The Blockade by Ross Sutherland

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It’s time to check in on the progress of Ross Sutherland‘s “30 Videos/30 Poems” digital residency at The Poetry School. He’s uploaded 27 videos so far, and intends to finish by the end of this week. As promised, the videopoems in the series have been highly diverse, “exploring the different ways that the two mediums can shape and influence the other” in a wonderfully witty and experimental spirit—which means that even the ones that don’t wholly succeed are still instructive. I’d count this one as a success, a remix of a newscast from Irish television that offers one answer to the question: How the hell do you make a videopoem with a text describing another work of art? I’m not saying that’s quite what he’s done here, but that’s the pretense. The viewer is rewarded with a kind of double seeing, trying to picture the painting described by the museum-docent narrator while simultaneously re-evaluating the newscast in light of it.

To see Sutherland’s picks of his four favorite videos from the series so far, check out his April 29 blog post. He’s also archiving the videos on a Tumblr site.

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