Search Results for: our bodies
Los Nadies (The Nobodies) by Eduardo Galeano
Spanish director and designer Carlos Salgado made this film for the NGO Africa Directo, evidence of the nearly universal appeal of Eduardo Galeano‘s writing. (Judging at least from my Facebook feed, Galeano’s death on April 13 occasioned much more widespread mourning than the death the same day of the Nobel prizewinner Günter Grass.) “Los Nadies” appears in Galeano’s 1989 collection El libro de los abrazos, translated by Cedric Belfrage and Mark Schafer as The Book of Embraces and described by Library Journal as a “literary scrapbook, mixing memoir, documentary, essay, and prose poem, [which] defies clear-cut genre classification.”
Salgado notes, “The project came through the agency Sra Rushmore to USER T38, which was where we did the animation and post production.” The credits given in the Vimeo description include 2D Animation: Raúl Echegaray and Alberto Sánchez; Additional 2D Animators: Rubén Fernández and Raúl Monge; 3D Artist: Alex Baqué; Compositing: Ezequiel Bluvstein, Eloy Gazol and Roi Prada; Sound: Sonomedia; and Music: José Battaglio.
This take on the poem by German animator Laura Saenger was much more simply produced (“Animation in After Effects, Music editing in Logic Pro”) but is equally beautiful and imaginative, I think.
Sound decisions: from minimalist to maximalist in poetry film soundscapes
I’ve always been fascinated by sound. When I was at art college a very long time ago I was electrified by the way directors like David Lynch combined sound effects, music and voice to fantastic atmospheric and emotional effect.
So when I was invited to curate a series of films for this year’s REELpoetry festival in Houston, I knew straightaway that even though sound wasn’t the most original of themes, I wanted it to be my focus.
I chose eleven films by ten filmmakers, a tip-of-the-iceberg look at how different poetry filmmakers build soundscapes that play a leading role in creating the emotionally immersive world of the poetry film.
There were hundreds of films I could have chosen, but my way of whittling down the selection was choosing the films that have the most emotional punch for me personally. So, these are also some of my favourite poetry films.
Fran Sanders, Festival Director of REELpoetry, says, “Janet Lees’s beautifully curated selection of poetry films highlights the dynamic power and subtle influences of soundscapes, providing wide ranging examples of how they animate our emotional responses and impact our visual involvement.”
To get under the skin of how they manage this feat of animating our emotional responses, I asked the filmmakers for insight into their decisions regarding sound. Here are those insights, along with the films, in the order they were screened at the festival.
Lament
This animated film by Afroditi Bitzouni is inspired by the poem of the same name by Miltos Sachtouris, with music and sound design by Kyriakos Charalampides and Giuliano Anzani.
I love the way the sound works with the visual here, right down to how the poet’s voice is integrated. There’s a constant sense of threat and precariousness, but at the same time a dynamic feeling of hope – the irrepressible energy of life.
Afroditi says, “I wanted audiences to engage with the poem on multiple sensory levels. The sound is composed of narration, flute recordings, foley, and analog synthesizers, which were later digitally processed. The music aims to complement and emphasize the poet’s raw diction and articulation, while simultaneously aligning with the fast-paced rhythm of the animation.
“A series of musical phrases creates a sense of continuity leading toward a resolution that never arrives. Instead, the sound generates a constant climax that persists until the poem’s end, when everything dissolves into the void.”
Beyond Words
Directed by Helene Moltke-Leth, this deceptively simple film is based on a poem by Else Beyer Knuth-Winterfeldt.
Helene says, “Sound has always been a key focus in my work. At the first art school I attended at 19, I created a sound piece that was showcased in a sound cinema designed for the event. Later, I became one of the first female electronic DJs in Copenhagen, which led to a four-year role at Denmark’s national radio. My documentary filmmaking education at the National Film School of Denmark also emphasised sound design. All of these experiences have shaped my deep love for sound in my creative process.”
This film opens with sounds of mass communication and city life, a masterful combination of sound effects and music that propels you into the film. And then, sudden silence, accompanied by a black screen. Out of this, like dawn rising, emerges a natural landscape, combined with slower, gentler music and natural sounds.
“My idea was to juxtapose busy, everyday life with the calming stillness of nature, reflecting the spirit of the poem,” said Helene. “This contrast came together beautifully in the editing process, particularly with the jarring sound of the truck that transitions the audience into the calmness of nature.”
Throughout the film, one recurring note sounds. For me, this anchors everything and adds a layer of meaning. It feels like the tolling of a bell, a lament for everything we’ve lost and stand to lose, if we do not heed the call to respect and reconnect with nature.
Body Electric
There is stupendous subversion at play in this largely purloined piece by the inimitable Mike Hoolboom. Bookended by other footage, the body of the film is a stolen ad – an iPhone commercial in which an electric socket laments in song how much it’s missing being connected to the phone (because the phone’s charge lasts so long).
The film opens with a forest fire, before switching to the iPhone footage, accompanied by partially repeated broken phrases and electronic sound. The roar and crackle of flames, followed by unpredictable synthetic noise and the hypnotic anaphora – delivered in a robotic voice that somehow holds both bafflement and yearning – are fantastically effective in creating a world of deep unease and existential sorrow you can’t look away from.
Mike says, “The soundtrack is mostly stolen. I cut it to fit the iPhone commercial (more or less) then only added layers of electric bulbs, buzzes, line hums, etc.”
Our Bodies
Another brilliant example of subversion, this time by Matt Mullins, which I find completely mesmerising. I love how it’s a fully found poetic experience – visually, textually and sonically: a recycling of a broadcast by the Christian televangelist Oral Roberts. Its soundscape is incredibly effective – whenever I think about the film, I can recall the sound with great clarity.
Matt says, “The soundtrack is directly tied to the source material and the creative process for that particular piece. The uncarved block of marble I started with was the original footage/soundtrack of that Oral Robert’s televangelist broadcast. When it came to me to make a visual/sonic cut up/erasure out of that source material/sermon, it seemed natural to do a cut up/loop of the music that accompanied the broadcast as the soundtrack/score.
“So what you’re hearing is a loop and distortion of the original organ music soundtrack that was played live at the beginning and the end of his sermon. I took that audio, looped it, added some dirt and other effects and let it gel with the visuals. It all happened rather organically and was part of that piece’s fever-dream process, which was basically two twelve-hour days back to back that resulted in the finished videopoem.”
What the Thunder Said
Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran are a mighty double-act on the poetry film scene. Their immersive soundscapes are momentous and at the same time curiously intimate. I would recognise a Jack-and-Pam soundtrack anywhere, and it always feels as though it’s playing inside my head.
This film is a masterclass in propulsive sound, which dovetails with the unfolding found poem (based on ‘The Wasteland’ by TS Eliot), and Pam and Jack’s drive-by footage, to create a kind of poetry road movie.
Pam says, “The footage was filmed after Jack wrote the cento poem, and we went out on location to find evocative footage that matched the tenor of the lines of the cento. We had some specific locations we wanted to use, including White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico, and Gary, Indiana, once an important part of the US steel industry, but now largely moribund. And we also shot whatever we saw in transit that seemed relevant to the poem.
“Most of the film was shot using our iPhones, because the stabilization is remarkable. We wanted a soundscape score that would function as diegetic sound. Some of that sound was stuff that we’ve recorded and saved as a library, but a lot of it is sound that other filmmakers and sound guys share on the internet, and some of it comes from Final Cut Pro and other editing software resources. Compared to what it was like to create analog sound mixes using 16mm film flatbed editing equipment, which was state of the art when we were young, digital video and audio comes close to nirvana.”
Here we have whistling winds, howling winds, and what Pam evocatively calls “empty and fearful winds”, along with eerie melodic water sounds, industrial noise, and a symphony of insects.
Pam explains, “Another reason we like to make soundscapes to accompany our poetry films is that they function like a musical score. A lot of our poetry films involve the natural world, and we like the idea of using natural sounds in a musical way to create a soundscape. Our soundscapes are composed from imagined diegetic sounds. We think about what we want to hear, and go looking for it, and sometimes we find it. Other times, we find stuff we weren’t exactly looking for, but is unexpectedly evocative. Sometimes serendipity works for us, so we try to stay open to it.”
Unseen
This breathtakingly powerful film by Helmie Stil, with a soundscape by Lennert Busch, is based on a poem by spoken word artist Sjaan Flikweert.
The poem is inspired by women who have endured domestic violence. The power of the film’s soundscape lies in its quietness, a direct contrast with the ear-splitting loudness of domestic violence. The whispered words and underwater-muffled sounds speak to silencing and suppression.
Helmie says, “The idea of whispering the poem came from interviews I had with women in a safe house. Some of them told me they whispered to their children and in general they had the feeling they should whisper in the house so they didn’t upset their husbands.
“Personally I think you listen more carefully to the poem because of the whispering. You really want to hear what is said, so the voice gets a stronger position. The whispering also gives a feeling of intimacy, it draws you into the inner world of the woman. It symbolises that the women are heard and seen.
“The underwater sounds emphasise the isolation. When you are underwater, the sounds are subdued and you get in your own world. Your inner world becomes more important, and it’s just yourself. You hold your breath. Women who experience domestic violence always hold their breath, but in their day to day life. I wanted to give the audience the same feeling (of holding your breath) while watching the film.”
Future Perfect
Ian Gibbins is renowned for his propulsive soundtracks and this film is no exception. It harnesses the energy of a music video while simultaneously subverting that energy with dystopian messages from a futuristic Babel. The language in the film is not so much deconstructed as blasted apart, accompanied by a terrifically exciting maximalist soundtrack.
Ian says, “I recorded the voice first: it’s one of the Apple text-to-voice readers that comes with the system. I liked the American tinge to the accent for some reason. The main text is so abbreviated that it’s actually hard to read in real life, so I wanted to see how the text-to-speech would work. Ususally I have to tweak the text a bit when I do this so that the machine reading says the right things, but this time I just went with whatever it produced.
“I wanted the soundtrack to be loud and aggressive, so then I wrote the music and fitted the vocal around it. As is my usual process, the tempo was set to make synchonising the video and audio edits easier – 120 bpm. Once the basic audio was done, I did the text animations to match it. As the video came together, I went back and redid some of the audio – eg the rising tones that come in during the word lists. Getting the final sound mix was tricky: I wanted the vocals to be clear but well embedded in all the noise of the backing.”
Swallow #8
I’m a huge fan of Kristy Bowen’s videopoems, and there are several I could have chosen. I chose this one partly because it sits at the opposite end of the maximalist-minimalist spectrum to Ian’s Future Perfect, but mainly because when I first saw it (courtesy of the Moving Poems newsletter), it stopped me in my tracks.
When I found out that Kristy made it when she had zero experience of poetry film, I was even more impressed. As well as being a great poet, she is also a natural at creating the ‘new poetic experience’ Tom Konyves says a poetry film should be.
Kristy says, “When I was working on the series, I was very new to making video poems, so I was sort of all over the place. I used public domain music for some, my own voiceovers for others. This particular piece felt like the visuals carried most of the weight, so I went with something that allowed them a bit more room and attention. I found it on archive.org which had many recordings of natural sounds that were free to use. It is probably the most silent of the SWALLOW pieces, but it may be my favorite because of that. That spareness was something I kept in mind going forward and as I worked on other series.”
Demi Demons
While there is no ‘official’ poetry in this film by Martin Gerigk, there is language, in both the chapter headings (commandments from the ‘Book of the Eel’) and the distorted words, cries, whispers, murmurs and hums that shimmer through Martin’s masterful soundscape.
At REELpoetry, Chris Pacheco, the director of Festival Fotogenia, talked about the diverse ways in which poetry can be found in film, not always in words. I feel that the combination of iconography and sound in this film creates its own poetic narrative. As he explains below, Martin has synaesthesia, as do I, although we experience it in different ways. In poetry and literature, synaesthesia is a rhetorical device or figure of speech where one sense is described in terms of another. It’s used to great effect in poetry, and poetry film, with crossings-over of visual/text/sound, is a great vehicle for it.
The soundscape in Demi-Demons is mind-blowing, an epic poem in itself, underpinning a momentous film that is currently earning accolades from many festivals as it does the rounds of the experimental film circuit.
Martin says, “I am a synesthete by birth, which means that I experience specific colors, shapes, and movements when I listen to music, speech, or sounds. As a professional music composer, I use this ability to enhance the visual elements of my films by creating soundscapes that synesthetically align with what is shown on screen.
“For Demi-Demons, I sought out particular sounds and noises that synesthetically correspond to every element in the overall visual composition of each scene, combining them into a complex, narratively driven audible landscape. Often, I position these sounds within a virtual space to express the three-dimensional structures I perceive in the scenes. For the vocal elements, I created specific spoken, whispered, shouted, murmured, and sung patterns, which were recorded, edited, and integrated into the soundscapes to achieve the distinct demonic quality required for the film.
“Each sound element is treated like a musical note in a conventional composition – a technique I developed a few years ago. As a result, the soundscape of Demi-Demons, in combination with the film’s visual style, is not merely a soundtrack but rather an orchestral audiovisual composition.”
Demi-Demons is not yet on general release, but the trailer more than gives a flavour.
I c
A clock ticks, a heart beats, and the whole film ‘blinks’. This perfect marriage of sound and vision is a terrific way of introducing the film as a sentient being, a conceit which Helene Moltke-Leth pulls off with great skill, wit and elan in this hugely engaging and powerful film.
Voice is at the heart of I c’s compelling soundscape. The first voice we hear – the ‘I’ voice of the film – is intimate, seductive, pulling you in. From there we switch to another voice, then another, then the voices speaking together. The voice changes keep you hooked, as do the tick and the heartbeat that sound throughout the film.
