Send & Receive: Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21 st Century. Symposium at FACT Liverpool

Transcription

1 Send & Receive: Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21 st Century Symposium at FACT Liverpool Transcript of presentation by Zata Kitowski 5 February 2015

2 Introduction I m Zata Kitowski, in 2002 I initiated a research art project called PoetryFilm, and I ve curated over 60 screenings in the UK and internationally. Venues include Tate Britain, The ICA, Southbank Centre, Curzon Cinemas, Cannes Film Festival, O Miami Poetry Festival, and CCCB Barcelona. PoetryFilm is an accredited member of Film Hub London, part of the BFI Audience network, and holds a trademark awarded by the Intellectual Property Office. PoetryFilm is supported by Arts Council England. Send & Receive I ll start with a few thoughts about the title of today s symposium, Send and Receive. Thinking about sending, or posting, in the context of poetry and film, brings to mind the 1936 film Night Mail, produced by the Post Office, featuring music by Benjamin Britten and lines of poetry by W.H. Auden, which were cut to fit the already-edited film. A year later in 1937, the experimental filmmaker Len Lye produced the animated Trade Tattoo for the Post Office, a promotional film urging people to post early, and the image used for today s symposium is taken from this.

3 The words send and receive, as well as being instantly recognizable from the context of everyday , also allude to the technical language of communications theory, and the transmission and reception of neural impulses. In any act of communication there s a source, a sender, a message, a channel, and a receiver. Nomenclature What do we call this zone of poetry, film and technology? Is it poetry film, video poetry, screen poetry, moving poetry, cine-poetry, kinetic poetry, code poetry, poetry 2.0, poetry in motion, visual poetry, hypertext, cyber poetry, digital poetry? ( and the list goes on.) What is it? Is it a genre, a medium, a language, a channel, or a semiotic mode? How do we write it? Is there a hyphen, a space, or a slash? Today s focus is not on nomenclature and in this talk I m going to refer to the artform as poetry film and I m calling it an artform. History The majority of existing literature dealing with poetry and film looks at the history of avant-garde film (and this includes film that might be described as alternative, experimental, underground or poetic ). It s useful to acknowledge this history briefly: the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, for instance, the film director Dziga Vertov s visual-linguistic punning in Man With a Movie Camera, and Sergei Eisenstein s tertium quid montage theory that two images edited together create a third entity, greater than the sum of its parts; the German avant-garde (for instance Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger); the French avant-garde (for instance Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp); and the Surrealists Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. In London in the 1930s, John Grierson at the Post Office oversaw projects such as Night

4 Mail and Trade Tattoo. Maya Deren s works such as the iconic non-narrative Meshes of the Afternoon and Ritual in Transfigured Time in the 1940s, and Stan Brakhage s 16mm experiments, such as Mothlight, in the 1950s, went on to influence generations of artists, though whilst artists such as Deren and Kenneth Anger embraced careful camera composition and film editing, Brakhage celebrated mistakes, randomness and accidents as the actual content material. There were different approaches. Brakhage, though quoted widely, was strongly influenced by Isidore Isou, the founder of the Letterism art and literary movement, who directed the highly experimental 1951 film Venon and Eternity 1. There was Jean-Luc Godard s New Wave in the 1960s and theoretical works by writers such as P. Adams Sitney and Christian Metz in the 1970s. There were the feature-length poetic cinemas of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean Cocteau. There were experimental movements such as Oulipo, Dada and Fluxus. More recently, there have been some valuable retrospectives, for instance, Margaret Tait s Subjects & Sequences retrospective in 2004, organized by LUX, and a retrospective of work by Tony Harrison at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, also in Of course there are many other artists, and the artists mentioned represent just a few obvious signposts. Today s Symposium One of the aims of today s symposium is to provoke new ways of looking at ideas, and my provocation for today is that I m not going to focus on poetry and film in the context of the history of experimental film or indeed the history of film itself and I m not going to focus on poetry, or nomenclature. I m going to look at something else. I m going to look at meanings and meaning-making systems, or semiotics. The crossovers between poetry, film and technology we re looking at today present opportunities for creating new meaning-making systems, for communicating messages and meanings in new ways, and for communicating new meanings. 1 In Venon and Eternity, the film is scratched, the soundtrack is desynchronized, the story is deconstructed.

