtml ]

“Meditation no 4, by Tomasz Wilmański, an animated alphabet poem in Adobe Flash, shown as a one-off installation in a gallery space where it was projected on a screen (AT Gallery, Poznań 2004). As a tribute to Kenneth Williams and his series of concrete poems, Meditation no 4 relied not only on its visual but also aural aspect. The sound, embedded in a Flash file, played crucial role. [ Taken from Electronic Literature Publishing and Distribution in Europe, 2012 ]

The idea is to create a structure online, where authors, but also soundengineers, videoartists and graphicaldesigners kan make contributions to the same history-universe, with special emphazies on the litetterary. The history should not be understood in a lineary sense, but rather as an experience of a story where each piece ( picture, sound) could be experienced unchronologically. The way [the author does] this is by creating a text-concept that can be visualized in a graphical form. The authors have to pertain to this form and place their text in a visual room. Their text will then become apparent as a visual grapical element in relations to the other elements. The reason [the author] calls it a "performance" is because the creation of this little universe is being controlled by [the author] and will transpire over several days. Contributers are placed in several countries and everything will be run online, by email and ICQ. And probably a phonecall or two.

Source: author's description

Mary Flanagan, State University of New York, Buffalo (USA)"[raveling]"

[raveling] is a poetry performance piece for machines and human about memory and communication which posits verbal communication and text as iterative rituals that can mutate and change over time, distance, and repetition.

Prior to the piece I produced a poem with my computer. This performance was a stream-of-consciousness spoken word event and was translated by the machine. My computer synthesized the words it recognized and I saved these words into a rough poem.

In performance I read this synthesized computer/human poem to the public and to computer #1. This first computer/performer will listen to the poem and after listening, read back the composition as it recognized aloud to the audience and to the second computer/performer. The second computer/performer will listen to the poem composed by the first computer and read back the poem it recognized aloud to the audience. Each computer and human has its own voice and vocal qualities including timbre, speed, etc. They work together to bring meaning to the piece.

This interpretation/reinterpretation creative loop is accompanied with text images on each computer that can be projected. The words twisting around will be projected so that the audience can listen and view the interaction.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)