Helene says, “It is the film itself that is the protagonist in ‘I c’. Usually, the film is the form and the illusion we buy into through which we follow a main protagonist and supporting characters who must undergo a development. In ‘I c’ it is the film itself, which develops from woman to man, from younger to older, from individual to a multi-gendered ‘we’ – from the individual’s questions of identity to the survival of the planet. This ‘we’ is ultimately an omniscient voice coming from within Mother Earth, which articulates the serious climate crises that all of humanity is facing now, no matter who you are. I believe it is important to raise questions in art and this film is one long line of questions.
“Right from the onset and ideation of ‘I c’ I wanted the sound image to consist of a heartbeat and a ticking bell. These sounds symbolically fit well with the narration of the voices. A heart that beats is an absolute necessity for us to be alive. The ticking bell indicates that we need to change our behaviour in this world, otherwise the heart will stop. Both sounds also give the narrative momentum. The rhythmic heartbeat acts as a bass drum, and the ticking bell as a hi-hat. As the work evolved, I also wanted to incorporate the sound of water into the work – both the notion of being below the water surface as well as in the middle of dripping rain. The sound of water gives a dynamic to the soundscape, and water is a common thread in humanity. We cannot live without water, and if we continue life in the way we do now, consistently warming the earth, then large masses of ice will melt, and many people and communities will be flooded by water.”
Build me a Cottage
The soundscape of this beautiful film by Pat Van Boeckel, based on a poem by the legendary Fernando Pessoa, is simple. A straightforward combination of natural sounds, a relatively spare musical score, and voice. Straightforward, yet perfectly balanced. Sometimes there’s just too much going on sound-wise in poetry films. While maximalism can be brilliantly effective when handled well, it can sometimes be intrusive, drowning out the poem and the visuals, preventing you hearing, seeing and feeling them.
Because of that perfectly balanced simplicity, this soundscape lodged itself in my consciousness the first time I saw the film two years ago, and stayed there. Like a river, it brings with it the poem and the beautiful and astonishing visuals, in a work of art that for me is unforgettable. The two-note refrain that sounds throughout the film set up a permanent echo in me; when I think of those two notes they bring back the entire film in vivid clarity. This is one of those rare poetry films that cracks my heart wide open. I think that is a lot to do with the choice of music and how it layers with the natural sounds and the deep, resonant voice, ending with a descent into silence.
Pat says, “From experience, I’ve learned never to choose a poem in advance and then look for images. During the filming of this project, I was invited as a visual artist. I first created a house made of white fabric in an old, abandoned factory where they used to process wool.
It was in Portugal, so naturally, I had brought a collection of Pessoa’s poetry with me. I had already filmed everything except the naked man at the end. I only shot that scene after I was certain I wanted to use this specific poem.”
The way Pat describes his editing process, in terms of the part music plays in it, coincides exactly with mine.
“Once home, I could gain some distance with time. Searching for and finding music gives me a sense of direction and hope that it might become something worthwhile. Music raises the bar because I often find it so beautiful and powerful – it helps me push past my occasional bouts of insecurity.
“When I have the music, I usually let it guide me entirely. The music ‘dictates’ the editing process. I then add the background and consider where the emphasis should lie. In this case, the sheep and how the silence builds toward the end, making the stillness even more profound.”
For those who are not familiar with REELpoetry, it is one of the highlights of the international poetry film festival circuit.
This year the festival ran between 31 March and 12 April, expanding its online presence to show a huge range of films, including juried submissions from 14 countries, many of them premieres, as well as themed programmes curated by invited directors. An addition for 2025 was a series of poetry videos created by young artists aged 18 and under.
Every year the festival also features the vibrant REELcafé, hosted daily by Fran Sanders. This virtual space provides a platform for filmmakers, poets, videographers, viewers, curators, creatives, submission judges, and friends both old and new to connect, converse, and network.
Ten Questions for Tom Konyves
When I interviewed Lina Ramona Vitkauskas in September, she mentioned this interview of videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves that she’d conducted back in February of 2022. Tom kindly agreed to let us publish it after a thorough revision, reflecting his latest thinking. (If you’re reading this in a feed reader or in the email digest, click through for their respective biographies.) I’ve included embeds of the videopoems Tom discusses, but would encourage people who are more visual learners—which I imagine includes a number of our subscribers—to check out his recent talks on YouTube: “Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020” and “Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry.”
Despite enjoying the occasional provocation, I’ve never had a good grasp of literary theory, and admire those who do. Thanks to Lina for knowing what questions to ask, and asking them. —Dave Bonta
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: You have said “videopoetry is the poetry of poetry.” Please share more about this idea.
Tom Konyves: In the process of defining and assigning constraints and categories in my 2011 essay, “Videopoetry: A Manifesto” I made a number of what I still consider provocative, challenging statements. One of these key points, in the section “Of Text”, was the following:
Used in a videopoem, a previously composed/published poem represents only one element of the videopoem, the text element. The “poetry” in videopoetry is the result of the judicious juxtaposition of text with image and sound.
What you cite was a statement related to ‘(where is the so-called) poetry in videopoetry’ that I made during a Masterclass lecture, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace”, that was hosted by the Berlin-based Zebra International Poetry Film Festival on Nov. 22, 2020.
It was my comment on the text element that ended with the hyperbolic quote that you cite above. I had been going round and round about how videopoetry was changing the very definition of poetry, of what makes poetry poetry in our time. In retrospect, I should have used air quotes around the second use of “poetry”. The poetry without air quotes is the poetry that I saw replacing the poetry with air quotes. The poetry with air quotes is the example of any text, including the previously composed/published, i.e. pre-existing poem. As soon as this pre-existing poem enters the videopoem, it loses the privilege of the autonomous object: it becomes only one element of the videopoem, the raw matter/element we describe as the text. Following a successful juxtaposition with the two other elements of image and sound, the resulting effect or experience is a poetic experience, the poetry (without air quotes).
One take-away from this “idea” is that if you’re going to bring some text into a videopoem, even if it’s a pre-existing poem, be prepared for the meaning/context of that original poem to change, regardless of that poem’s original function. That new meaning, if I may reiterate, is the aim of a poetic juxtaposition of text, image and sound, namely, videopoetry.
Finally, to speak of the medium (the film part or the video part) as a “poem” is surely a rhetorical device. By the time Man Ray dubbed his 1926 film Emak-Bakia a “cinépoème”, French critics and filmmakers were already advancing the idea of cinema as poetry. At stake was the autonomy of film and its legitimate place alongside other art forms. On that day in November 2020, our hybrid form was also claiming a legitimate place, this time alongside vispo, langpo, concrete poetry, internet poetry, e-poetry.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: You have cited filmmakers Maya Deren and Sergei Eisenstein in reference to the idea that the poetry film—or the poetry of film—is not linear nor horizontal in movement; in fact, it is vertical because it is “concerned in a sense not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means.” Please elaborate.
Tom Konyves: The case of the post-war experimental filmmaker Maya Deren is a curious one: on the one hand, her films carried forward the 1920s argument for medium-specificity; in all her works, but most notably the 1943 film “Meshes of the Afternoon” that was described both as a “film poem” and “poetic psychodrama”, text-image relations were never an issue because she, like Eisenstein and her “cinema pur” predecessors, excluded the material presence of words, displayed or voiced. Immediately, I would find it difficult to comment on the relevance of her work to the relatively new – think 1980s onwards – experimental text-based form that I refer to as videopoetry, wherein the presence of text is an essential element.
On the other hand, she was also a film theorist. On Oct. 28, 1953, she participated in a historical symposium whose topic was Poetry and the Film. Flanked by her adversaries, playwright Arthur Miller, poet Dylan Thomas and the critic Parker Tyler, Deren introduced a radical concept that would influence the way we would perceive and identify the poetic moment in a dramatic narrative: in her view, the narrative continuity we expect as viewers is necessarily a horizontal movement, while the poetic is distinguished by its vertical movement; she described it as “a ‘vertical’ investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of the moment so that you have poetry concerned not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means.”
Maya Deren uses the example of Shakespeare. Taking Hamlet’s monologue –To be or not to be – she perceives it as outside the action or built upon the action as a pyramid at a certain point as “a means of intensifying that moment in the horizontal development.” When that moment is intensified, it’s a poetic moment. Here and there, along the horizontal development of a play like Hamlet, “there are periodic vertical investigations which are the poems, which are the monologues.”
There are other useful terms for the “incursion” or attack of a vertical investigation to produce the intensified moment. I sometimes use the word ‘interruption’ to signal that the action, the narrative continuity that runs along a horizontal axis, has to be similarly investigated for its poetic potential.
Lastly, the ‘vertical’ is a useful term for any literary activity; when I’ve done a close reading of a short story, I make sure to notice where the action stops and description takes over, effecting what is ultimately a delay of the action. The function here is to create suspense, “suspending” the hurtling of the story toward the end. During the delay, descriptive language often rises to the level of poetry. (I am thinking of the 1995 short story “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Woolf.)
Applying verticality to a particular videopoem should not be taken as a one-fits-all method to interpret works in this genre but it may be worthwhile to discover verticality at work in the singular 2011 “Snow Queen“, a cin(e)poem by the team of Natalia Fedorova and Taras Mashtalir aka Machine Libertine, whose motivation is “the liberation of the machines from their routine tasks and increasing the intensity of their use for creative and educational practices.” In fact, applying verticality to any work should not ignore its binary “opposite”, horizontality; indeed, another set of binary features in this work were foregrounded by the producers as they pointed out the “masculine poem «Poison Tree» by William Blake contrasted to mechanic female MacOS voice”.
“Snow Queen” takes for its soundtrack the text of William Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree” voiced by the Mac OS automated feminine voice Vicky, mixed with Taras Mashtalir’s haunting electronic sound-generated repetitive soundscape (surrounding four notes) for the entire duration of the 6:25 minute work. The four stanzas of Blake’s poem could be seen as the horizontal development of the event described in binary terms in the first stanza: ‘Angry with friend, told friend, anger gone; angry with foe, told not, anger grew.” The next three stanzas further elaborate on the growth into an apple in a garden, the foe then killed under the tree. The voiced text repeats the first stanza numerous times then focuses on the phrases “my friend” then “my foe” before continuing to recite the rest of the poem. Meanwhile, the video track similarly repeats a brief scene from the 1953 Russian film based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.
The repeated images on the video track are a series of wide, medium, close-up, and extreme close-up shots of the character of the queen in this animated film. The constant motion of these medium-to-close framed images is emphasised by the dilating or expanding eyes of the character.
The angry “look” of the queen supports the theme of the poem, comparing anger-shared vs anger-suppressed. The visual investigation of the theme or subject of the poem is focused on intensifying the moment which holds the text, suspending the narrative continuity in the film. The angry look is a device, similar to the electronic generation of the soundtrack. In this film, the “angry look” is a vertical investigation of selected moments from the appropriated Russian film. The text of Blake’s opening stanza is pounded into the viewer’s consciousness, delivered through line repetition followed by phrase repetition, “intensifying the moment” in a manner similar to the “amplified” image which progresses from medium to close-up to extreme close-up shots.
In any binary system, one element cannot be expressed without the other. Eventually, the first stanza of Blake’s poem is released from the intensifying repetition, enabling the horizontal development of the poem, the remaining three stanzas, to continue. Following a minor repetition at the poem’s last line “my foe…beneath the tree”, the text reverts to the first stanza, reminding the viewer that repetition – as a vertical investigation – will always require its binary opposite, the telling of the rest of the story, to complete the poetic experience of release and relief.
For his part, Sergei Eisenstein was faced with a different compositional problem: “… finding a key to the measured matching of a strip of music and a strip of picture; such measured matching as would enable us to unite both strips ‘vertically’ or simultaneously: matching each continuing musical phrase with each phase of the continuing parallel picture strips – our shots.” Thus, for Eisenstein, verticality or simultaneity are elements in combining music and picture, a very different problem. He likened the horizontal movement or development of film shots to the horizontal, linear development of a “melody” in music, as opposed to the vertical orchestration that produces the effect of a “harmony”. Whether through image theory or music theory, both Maya Deren and Sergei Eisenstein found the idea of verticality a convenient term if you were ‘concerned in a sense not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means.’
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: Videopoetry exists in what you describe as a pluralist art era (in lieu of the now-passed post-modernist era). What about this era embodies videopoetry?
Tom Konyves: In the late ‘70s and early to mid-1980s, not everyone had access to the resources – the means of production – required to produce a hybrid art form like videopoetry. With mobile phones used for capturing images, the playing field is more level than ever.
In the context of videopoetry, there has always been a concerted campaign to express the many different “meanings” of poetry in as many “forms” as possible, a pluralist approach, to be sure, by the makers but also by the organizers of festivals, the presenters/distributors of works in the genre. For the creators, it’s been “open season” on the basics: what images will best function with the words of a pre-existing poem; where are the words which would best suit a succession of images; should the words be read aloud or written on the screen; should there be words at all? (On that last point, I came down on the side of the poets: yes, there must be an essential element, so let it be words, and – if abstraction is desired – then let it be lettered, as in most of 21st century visual poetry.) It is an aesthtic pluralism that I’m usually talking about, a pluralism that I discovered at work across the five categories of videopoetry, categories that defined the variety of text treatment: kinetic, sound, visual, performance, and animation, but could also be used to define different styles of exhibitions.
Context is everything. In terms of your question, “my” pluralist art era was pointing at the situation of a critic, Danto, yes, but to some extent, myself, as we both examined what could have been a throwaway phrase – the transfiguration of the commonplace – and decided that it served our individual contexts equal to Muriel Sparks’ (in this case the originator of the phrase). In our opinion, the appropriation of the phrase could have opened ourselves to criticism that would then have to be reconciled with a simple appeal to “pluralism”.
For me, that phrase – the transfiguration of the commonplace – became a way to balance competing interests. I am finding that the “anything goes” method of juxtaposition may not always be advancing the genre. (I equate mediocrity with ‘whatever does not advance the genre.’) At the same time, I am happy to equate the “transfiguration of the commonplace” method with the remedy, because the sheer ubiquity of ready-to-hand, “commonplace” elements still requires an unusual degree of skill to select the most suitable detail from the myriad of possible images, texts and sounds to be used for the implementation of having successfully transfigured the commonplace. How? Provide a new context for the image. Or the text. It could entail a “before unapprehended relations of things.”
