animated text

hatchet    (video - 29 seconds, in color with sound)

hatchet is a fright of fancy - a concrete poem part rage, part fear. Decapitated segments are propelled in phonetic sequences suggesting threat, violence (domestic violence, stalking, rape) and escape. Words moving, pulled, hacked, torn and swallowed in a scream and blood red tear-drop; fighting flies; a “hatchet” refrain in whispers chugging like a train or train of thought locked in madness or fear. Audio recordings of trains squealing, a girl’s metallic screams and a cloying backdrop of “Tonight You Belong to Me” sung by Patience & Prudence are used, in part, to depict the tumbling psychological confusion often resonant in these crimes (e.g., she was asking for it; I made him mad; etc.). 

Sonically layered, pictorial and linguistic, functioning as text and subtext, words in hatchet are expressive through their shape,  color  and motion.  Unsynchronised from any audible words in the turbulent passage of the short piece, their chaotic silence corresponds conceptually to that of victims in predatory or violent relationships – e.g., historically, in the literal and judicial suppression of a victim's voice (or that of any powerless member of an unequal relationship). While reminiscent of aesthetic tropes in graphic novels,  the prominence of the text here is meant to evoke, on a visceral level, the shock and physicality of violence. At times unmasking the action or a memory of violence – catch her, hit her – and the pleas of protest erupting and disappearing throughout, a simmering persistence of revenge (fantasy) finds expression beyond words, through violence turning in on itself and an escape through that violence turning outward.

The brevity of the piece is intended on many levels. Aesthetically, each frame and sound bite is treated as elements in any work of art (e.g., painting, poem or soundwork) would be – that is, only what is precisely and perfectly necessary for aesthetic, conceptual, dramatic reasons is there.  The brevity is conceptually relevant as the video depicts a kind of powerlessness or diminutive position of the protagonist, the relationship of smallness to large, and relative largeness or smallness - forces, physicality and claustrophobic space.  Using essential aspects of the medium, time and rhythm, brevity and pace here mimic the kind of internal timing of memory, of fleeting thought, of instances of violence experienced, witnessed, remembered. 

Signagens (Signings) is a series of videopoems (1985-89) developed by E.M. de Melo e Castro with the support of the Portuguese Institute for Distance Learning (IPED) and later by the Open University of Lisbon, in its electronic and digital TV studios. According to Melo e Castro, "this project intended first of all to investigate video possibilities as a new medium for reading poetry. It was meant to be used in classes of literature and of Portuguese language. Very soon I realized that intersemiotic translation of print-based visual and experimental poems was obvious, as video seemed to me a perfect medium for animation of letters and words." (Media Poetry: An International Anthology, 2007: 180-181) For the full series, including all the videos:

Northern Venetians is an experiment in collaborative electronic literature. When viewing the website, it is best to use Internet Explorer or Firefox (on other browsers there can be a slight distortion of the moving text on the homepage).

In his Magnetic North, Jonathan Meades asks of Hansastadt Stralsund in Germany: “Is this the Venice of the North?” He then lists several other places which have also been known as the Venice of the North, including the Maryhill area of Glasgow. A native of that district, I was amused by this comparison, as Maryhill and Venice are not regularly mentioned in the same breath. Anyway, I got to thinking about the other places mentioned and that not only should they have something in common with Venice, Italy, but also with each other.

Using short texts by writers and artists who have been inhabitants of a Venice of the North, Northern Venetians seeks to depict the composite city of Northern Venice. All of the stories are based on personal experience and, hopefully, taken together they give us a sense of that city. Starting with a few contacts, I developed extended emails chains and at the end of this process I had my participants and their stories. The work is of open duration and new texts will be added if and when they arrive: if you know of any artists or writers who are Northern Venetians, please contact me at greymirths@gmail.com

The home page shows some illustrative quotations, and lists the Northern Venetians and the composite city’s districts. The main page sets out the texts as a series of animated lines which can be moved back and forth. These texts can also be accessed as individual pages arranged in a traditional format. I constructed the website with the help of Scott Porter of Digital Engine. The site’s animation borrows shamelessly from J.R. Carpenter’s Along The Briny Beach, particularly in our lifting of sections of programming from that work.

When the work first went online (October, 2013) the Northern Venetians were: Richard Barrett, Kristian Byskov, Charlotte Desvages [tr.], Nikolai Duffy, Frédéric Forte, Sarah Hayden [tr.], Gill James, Tom Jenks, Madis Kari, John Kearns, Mirja Koponen, Olga Kortz, Keith McKay, Aleksandra Maciejewska, Peter Manson, Anna Olkowska, David O'Meara, Paulina, Dorota Prądzyńska, Kim Sandra Rask, Sandra Ridley, Gerry Smith, Magdalena Szulc, Patryk Włazik, Barbara Wronkowska and Minna Rombo Zetterlund.

Çacocophonie is built with Processing and was published at DOC(K)S homepage in July 2013. On September 23, 2013, during the first debate of the ELO 2013 conference "Chercher le Texte," Castellin presented at Le Centre Pompidou auditorium in Paris three different versions of the poem: a plain and static text version, written on a word processor, and two animated versions, both built with Processing, but having slow and quick juxtapositions of animated text.