Karenina.it
- New Media / Experiences
Crossing Language, Media, Culture
By Fatima Lasay
University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts
July 2001
The invitation to participate in The Virtual
Mine's Gegenort Project came into my e-mailbox nearly three months ago from
Brazilian poet and literature professor Jorge Luiz Antonio. I have known Jorge
for several months now through an electronic discussion group hosted by
Webartery.com and we have done a number of previous works together, including
the Internet Soul Project Gimokud and the visualizing and translating of poetry
in Portuguese, English, Filipino and re-reading through digital music. I have
also enjoyed translating Jorge's poetry into the ancient Filipino script,
baybayin.
For the Virtual Mine, Jorge and I
conceptualized /e-m/ag/inero/ which encompasses electronic, imagination,
imaginero the image maker, minero the miner. And Jorge goes on to play with the
words: " I can observe "ignero", or "ígneo"
(Portuguese word, adjective, for the meaning of "igneous",
"fiery", "pyrogenic", "ignescent state",
"combustion"…)."
And even further:
E-M(AG)IGNERO
E-MAG(IMAGE)
E-MAGI(NATION)
E-MAGI(C)ER(A)
E-MAI(L)
E-MAGIGNE(R)O(US)
This playfulness with words, a natural for Jorge,
I could match with a visual and aural installation, by using the various
translations to produce computer-generated music that played while Jorge's
infopoetries danced on the screen. What resulted was a piece of work that very
well complemented the location of the installation, the Gegenort Mine Pit in
Germany, where energy, coal, fuel was mined. The transfusion and translation of
words produce energy - virtual and real - as the light of imagery and the sound
of digital music. The images are animated, looping to dance to the music. The
entire energy generation process presented is an infinite loop, from the words,
endlessly animating visual poetries are generated. The sound component of
/e-m/ag/inero/ also come from the words, which are fed into a program that
converts the text into vectors (numbers) and the vectors into music. The
instruments used give ambience and reflect the energies of the words. The
result - visual, sound poetry - A Energia! / THE ENERGY!
In Jorge's essay
"The Digital Poetry Genre", Jorge discusses how artistic texts are
seen by two points: "the digital art, the digital poetics, with the
predominance of infographic images, with certain similarity with visual arts;
and the digital poetry, as the union of poem, moving image and sound in the
digital-electronic environment, by means of interactivity, hypertextuality,
hypermedia and interface."
Some of the
visual poetry or infopoetry, created by Jorge in E.M. de Melo e Castro's
course, also make the work a tribute to the foremost teacher and experimental
poet of Brazil (Infopoetry is the
name given by E. M. de Melo e Castro in a Course of Infopoetry and Sound Poetry
in the Postgraduate Program in Communication and Semiotics).
In Jorge's essay, I also especially enjoyed
the discussion of how digital media and telecommunications has enabled poetry
to rapidly change form and dimension. In /e-m/ag/inero/ we present how the
authorship of poetry has also changed dramatically, with the use of the
expansive infrastructure of the internet, crossing space and time. The
readership of poetry has also dramatically evolved here as /e-m/ag/inero/ will
be installed in a room where the only light source would be the animated visual
poems projected towards the ceiling and the music playing in the background.
While there will be five poems to be projected, depicting five elements that
fuse energy to fuel the World (Fire, Water, Earth, Air and Spirit), the
background music represents the Spirit Element in the installation. I refer to
this as Spirit Music, a wild hypnotic rhythm of taiko drums and shakuhachi,
playing to the dizzying dance and color cycles of the projected poems. The
Spirit Element and its attendant poem binds all the other poems together, as
such:
Let sound(s) be wor(l)d(s)
Deixe o(s) som(s) se tornar(em) palavras) / mundo(s)
Let wor(l)d(s) be image(s)
Deixe as palavras / mundos se tornar(em) imagem(ns)
Let image(s) be wor(l)d(s)
Deixe as imagem(ns) se tornar(em) palavra(s) / mundo(s)
Let poetry be chain of all
Deixe a poesia ser a união de tudo
Let poetry link all of them
Deixe a poesia ligar tudo
Hayaan ang
daigd/tin/ig
Hayaan ang ti/nig/tik
Larawan ay syang tinig syang titik syang daigdig
Hayaan ang tula/y/ nilang lahat
The use of music in the work is an important
point in communicating and creating meaning which is a process of generating
energy as well, such that entering the room would be a participation in a very
energizing poetry reading. For Jorge, "it is really another poems'
readings, it remembers Camilo Pessanha's poem (first verse): "Só,
incessante, um som de flauta chora " (Alone, incessant, a flute sound
weeps ...". And the verse remembers not only the flute sound but the sound
made by digital and electronic way."
