In an empty landscape a storm is announced by uprising sand, moving objects, silent people and a traffic jam on a narrow road.
In een leeg landschap wordt een storm aangekondigd door het oprispende zand, bewegende dingen, stille mensen en een file op een smalle weg.
Research into the possibilities of a chatbot as a poetic device.
Momenteel onderzoek ik de mogelijkheden om (chat)bots als poëtisch gereedschap in te zetten. Dit onderzoek wordt ondersteund door het Nederlands Letterenfonds en valt onder de regeling Digitale Literatuur. In 2017 organiseerde ik als onderdeel hiervan in Perdu een tweedaagse workshop in samenwerking met collectief Hackers&Designers en Botsquad.
Mijn eerste bevindingen en experimenten werden gepubliceerd in het “Vintage-nummer” van DWB, 2018-1. Daarnaast kruipen momenteel verschillende chatbotjes rond op deze site. Deze botjes bevinden zich in hun peuterpuberteit, er gaat nog wel eens iets mis. Naar aanleiding van de gesprekken die ze voeren, probeer ik ze te verbeteren. Spreek ze gerust aan, wellicht vindt u uw woorden nog eens terug in de poëzie.
I reflect on this edition I think about one of the major contemporary political issues of our time that reaches into the past and into the future.
Nature. The Earth. Climate. The human body. The human soul.
Many of these pieces evoke the cries of the earth under the scorching fury of our activity as humans. These pieces speak to the earth and the earth speaks back to them, creating a dialogue that begins in the soil and moves into the soul. Earth to Human. Human to Human. Human back to the Earth. I see these pieces, in collection, as a journey from the soil into the human mind. And if we are to regard media as a means of communication between humans, we can therefore understand how new media is an apt form of art for reflecting the current dissonance between the earth and the people who call it home: technology has both bridged the distance between humans, allowing us to communicate with people across the globe, as well as being the force that has damaged people’s lives; we as humans have a better understanding of the earth and its physical and biological systems than generations before us, while also almost unable to hear its cries—or, rather, we are not ready to truly listen.
(Source: http://thenewriver.us/editors-note-for-the-new-river-fall-2019/)
Shadow Trees compiles and animates images of urban nature. Focusing on shadows cast by trees onto walls, buildings, pavement, and the trunks of other trees, Jody Zellen is able to investigate places where natural and built environments overlap and touch.
The short video disrupts audience expectations of nature films and photography, which are often framed to limit or erase the presence of humans, so that trees are shown to exist in forests, not in city blocks. In so doing, such photographic conventions comfort us by removing our role in the precariosness of their existence, particularly in large metropolitan places like Los Angeles where carbon emissions choke human and nonhuman life alike.
(Source: http://thenewriver.us/shadow-trees/)
Thanner Kuhai is a short work of digital poetry, an elemental metaphor about wrestling with depression and finding hope against all odds. The reader/player is transported into an environment where language becomes intertwined with nature in a flooded subterranean world. Navigate tunnels and passageways teeming with strange life and shadows of words. Submerge beneath the water. Or seek escape to the surface. Available in English and Tamil.
Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.
Nearly two decades after the great eruption of May, 1980, a slow, remarkable regrowth of flora as well as a massive human involvement feed back to me old questions about the ecological order and our place in it. “A mountain bounces back,” I read; Mt. St. Helens has struggled “to be born again.” That’s not it, I think, but I am moved by the reappearance of plants and trees and animals and fish at Mt. St. Helens - the symbiotic reaching out of fungus filaments to plants roots deep beneath the volcanic ash, the herd of Roosevelt’s elk returning to feed on grass sprouting from the earth of an apparently unwelcoming ashy, silica-infused but now media-hyped “miraculous mudslide.” This blast equal to 2500 Hiroshimas the environment did, not us. But what is the environment? I search the abstracts of some of the more than 500 vineyard-laboring, exact, and specialized field studies that have provided “an excellent baseline for tracking ecosystem reassembly here.” I puzzle the human significance, if any, and will make a few field notes of my own to locate among these phenomenal events the voice and place of my species too. I take for granted here that the human organism finds itself in an ecology humanly social and political with all that that, from Plato to Bateson and Schumacher and the Bureau of Land Management, tries to comprehend; but I wander here in a specifically volcanic wilderness and in the presence of the psyche.
Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.
Nearly two decades after the great eruption of May, 1980, a slow, remarkable regrowth of flora as well as a massive human involvement feed back to me old questions about the ecological order and our place in it. “A mountain bounces back,” I read; Mt. St. Helens has struggled “to be born again.” That’s not it, I think, but I am moved by the reappearance of plants and trees and animals and fish at Mt. St. Helens - the symbiotic reaching out of fungus filaments to plants roots deep beneath the volcanic ash, the herd of Roosevelt’s elk returning to feed on grass sprouting from the earth of an apparently unwelcoming ashy, silica-infused but now media-hyped “miraculous mudslide.” This blast equal to 2500 Hiroshimas the environment did, not us. But what is the environment? I search the abstracts of some of the more than 500 vineyard-laboring, exact, and specialized field studies that have provided “an excellent baseline for tracking ecosystem reassembly here.”
Andrew McMurry reviews John Livingstone’s Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication.
During the central Canadian summer many are drawn to what is known as “cottage country,” a region of lakes and rivers, shield-rock and trees that belts the near-north of the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal corridor. On any July week-end the road- and water-ways of this bucolic district are crammed with eager recreants, speeding toward the natural beauty and repose which, as a result, now exists mostly in memory. In the vicinity of a large provincial “wilderness” area, Algonquin Park, I recently passed some leisurely sunsets observing what has become a rather common sight in those parts: a pair of loons, bobbing and diving in a lake made turbulent by the twilight passages of innumerable jet-skis and power boats. Their haunting calls bounced around the bay, competing with the full-throated roar of outboards and, once, the thunder of a float-plane taking off right over their heads.
In connection with the workshop “Aesthetic Imaginaries in Text and Image” 28-April, author and professor of English Steve Tomasula (University of Notre Dame) wil give two talks connected to his work. The talks are open to all interested:
“Ascension, A Novel: A Reading/Presentation of an Image-Text Novel in Progress”
“Ascension is a story of nature as it was. And is. And might become. It is the story of how our changing conception of nature, and the means we use to depict it, change the “natural.” And ourselves. It is the story of how we continually remake the world in our own image and in turn are remade by it."
(Source: http://www.uib.no/en/node/106721)