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: The Russian formalists proposed one should derive meaning not from content but via structure. Please explain how this idea relates to videopoetry.
Tom Konyves: When you find yourself wondering about the nature and workings of a hybrid artform like videopoetry, next to searching out the leading works in the genre, you may want to locate the historical “ism”, like formalism, a “language” that speaks best for those works, identifying their inner form (what you call structure) in hopes of appreciating the ‘performative’ value of what is being presented for your attention.
Of the many “isms” to choose from, I at first felt most at home with surrealism; in fact, when I searched for the most judicious way to describe the function of a videopoem (what the work was meant to do, to accomplish, its unconscious intention) the italicized “process of thought” and “simultaneity of experience” suggested themselves, two absolutely surrealist qualities we would ascribe to a text, not unrelated to the formalist “device”.
So, the surrealists, by way of Dada, and I go way back. It was a commitment I had made long ago. Before I met with the Russian formalists, in a manner of speaking, there was the English critic Clive Bell who developed a theory known as “significant form” around the same time that the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky devised the concept of “art as a device”. Clive Bell’s “significant form” resonated with me because he envisioned the term as the “subject” of an art form. It was therefore a straightforward leap to envision a juxtaposition such as Gerhard Ruhm’s voice rising and falling with a rising and receding tide in Hubert Sielecki’s Unequal Brothers as a “motivated” example of significant form, openly displayed for the viewer. The ebb and flow of the image smoothed and levelled the binaries in Ruhm’s text.
The Russian formalists did not do away with content altogether in favour of form; their aim was to identify the device which functioned as the vehicle to get the viewer from A to B. They had a term for this as well: it was “baring the device”.
As one who practices of what he speaks, I was very taken with the antics of the young poets in St Petersburg who went by the name of “Futurists”. Under the Futurist poets’ influence, two groups of energetic students of linguistics and literature, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, became the group of writers to be known as the Formalists. Innovation was key for both the Futurist poets who were “making” innovation and the Formalist writers who were championing the Futurists’ works. Rebelling against traditional poetry was very similar to my experience as one of 7 poets in Montreal who named ourselves The Vehicule Poets (after the Vehicule Art Gallery of which we were poet-members).
Led by Victor Shklovsky, the formalists coined a term that introduced the concept of ostranenie, making strange, or as more popularly known, defamiliarization. Like all good innovations that promise wide application, defamiliarization was a response to something lacking in society or in literature; the formalists recognized an attitude, a way of seeing the world, as automatized, a routineness that threatened the aesthetic response. To counteract this automatized attitude, particularly in the arts, the formalists offered ostranenie, making something strange in the artwork, be it a poem, a novel, a film, even music or a painting. Making something strange also required “making art difficult in order to heighten one’s perception” and even extending the duration of the difficulty because, according to the formalists, “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged for maximum affect.” It was a radical idea; if perception could be changed, triggered by the sensation of defamiliarization, it was possible to arrive at new ways of perceiving the world, to add new meanings to experiences. In the work Some Everybodies, Sarah Tremlett trains her camera on a street corner but renders the scene and the sound in more than half speed slow motion. An everyday scene is instantly defamiliarized, voices become blurred, indiscernible. Narrative space is perceived as strange, compared to real time. (The effect is prolonged for the entire 16-minute length of the work.) Such strange/incongruous juxtapositions in videopoetry are too many to cite.
It is no accident that so far, no mention has been made of the “structure” factor in videopoetry. (As a formalist, I have been busy fulfilling a typical pledge: “impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”) But structuralism is as relevant an “ism” to videopoetry as formalism. It has resonated with me not only because historically it’s an outgrowth of formalism; I can identify with its focus on the relationships in a system because it relates to the “significant form” of the interdependence of videopoetry’s three elements, text, image, and sound.
W.J.T. Mitchell’s version of the formalist/structuralist divide – even as it describes the divide in terms of their impact on literature, not a hybrid form like videopoetry – is worth citing here verbatim:
If form has any afterlife in the study of literature, its role has been completely overtaken by the concept of structure, which rightly emphasizes the artificial, constructed character of cultural forms and defuses the idealist and organicist overtones that surround the concept of form. The replacement of form by structure, in fact, is one way of telling the whole story of twentieth-century criticism. Russian formalism gives way to structuralism.
Is structuralism then the Derridean supplement of formalism?
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: How does videopoetry lend itself to the instability / malleable nature of language?
Tom Konyves: What if one person’s instability is another person’s jazz? If you’re one of the latter, you may be interested to know that Nicholas Payton considers jazz a four-letter-word – if you aren’t prepared to see the word and the genre as ‘European constructs designed to divide, classify and marginalize.’
The wonderful Canadian poet and friend Lionel Kearns once said of poetry that “it’s tricking language into saying something.” (In a recent conversation with Lionel, he suggested I change it to “tricking language into truth” – which has “problematic” written all over it. I would say it’s “tricking language into saying something else.”) What if his statement could be interpreted as: language is so stable it has to be tricked into poetry or that language is so unstable it can always be tricked?
Love, Lord above
Rod Stewart, All Right Now (Andy Fraser / Paul Bernard Rodgers)
Now you’re trying to trick me in love
The simple answer is that videopoetry ‘recognizes’ the instability of language as either the subject for a work or the means whereby the object(ive) is to tamp down on the process to prolong the poetic experience. In other words, instability can be viewed as a positive quality of the work.
Everything that happens in a videopoem happens between the text and the image, between the text and the soundtrack, or between the image and the soundtrack. Like the “poetic experience” that results from the juxtaposition of the three elements, instability can result from the visual context in which the text is presented.
In Janet Lees’ 2014 “The Hours of Darkness“, the text was “found” by the artist on an overnight flight; it was a ‘mix of the cabin crew’s announcements and snippets from adverts and editorial in the inflight magazine’. The “snippets” or fragments were presented superimposed over a fixed camera shot of a wet, dark shed housing seven languid flamingos. (As a group, flamingos are known as a “flamboyance”, a connotation that here presents itself as anything but a flamboyant group; in fact, the birds appear more representative of the opposite definition, restrained, caught on camera in a hyper-real gloomy dankness.)
If the fragments were presented in their original context (sitting on an airplane, reflecting on the surrounding sounds and “texts” in the inflight magazine) the mood would be more in harmony with the text at hand. In “The Hours of Darkness”, the unexpected relationship of image to text allows for a different and possibly more interesting interpretation of the viewing (and reading) experience.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: You have referenced or mentioned the idea that “videopoetry is organized violence on words”. How does this complement—or how is it in conflict with—Derrida’s most fundamental idea of language (words reduced to mere signs, and signs only having meaning when they are in contrast to one another)?
Tom Konyves: The phrase “videopoetry is organized violence on words” would had to have been a modified version of the quote attributed to Russian critic and linguist, Roman Jakobson, who first used the provocative word “violence” in the context of poetry being “organized violence committed on ordinary speech”. (It has also been translated as “organized violence of poetic form upon language.”)
Less well-known, the Czech linguist and aesthetic theorist Jan Mukarovsky used a similar inflammatory statement when he described poetry as the “systematic violation of standard language”. For poetry, he explained, standard language is the background against which is reflected the “distortion” of the linguistic components of the work. (The polemical aim of terms like “organized violence” or “systematic violation” is, I hope, becoming quite clear…) In both, there is the reference to ‘ordinary speech’ and ‘standard language’ – implying that poetry “sounds” different from ordinary, everyday language, so different in fact that only words like “violence” or “violation” could do justice to communicating the effect of defamiliarizing the ordinary, “automatized” reality that manages language by bending it to its will, “organized” and “systematic”. It’s as if we’re describing a political will. We know that Mukarovsky is primarily interested in the difference between the standard and poetic language because he said so:
[T]he theory of poetic language is primarily interested in the differences between the standard and poetic language whereas the theory of the standard language is mainly interested in the similarities between them.
In videopoetry, there is no differentiation between poetic and standard language; both are of equal “value” when selected as the text element. That videopoetry is “organized violence on words” points to the recontextualization of the text element, whether poetic or standard. Especially when the words are of standard, ordinary speech, there is a potential for “transfiguration of the commonplace” when presented through the visual lens that, like Derrida’s contrast between signs, can be said to create a new meaning for the viewer. In “The Hours of Darkness”, the equivalent of Derrida’s “meaning” is created when “ordinary speech”, the word element of announcements on an airplane is contrasted or presented through the visual lens of a shed filled with flamingos. The juxtaposition is in high contrast between two sign types, presenting defamiliarization in the form of a difficulty, an incongruity for the viewer to process, warranting the use of a charged word like “violence” to announce that an intensified perception encounter has occurred. I call that a poetic experience.
Likewise, we can say that videopoetry is organized violence on images. In W. Mark Sutherland’s 2008 Poem in Memory of Jack Donovan Foley, the artist selects five found scenes (images) with sound, superimposes two words, POEM and POET, with arrows pointing these words, one after the other at some point within the image. The five scenes are looped to play also one after the other. Except for one thing. The sound associated with an image (scene) is “pushed” to accompany the next image (scene). Pretty soon, everything is out of sync, including our perception. The scenes loop until they return to the beginning, all is in sync; harmony – of image and sound – is restored. The end. The work poses many questions but it mainly performs for our pleasure (or displeasure). As with Janet Lees’ piece, we have been presented an incongruity to process, our perception has been, to a degree, violated for the sake of the transfiguration of the order we have come to expect in our commonplace lives – a transfiguration into art.
If Derrida’s deliberate (mis)spelling of differance indicates how a new meaning can be teased out of a distortion of one kind or another, then I would have to “complement” Derrida on his observation by asserting what a difference an “a” makes.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: Elaborate on the element of chance in videopoetry.
Tom Konyves: It was André Breton who discovered in Lautremont’s 1869 prose poem, “Les Chants de Maldoror,” the singular phrase that became foundational to the surrealist doctrine of objective chance: “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” The juxtaposition of Pierre Reverdy’s ‘two distant realities’ could easily be applied to the two distant realities of text and image in videopoetry. But I am most fascinated by the dissecting table; it is the space where the chance encounter occurs, the context of the encounter. The content – any two objects, material or not – could be interesting, for an analysis, let’s say, but ultimately it matters little. In a videopoem, it is usually the image that functions as the context.
Chance is one side of the coin of reality; it is obscured until, at last, a moment of wonder presents itself. It’s unmistakable. In her introduction to the book, “Chance”, Margaret Iversen cites Andre Breton and Salvador Dali on the ‘blindness’ of the camera, that, according to Breton, “gives it access to unconscious material normally only accessible to automatism and dream.” Dali praised the “lashless eye of (the camera) Zeiss – incapable of censorship, naked.”
When I first met George Aguilar, he of cin(e)poetry fame, he who inherited the whole library of the San Francisco Poetry Film Workshop (led by Herman Berlandt), it was in San Francisco for coffee on a street only George remembers – when, suddenly (I’m sure I was in the middle of a sentence, probably very excited to say something to do with videopoetry) a butterfly landed on my shoulder. George, his mouth open, pointed and that’s when I realized that this chance meeting was only the beginning. “Chance and chance alone has a message for us,” says Milan Kundera in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.
Interesting things seem to happen when ordinary objects – like snow shovels or urinals, like the signs painted on walls or awnings, even fragments of conversations overheard without the effort of listening – when they are displaced from their ordinary world and moved into the more rarefied world of art. Chance operations leading to these displacements, such as Tom Phillips searching out a second-hand book for thruppence, may not always succeed in creating an entirely new version from the materials found. Such is the price of every throw of the dice. Because, as Stéphane Mallarmé famously wrote, A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance.
For one of my early works, I allowed chance to generate the composition with a complex system using three I Ching coins. The “I Ching” (Book of Changes), is a Chinese manual of philosophy and divination. In this ancient system, 64 hexagrams are used as an oracle, a path to the divine. During the summer of ‘79, fellow poet and close friend Ken Norris visited me for a weekend and one night witnessed what was to become the impetus of a new videopoem for which I already chose the title “Yellow Light Blues.” I threw three coins, posing the question, “Is this videopoem, Yellow Light Blues, that I should be working on?” The answer I received was, “You threw Hexagram 30… in this hexagram, six in the second place means… YELLOW LIGHT. Supreme good fortune.” We nearly jumped off our seats. “Yellow Light Blues” became an “expression” of Hexagram 30, a line-by-line construction of the hexagram. Thus, the videopoem simulates the six lines of the hexagram by dividing the work into six sections, each introduced with an image of the corresponding line of the hexagram. The viewer participates in the “construction” of the hexagram, witnessing the work like the work of a bricklayer, one brick at a time.
It is strange to “throw” Harlene Weijs’ 2009 work “1 new msg” in the face of Mallarmé, one of the Symbolist movement’s leading poets, but chance smiled that day on the homegrown Canadian prairie girl living in Toronto, when she set up her camera on a sloping San Franciscan street, lens fixed on a blank wall, beside which an old woman stood, cellphone in hand, trying to “connect”. Weijs’ M.O. was (and I say was because she stopped working at videopoetry soon thereafter) long takes with a fixed camera, text superimposed where possible. “Where possible” is key; Harlene would let people pass til she was sure she could fit text in the gap. In this case, chance provided her with a frame (as we say) you couldn’t buy. The work is about her mother so having the old lady in the frame was heaven sent. How long would it last?
In her introduction to the book, “Chance”, Margaret Iversen could have had Weijs in mind when she wrote of conveying a “slightly estranged visual excitement of the city.” The filmmaker obviously hopes for “a striking composition but she has no way of controlling the outcome. It is this gap between intention and outcome that seems crucial to the meaning of chance in art. The question then becomes: why should artists deliberately set up such a gap in their practice? And why should the viewer find it so engaging?” How long would the old woman stay in the frame? How many “gaps” between passers-by allowing Weijs to pour out a few words of regret for not reaching out before another pack walks by? But she is made of patience, or rather, her camera is. The old woman is the stand-in for her mom. She fumbles with her phone. She fiddles with her bags. She performs. She stays.