In "Earth", where the words
ouro/carvão (gold/coal) are mined in the poem, three percussion instruments
play the three-language translations, the marimba, xylophone and taiko drums,
producing the industrial music of coal miners.
In "Water", we produced
translations of Jorge's Logo Logos Lago Algo (Jorge explains, "the Portuguese
words Logo, logos, lago, algo have
the some sound and writing similarity, but not in English: soon, Logos (the Divine Word), lake, something.") and
predicts, " Logo o logos poderia ser alguma coisa como um lago" (Soon
logos would be something like a lake.) The re-reading for Logo Logos Lago Algo
consists of crystal and rain synthesizer instruments, resulting in a flowing
and gushing sensation.
For "Air",
the only verse is "Lá fora um vento me diz ..." (Outside the wind
tells me ...) and, as Jorge describes, gets lost in the universe. In Filipino,
I saw the verse as "Ayon sa tinig ng hangin …" (According to the
voice of the wind …) and re-read the poem as shakuhachi, bottle blow and breath
noise.
In "Fire", which was the last of
the five poems that Jorge presented during our email exchanges, an idea he sent
just before going to the bus station to work, is an infopoetry from Melo e
Castro's course. Entitled "Sol Som Lá Fora" (Sun Sound There Outside)
and in the image it is written:
Lá fora, (There outside) o sol, (the sun)
meu sol, (my sun) meu som. (my sound)
For the re-reading in music I used three
patches: bird tweet, brightness and warm synth pad, which readily created the
ambiance of outdoor daylight.
Aside from the light, movement and sound
installation, there is an interactive installation both on the internet and in
the exhibition hall in Gegenort. Here, the readers experience the poetry in yet
another dimension, following the links to images, text, sound and animation
that the readers must "compose" as the links are distilled into their
memory.
While exploring the intertextuality inherent
in literary forms and experimenting various possibilities of hypermedia with
computers and telecommunications, I believe Jorge and I have entered new
configurations of space, crossing language, media and culture. Part of our
collaboration also is variable media interpretation of poetry, and as Jorge
adds, the criticism and creation of poetry with digital and electronic media. This
is exciting new territory and there is still so much to learn and explore.
References:
ANTONIO, JORGE LUIZ (2001) The Digital Poetry
Genre
Jorge
Luiz Antonio
BIOGRAPHY: JORGE LUIZ ANTONIO is from Brazil. He is a poet, writer, Portuguese
Literature professor, and is currently studying digital poetry for his PhD
degree in Communication and Semiotics Program at the Pontifical Catholic
University of São Paulo, Brazil. He wrote "Almeida Júnior através dos
tempos" (Almeida Junior throughout the time) (1983), and "Cores,
forma, luz, movimento: a poesia de Cesário Verde" (Colours, form, light,
movement: the Cesário Verde's poetry) (to be published in mid-2001).
Fatima
Lasay
BIOGRAPHY: FATIMA LASAY is an Industrial Design graduate of the University of
the Philippines; she is also a practicing artist, writer and researcher. Fatima
is a teacher of digital media art also at the University of the Philippines and
is currently working on her MFA thesis on religious imagery, symmetry and
visual recurrence analysis. Fatima runs and maintains Hoydigiteer.org, a
digital art initiative focusing on networked projects, workshops and
exhibition.
/e-m/ag/inero/ by Fatima Lasay and Jorge Luiz
Antonio is an Experimental Poetry Installation that will take place in
Neunkirchen-Wiebelskirchen, Germany, along with ten other installations from
all across the globe. The project, initiated by five new media artists from
Saarland, Germany, will also present the installation online through
http://www.the-virtual-mine.net/ in August 2001.
(This review was first published in FineArtForum,
E-zine, vol. 15, issue 08, August 2001, in the following url: http://www.fineartfortum.org/Bakissues/Vol_15/faf_n08/text/review02.html
)