5 These artforms can provide rich potential for exploring the creation, experience and perception of emotion and meaning. How do we create meanings? How do we experience meanings? How do we perceive meanings? The theorist Christian Metz was one of the first to apply psychoanalytic thinking to the cinema, and positioned film as a way of connecting with our unconscious. The filmmaker Kayla Parker has described the director of her films 2 as being her unconscious perhaps this is the ultimate origin of the messages we try to transmit, the starting point of all starting points. Perhaps if we go back one step to this origin, we can reassess the full range of approaches available to us, to try to express and communicate emotions and meanings, and choose which to use. What tools do we have to send and receive meanings? One meaning-making system, or we could call it a language, or a channel, or a semiotic mode is the use of words. Another meaning-making system is the use of visual images. Another meaning-making system is the use of sound. 2 Source: PoetryFilm Archive submission for Kayla Parker s Unknown Woman in which a woman and a crow share the same sentience.

6 More aspects to consider Here are a few more aspects to consider: Different Transitions represent a meaning-making system. For instance, a jump cut or a slow fade will create different effects. Different Film stocks represent a meaning-making system. Different film textures on the screen can evoke different associations, for instance, grainy 16mm scenes cut in between crisp high definition scenes might suggest a flashback to the past, as if the film were in italics. Colour is a meaning-making system. Typography is a meaning-making system. Layout is a meaning-making system. Imagine if each frame were a photograph what is the composition of elements on the screen, and what effect does this create? Shape is a meaning-making system. Body language, gesture, sign language and dance are meaning-making systems. Speed is a meaning-making system. Framing is a meaning-making system. Do we see things from afar or close up? What implication does this have on our experience and perspective? Duration, in many aspects, is a meaning-making system. For instance, an artwork could be five minutes long, or it could be potentially infinite. Each shot could last no longer than 12 frames, as in Jurgen Leth s

7 remake of The Perfect Human, or a 96-minute film could be a single take, as in Alexander Sokurov s Russian Ark. Pattern is a meaning-making system. What if the pattern of a series of edited shots paralleled the form of a poem form, for instance, a villanelle or a sonnet? This is something I have explored in my personal practice, for example, in the silent poetry film artwork Palindrome (where the edited shots form a perfect palindrome). There are many more modes of meaning-making. The above examples are just a few aspects to consider. It is not a comprehensive list; such a hypothetical list would be infinite. Senses The visual and the auditory (two critical features of artworks within the poetry, film and technology crossovers) represent two out of the five senses. In our attempts to communicate emotion and meaning through artworks, could we somehow incorporate other aspects, such as scent, texture, touch and taste? Could we try to convey meanings in an even richer way more experientially, more synaesthetically? Could we amplify an individual aspect, or combine various selected aspects? The artist Eduardo Kac has harnessed scent as a meaning-making system by exploring osmic aromapoetry, where he has created a range of complex perfumes as a series of scent-poems. Each scentpoem has a title, though there are no accompanying written poems; the poems are purely osmic. 3 3 Aromapoetry is a new kind of poetry in which the compositional unit (the poem) is made up of smells. The poet "writes" the smells by conceiving the poem as an olfactory experience and then employing multiple chemical procedures to achieve his poetic goals. It goes without saying that, as in any kind of poetry, the reader is an active participant that interprets and thus ascribes his or her own meanings to the poem beyond the writer's original motivations. In my book Aromapoetry, the first book ever written exclusively with smells, readers find twelve aromapoems that range widely in their material structure and semantic resonance. While I composed some of my aromapoems with only one or two molecules, most of them are composed of dozens

