elegy

Description (in English)

RE\VERSE: an elegiac e-poem (2020-21) results from the collaboration between cyberliterary artist collective wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 and visual artist Daniela Reis during the first 40 days after the Covid-19 pandemic status (March – April 2020). Following a random plus (pre-)combinatorial logic, 40 textual verses and 40 pictorial fragments intertwine in order to provoke a self-reflective reading of the verse(s) and reverse(s) characterizing the first quarantine period of pandemic confinement by COVID-19. On one side, a painter making use of the sparse materials she had at home, locked up in a small apartment and without access to her studio, dividing her attention between two children, a husband and a dog; on the other side a poet ekphrastically writing a verse per day as suspended portraits of a collective experience of fear, uncertainty, and emptiness that assaulted the whole world. Combined, in the sum of their verses and reverses, image and text (un)veil a dialogic path that, although necessarily entropic, is made of continuous renewal.

(Source: Author's abstract)

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Description (in English)

A series of 17 poems written in honor of Fluxus artist, poet, printer, and musician, Dick Higgins (1938-1998) on the occasion of his death. Each poem is a mesostic built around the letters "DICK HIGGINS" using words extracted from Higgins' "foew&ombwhnw."  An concurrently published and extremely limited edition (50 copies) of Mesostics for Dick Higgins was printed under the Xerox Sutra Editions (Le Farge, Wisconsin: 1998) and distributed at Higgins' funeral. 

Description (in English)

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.

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Seedsigns screen 1
Contributors note

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Description (in English)

ARTIST STATEMENT: Nuclear reactors are built to last for about 30 years. After that, the spent fuel needs to be stored for thousands of years. Zero-fault is unknown in all human endeavours. Culture fissions. Extinction Elegies is about the fragile instability of received meaning at both biological and social levels.

(Source: Artist's description on the project site)

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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Screenshot of Extinction Elegies
Technical notes

TECHNE: The display of Extinction Elegies is non-linear and changes over repeated readings. For every time the entire poem is read (by the current reader), a mutant word(s) is introduced into every verse. In other words, after reading all the verses once, the next loop all the verses will contain one word replaced; after two reading loops, two words are replaced, etc... When the number of loops or mutation-rate exceeds the number of words in a verse, individual letters are replaced with words and all the verses disintegrate into untenable bloated nonsense.

INTERACTIVITY: Click on video, then use the LEFT or RIGHT arrow keys on yr keyboard to get new verses & the UP or DOWN arrow keys on yr keyboard to increase or decrease mutation. Alternatively, after the first time all the verses are read, the mutation rate auto-increases and buttons appear (at top and bottom of screen) which permit direct control of mutation rate.

Contributors note

For information on nuclear power, I am indebted to Rosalie Bertell and FaireWinds. Soundtrack (produced using Ableton's Tension) available for free download on Bandcamp. Most footage shot (March 2011) at La Societe des Plantes in Kamouraska using a Canon T2i with 50mm 1.8 lens (Author's note)