In 2005 Harlene Weijs makes “Pure Moment“, her camera fixed on a single maple leaf. (She comments, “Nature in Poetry. Poetry in Nature. Montreal, Canada, 2005”) The leaf is relatively still, so she gets to superimpose the text “i’ll call you when i’m 90” but then! The leaf turns sideways and will not be still…
For one of my earliest videopoems, “And Once They Have Tasted Freedom” I brought my portapak to St Helen’s Island, set up the camera and fixed the frame on 3 sailboats, a postcard image. I thought, I could place some text over this image. I pressed record, stepped back, and lit a cigarette. I needed enough “footage” to work with. After a few minutes, I noticed something strange. In the background, on the other side of a land mass, I spied a ship’s mast moving from left to right ever so slowly past the frame. Here was the missing ingredient, chance (in the form of the unexpected), which had inserted itself in my little world, unbeknownst to me, supplementing what was a too simple picture postcard with “significant form.”
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: Besides yourself, which videopoets, in your view, are elevating the artform?
Tom Konyves: Many experimental filmmakers have paved the way for the names I attach here. But these are the artists of the present time who are responsible for elevating the form. Most of them have found an interesting method to accommodate text and image juxtapositions; many of them have been able to describe the devices they discovered and planted in their works; some of them made us see unexpected new meanings; and a few produced works that spoke of their autonomy without our assistance.
W. Mark Sutherland, Peter Rose, Arturs Punte, Valerie LeBlanc, Sarah Tremlett, Matt Mullins, Adeena Karasick & Jim Andrews, Azucena Losana, Hubert Sielecki, Machine Libertine, Gary Hill, Manuel Vilarinho, Janet Lees, Maciej Piatek, Ottar Ormstad, Alice Lyons, Ralf Schmerberg, Martha McCollough, Guido Naschert, Brandon Downing, Jan Peeters & Paul Bogaert, Young-Hae Chang, Heavy Industries, Pierre Alferi, Javier Robledo, David Jhave Johnston, Yves Bobie Bommenel, Federico Federici, Kurt Heintz, Rich Ferguson, Caterina Davinio, Enzo Minarelli, Gary Hurst, Chris Stewart, David Moore, Katia Viscogliosi & Francis Magnenot, eddie d, Henry Hills, John M. Bennett, Sheri-D Wilson, Heather Haley, Marc Neys (aka Swoon), Elena Simak, Avi Dabach, Dave Bonta, Jane Glennie, Donna Kuhn, Ellen Maybe, Giney Ayme, Joel Baird, Lenora de Barros, Oscar Berrio, Nico Vassilakis, Tamarin Norwood, Xavier Sabater, Ye Mimi, Harlene Weijs, Susan Cormier, Alejandro Thornton, Andrew Gribble, Anna Tolkacheva, Arnaldo Antunes, Aya Karpinska, Billy Cancel, Brady Olson & Patrick Campbell, Claire Trevien, Claire Walka, Dier, Eric Cassar, Eric Gamalinda, Jelena Glazova, Lola López-Cózar.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: What is the most essential part of your Videopoetry Manifesto?
Tom Konyves: For the 2022 exhibition, “Poets with a Video Camera”, the following excerpts were projected on the north wall of the gallery:
(See also the opening question in this interview.)
In its earliest manifestation, it was probably that there had to be the presence of text, voiced or displayed. When this became more self-evident, the identification of five categories provided an objective means to compare and evaluate works in this artform. However, one statement that’s often missed or misprized is that concerning the “poetry” in videopoetry:
When the text is borrowed from a previously composed/published poem, it must be that the artist has discovered a new function for the pre-existing text, based on its juxtaposition with certain imagery, or a certain soundtrack.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: In 2022 and beyond, how do you see advancements in AR / VR and AI technology affecting the videopoetry artform?
Tom Konyves: I was always on the support side of poets and poetry; I argued that videopoetry is a genre of poetry, not film or video. Not to say that Visual Poetry (vispo) hasn’t made the advances that videopoetry has; in fact, when I first opened my copy of the 2012 heavyweight “The Last Vispo Anthology“, edited by Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis, I was blown away, aside from the gloss, which always helps. I recognized many of the contributors, those who nudged up against videopoetry-making without a fuss, foremost Jim Andrews, whose 2018 collaboration with Adeena Karasick’s text Checking In with his Aleph Null 3.0 is an epic of kaleidoscopic proportions, constructing the only possible frame for a 22 min. work worthy of the name cin(e)poetry. Gary Barwin has dabbled, and John M Bennett is certainly one of the pioneers of cin(e)poetry with his 1987 “The Drive”. Reminiscent of Harlene Weijs, Bennett’s decades-long ongoing collaboration with Nicolas Carras has only improved (see his Street, 2020). Of vispo artists I should mention Ladislao Pablo Gyori, his “wordship” Richard Kostelanetz, whose “word strings” (see at 49:29) were prototypes of what I called kinetic text, W. Mark Sutherland, for whose works (see America, a videopoem, as a recent example) I was compelled to add the supplement category of Conceptual Videopoems to my manifesto, and Nico Vassilakis, whose 5 short works of “video poetry” prompted the Continental Review to announce “Poetry has entered the age of new media.” I preferred his 2007 “toward a” – the harbinger (for me) of vispo and Vassilakis’ magnetic relationship with the alphabet – as we would come to know it. Finally, we should acknowledge and appreciate the contribution of Karl Kempton who has done as much if not more than anyone to introduce “individuals with no or little exposure to the historical streams leading to the contemporary expression named visual poetry.”
Language poetry (langpo) straddles the divide between print and the more recent iteration of e-poetry. Performance is either a slam or a plain reading; sound poetry, of the classic Hugo Ball variety, is an ultra-niche form although it has managed to find its way into some interesting videopoems (check out eddie d for a couple of amusing if not disturbing pieces; for the sheer speed effect, compare with Arnaldo Antunes’ Agora or Oscar Berrio’s Vertigo). If you’re not sure whether the art form of sound poetry can survive the intellectual demands of videopoetry, just watch Matt Mullins’ irresistible “morality-play” Our Bodies or W. Mark Sutherland’s not-quite retort to John Cage’s 4:33, Cutup, featuring the voices of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gyson, a forced incongruity with glue.
The porous border between poetry and AI is probably best exemplified by David Jhave Johnston’s 18-minutes of AI morphs that simply… puts the morph into metaphorms. His AI is Artistic Intelligence and… I have to stop there, you know, the rest is beyond my ken. (I got as far as a Tech Talk with Tyler and had to let it go.)
Then there is E-Poetry whose membership, as far as I can tell, is globally equal in number compared with videopoets but substantially larger in project grant amounts. (Subsidies to poets whose “medium” is print and/or public readings also outnumbers grants to videopoets; our share of the poetry pie is meager compared to other media. The days of commissioned works by private benefactors are gone or at least not on my horizon. Notwithstanding the ever-growing video archive of works on the web, we, the producer-artists comprise a relatively small community; government funding is such that we are just beginning to appreciate our position in our cities if not our countries.)
The three websites I first became aware of were I[heart]E-Poetry.com (no longer accessible), elmcip.net, and ELO (Electronic Literature Organization) where a search for “videopoetry” yielded one result, a Call For Papers for the 2017 Conference.
The e-poetry/videopoetry relationship has not been easy. Consider the following entry from elmcip.net on the topic of the French review “alire” published on 3.5 floppy disks by L.A.I.R.E. (Lecture Art Innovation Recherche Ecriture):
In the 2000s, the adventure of Alire coincided with that of a collective, Transi toire Observable. As the years went by, the authors of alire acquired the conviction that programming was at the center of digital literature and that it was essential to look more closely at the new forms, specifically programmed ones, which it could produce. The founding act of the collective was a manifesto cosigned in February 2003 by Alexandre Gherban, Philippe Bootz and Tibor Papp. This collective opposed itself to videopoetry, which considers programming as a mere tool used for the production of a fixed multimedia object, totally observable and considered as the work. It also differentiates itself from software art, which asserts that the code of the program is the work. For the actors of the Transitoire Observable collective, the multimedia event accessible to the reading, the only legible part of the work, the observable transitory, is only a passing and observable event of an active programmed process, its forms being produced by deeper programmed forms, sometimes even [emphasis added]
And thus, the entry ends with “sometimes even”. Unfortunately, that can happen sometimes even
when the collective “opposes” another medium… chance intervenes… Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… On the other hand, there is vispo.com, a “language sandwhich language” site © 1996-2096 run by Jim Andrews where you can find a myriad of the most interesting and innovative “dishes” served up to the visually curious and the worthy. In fact, it was through vispo.com that I discovered bp nichol’s groundbreaking 1983 work “Letter” (watch it at 1:09).
In my 2022 exhibition, “Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020”, my main objective was to assemble the most representative of all distinct types of artworks that were produced in the four decades between 1980 and 2020. I selected Andrews’ own “Seattle Drift” as a type of kinetic text that best speaks to the similarities and differences between the two forms of new media poetry:
While videopoetry and e-poetry share the electronic e – consider the videopoetry category of cin(e)poetry – it’s the interactivity of e-poetry that sets it apart. Jim Andrews’ 1997 work is an excellent demonstration of the self-reflexive “command” in lines 5 and 6 that not only expects a response from the viewer/user but in its performance of dispersal recalls the materiality of concrete poetry as it – with its genre – “drifts” away from its position on the screen and away from traditional poetry.
Afterimages by Mackenzie Duan
love everything about this animation by Evan Bode, though the first time I watched I wasn’t completely sold on the high school-aged poet Mackenzie Duan’s voiceover. On second viewing, I changed my mind, discovering, as Bode evidently did, that a youthful lack of assertiveness can code as sincerity and a kind of wisdom when one absorbs it in the overall context of the sound design, the intense colors, and most importantly the gorgeous lines of poetry. The film was created for Season 4 of the literary magazine Counterclock‘s Patchwork: Film x Poetry project,
a nine-week interdisciplinary arts fellowship open to filmmakers and poets. Filmmakers and poets are paired together to create original film-poems, or short films inspired by poetry. In the first half of the fellowship, each poet works to produce an original poem informed by both their and their partner’s creative interests; in the second half of the fellowship, each filmmaker works with their partner to adapt their partner’s poem into a short film.
Visit the film’s page at Counterclock to read the poem and bios. Here’s a snippet from the former:
Behind us, the hills
slope in brushstrokes over a lake,
soft and washed out, like the placefires go after burning.
Our bodies become stations of lightwhen the sun dips.
New Art Emerging: Notes from a Symposium on Videopoetry
Editors’ note: the symposium titled New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry took place on 5 November 2022 in Surrey, BC, Canada. It was convened by the renowned theorist of videopoetry, Tom Konyves, who also curated a related exhibition program, Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2022. Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas were guest speakers at the symposium and kindly accepted our invitation to write an account to appear here at Moving Poems Magazine…
To start, instead of cutting the information down to fit, it might be easier to just start a new videopoetry blog. That is not a serious proposal, it is just that every videopoet holds the potential to write a book in a conversation and each videopoem is a complete story in itself. Writing a report from within is new for us and to begin, we admit that our comments must be somewhat biased.
The exhibition Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2022 at the Surrey Art Gallery formed the base for the Symposium, as well as providing the impetus for Poems by Poetry Filmmakers, readings at Vancouver’s People’s Co-op Bookstore that were organized by Fiona Tinwei Lam, Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, 2022-2024 and the Symposium’s keynote speaker, Sarah Tremlett.
On Friday night, November 4, a major windstorm blew through the Lower Mainland with the City of Surrey being one of the hardest hit in the area. Large trees, weakened by months of drought, had been toppled, and on Saturday morning scores of BC Hydro customers were affected. Surrey was at the epicenter of the storm and the Gallery was without power but not powerless. Thanks to the quick action of Jordan Strom, Surrey Art Gallery’s Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, Rhys Edwards, Assistant Curator, and Zoe Yang, Curatorial Assistant, the symposium was efficiently moved to the Surrey Public Library, a stunning building in the City Centre. The schedule had to be retooled into a shorter program, but the room was packed and ready to see all the facets of this videopoetic diamond.
To contextualize the place of the smposium it might be useful to have some information about the exhibition. From the gallery’s website:
Poets with a Video Camera presents the largest retrospective of videopoetry in Canada to date. The exhibition features over twenty-five works by some of the world’s leading practitioners. It is organized around five categories of videopoetry: kinetic text, visual text, sound text, performance, cin(e)poetry.
The title is a reference to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera that has become iconic in experimental film discussions in advocating for a complete separation between the language of theatre and literature. Similarly, Konyves argues for videopoetry to be thought of as outside of poetry and video art. Instead, Konyves states that it is a form that is in its “early days . . . still in a process of redefining poetry for future generations.” This exhibition shows the humorous next to the serious, the experimental alongside the genre bending, the ironic with the sincere, and the timely together with the timeless expressions of this new form.
Jordan Strom opened the Symposium and introduced Guest Curator, Tom Konyves.
Tom stated his intention to provoke dialogue and to challenge perspectives. While developing a course in visual poetry for the University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford (2006), he had come to realize that he needed more sources for videopoetry than his own work. After contacting Heather Haley, she sent him 76 examples. From there, he came up with a definition of videopoetry that proposed a triptych of text, image, and sound in a poetic juxtaposition. He was able to further clarify his research findings in Buenos Aires when he met Argentinian artist Fernando García Delgado. Finally, Tom arrived at the idea that the role of the videopoet was that of juggler, visual artist, filmmaker, sound artist, and poet. He concluded that, within that mix, the videopoem as an art object, poetic experience, and metaphor, is created.