8 The Cinema for the Ear project explores the idea of cinema in the dark and has presented events with 5.1 surround sound audio only, with no visual images whatsoever: purely auditory cinema. The Edible Cinema organization has used taste to enrich the film experience by serving certain dishes at specific moments during screenings. For example, in Some Like it Hot, champagne-flavoured Turkish Delight laced with popping candy was served during the kissing scenes. In the film artwork Floaters in the Eye by Antoinette Zwirchmayr, the text of Paul Celan s poem Schliere (Floaters) is stamped with a Braille writing machine onto 16mm film. Projected onto the screen, the Braille transforms into an unidentifiable code of bright spots. A blind person can read the 16mm film through of molecules each. In some cases, a single poem has distinct olfactory zones on the page each comprised of dozens of molecules each. In other words, the level of molecular intricacy of the works in Aromapoetry varies from the very simple to the extremely complex. I composed the twelve poems in Aromapoetry so as to provide the reader with a broad field of aromatic experiences. The titles simultaneously delineate and open up the semantic sphere of each work. Each poem is a distinct and selfcontained composition. At the same time, the book has a dynamic internal rhythm produced through the alternation of different or contrasting smells. Every poem in the book Aromapoetry employs nanotechnology by binding an extremely thin layer of porous glass (200 nanometers thick) to every page, trapping the odorants (i.e. the volatile molecules) and releasing them very slowly. Without this nanotechnology, the fragrances would quickly dissipate and the smells would no longer be experienced after a few days. To ensure even greater longevity, a set of small bottles is integrated into the book, allowing the reader to recharge every individual page. With an eye to the distant future, the book s summary presents key molecules used in the production of each poem. Aromapoetry is a book to be read with the nose. Eduardo Kac

9 physical touch, though can t see the film; a sighted person can see the film, though can t read the visual Braille poem a paradox particularly appropriate in relation to Celan s key themes of language and trauma. Those are just a few examples of how various aspects can be amplified and combined. There are many more possibilities, and in many artworks today, there are multiple systems at play. Different combinations of these systems, or modes can be used and the systems can reinforce each other, or they can contrast with each other. Powerful juxtapositions, combinations, associations and new meanings can be made. The approaches of using spoken words or written words to communicate emotion and meaning are just two approaches of many. Words Firstly, as the topic today is poetry, film and technology, it s worth noting that writing is a form of technology, in case this has been overlooked.

10 If spoken words or written words are used in an artwork (and they do not necessary need to be used) here are a few things to consider. This is not a definitive list just a few thoughts. Is it visual or verbal text? If it is verbal text, are the words being intoned differently to how you would intone the words? What is the speed of the reading? Is the pronunciation clear? Were you expecting a voice belonging to a different gender? Were you expecting the voice of someone older, or someone younger? If it is visual text, is the text being read aloud at the same time as it appears on the screen? If so, are you reading it at the same synchronized pace in your head? Or are you reading it at a different pace? What is the typography like? Does the typography match the content? For instance, how would you react if the subject matter was about politics, and the typography conveying this information appeared as cartoon-style bubble writing? What if that bubble writing was hand-drawn and animated, and had clearly taken a painstaking amount of time to make does that give it more meaning? What colour is the text? What size is the text? Is it consistent or does it change? Does it remind you of something? Is it bold, underlined, or three-dimensional? Is it in lines, or can you choose how to read it? What is the kerning (the spacing in between the letters)? Are the letters spaced out and does the text on the screen feel open? Or, are the letters pushed close together and do they feel tense and tight? Where is the text positioned on the screen?

11 Is the text actually a subtitle? Is the text all over the screen like a concrete poem? Is it making a shape? Is the text moving about? At what speed is it moving? Do you have enough time to read it? In Dream Poem by Dann Casswell, there isn t quite enough time to read all the text on the screen; however, this works well for this particular film, because not having quite enough time to read all the text on the screen is very similar to the experience of trying to remember a dream that is slipping away from you. Dream Poem creates within us an experience. In what sorts of segments are we receiving the text? Does the whole poem appear all at once on the screen, as if on a page? Or, do the words appear line by line? Or, are we fed the words one at a time? Or, do the letters appear one by one, so we have to guess what each full word might become? Is the text-on-screen legible? Is it meant to be legible? Are there spelling mistakes? There are many more considerations. These are just a few. How do these different ways of receiving spoken word or written word transmissions affect our emotions and our understandings of the meanings being sent to us?

