For my junior year personal anthology I've been thinking a lot about work with intersections between text and visuals. A lot of that time researching was spent looking at the fairly new genre of the video essay, as well as multimodal writing. My Dad talks about about Poems that Go, which sort of pioneered all this. Here's an excerpt from their website that sums up some of the complexities in defining this sort of mulitmodal work (i.e. is it art? where do we draw the line in calling stuff like this creative writing? (most of the poems are broken, now. I think a lot about our discussions on the difficulties in preserving digital wor.) :
What makes a poem a poem? If a text is sung, does it become a song? When motion graphics are involved, does that make it animation? If the images are photographic, is it cinema?In the age of "Post-media aesthetics," as Lev Manovitch has pointed out, the blurring of traditional media genres makes it difficult, if not impossible, to rigidly define media territories. Instead of struggling to draw these separations, we freely let the arts mingle in a space we still dare to draw a circle around and label "poetry."
None of this is especially coherent but it's something I've been thinking a lot about, where are there opportunities to being art and text together, who's doing it, and is it being done digitally....
All this thinking made me jump to a slightly unrelated video that I think I'd like to include in this post which falls into a different sort of category... not a multi-modal poem but a poem written by a well known poet (and coinecendatly a family friend) which a group of animators used as the basis for an animation. I think there are instances where in doing something like this, artists just become illustrators for a piece of text---but this feels beyond illustration a piece of its own that works with and draws from the poem. I find it particularly affecting. If I could do something even remotely similar in my own work (not this sort of full scale animation, obviously) I'd love to work with T.R. Hummer's "Where She Goes When She Sleeps." This may be a later in life thing. I'm thinking about it, though.
Below is the video I was talking about; an animation that works with the Steve Scafidi poem The Junebugs, part of a series of poems about Abraham Lincoln that blend history and myth...
All this thinking made me jump to a slightly unrelated video that I think I'd like to include in this post which falls into a different sort of category... not a multi-modal poem but a poem written by a well known poet (and coinecendatly a family friend) which a group of animators used as the basis for an animation. I think there are instances where in doing something like this, artists just become illustrators for a piece of text---but this feels beyond illustration a piece of its own that works with and draws from the poem. I find it particularly affecting. If I could do something even remotely similar in my own work (not this sort of full scale animation, obviously) I'd love to work with T.R. Hummer's "Where She Goes When She Sleeps." This may be a later in life thing. I'm thinking about it, though.
Below is the video I was talking about; an animation that works with the Steve Scafidi poem The Junebugs, part of a series of poems about Abraham Lincoln that blend history and myth...