life/death

A hypertext with original graphic design including poetic texts and prose. Second place in Multimedia Literature nomination of Teneta 1998.

In the film ”when” Ottar Ormstad is transferring his practice as concrete poet to the realm of a programmable networked space, blending his poetry with specially composed modern music with electronic elements. His b/w photographs developed in the darkroom are presented in combination with words in different languages, some of them exceeded into ”letter-carpets”. Some sentences are from well known songs or films, other letter-combinations are invented by the author.

The film is telling a story about life and death, basically from the standpoint of cars, rotten in a field in Sweden. The narrative is very open, and each viewer may experience the film very differently. This is also dependent upon the language background, any translation is – intentionally – not given.

when has been screened at festivals for experimental short film, so far in France, Romania, Russia and Norway.