12 Visual Grammar Shapes and forms affect our subconscious enormously and help us to communicate visually, so it may be useful to take a look at visual grammar and the language of design. Visual design elements are like letters and words, and design principles are rooted firmly in the psychology of perception, so there are reasons why certain things are more effective than others. We can leverage this knowledge of design rationale and design thinking to create stronger visual artworks. Designers and branding agencies use this kind of knowledge to create powerful visual identities and product designs, and to inject more emotion into brands. For example, rounded, bevelled corners are perceived to be more friendly than sharp pointy corners, which have been shown to trigger aversion in consumer research that s why mobile phones, computers, TVs and most devices feature the friendly and inviting curved corners: companies don t want you to have negative feelings towards their brand, and they definitely don t want you to have a subconscious aversion to their products.

13 Shapes and lines are essential to visual vocabulary and visual grammar, and the basic meanings of shapes can illustrate this principle. For instance: Circles can suggest love, protection and care Squares, rectangles and pyramids can suggest stability, balance, and strength Vertical shapes and lines can imply masculinity, power and aggression Horizontal lines can suggest femininity, peace and stillness Soft wavy curves can suggest rhythm and movement Sharp pointy lines can suggest energy and liveliness - though also violence, anger and aggression It s impossible to not use a shape, because even a blank page or a blank screen is a shape. We re making meanings all the time. For example, Derek Jarman s Blue is also a rectangle. Was it harder to visualize all the simple shapes I was describing because you re staring at a hexagon? It should have been that s an example of contrasting auditory and visual information. We can look at the FACT logotype to illustrate basic visual grammar in action. The hexagon is a symbol associated with technology and science, and it s used in commercial graphic design to represent high-tech products. Hexagons can tessellate with other hexagons, so this suggests connection or engagement, and it also reminds us of productive bees creating honeycomb. The typography commands respect in strong mid-weight upper case letters, and the baseline of the letters provides a solid foundation for the whole logo, yet the slightly spaced-out kerning in between the letters suggests a welcoming openness. The colour orange is associated with stimulation and creativity. White is associated with science and research (so it s used in the medical and pharmaceutical industries), though here the bright energetic orange prevents the overall logo from looking too clinical. The visual grammar of this logo is transmitting messages of technology, science, foundation, connection, engagement, energy activity, stimulation and creativity which is appropriate for an organization that s concerned with technology and creativity.

14 This brings us onto another aspect of visual meanings: colour semiotics. Colour Semiotics This is a Pantone colour wheel 4. Opinions about color meanings are subjective, though sometimes there seem to be universal alignments. For example: Red can signify energy, desire and love, though also war and danger Yellow can signify sunshine, joy and warmth, though also cowardice Orange can signify innovation and creativity, and it s a stimulating colour (the colour of ginger) Green can signify nature, growth and harmony, though also envy and jealousy 4 Pantone is the definitive global colour reference system used by designers.

15 Blue is the colour of the sky and sea, which are universal, and blue can signify integrity and confidence, though also sadness Purple can signify royalty and luxury White can represent science or innocence and purity, though in some cultures (for example in Asia) it s used for mourning Black can signify elegance and power, though also death and evil. Combined with yellow, black can be aggressive; combined with white, it can look chic. So colour combinations are important These interpretations of design principles, visual grammar and colour semiotics are only guidelines not rules. Some associations will vary from culture to culture; others are more universal. The analysis of colour meanings is a rich field, for instance, Carol Maver has written an entire book dedicated to the analysis of the colour blue in art, film and culture, Blue Mythologies. Individuals will always perceive things differently, but having an understanding and awareness of the possible stretch and impact of the meanings we are sending and receiving is useful in the creation of artworks. Multimodal Semiotics Why does there seem to have been a sudden rise in the popularity of poetry and film artworks in recent years? Is this a clue to something? Why are more and more people turning to poetry and film as a means of expression in today s society, and what does this mean?

