Socrates "Phaedrus"
The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulnessin the learners souls, because they will trust to the externalwritten characters and not remember themselves...You give your disciples not truth but only the semblanceof truth; they will be heroes of many things and will havelearned nothing; they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing.
T.S Eliot "Burnt Norton"
[...] Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not say still. [...]
I am drawn to language, how it is used and what it means to different people, how it can make concrete some of our abstract thoughts and understanding of our world.
It often mystifies me how these lines and circles create meaning as well as how easy it is to misunderstand it.
BEFORE
For my 1st Brief I did an animation [Time#01] with the text from T.S Eliots Burnt Norton [from Four Quartets]. I was particularly drawn to the idea of parallel dimensions that the poet hints to that follow on from '... the path we did not take". This is directly linked to my interests in parallel narratives, timelines and space.
Inspired by the Cats Cradle game and I created a sphere with the interconnected verses of the poem.
Inspired by the Cats Cradle game and I created a sphere with the interconnected verses of the poem.
NOW
The poem explores the notion of time and consciousness as something that exists beyond time. My interest lies in visually exploring the notion of time as an abstract concept tied to space as a non fixed changing and relative fabricated structure which is the poem itself.
I wish through this to share the experience of the linguistic/verbal meditative journey of the poet but to also form a dialogue with it. The animation and camera point of view having a dialogue with the words, through the use of space and timing.
Each part of the poem is a separate structure that is a type of a constellation with each verse a separate star/column, moving individually but attached to the structure/mechanism. In this way the shape continuously changes and words/verses overlap offering a different reading to the poem.
In this way I am hoping to offer the viewer a sense of the abstract relative notion of time and the words which try to describe it and instead of understanding a particular meaning and didactic message in a verbal sense, which the poet offers, to get a feeling instead in a non-verbal manner through motion and sound. Words are fabricated structures and mechanisms and verbal meanings are subject to points of view and interpretation.
AFTER
I selected parts of the poem that I am most drawn to and put them together into a new poem which the camera will narrate:
a storyboard has started to emerge:
and this is the initial sketch of the post-cinematic space I want to create:
