Anushka Bansal, theoceanmyfriend (2018)

Instagram

Author's Note: This piece is about my relationship with the ocean. It feels like it is a personal, one-on-one kind of connection. But in fact, I come to realise that I am just one of many. Yet, the ocean has a way of making that special.

Stella Egelja, Junk (2018)

A collection of interactive works and objects accessible through Finder; Audio, Visual

Artist Statement:

Junk is designed to be interactive in more than one way. Accessible via a USB flash-drive, this interactive, digital poetry experience is a collection of videos, audio clips, objects, and images which are related to a poem the viewer is first exposed to. The poem is a collection of definitions, example phrases and other found fragments referencing the keywords from the folders. Junk is a compilation of personal archives that bury themselves within folders on any generic desktop, or any junk drawer; the contents of which are often left unopened and unimportant following their placement in their respective folders. The viewer is meant to navigate these embedded folders like a digital maze, confronting digital and physical junk which begins to embody an individual. In many ways, Junk becomes a sort of self-portrait for whoever contributes and circulates the flash-drive. Because this piece is designed to be exclusively accessed via a flash-drive, it is meant to be dragged onto the desktop of the user/viewer, who is able to add their own videos, audio samples, images, and objects in response to the poem and parallels one is able to view in their own digital life, of which to circulate further. In theory, this process could go on endlessly. This poem is inspired by Grosse Fatigue by Camille Henrot.

Editorial Statement (Travis Morehead)

Junk is an immersive poem, requiring time, deliberation and choice on the part of the viewer. Incorporating and recontextualizing familiar tools and organizational structures inherent in all computer desktop interfaces, the poem leads viewers down a visual rabbit hole, utilizing layer upon layer of folders, windows, audio/video clips, and reading as a rhizome like structure of containers; a sort of exponential variant on Russian nesting dolls. Constructing a poem from such a ubiquitous visual system, Junk feels like sanctioned voyeurism. These folders and files could be anyone's digital detritus. The difference is that the poem presents itself as a carefully curated yet open-ended experience; a playful use of what is generally a solitary interactive experience, worked into an expressive medium for an external audience.

Marco Aguire, Not architecture but evidence it exists (2018)

Keywords: Model, Space, Light

Tech Details: .3dm Rhino Model and Documented with screen recording video

Author's Statement: “Not architecture but evidence that it exists,” is a TAVIT Poem experiment within space. Unsure of how to propose the poem, I decided to hide the texts as Easter eggs in boxes. I then h recorded two Architecture students interacting with the poem.

Alex Nickolson-Edie, A Golden Void (2018)

In making this video, I made my own set of cards (52) and wrote on some part of a few poems I have been writing the last few months and left some of them blank with marks of paint on them to either create meaning as cards are pulled or to be indications of possible punctuation. I then shuffled the cards and would pull five then on the sixth card put it back into the deck and pull five more and I let those ten cards whether the words fit together grammatically or not or if there were even words on the cards pulled, those ten became a poem. And the text seen throughout the video is the ten cards that I pulled first. I pulled the cards like this five times and took pictures of each card in the order they were pulled and strung them together to make this poem/video. I find that the software after effects had a unique interaction with the images (by compressing and altering the original way to view the card which at first was only vertical) at first and helped shape the video into what it is rather than what I thought it would be. And anyone can write their own poem using the cards, I could draw the cards again and create a new poem.

(Also fun fact out of the Five times i did it a few cards showed up ⅗ times even when i reshuffled the card, It makes me think that somethings we think are random aren’t.)

This video was created using after effects, bridge, and my roommate, Chelsea Garvey, helping me understand the two.

Diya Jain, Poetrying Ads (2018)

Author's Note: The purpose of the piece is to explore Jhave’s idea of TAVIT (textual audio-visual interactive). While exploring this concept, I built an understanding that commercials could be considered a form of textual audio-visual poetry. I think that commercials heavily tend to influence our decisions. They are usually involved in all aspects of our lives from the beauty products we use to our mattresses to the type of 4G LTE data we choose to carry in our pockets. They also incorporate a pattern in its creation: the timing, the limits of the number of shots, sound, and title presentation etc. Commercials are technologically driven poetry and their presentation essentially becomes their mode of interaction between them and the viewers. Despite their operative tone, commercials quietly gush their existence in our decision making as their means of interaction.