UK-based videopoet Sarah Tremlett delivered the symposium’s keynote speech in which she spoke about her definitive volume The Poetics of Poetry Film, as well as the importance of sound and subjectivity in an artist’s experimental audiovisual journey. Through her own work, as well as her contributions to the examination of poetry film, film poetry, and videopoetry, Sarah occupies a central place in the videopoetry world. While addressing the symposium, she also introduced her current work: research into a complex family history, spanning several centuries.
Heather Haley and Kurt Heintz spoke of their individual activities and collaborations in what is recognized as their history in the world of videopoetry. Their presentation, titled Entangled Threads: How One Canadian and One American Poet Took on Technology and Charted a Genre, proposed an engaging exchange on the shared commonality of early events linking not only poets in different geographic locations, but also text/voice to technologies. Among these commonalities was the early 1990’s Telepoetics project, a series of events using videophones to connect poets. As noted by Heather Haley on her website: “[…] before Skype or Zoom poets were using videophones to connect, to exchange verse, despite a myriad of limitations and challenges. […]”
Poet, performer, essayist, media artist, professor, thinker Adeena Karasick, and artist-programmer, visual poet and essayist Jim Andrews delivered a high-powered and mesmerizing performance of Checking In, a work about our insatiable appetite for information. Jim’s coding meshed seamlessly with Adeena’s texts and her high-level acrobatics of spoken word and movement. Through the fusing of voice, text, and image, Jim’s video, and Adeena’s recitations/movements, the two delivered a performance that never missed a beat!
Founder and Director of the VideoBardo Festival, Javier Robledo (in absentia), planted himself onto a sofa and placed a bird cage on his head to present a playful performance/poetry mix. Reminiscent of early 20th-century Dada performances, he closed the performance when he blew a whistle that mimicked a caged bird. In his video presentation, and speaking about his work P-O-E-S-I-A, Javier spoke about the importance of the performative gesture and its repercussions in articulating meanings.
As Matt Mullins was also in absentia from the symposium, Tom provided an introduction to his work in the exhibition, as well as Matt’s own pre-recorded intervention about his creative process and the decisions made in the making of the three videos: Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer), 2012; Semi Automatic Pantoum, a collaboration between Mullins and the Poetic Justice League of Chicago, 2019; and america, (i wanted to make you something beautiful but i failed), 2022.
When we spoke with Annie Frazier Henry a few days following the Symposium, she felt energized by taking part in the event. She is a writer with roots in theatre, music and film. In her presentation, she mentioned the influence that E. Pauline Johnson had on her growth. She generously expressed that the warm and safe space created by the meeting was about all of us. Grounded in her perspective, Annie talked about encouragement and relevancy. The words from her 1995 poem Visions resonate forward to the contemporary platform of videopoetry:
I don’t want to see stars in my eyes
I want to see stars in the sky,
Where they belongWhen you enter a room
There’s invisible war paint on your face
And it looks good
Fiona Tinwei Lam, the Vancouver Poet Laureate (2022-2024), presented The Plasticity of Poetry, a series of videopoems based on the dilemma of plastic pollution and its dizzying accumulation. Many of Fiona’s works are collaborative endeavours with animators. She also screened the work Neighborhood by Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran which they state “is a look at modern life in the suburbs as the world courts climate disaster.” Neighborhood juxtaposes a poem by Fiona over live-action and animated scenes of suburbia. At the root of all of these works resides a deep desire to make a difference in the world.
As for us, we presented Rust Never Sleeps: Nuances in Collaborative Creation, a talk on collaborations and the diverse ways that we have collaborated while continuing to each work on our own individual projects. Collaboration begins with a discussion, and that exchange frames the outcome of any project. It is a shared authorship and to work in such a way, one must be ready to let go of preconceived ideas and to be ready for whatever might arise.
Conclusions
To accommodate the time frame for the venue afforded by the library, the Q&A was pushed to the end of the day. One member of the audience, Surrey-based poet Brian Mohr, has a story worth mentioning. When he showed up at the gallery to see the exhibition on Saturday morning after the storm, he was redirected to the library. He knew about the exhibition but not about the symposium. Brian, who is in the process of making his first videopoem, went with the flow and ended up participating in the event. He had a question for the panel about using video games as source locations for videopoetry. Several presenters addressed his question and according to discussions we had with him later, the symposium gathering was of utmost importance to his development as a videopoet.
Just as Jordan Strom finished his closing remarks, a loudspeaker announcement resonated through the building: “The library will be closing in five minutes!” Videopoetry is all about timing, and so was the conclusion of the symposium.
A symposium is designed to bring together, a group of people with common interests. When they come away from the meeting, they should have learned something new, made new connections, and should have possibly established the grounds for future collaborations. The Surrey Symposium made visible a complex web of relations and affinities between videopoets. It revealed the contour of a community of artists/poets, and affirmed that we are not isolated, that we are not living in a vacuum; that we have a place in the world. This sentiment was echoed in a comment that Kurt Heintz wrote on an email thread after the Symposium:
While I have long been aware that I’m not the only person doing what I do, I’ve often felt quite solitary. And so, one of the biggest takeaways for me is simply having experienced a critical mass of minds, if only for a weekend. Certainly, we’re all very different people with different perspectives on the art we make and/or study. Our critical languages often differ. And we’re far-flung; the exhibit plainly speaks to the international origins for poetry in cinematic form. And yet, that very mix is what actually pointed to a body politic.
This symposium answered some questions surrounding the creation of videopoetry. It also made it clear that videopoetry operates on many different levels of consciousness. The event accomplished its mission, and if there might be an idea to improve upon the gatherings, it might be to increase the meeting to a full day, which would allow more time for Q&A as well as informal discussions. A dream would be to have a bi-annual videopoetry symposium.
From the art gallery to the library, this symposium managed to bridge two of the fundamental sites of videopoetry: visuals and words. The voices that we heard on that afternoon were the third element — a perfect poetic juxtaposition.
Second row: Kurt Heintz, Sarah Tremlett, Heather Haley, Valerie LeBlanc, Daniel H. Dugas, Tom Konyves
Photos: Pardeep Singh
Interview: Lee Campbell – filmmaker, poet, performer
I first came across Lee Campbell’s work by chance in a Margate (Kent, UK) shop window early in 2022. It was part of a two-person show with Bashar Ali in The Margate School (an art school resident in the long gone Woolworths shop building). I was initially attracted by Lee’s use of lettering in his film. I found him on Instagram and watched more of his film work on his website, and discovered recordings of his incredible Zoom performances. I decided to interview him and this is the result … Rather conveniently, a few days after Lee had responded with his answers we were lucky enough to meet in person at the Absurd Art House Film Festival in another Kent seaside town – and I could thank him in person.
His pop-up solo show will be in Fountain Street Gallery in Boston from 26-31st July 2022.
Congratulations on your solo show “SEE ME: (An almost) autobiography,” coming up in July in Boston (USA). Did you conceive the work in the show as a collection from the outset, or did it evolve into it?
Thank you! I am really excited about it as I am pulling these films together into one collection lasting just over an hour in duration for the first time – and to show these films in North America, in a city which I have been to, and love, is a real honour. No, the collection of works on show has evolved over time. Between 2019-2021, I made a series of short films which recycle my personal archive of artworks as an artist of 25 years into the present. Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing and Not Seeing (2019), Let Rip: The Beautiful Game (2020), Let Rip: Teenage Scrapbook (2021) and Let Rip: Bodies Lean and Ripped (2020) use the ‘rip’ as both metaphor, symbol and filmic structure to build upon existing work, create new forms out of ‘old’ practice and indeed show new versions of ‘old’ me. This meant creating surfaces and layers on the screen which I would appear to be ripping or tearing apart to reveal something about myself. Cascading through different time periods but really speaking to the present, these films play with the sensations of an image, aiming to capture how reality is constructed of images, images that are out there in culture but also personal images that I create myself. Creative green screen usage in films has been around forever and could be said to feel retro but in these films, as I do with most of my films, I have employed green screen to create textural surfaces and review history. In 2021, I then integrated poetry into these existing moving image works to become poetry films. These poetry films sat alongside a body of poems that I had written about my personal history of seeing and not seeing as a working-class gay British man, to confront the politics of seeing and underline how validating seeing can be, but also the difficulty of not being seen. Whilst I was gaining really positive responses from audiences of me reading these poems as I regularly performed them around various venues in London and further afield, at the same time I produced poetry films of my poems to sit alongside but to also use the visuals within them to offer new/alternative ways of understanding what is being said in the spoken poetry. I then started to make connections between the different poems/films that I was producing. I noticed that underpinning all the work is a love of the absurd, the humour and the comedy to be found in the banal, the mundane and the everyday, as well as ideas as I mentioned above pertaining to acts of seeing, being seen, not being seen etc. What become very evident as a common thread was the idea of relationships and my relationship to people, places, ideas, objects etc and I used this as a curatorial thrust to put together these films as one entity. Now as a collection of both poems and poetry films combined, SEE ME presents a journey through different relationships including those as a teenager to my dad (e.g. in Let Rip: The Beautiful Game), grandparents (e.g. in See Shells), teachers, school peers, work colleagues (e.g. in Covert Operations and Head Boy) then adult relationship to gay community (SEE ME: A Walk through London’s Gay Soho …), alter ego (e.g. in Camp-Belle), my partner (e.g. in Nice Cup of Tea, Rufus) and spaces of queer imagination (e.g. in The Tale of Benny Harris, Cottage and The Perfect Crime: A Doggy Whodunnit). The collection also addresses a range of complex and tricky issues including body shaming and bitchiness within the gay community. Self-worth, doing things to ‘fit in’. Unrequited love, unobtainable love, unsatisfying relationships, fear of being left ‘on the shelf’ (e.g. in Spinach and Eggs), as well as internalised homophobia and confidence (e.g. in Reclaiming My Voice).[1]
The Fountain Street Gallery shows a wide variety of work including straightforwardly saleable paintings and sculptures which isn’t an obvious fit with poetry film. I’m excited that a gallery like this is showing your work. How did the show come about?
The gallery has been really supportive of my work since 2021 when they selected one of my works, On Your Marks (Tension Lines) (2020), a silent short film for their Sidewalk Video Gallery programme and then earlier this year included my poetry film Let Rip: The Beautiful Game in a group show, Beyond Words curated by Gabriel Sosa, an exhibition of works by artists who use language.
My formal training background is actually in Fine Art Painting. Prior to receiving my doctorate in 2016 from Loughborough University, I trained in Fine Art Painting at Winchester School of Art (1996-2000) where I earned my B.A and Slade School of Fine Art (2005-2007) where I received my M.F.A. Whilst I’ve really enjoyed showing my poetry films in cinemas and alternative spaces, it feels great to be showing the work in the context of the white cube too. I actually think my poetry films are like moving paintings, filmic paintings that reveal themselves over time. When I used to make painting back in the 1990s/2000s and in fact any ‘static’ 2D image that I produced then and now, I’ve always been interested in ideas around time and duration within a static image and ideas and thoughts being ‘revealed’ over time, in acts of looking and duration involved in looking at supposedly ‘flat’ static surfaces whose form and content reveal themselves over time. Time, in relation to the (2D, static) works in my career portfolio underline that time can be understood beyond that of a durational work e.g. in film and moving image work, as time can also be considered as being an aggregate of thought.
Looking at the kind of work that Fountain Street supports, including that of its director Marie Craig, what struck me was how many of the artists play with surface tension in their work. Regardless of whether the work is time based or not (in the traditional sense), many of the artists create within their chosen art form, at times, fleshy layers seeping underneath and revealing themselves only to be interrupted by other sets of imagery or text coming through which brings layers of personal and collective memory and personal and collective history. Recalling Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), in which he erases an artwork by Willem de Kooning, but traces of the lost de Kooning artwork are still evident, just under the surface. The past and the present combust on the same surface, so the viewer is unsure what is past and what is present; works on one level contain a haunting quality and a modernity whilst still being archival/referring to the past/employing retro aesthetics. The compositional elements of my poetry films speak to these ideas, too, and more I feel. Thinking my poetry film work would be a good ‘fit’ for the gallery, I approached Marie about showing the films as a collection at Fountain Street and she kindly agreed to! [2]
What do you think we (as poetry filmmakers) can do to get work accepted into galleries or contemporary art events?
Moving Image work is embraced within the context of the white cube as a relatively new player against the historical canon of painting and drawing. Checking out the opportunities section of videoclub’s newsletter (www.videoclub.org.uk) can be useful. Visions in the Nunnery is an open call that happens every two years at the Nunnery gallery in Bow, London which I have been part of and highly recommend.
Your work shows in both poetry film festivals such as REELpoetry and a very wide variety of film, poetry and art festivals and events… Do you modify how you describe yourself and/or your work for different audiences in order to step into the contemporary art scene, the poetry scene or the poetry film scene?
Someone once told me that I occupy a space that is equivalent to a diamond in terms of my practice, with one arm of the diamond: poetry, and the other arms, comedy, performance and art. They did then make some generalisations, that in poetry, the brain does the theatricals and audiences don’t need anything else (i.e., visuals), that in comedy people just want to laugh and in art, people just want emotional/profound experiences. I did think these were sweeping generalisations, but they did make me think how these different media/artistic forms influence what the audience take away from what I do. I like straddling across all these ‘scenes’. I don’t like being pigeonholed or me/my practice being taxonomized as that feels very reductive. You will know by watching several of my poetry films like Spinach and Eggs and Bears with Bananas and Bubbles in Their Boxers, which talk about how the gay male community likes to label me, that I have a real issue with identity labelling more widely. Inhabiting different scenes, poetry one night, comedy the other, indeed, I may change the emphasis a little for each ‘scene’ but without diluting what I do or running the risk of ‘selling out’. Sure there are some events that I have attended that are less open to the experimental, interdisciplinary nature of what I do (they like poetry, comedy etc in the traditional sense of these terms). When I do find spaces/events/nights like these in London that I regularly attend—Incite! run by Forum +, New Poetry Shack run by Jack Shamash and The Word Zoo run by Teige Bigman Maddison—that embrace interdisciplinarity, then I’ve struck gold.
