Smile for London: Shaken to Heat

Word in Motion in Camden town Jan'12, with R Holland

Interactive Visual Poetry

A friend recently brought to my attention Unidentified Game Object by Paolo Pedercini (August 2009) from molleindustria (Radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment). It is a fast paced interactive visual poetry piece that seems never-ending.
Here are some stills I grabbed from it and I would definitely advise you to have a go.

void with a fist

I watched Enter the Void in the cinema and from the beginning it was like a punch in the face (nothing less than expected for Gaspar Noé). Let alone the film itself but these titles are as if they are destroying the whole notion of opening titles. End credits and opening titles are all in one and its a mish-mashed blast of type and effects that I would in a different situation most probably find idiotic but in this it works so beautifully. Maybe beautiful is the wrong word here but for lack of a better word at the moment if will have to do.

the circle is complete

immersive poetry

This is an extract of the two animations that I've created. They are both two different viewpoints of the same thing in a way visualising the throught process on the left and the words and phrases on the right. The sound is a result of a voice recording I made of my friend Dave and samples from Nick's sonic art compositions which i have compiled here to match with the motion and speech. Next step is to work on panning the audio and experiment with different projection compositions for the immersive space.

A dialogue between the soul and body [by M. Phillips]

[A conversation between two computers. One read a verse aloud and the other transcribed it through voice recognition and vice versa. The process was repeated until Andrew Marvell's poem "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body" had been completely re-written.]

I just stumbled upon this during my research. I am very interested in this "chinese whispers" effect between digital technologies / the "meaning-noise" that is created from reading out something written to writing something spoken to reading out something written etc.

POEMAS CONCRETOS

Audiovisual adaptations of the concrete poems “Cinco” by José Lino Grunewald (1964), “Velocidade” by Ronald Azeredo (1957), “Cidade” by Augusto de Campos (1963), “Pêndulo” by E.M. de Melo e Castro (1961/62), and “O Organismo” by Décio Pignatari (1960). Director: Christian Caselli.

Poetic environment project

Socrates "Phaedrus"

The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness

in the learners souls, because they will trust to the external

written characters and not remember themselves

...

You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance

of truth; they will be heroes of many things and will have

learned 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.

 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:

Experiments in "type-structures" and motion

... is a Movie

Bob Cobbing

[This Book is a Movie: An Exhibition of Language Art & Visual Poetry, ed. Jerry G. Bowles & Tony Russell, 1971, p.82-91]

type in motion eg#01

I like how the illustrations are exploring what is being read in between the lines.




thoughts and questions:
+ the typeface size and motion clearly relates to the anger and power of one character and puny-ness of the other
- positioning of the text and motion of typography feels very "print" based to me. It is following a particular style of type-in-motion-graphics that has been quite fashionable the past few years.
I don't necessarily believe that type-in motion and for screen needs to follow similar grids as it does for print nor that it shouldn't. I just wonder whether it is becoming a bit of a tired old technique.

Why choose to animate a particular text that you simultaneously hear being spoken?