The four commercials used here are from T-Mobile, Groupon, TRESemme Platinum, and NECTAR, all of which speak directly to viewers. To create the video, I simply placed them one next to the other in a grid like collage with overlapping sound.

Editorial Note (Hannah Yi)

It is hard to believe that the commercials being played were not edited to be timed together because of the queue that seem to happen at similar times. Certain aspects seem to appear at the same rate like the logo and when the actors speak. It is quite eerie and super interesting to see how companies use certain formats/pacing for their commercials. I would love a further exploration about this especially with the rise of social media and how ads are portrayed on a mobile scale as well. Perhaps an entire wall of these commercials could play in a gallery setting? It makes me wonder what other patterns there are for certain ads. How similar are ads in another country to the US? What do other cultures/places target in their ads for specific consumers? In the realm of digital poetics, how can these patterns simulate other senses?

Travis Morehead, to hold one feeling (2018)

Keywords - Poetry, Interaction, Live Feed, Face Recognition

Tech Details - Created in Processing 3.3, using OpenCV face tracking functions. Both of which would need to be installed on a desktop or laptop (with a webcam) to be read/performed.

Code

Author's Note: to hold one feeling is a poem born out of the form that contains it, resulting in a contemplative, temporal experience shaped between viewer and program. Utilizing open source facial recognition software, text is continually projected at 30 frames per second onto, and in response to, any face recognized by the program for the duration that the program is left running. No previous frames are erased from the screen, leaving text increasingly obscured over time. Because of the camera's sensitivity to any/all movement, the physicality of interaction elicits an immediate sense of self in relation to text; creating a paradoxical space of influence and futility. While the words connote an emotional landscape in the mind, the awareness of self is tied to the body.

This poem was also created in response to one of Maggie Nelson's propositions in her book, Bluets:

"79. For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one's life in a world made of it. 'Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,' wrote Emerson. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what its hue, can be deadly."

Editorial Note (Stella Egelja): to hold one feeling is an interactive poem that engages the viewer directly through the video camera using Processing. Upon running the program, the viewer is exposed to a black screen with the words, “to hold one feeling.” When the viewer moves, or reacts to the screen with physical motion, the camera begins to trace the movement of the body with the original text. The choice of words, “to hold one feeling” gives rise to the difficulties of sitting with a feeling, specifically one of discomfort in being recorded. This work also personifies the feeling of carrying emotional weight with you for a specific period of time, the feeling literally following the body. When the program starts running and the green light signals the camera begins to engage with the viewer, questions of interactivity arise from both sides of the screen: the digital body behind the camera and the physical body in front of it. To Hold One Feeling gives kinetic skins to the text, literally mirroring the motion of the body, bringing the text to the viewer’s life. This interaction allows for a surface on which to project one’s own feelings, and to hold onto the tracks of their movements as a sort of archive. Upon interacting the green light of the video camera can be seen as something invasive; yet, when the viewer recognizes the camera’s analysis of the viewer’s body, there is a sense of both joy and discomfort associated with the digital mirror To Hold One Feeling creates.

TITLE + AUTHOR

ProtoPoems, Tallulah Hood

METADATA

Year: 2018

Language: Tracked movement of micro-organic matter and Protozoa

Keywords: Microorganism, Protozoa, Scale, Dynamic Language

Tech Details: Olympus IX51 Inverted Microscope, ProgRes® CapturePro 2.9, WILDCO FieldMaster Plankton Net

AUTHORS STATEMENT

Poetry constructed from the captured movement of various protozoa scraped off the floor of the Providence Canal.

Jhave writes “Humans are proficient at forgetting how tiny within the vast precipice of time and space our most ambitious projects are… Writing permeates space at all levels (not just human)” Thinking about poetry/ language in terms of scale/ comprehension, I was intrigued by the work of Zuzana Husarova and Eduardo Kac in their interventions in realm of Nano Poetry and Bio Poetry. This series of micro-organic poems is a collaborative effort to expose an active world, a living language so impossible to see with the naked eye but so effective when made available through the lens of high tech materials. The mesmerizing patterns and markings of the organisms in the water start to resemble symbols and scratch marks. Capturing them through various degrees of magnification they are somewhat organized/edited and each begins to develop its own rhythm. Going forward (with the right technology) I’d like to investigate the audible world of these protozoa, and perhaps develop systems for drawing markings from the imagery.