A night that I particularly enjoy is Paper Tiger Poetry that is held monthly at the Tea House Theatre in Vauxhall, London hosted by Jason Why. The night has been a brilliant support for me to showcase my poetry and develop my skills as a performance poet since I first performed there back in June 2021. Yes it’s billed as a night for performance poets but there is also a fair share of poets like me including Tom McColl, Frankie Calvert, Redeeming Features, Keith Bray and many others who fuse everything from biting satire, anarchist punk, ventriloquism and visual art with comedy elements into their poetry performances. It’s a creative melting pot where I’ve met poets who perform poetry, in the expanded form! And I also run my own night in South London called POW! Play on Words where I encourage artists to come together who, like me, play promiscuous across varied artistic forms, by me providing a space for poetry performance to occupy the same space as poetry film, experimental comedy. In fact, labels are pointless here, as what underpins everything that I programme is how artists embrace and play with language in subversive, surprising and unexpected ways.[3]
When did you come to poetry filmmaking? Did either the poetry or the filmmaking come first or did they naturally come together from the beginning?
The filmmaking came first. Bear in mind that I also have a long history of creating performance art which often included spoken word/verbal language elements but not what I would necessarily consider as being ‘poetry’ or ‘performance poetry’ for that matter, but that’s open to interpretation! Many of the films that I created within the Let Rip series I referred to above actually begun life having written text placards embedded within them rather than me speaking poetry that I had written as a voiceover (I’ll refer to this point again later in the interview). Artist Clunie Reid, when watching Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing and Not Seeing (2019) in November 2020 commented that the written placards within this film needed to be spoken/performed/read aloud by me rather than written as I have a particular voice from a particular point in London’s queer history. She suggested that my voice and my accent evidence my life so clearly – a specific voice that gives me a specific identity to a specific place. She said this at a time when London (where I live) and so many parts of the world were in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I liked what she suggested but could not imagine the conditions at that particular time of me ever performing (physically) in public again.
It was a cold and dull Sunday in late November 2020. An advert for an online poetry mic called PoetryLGBT on Zoom popped up on my Facebook feed. I was caught by the graphics of the advert initially but then thought this would be a good chance to read out those written placards above as ‘poetry’, a context and a scene that I had not ventured into before. What’s the worst that can happen I thought. If they all think what I read out aloud is sh*t then I’ll just press ‘exit’ on my laptop. What have I got to lose! Little did I know that this Sunday afternoon online open mic, was going to change the direction of my practice forever.
I remember the experience well. The host Andreena Leeanne was so supportive and welcoming to everyone. I was enthused by her energy and passion for the poets performing. I listened to the poets including Barney Ashton-Bullock, Lantern Carrier, Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Carriere and Paul Frewer-Lepper perform before me and enjoyed their poems. I was so nervous when it was my turn. My legs trembling, my stomach was in gut wrench, I had performer’s butterflies in the stomach feeling for the first time in a long whilst as this was the first moment I was performing live to an audience and sharing very personal details with an audience who I could not see on Zoom, which probably helped with my nerves. Their response to my performance however was incredible. They loved the comedy and humour in what I was saying, and could really relate to and empathise with the experiences that I shared. I had found a new platform for my work and was very excited about the possibilities.
Excavating text from my Let Rip films to create live spoken word poetry pieces, I then began regularly writing poetry about my identity as a gay, working class British man and read these aloud for the first time at regular LGBT-centred open-mics including PoetryLGBT that were all taking place online at the time because of lockdown restrictions. Sometimes doing three or four online open mics a week, with me performing from the spare bedroom in my flat, just to gain the audience’s reaction and for me to try things out in this new context for my work. Growing in confidence, I started to incorporate props into my then performances including cassette tape recorders and hand-drawn pencil drawings of a dog called Rufus to add a visual element to what I was doing. Whilst it was a great experience to get audience feedback on my poetry, the language I was using and how what I was saying evoked certain images/pictures in the imagination of the audience, I began to think much more about the visual aspect of me performing. Me working in poetry film came around late 2021 when I combusted the practice of me generating live Zoom performances (which I refer to below) and my history of working within artist moving image practice together.
I love your use of lettering on screen in films such as ‘The Tale of Benny Harris’ and ‘Cottage (Perusing the flower bed)’. Can you tell me something about your ideas or your process around your lettering? I’m guessing you’re using your own hand lettering?
Thanks, I like the brutal simplicity that I feel I have achieved with the felt tippery effect of the writing that appears graffitied over the screen in these films and also in Head Boy, Covert Operations and Reclaiming my Voice. As I said above, the earlier versions of the Let Rip series of films contained written placards rather than spoken word.
These placards were generated using the Titles option within iMovie (the software that I use to create all my films). The font that I used (Helvetica Neue), although giving a very clean and crisp finish to the lettering, also made these films feel and look very corporate and PowerPoint-y in their appearance. Some viewers of these films liked the tension that this created. On the one hand, the films are a personal exploration for me to discover what I can do to the image in an affective way. Me creating almost fleshy, visceral layers to images appearing on screen, with each film recycling my personal archive as an artist into the present, and by doing so, building up a sophisticated linguistic system of collaging images from my personal archive of artworks, mixed in with found ephemera and moving image footage (for example football matches in 1990s on YouTube). There was a real sensitivity about the [content of] the writing and imagery.
But then on the other hand, as my friend artist Harun Morrison commented upon about this aspect of the work when I spoke to him in December 2020, there was no sense that the typography I was using was grounded in the work at all, and that the PowerPoint feel and look in these films inevitably evokes managerial and administrative culture which, as he reminded me, are some of the most oppressive forces in the world. Harun said he found that when watching these earlier versions of these films, he was constantly distracted by why I was using this PowerPoint style-format, because I am talking personally about escaping certain kinds of restraint and personal acts of emancipation (e.g. emancipating myself from 1990s homophobic Britain). He suggested that as soon as I started to make things look and feel like PowerPoint or display the text in the way that I have done in these films, I am putting my thoughts on a track which is why it’s such an oppressive piece of software. He suggested that I think then at that time more about the typography within what I was doing as another space to put accents on the texts especially since the work is so much about zine culture and other kinds of material that I was seeing. He recommended that I then work with a graphic designer to think through how that text operates, especially in reference to different materials and that maybe I employ a singular font all the way through my films that could be handwritten or speak to different sources that I talk about in the films. For example Playgirl (which I refer to in one of the films) has its own distinct font and so does Television X. I could use different fonts evoked by the references, even employing the handwritten, which whilst making things feel makes it very diaristic can also depend on one’s handwriting.
All great suggestions from Harun, but then I remembered the font that I had designed myself when I was doing my MFA at the Slade fifteen years prior, which I called See Me. See Me is a font that looks like old computer writing from the 1980s/1990s. I used this font as part of a new film that I was making at the time, SEE ME: A Walk through London’s Gay Soho in 1994 and 2020, and it really got me thinking about how I could design another font which spoke of the personal within my films and not appear deadening or just sitting on the surface without making much/any connection to the imagery and sounds around it. I was concerned about using my own handwriting as I didn’t want the work to look diaristic in the way that artists can often use their handwriting and then the work looks overly confessional to the point of being self-indulgent.
The lettering that appears in these newer films, like, as you mention, The Tale of Benny Harris and Cottage, is generated by me screen-recording myself creating words using the pen/pencil drawing option within Notes on my iPad, and then using the recording as a green-screen layer within the films. I like the way the words reveal themselves sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly across the screen and how they don’t just sit on top of the imagery but often become images within themselves. Especially so I think when you can see the underwater imagery ‘through’ the surface of the letters in Head Boy and the way they bleed into the imagery within Reclaiming my Voice during the ‘dipping my toe in but never my feet’ section. You can see the words ‘dipping my toe in’ on the screen but only just. This corresponds exactly to what I say in the poem, about my straight mate Danny experimenting with his sexuality (dipping his toe in) but not going as far as being a ‘full time full-blown gay boy’. The appearance of the black text on the white background in the following sequence in the films containing the words ‘never my feet’ underlines Danny’s affirmation that he is straight (or so he claims) in black and white, full stop.
Although I really love the effect of the animated lettering throughout my latest film Covert Operations, which at the start recycles the written placards used towards the end of Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing and Not Seeing (2019) and from other films, I am also loving using the iPad drawing recordings to compose imagery so as not to overdo it with the lettering. I really enjoyed creating the drawings of the moustache, the well-spoken but very attractive posh boy I worked with in McDonalds aka Grammar School Guy being undressed on screen, Gavin aka Black Eyeliner Boy, and Mike with his chest hair poking out of the top of his Nirvana t-shirt that all feature as hand-drawn animations at the start of Covert Operations.[4]
Your live Zoom performance ‘Clever at seeing, without being seen’ is just incredible. For many people just getting used to speaking to someone on Zoom has given them the heebie-jeebies. How much did you experiment to get your set-up to do what you wanted?
Thank you! It’s been quite a journey developing forms of live poetry performance practice that, contributing to my ongoing critical digital pedagogy research project Technoparticipation,[5] use Zoom as an immersive autoethnographic storytelling prototype. Emerging as a positive of using Zoom under Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, I’ll try and summarise the main points in terms of how I have explored the possibilities of Zoom to really enhance my creativity and combine my performance, poetry and live cinema practice to create new hybrid forms.
A month before I had my ‘epiphany’ moment during the PoetryLGBT open mic in November 2020 I spoke about above, my first venture into performing live in front of an audience since the outbreak started was at a time when the U.K was under Covid-19 lockdown restrictions — ‘our bodies and minds were restricted but our creativity was not. Everyone was in the same predicament’[6] . I was invited to create an online solo performance to be performed via Zoom as part of activity I was engaged with at the time, as part of Conditions artist studio programme. When thinking about the set design for the performance, when experimenting with the green screen effect on Zoom, rather than using one of the pre-defined video backdrops made available by Zoom, I then made a new piece of moving image work to be used purely for the purposes of Zoom green effect. Having just discovered the green screen video option on Zoom only a couple of hours before the performance and with no rehearsal time available before the performance entitled Polari Puppet,[7] my innovative usage of Zoom’s green screen during the performance had an incredible reception with viewers commenting that they had never experienced anything quite as immersive ever before on Zoom. With Polari Puppet, I really wanted to push Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame, act as a visual container and play with different levels of order and chaos through the visual confinement achieved.
As a result of the success of me creating the personalised Zoom backdrop with Polari Puppet and the success of my film work being screened internationally (remembering that these films were not poetry films at that point), I then wondered what would happen if I combined the two and (with a bit of tweaking) repurposed the short films that I had made as green screen Zoom backdrops to explore what it may mean to remediate, excavate and bring back to life past artworks through the medium of moving image in the films that I was making, and then remediate and re-plug those films, those remediations, through the medium of live performance via Zoom to generate multi-layered multimedia sociocreative live poetry performances that are colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montages of young queer experience told through my own personal autobiography.
Over the course of 2021, I created numerous poetry performances online, using the past films as video backdrops for my poetry, complexifying each online performance with each new iteration performed. When interviewed by Matt Skallerud in April 2021, Andreena Leeanne of PoetryLGBT remarked, ‘I love how Lee fuses the poetry with the filmmaking, really creative and everyone appreciates him when he comes to PoetryLGBT, he brings something different, he’s been able to use Zoom to enhance his creativity and that’s been amazing to see’. In his May 2021 review of Spoken Sessions, an online poetry reading event by Write Out Loud, Greg Freeman wrote, ‘I tuned in on Thursday night to watch open mic performers Francis Golm, Pip McDonald, Lee Campbell, and Jaden Morton make full use of their opportunity, often employing the extra potential of online visuals to great effect – especially in Lee Campbell’s case. He was able to show us what we missed when a glitch prevented us from seeing the full range of his experimental and innovative visuals at the Write Out Loud fundraising night in January’. In a more recent review of my headline set for Creative HE Open Mic (June 2022), Dr Aspa Paltoglou wrote, ‘I loved the final performance where auto-ethnography, identity and art came together to create a spectacular spectacle and an opportunity for the performer to bring together different parts of themselves that they kept apart before. As a former Greek musician and a current British (as I somewhat delusionally like to consider myself) academic psychologist, I know how important it is to bring together different identities, and this is helpful both for good mental health and creativity.’
By summer 2021, with many Zoom performances under my belt, I then fused many of my short online poetry performances together into one longer performance (each one not lasting any more than five minutes as that’s the standard timeslot for an open-mic), to create longer performances including Clever at Seeing without being Seen and Peer.[8] These performances, as a form of expanded live cinema, pull together several poems/several performances that existed as individual scenes to create a bigger narrative. This new duration is important (beyond the initial early iterations at under five minutes). Through a lengthier duration, the viewer is shown the complexity of the layers, what’s in them and how they interact, and they are being shown that again and again and again, and it’s never the same.
These performances have since been included in prestigious festivals and events including Disturbance#2, Ugly Duck, London, Festival ECRÃ Edition 5, Rio de Janeiro, the Immersive Storytelling Symposium, Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham, and Rise Up! Reconnect, Rebuild, Recreate 10th International Digital Storytelling Conference, Loughborough University.
Co-curator of Festival ECRÃ Ana Albuquerque remarked:
Lee Campbell’s Clever at Seeing without being Seen and Dina Kelberman’s The Fan May Not Be Changed, You Just Don’t Know The Future turn platforms like Zoom and Teams into stages where the curtain never falls. Artifices once used for the furtherance of neoliberal productivity slavery become spaces of creative potential in the hand of our artists. The possibilities are endless. The performances in this edition prove that the exploration of the body, space and canvas does not cease with physical distance, and prove that the pandemic is more a challenging environment than a scenario of infertility.