16 We re moving from a mainly mono-semiotic model (using mainly one type of meaning-making system at a time for instance, the use of words) to a multimodal model (using lots of different types of meaningmaking systems simultaneously). Communication has always been multi-modal; however, today we seem to be moving towards a richer consolidation of modes, and technology enables us to employ more modes more easily. We are surrounded by semiotics all around us whilst words and language represent one semiotic mode (that is, understandably, analysed closely in the study of poetry), there are many other ways of making meanings. Different combinations of modes can reinforce, render more complex, or produce different meanings. Multimodality provides a rich and valuable approach to reading poetry film artworks. Language Evolution In the book The Sixth Language, the media ecologist and language evolution specialist Robert K. Logan argues that speech, writing, maths, science, computing and the internet form an evolutionary chain of

17 languages, and new languages arise when some kind of information overload occurs, and the previous language can t cope. New processing systems become necessary and new languages become necessary. We could take this idea further by suggesting that perhaps new artforms become necessary. The term media ecology was coined by the media theorist Neil Postman 5, and media ecology refers to the study of how communication channels affect human perception and understanding. Media ecology theories argue that social and political change is actually caused by the communication technology that s around at the time. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, developed by Benjamin Whorf, suggests that not only do language and grammar influence the way we form thoughts, but that language and grammar actually determine our thoughts, and determine our cognitive and perceptual abilities. This idea that the structure of language itself determines what people are capable of thinking has been around for a while, for instance, in George Orwell s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is the fictional language designed to limit freedom of thought. This raises bigger questions so is the way we think, and what we are capable of thinking, changing too? Final Thoughts Crossovers between poetry, film and technology can provide means of exploring multimodality, and of exploring complex inter-semiotic relationships. Through using meaning-making tools other than words, by communicating without words, or by not using words alone, we can bypass actual words and tap directly into the pools of meanings associated with words, and we can suggest richer meanings, and new meanings. 5 Another Postman in today s symposium context of sending and receiving.

18 The receiver today isn t just a reader of words. The receiver needs to be a reader of multiple semiotic modes. Crucially, variations occur in the reception of communicated transmissions because all signs (all signifiers) need to be interpreted. The receiver of a meaningful transmission still has to de-code the full richness of the meaning and its associations through complex interpretation. The meanings we send and receive aren t fixed and they re not anchored. The receiver is fully involved in the decoding, and the receiver s decoding is dependent on perception. I m going to finish with another provocation, and suggest that instead of being senders and receivers, we are more like senders and perceivers. Send and Perceive. [ends]

19 Note The content of this presentation is taken from Zata Kitowski s ongoing poetry and film research. This presentation was written to provoke discussions about aspects of poetry, film and technology at the Send & Receive: Poetry, Film & Technology in the 21 st Century symposium at FACT on 5 February Thanks to Roger McKinley for the invitation, and to the team at FACT. The author acknowledges the support of Fjuk Art Centre in Husavik who awarded a four-week Artist-Researcher Residency on the north coast of Iceland, enabling the continuation of this research. Questions regarding primacy, questions regarding creative starting points, and questions relating to the age of poetry and film artforms featured prominently in the discussions on the day, so below are a few addenda addressing these points. It was also interesting to observe a strong desire to categorise: for example, after the twenty-minute facilitated discussion, one group announced three types of poetry film. Addendum: Early Examples One of the earliest known examples of a film based on a poem is a silent storytelling of Clement Clarke Moore s poem The Night Before Christmas made in 1905 by Edwin S. Porter. The film follows Clement Clarke Moore s 1823 poem Twas the Night Before Christmas closely, and was the first film production of the poem. Considering the history of film as a whole, one of the earliest films ever made was The Arrival of a Train by the Lumière Brothers in The film shows a train moving towards the camera, arriving at a station. This film could also be considered as an experiment in perception as, allegedly, people in the cinema, who had never before experienced a motion picture film, thought the train was going to hit them, so they ran out of the venue screaming in terror. However, in 1878, Eadweard Muybridge created an animated film of a galloping horse using a series of animated stop-motion photographs this was in 1878, many years before the invention of the

20 cinematograph. The film was made in order to analyse a horse s gait, and it is an example of an artistic fusion of art and science. Stop-motion animation is still used today. Addendum: Primacy The question of primacy whether the film is more important than the poem, or whether the poem is more important than the film is a common discussion point. However, upon closer inspection, this binary question collapses on itself. From the point of view of perception, the artwork is an entity in its own right. It is a whole creation. It is a total entity. Furthermore, there are many other important aspects that can be dialled up or dialled down, to create different effects. Material that is created from the outset as a cohesive artwork, with a strong creative vision and robust concept, can reveal the richest aspects of this fertile artform. Such artworks do not necessarily need to be complicated; they can be simple. The strongest artworks can be open to multiple interpretations.