Whilst audiences may or may not pick up on all the many references here (related to my personal experience of discovering my identity, internalised homophobia, etc.), I intended that they would, at base level, have a sensory/elusive view of the work, as one viewer described on seeing Clever on Zoom in June 2021, ‘a block of amazing visual and auditory input’. Often in my performances, as is the case throughout the entire duration of Polari Puppet, I perform with my back to the audience where my back operates like a screen/projection surface, exploiting the fragmented-ness and inaccessible feeling of turning your back to the audience. A tape recorder acts as an extension of my body and offers another set of voices to that of mine performing and other voices heard elsewhere. Green screen effect employed with a constant repetitive video being played ‘projected’ onto my back gives the impression of text and imagery superimposed over my body, that I am wearing text/imagery like a garment, that of a body that has been layered with fragments of text/images/ history. Sounds that can be heard throughout the performance are textured, glitchy and uncomfortable deliberately to give a sense of layer.
The audience is never sure what is live, what is pre-recorded and what is playback of what has been recorded during the live performance. Pre-recorded sounds play in the background on iTunes shuffle which I react to there and then in the moment of liveness. Some viewers of the documentation of these performances have mentioned that they are completely unaware that they were watching documentation of a live performance. Some have suggested that the writing on my back is happening live too. One audience member commented that the live performance of Polari Puppet was the first time they had seen left-handed text being written.
The key underlying principles in early video art were the body and the performance object, and that was the thing that signified its liveness and differentiated it from the history of cinema /avant-garde film. Polari Puppet as a back projection performance comes from the history of video art (Vito Acconci, Valie Export, early Nam June Paik, Robert Morris’ film Mirror etc.) where the camera becomes like a mirror or a viewer that can be controlled.
The video being live and able to feedback on itself is similar to my Zoom usage here. On the one hand, the work is like a flashback 45 years but now bought into the present due to the now unprecedented, familiar use of Zoom as a desktop communication tool because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Zoom attempts to put bodies in a room at times when you can’t have bodies in a room. People have become much more familiar with it to a point of fatigue in terms of, amongst other things, how it promotes a disembodied embodiment. In this Zoom explosion, primary importance has been given to the face and the way that we are looking at each other now even to the naming of an app like Facetime (similar model to Zoom just different name) and not as Matthew Noel-Tod, when in conversation about this work, wittily remarked, called ‘Backtime’.
The face is hugely significant in all this technology, so me turning my back is a simple yet powerful reversal of that. All we have now on Zoom is (usually) the face, shoulders, and chest, so turning the back to audience is erotic as I am giving the audience something that they do not usually see. A viewer once suggested that my turned back appears almost demonic. Whilst it could be said to turn one’s back on an audience is a deliberate act to conceal oneself or block the audience, that’s not what is happening here either. A friend commented upon seeing an iteration of the Zoom performance Clever that her favourite part was when I turn around to check if the audience are ‘still there’. I like the fragmented-ness and the inaccessible feeling of turning your back to the audience BUT I also want to gauge their visible reaction so in latter performances using Zoom, I went half and half (half the time with my back turned to the audience and the other half, not). By turning my back to the audience at certain moments in a performance, I really made a statement, i.e. ‘I don’t want to see you and I don’t want you to see me (my face)’.
I have come to enjoy the uncertainty, the danger of performing, not entirely in full control of how the green screen would operate throughout the duration of these live Zoom performances. The effect of the moving imagery appearing on my body and me achieving that sense of immersion for the viewer for the performance to ‘work’ is somewhat dependent upon how much light there is in the space/room that I am performing in, and whilst I had perfected the lighting level in the room I perform (my spare bedroom reconfigured as a space for me to perform in and for my partner to create paintings in during the pandemic lockdowns) to achieve the ‘optimum’ effect, I can never fully control it so it ‘works’ every time.
However, this serendipity, this state of being in a ‘radical not-knowing’ was really important to me at the time. Sometimes, I could only achieve half the screen space/viewing area/my body ‘catching’ the green screen imagery. In reality, this imagery that appeared not ‘projected’ on my body’ was the green screen trying to operate on what was behind me/what I stood in front of: a white emulsion painted wall in the bedroom. With a lot of practice, I carefully manipulated the light in the room (using cardboard to black out the skylight window and placing my laptop which I used for the performance at a very specific position under an artificial ceiling light). Despite all my efforts, sometimes the effect just did not ‘work’, but I learnt to accept that and indeed capitalise upon it, which I shall refer to later. As much as I enjoyed making the short films around the same time, everything within them was neatly ordered into a timeline and I could pretty much control everything (although I could never fully control the green screen layering effect which I loved), so having this aspect of real uncertainty to what I was doing with Zoom was strangely appealing at the time.
The Zoom performances have taught me a lot about some of the complexities surrounding polycontextuality—being in more than one space at the same time. In terms of the somewhat, at times, awkward spatial dynamic I set up to create my Zoom performances where my body and the space that I am performing ‘in’ is liminal; neither entirely physical nor wholly virtual/online. But there is another awkwardness at play here in what I have identified as an interesting relationship between what I am saying in my poetry, the slippages of the sonic, bits where I am typing/turning on technology etc., and resonances that are happening at home. The spare room that I use to make these performances backs onto the lounge area of my flat and directly behind the (thin) wall, which I refer to above, that I stand in front of whilst speaking/performing is a sofa which Alex, my partner, often sits on whilst I am performing my poetry, sometimes speaking very loudly, in the room adjacent. How much can Alex really hear behind the wall I wonder? A lot of the time I share really personal details (and some quite intimate about me and Alex’s relationship) which I have never shared with anyone else before. Alex claims he can’t hear what I am saying but I reckon he must catch certain things. And rather than seeing this as a problem, I’ve come to embrace this and remind myself of my love of the serendipitous nature of working with liveness, of me being the poet-performer-autoethnographer harnessing live Zoom performance as a space of radical not knowing and its disruptive potential, I have learnt that I cannot replicate in any way possible the visual effects I can on anything else but on Zoom. Beyond post Covid-10 lockdown restrictions as we head out of a ‘Zoom world’ and into physical/hybridised spaces, I am well aware that my usage of Zoom is more than a convenient (and for a long time only) form to show/make work, but Zoom entirely underpins the aesthetics within what I do, and for me to accept and embrace that I may not be fully in control of exactly what the audience sees/being able to replicate the visual/audio appearance of the Zoom green screen for the audience when live.
As part of the Immersive Storytelling Symposium, Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham in Autumn 2021, I was invited to create a live Zoom performance at the venue in physical space. I must admit I hesitated at first as, at the time, I was nervous about what I thought I needed to make the performance ‘work’ (I had not come to accept at that point that the effect ‘not working’ can also be intrinsically part of the work). Would I be able to achieve the lighting levels required, maintain a certain distance between me and the laptop screen and a white wall behind me ‘catching’ the green screen, would I be able to stand in a certain way for imagery to appear to be projected on me? But then I asked myself, ‘Does this work only exist in my spare room, in the bedroom at the back of 96a Devonshire Road, Southeast London and nowhere else because that’s where I control things to my “desired effect”‘? I recalled a remark that Graham Barton, who I work alongside at University of the Arts London, made as part of the successful Digital Pedagogies Open Studio project I initiated last year with Natasha Sabatini and Richard Parry. In speaking about how the move to teaching and learning online was a form of disruption when Covid-19 lockdown first hit in 2020, Graham suggested that now in respect to moving back into the physical world from the digital/virtual, ‘The disruption is in the return’. But there was also something potentially very liberating about me not being in the bedroom at the back of 96a Devonshire Road, Southeast London – Alex won’t be there, and so I could potentially say what I like throughout my performance without fear of upsetting him (but why would I want to upset him anyway).[9]
With the encouragement of Alex, I took the plunge and headed to Nottingham. It was a wonderful experience in terms of performing the work elsewhere and the audience/performer spatial dynamics that were set up. Whilst I performed live via Zoom in one room of the venue, another audience watched online and another audience watched physically, watching me perform on a livestream projected on a large screen in the theatre space, only a few steps away from the room where I was performing. Upon seeing documentation of my performance, I had only achieved the green screen superimposition on my body and not in the background, but I didn’t care; the content of the performance, Clever at Seeing without being Seen, is all about the difficulties gay people experience in terms of seeing, looking, being seen etc so in this way what I did underlines form is content.[10]
Have there been any unexpected results?
My Zoom performances have opened up unexpected ways of me being able to explore and discover new ways of seeing (both pedagogically and artistically) through the Internet as a very specific and nuanced kind of viewing platform, and how these may in fact correspond with ideas of (in)visibility experienced by the LGBT community.
To explain, as a practical embodiment of what I refer to as techno-empathy, in December 2021 I invited members of the University of the Arts London (UAL) LGBTQ+ student network to attend a presentation of my Zoom performance Clever at Seeing without being Seen which nails a specific talent queer people need to acquire – the title. The performance was as an iteration of the Digital Pedagogies Open Studio mentioned above. Having watched the performance, audience members feedback how they could feel empathetic to so many of the personal experiences that I shared throughout the performance, as they had encountered similar experiences themselves. The performance generated a space of empathy to break down hierarchies between student and tutor in two ways. First, in terms of me and the students as mutual practitioners by me demonstrating how to combine physical and virtual forms in terms of my usage of physical props during the performance that bring to life certain parts of the poetry, including cassette tape recorders from the 1990s and photocopies of a large scrapbook I made as a teenager between 1993-1998, and secondly, in terms of the autobiographic content of the poetry that I shared throughout the performance. During the post-performance feedback discussion, students said they appreciated the level of honesty that I shared with them in terms of revealing, at times, quite difficult personal subject matter but subject that they themselves could relate to.
Attending numerous online events since lockdown in March 2020 designed for the LGBT community to share their experiences using spoken word and poetry, including PoetryLGBT and Incite! run by Forum + and hosted by Hannah Chutzpah, paired with the move I went through in my teaching practice to online-only modes of teaching delivery, I noticed that a platform like Zoom, or Blackboard, can facilitate a person’s social interaction, and sharing ideas/stories with others which may not have happened offline/IRL. These platforms can be an effective means of encouraging those who do not wish to be identified, are too nervous to ask a question or share an idea to participate in group discussion. Someone can often gain heightened confidence digitally as opposed to when they would sometimes have previously held back during activities in the physical world. In many ways, the confessional booth of chat windows on Zoom resembles a Freudian couch; when you are not necessarily making direct eye contact, you can actually share more in some ways. The virtual environment, to some extent, may hold us hostages but we are liberated – we have a freedom to imagine. By sharing our personal stories online in an anonymised, optically restricted manner, we may be able to begin to heal traumatic experiences.
Returning to the discussion referred to above with the UAL LGBTQ+ student network members, we went further in our evaluation of Zoom, and began to explore how the optics at work for both audience and performer/speaker when engaging in Zoom may be (re)considered in terms of potentially opening up ways of thinking about the content of these performances: queer (in)visibility. We began to think together how certain aesthetics afforded to the online digital environment may offer a way to (re)think about optics and how this investigation may also relate to issues of (in)visibility within the queer community.
The virtual encounter is a sort of crossed gaze in a way – you are looking but you are not being looked back [at]. Online parties cannot look at each other in the eye — this kind of direct visual encounter with another human is interrupted completely, in addition to the delay in reaction time (another resumption lag, albeit a technological one). We found a relation to how queer people see and are seen and identified a relationship between my specific usage of the form and aesthetics of Zoom (optical one-way street, interruptions, disruptions, interferences etc.) and queer storytelling in relation to ideas of (in)visibility. In tandem with Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 provocation: ‘the medium is the message’, the students enjoyed thinking about how I employ the form and aesthetics of Zoom within my performance as a means to underline the content of what I share in my poetry; personal stories of the difficulties of being seen, not being seen etc.
How precise can you be between your live reading and what is happening with the images? Are you controlling the changes in film sequences – for example from football to Brighton – live as you speak, or can you time your performance perfectly to something that runs from beginning to end?
There will always a be a slight second lag between what is seen on screen and what is heard when the work is performed on Zoom. However, that quality is not seen as a negative in the context of these performances where the importance and clarity of hearing and understanding is deliberately obscured/ intentionally difficult to decipher; an intentional confusion to suggest that the audience may not understand what’s going on. As I refer to above, the possibility of lagging and buffering, interferences, interruptions etc. create a texture that has resonances with some of the difficulties queer people can experience in being heard/seen and is a textural quality that I embrace in my poetry storytelling to underline a point. Especially so in terms of when I talk about queer people including myself discovering our sexuality at a young age in spaces/ places where being anything other than heterosexual is frowned upon/not accepted. Obstacles are often deliberately put in someone’s path to coming out or feeling they are unable to express their (queer) sexuality directly/clearly or express it in any way at all. Whilst the green-screen background acts [as] a base, each live iteration containing so many levels of improvisation means that a performance/film screening can never be repeated twice. Containing so many visual and audio clashes and dizzying sound levels for texture and difference, the layering subsides in places and towards the end, and the taunts are heard more clearly. Whilst there are moments throughout the performances where I make everything super clear, then I go back out, one audience member commented that the discomfort weirdly enough made him feel like he was in the room with me and that the ‘interruptions, craziness, and everything being so distorted visually made it better than it being smooth otherwise it would have felt like a slide show. I loved love the fact that it is not perfectly synchronised’. Extending these qualities when I perform the work now more often IRL, with the imagery on a screen / on a projection near me where I read my poems, I deliberately engineer a slight ‘out-of-syncness’.
What do you feel are the differences for yourself as performer and/or for the audience between the live events married with film and the works that have been made as complete films?
I guess for me it has something to do with me performing my poems live and me being present in the moment with an audience, be that online or in the physical space. During the live performance, I often incorporate a sense of improvisation within the work to whatever degree I feel/ how I am triggered by a particular audience. At present this only extends to the poems that I am reading and not to the visual imagery. To explain, as I perform, I go ‘off script’. I don’t mind if the moving imagery is out of ‘sync’ with what I am reading as a result of me going off-script as that adds to the performance. It also shows to the audience that I am present with them and responding to the mood and feel of the room, much like what a stand-up comedian does. [11]
When I go off-script I often give the audience ‘insider’ details about something that I have just said in the poem. For example, when I performed my poem Nice Cup of Tea at Gobjaw the other week in London, I stopped reading towards the end, came out of my ‘poetry-voice’ and told the audience that after all those cups of tea I had been drinking mentioned in the poem, I really wanted to go the toilet (which I knew was what a lot of people in the audience were wondering!). But more provocatively than that, at other times, I self-interrupt my performances and say things that I would never be able to say to anyone at the time (my teenage years in the 1990s) that a lot of my poems are set in. I remember stopping during a reading of Covert Operations recently just after the line where I say ‘Mr Suputo, my sexy Italian teacher for Geography Phwoar. My imagination in your class took me everywhere’ to tell the audience exactly what I found attractive about said teacher; that I thought Mr Suputo had a great bum despite those rather baggy cream coloured chinos popular with men in the 1990s that he wore, and that I am convinced he clocked me having a peak at said behind which I think he quite enjoyed from the cheeky (no pun intended) smile he gave me. And don’t start me off on what I once shared with the audience during a reading of Covert when I talk about secretly fancying Grammar School Guy ‘through the flames of my griddle’!
Sure, there can be times during a film screening that I am present at with an audience that I can share these more intimate details after the screening but there’s nothing like sharing those details live with an audience as the poem unfolds.
At present, as I am speaking out my poems aloud with the moving imagery behind me/to my side, the imagery will be set.[12] However, I am now exploring live ways to remix that imagery in future performances by adding another layer (a ‘live’ layer that could have more than one video feed) by using VJ software and live feeds. I love working within the field of moving image because of the levels of control that I can have and the (creative) restrictions of the confines of the iMovie timeline. Yet, this sharply contrasts with my prior performance work which often had an improvisatory nature and could be characterised as having a high degree of unexpected/chance elements. To explore this axis of working between control and the unexpected/unplanned/improvisatory initially, I’d like to gain knowledge and understanding of working with VJ software and live feeds where I import clips into VJ software so I have no control in terms of the running order those clips will appear during screenings of the films.
The situations above recall a conversation with University of Nottingham’s Susannah Goh, after my aforementioned Immersive Storytelling Symposium performance above, where I was performing in one room and the audience sat watching me in a theatre on a giant screen. Susan expressed that there was almost magical quality about the different spatial dynamics at force during what I did. Paraphrasing her ideas, Susannah suggested that the moment that I walked out of the room where I had conducted the performance and into the theatre only feet away was ‘as if by magic’ I appear from my performance digital reality into another (real-world) reality, almost like a person on television stepping out of the TV set and into the living room (physical space). ‘All of a sudden, you appeared!’, Susannah mentioned with gusto. She then mentioned that one of the audience members watching my performance live in the theatre, the audience had witnessed, for her, what was a deeply personal raw experience through someone else’s eyes. And then, as if by magic, that individual (me) appears as a (physical) person like me on television appearing/stepping out of the screen. Consequently, the audience had to relate to me in a completely different way. I entered the theatre to answer questions from the audience and break things down. Susannah appreciated this as the actor(s)/performer(s) being present to take questions, explain things etc. immediately after the performance in the same space as the audience is not what you (always) get in a theatre and therefore the audience superimpose what they think the performance was about.
I am also currently exploring incorporating a live performance element and generating a live cinematic experience where live performance ‘interacts’ with the films. For example, as the film Let Rip: Personal History of Seeing (2019) is being screened, all of a sudden, performers start coming in, re-enacting what is on screen creating a mirroring what’s on screen so there is a liveness to proceedings. These performance interruptions echo moments in the films. Actual football players enter the space carrying McDonalds’ bags and then pull out their jockstraps; a football player in a jockstrap winking at me, etc.
Artist Jeff Keen used ripping, cutting and burning in his films and also integrated drawing and performance. Like Jeff, I’d like to paint onto the (projection) screen then rip the screen as something is being projected and then rip the screen with another screen behind it. Or maybe that I use Zoom to do the interrupting? In other words, in the same manner as I have segued Zoom recordings into my poetry film, as I have done so with my 2022 poetry film version of Let Rip: Teenage Scrapbook during moments in my physical performances where ripping takes place, there are Zoom interruptions which the audience are not sure are recorded or taking place live.
In terms of developing my poetry film further, I am also planning to make a new film which has both the narrative arc of a football match and the same length: 90 minutes. This is to question: 1) How much of myself would I disclose in terms of the personal given that duration (90 mins)? and 2) How much time do you give yourself as a viewer to work that you know is difficult psychologically or emotionally or physically to engage with? Whilst still wishing to incorporate archival footage and employ the same green screen effect I currently use to achieve seductive layers seeping through to ‘compel’ the viewer, by creating new mantras/rituals, I want to explore repetition and the ‘musicality’ / the sound design of the film to compel and ‘repel’ the viewer. My film Tackle has a musicality, but its sonic complexity doesn’t go far enough. Let Rip: The Beautiful Game only reveals limited personal details about me because of its short duration. Using sonic visual attacks associated with my love of the YouTube Poop phenomenon, I want to now produce a film so unlistenable but at the same time involves/seduces the listener/viewer.
You’ve said that the “performative filmic backdrop … involves me creating a bridge between video, poetry and performance and, in turn, proposing a new way of thinking about what the somewhat tired term ‘collage’ may be.” I’m very interested in this idea of creating a bridge between communicative formats and your exploration of collaging and layering. For me that is developing between video, poetry and the page and a new way of thinking about graphic design. Does your work appear on the page? Is this an interpretation you’ve thought about?
I’ve had several of my poems published in journals and magazines including The Atticus Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Powders Press, Otherwise, You Are Here – The Journal of Creative Geography and Queerlings – A Literary Magazine for Queer Writing and where possible a link to the poetry film accompanying the respective poem is provided and/or artworks that I have made to accompany the poem. I haven’t really thought too much beyond that at the moment but is definitely something I would like to work with in the future.
Particularly so as the ‘static’ printed page, for me, also represents a space which can be thought of in terms of time and duration if we recall comments that I made earlier about static things and objects revealing ideas and thoughts over time in just the same way as durational work e.g., in film and moving image work do in the more traditional sense of them being ‘durational works’. In 2020, I made a 2D collage work using felt tips on paper, Fag in your Face. Its composition sets up a relationship to depth, surface and text where the writing interrupts the image thus setting up a dialogue between interiority, superficiality and surface and depth.[13] Cut lines and ripped lines combine with one text layer on another text layer. The writing is direct whereas the image is less direct. The writing over the image determines its meaning. There is an oscillation between something that is overwhelmingly simple but actually quite complex. It could be said that the writing interrupts that in many ways. The text seems quite blunt first off but not over time. As a collage drawing, different layers make the viewer explore idea around shininess, smoothness, texture and intimacy. The ripped pages have a grainy texture. On a sensorial level, it feels like there’s’ more depth to something; the shinier something is the more impenetrable it is in many ways, the less that it reveals about itself. The imperfectness of it not being perfectly smoothly stuck down gives it a depth. The repetition of the figure that is turned away from you. Aggregation of time is coming through in the sense that you can still feel the rip even if you can’t see it or hear it. The gentle tears and violent rips of the collaged-together drawings that form Fag directly reference my moving image work, where ripping is used a device to both reveal and conceal.
Developing this work, I thought that maybe the writing and the faces in opposition with each other could be more explicit. I could decentre the text or rethink its placement, so the writing is a layer in itself beyond just being a vehicle for meaning / getting a message across like a protest placard. Maybe the writing could get more diffuse and indeterminate as to create a third meaning with the images rather than underlining the meaning of the work.
The ideas above about Fag could act as a starting point for how I start to work with the page more to present my poetry in a time durational manner in the ways I suggest. I like the ideas of the words to my poems written on the page in ways that make them illegible/hard to make out/indeterminate in places as to underline the content within a lot of my poems. Words that are folded into the texture of images. Certainly an interesting avenue to explore!
Bio: Dr Lee Campbell is an artist, poet experimental filmmaker, writer, Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts London, curator of regular performance poetry night POW? Play on Words in South London and founder of Homo Humour, the first of its kind project on contemporary queer male film and moving image practices that explore humour and LGBTQ+ storytelling. His experimental performance poetry films have been selected for many international film festivals since 2019 including Queerbee LGBT Film Festival, The Gilbert Baker Film Festival, Kansas 2020 and 2021, HOMOGRAPHY, Brussels and STATES OF DESIRE: Tom of Finland in the Queer Imagination, Casa de Duende, Philadelphia, USA, 2020 WICKED QUEER 2021, Boston, USA, FilmPride – Brighton & Hove Pride’s official LGBTQ+ film festival, Brighton, UK, Splice Film Festival 2021, Brooklyn, USA and Darkroom Festival, London.
Notes:
[1] You can read more about my usage of the rip in these films here in this reflective account I wrote this year for Moving Image Artists Journal https://movingimageartists.co.uk/2022/03/25/let-rip/ You can view all of these films mentioned in this paragraph here: https://filmfreeway.com/LeeCampbell
[2] Details of On Your Marks (Tension Lines) (2020) as part of Sidewalk Video Gallery programme can be found here: https://www.fsfaboston.com/the-sidewalk-video-gallery/campbell-milosevic
[3] You can find documentation of past POW! Play on Words events here: https://leecampbellartist.blogspot.com/p/curatorial-lee-campbell-projects.html
[4] Compare the text on screen in Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing and Not Seeing (2019) https://filmfreeway.com/LETRIP with the hand drawn text animations at the start of Covert Operations (2022) https://filmfreeway.com/COVERTOPERATIONS
[5] Details of this project can be found here: https://leecampbelltechnoparticipation.blogspot.com
[6] These comments were made by Esther Moreno Morillas during her presentation ‘Porn Festivals During COVID-19, An Online Approach’, at Moving Image, Popular Media and Culture Research Seminar on Wednesday 9th March 2022.
[7] You can view details and watch a recording of this performance online here: https://filmfreeway.com/POLARIPUPPET2020
[8] You can view details and watch a recording of these performances online here: https://filmfreeway.com/CLEVERATSEEINGWITHOUTBEINGSEEN2021 and https://filmfreeway.com/PEERLIVEZOOMPERFORMANCE
A live Zoom performance of Peer is taking place on 17th July as part of Festival ECRA: Details here: https://www.festivalecra.com.br/6fecraperformances-1/par
[9] You can read about The Digital Pedagogies Open Studio I co-set up at University of the Arts London in ‘Technoparticipation’ article I wrote, recently published in Performance Research journal issue ‘On Interruptions’:
[10] To see documentation of the performance and the spatial set up I mention here, visit: https://leecampbelltechnoparticipation.blogspot.com/2021/11/clever-at-seeing-without-being-seen.html
[11] For an example of this, see when I performed my poem Rufus last year at Monkey Business Comedy Club in Camden: https://youtu.be/EGfvcbTLJTQ
[12] For examples of this, see when I performed at Bold Queer Poetry Soirée, Above the Stag Theatre, London in June 2022 https://youtu.be/UrQlOEZH7do and at Runt of the Litter in London, May 2022 https://youtu.be/n5iXKBQQMeU
[13] This work was made as part of The Daily Winds Map of Brighton https://brightoncca.art/event/the-daily-winds-map-of-brighton/
Hover over the area around George Street on the map and Fag in my Face will appear with accompanying description.
Elephant by Elisabet Velasquez
Brooklyn-based Puerto Rican poet Elisabet Velasquez took the top prize in Button Poetry’s 2017 Video Contest with Elephant, which she calls
a short choreo-film entirely produced by women of color against street harassment. The video is the collective effort of a group of interdisciplinary artists from New York City who came together to highlight the importance of looking at street harassment from a lens of reclamation of power.
We believe that all people who identify as women as well as gender nonconforming individuals who are impacted by street harassment have a right to their bodies and in this video we take our bodies back.
If you or any one you know has been impacted by street harassment in any way we invite you to share.
Peruvian filmmaker Connie Chavez directed the film and Keomi Tarver is the dancer and choreographer, with body art by Alicia C. Cobb.
Ode to my Bitchface by Olivia Gatwood
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of “resting bitch face” (apparently it’s mainly an American expression), the Wikipedia article will get you up to speed. Once you’ve read it, you’ll understand why this response by poet Olivia Gatwood and the dancer/choreographers Rebecca Björling and Rebecca Rosier of the We:R Performance Collective is so, so good. The video was shot and edited by Tim Davis. Björling and Rosier note on Vimeo that
Our latest work ‘Bitchface’ is a dance film we made in reaction to the amazing fierceness of Olivia Gatwood’s poem ‘Ode to my Bitchface’. Beautifully delivered by Olivia in a live performance, we felt like we had to dance the chills out of our bodies as soon as we saw her original video.
And here is the original video in question, posted to YouTube on April 2. It has already been viewed more than half a million times:
Swoon: Top Ten Videopoems
Here’s a top 10 showcasing some of the possibilities in videopoetry. Things I like a lot over the last few years…yes there are many more.
Heimweg (poem by Peh)
Film and animation: Franziska Otto (2010)
Racing Time (poem by Chris Woods)
Adele Meyers & Ra Page (2012)
Delikatnie mnie odepchnąłeś całą (poem by Bozena Urszula Malinowska)
Marcin Konrad Malinowski (2012)
https://vimeo.com/35127990
You and Me (“May i feel said he” by e.e. cummings)
Kartsen Krause (2009)
Profile (poem by R.W. Perkins)
R.W. Perkins (2012)
The Forty Elephants (poem by Gérard Rudolf)
Alastair Cook (2011)
Silent Scene (poem by J.P. Sipilä)
J.P. Sipilä (2013)
Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer) (poem by Matt Mullins)
Matt Mullins (2013)
Who’d have thought (poem by Melissa Diem)
Melissa Diem (2013)
What Remains (poem by Gareth Sion Jenkins)
Film by Jason Lam (2010)
