Posts By Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

Call for entries: OLE International Festival of Electronic Literature

On 30 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

A month-long International Festival of Electronic Literature—OLE—will be held in Naples and its environs in October. There is of course some overlap between videopoetry/filmpoetry and electronic literature; here’s how the festival website describes the latter:

Electronic Literature, also known as eLiterature or digital literature, includes a wide genre of works that make use of digital media (from the computer to the Internet to single software) to be created and / or to be used. It is therefore not about traditional works subsequently digitized, but born digital works that generate real new languages and, therefore, new literatures.

The festival is divided into two sections, one “made up of internationally renowned artists from all over the world,” and the other for younger artists. The call for proposals targets the latter group:

Present Call is addressed to young people of any nationality who are under 35 years of age. The theme of the Festival is “Memory of the future: to know ours roots to plan a common future”. The other sub themes are: “conditions for peace, sustainable development, knowledge and cultural diversity,” in parallel with the theme of Universal Forum of Cultures.

The works they’re seeking include:

2. ELECTRONIC POEMS

  • videopoetry
  • kinetic poetry
  • interactive poetry
  • 3D poetry
  • multimedia poetry
  • hypertext poetry
  • flash poetry
  • generative poetry
  • code poetry

The deadline is May 15. Refer to the website for the rather complex submission procedures (which may be more comprehensible in Italian).

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Visual, film, and sound artists sought for collaborative project with Minnesota poet

On 30 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

Duluth, Minnesota’s Prøve Collective (which counts among its members the cellist/composer and videopoem maker Kathy McTavish, whose work I’ve featured on Moving Poems) recently issued a rather unique call for artists to collaborate on multimedia projects with poet Kathleen Roberts, culminating in a two-week exhibition in August. Here’s the call as it appears on mnartists.org:

Accepting submissions of visual, film, and sound art for With Sirens Blaring. Deadline: July 1

Duluth’s Prøve Collective announces an open call to filmmakers and artists for its upcoming show, “With Sirens Blaring”.

Deadline: 1 July, 2014.

Prøve Gallery, Duluth, Minnesota’s independent and artist run contemporary gallery, is proud to announce “With Sirens Blaring”, opening 8 August, 2014.

Show Description: Poetry is, above all things, an attempt to view the world through language. This summer, Prøve Collective will display a body of work linking poetry to visual, film, and sound art. Pursuant to a grant from the McKnight Foundation, award-winning Duluth poet Kathleen Roberts is creating an assembly of films and artwork by local and regional artists based on her words. These works will be displayed permanently on her website and in Prøve’s August exhibition, “With Sirens Blaring”. Artists in all disciplines are encouraged to inquire.

Mission Statement: Prøve Collective is a cultural organization dedicated to the role of art exhibition as a conduit of powerful ideas and diverse viewpoints. Our mission is to foster a greater appreciation of the contemporary arts, to bridge cultures, to create and expand community, and to provide cultural exchange, networking opportunities, and educational outreach through regular interaction with the contemporary arts. It is the goal of Prøve Collective to present monthly gallery shows, collaborate with like- minded arts organizations, and provide an arts retail environment.

Submission guidelines:
Interested parties may contact Kathleen via e-mail at kathleen@provegallery.com. Please include a brief statement of purpose and Curriculum Vitae. These will be works of collaboration, and we are interested in sharing in your ideas about poetry and its intersection with other art forms.

All submission materials must be written in English. Prøve Collective will provide publicity, exhibition invitations, mailings, and an opening reception. All work resulting from this project will be under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY), which requires that anyone distributing this work or making derivative work must give attribution to the original artists.

Submission does not guarantee that your work will be displayed.

Please e-mail kathleen@provegallery.com if you are interested in participating in this moving poetry project.

Deadlines:
• Submissions are due by 1 July. As this collaboration will take time and communication, it will be necessary for artists to initiate contact well in advance of the deadline for submission.
• The opening reception for “With Sirens Blaring” will be 8 August from 7-11pm.
• The show will run for two weeks and conclude on 23 August.
• Pick up will be August 28-30 from 3-7pm.

Please direct any questions to Kathleen Roberts, kathleen@provegallery.com.
PRØVE Gallery 21 North Lake Avenue Duluth, MN 55802 info@provegallery.com www.facebook.com/provecollective www.provegallery.com

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ReVersed Poetry Film Festival 2014 set for first weekend in April

On 29 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events

Working at break-neck speed, the organizers of the brand-new ReVersed Poetry Film Festival slated for April 4-6 in Amsterdam have scheduled a full program of screenings and events — it looks great. They even found time to make the above trailer. Timo Geschwill is the filmmaker, with text and voiceover by Daniel Vorthuys and sound design by Sinan Guven.

In other poetry festival-related news, Filmpoem has a slick new website — check it out.

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Spiegel / Mirror by Sylvia Plath

On 28 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Plath’s poem, translated into Dutch by Lucienne Stassaert, is read by Swoon (Marc Neys) as part of the soundtrack for this impressionistic new film (for which he has helpfully also supplied English subtitling). “It’s dark, anything but clear (like a mirror), full of fleeting spirits,” he writes.

Marc seems to be going through an unusually productive period right now, so I may be posting two Swoon videopoems a week until I catch up.

Shrike by John Poch

On 27 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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British filmmaker Alex Henery‘s adaptation of a piece by American poet John Poch. (Thanks to Nic S. for bringing it to my attention.) A great videopoem, I thought, albeit tantalizingly brief — but perhaps it’s better for the poet if we’re left hungering for more.

Tuba Player by Robert Wood

On 26 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A Robert Wood poem and Nic S. reading from The Poetry Storehouse were remixed with footage from the Prelinger Archives in this videopoem by Dustin Luke Nelson (whose poetry is also included at the Storehouse). The poem originally appeared in Rose and Thorn Journal.

Arion Resigns by Matt Mullins

On 25 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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American poet and electronic literature expert Matt Mullins, who has previously made some compelling videopoems on his own, collaborated with filmmaker Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon) for this one, as he notes in the Vimeo description:

A film by Swoon. A collaboration with Matt Mullins. Matt Mullins put together a recitation and score for a piece he’d written loosely based around the myth of Arion—a minor Greek god of music and poetry—that plays out in the context [of] corporate America. He pulled aspects of this myth into the score sonically, worked his recitation into it, and sent it off to Swoon, who came back with a visually compelling counterpoint that enhanced the poem’s subtext.

(Update, 28 March) Marc has blogged some fairly extensive process notes, including this:

I loved how he constructed a track around his poem. A scape full of (birdlike) noises that invited me to dive in.
The video is a splitscreen-storyline where I play out a female and male character (Thanks Rebekah, aka Softly Galoshes)
I took words from the poem and paired them with illustrations from other words from the poem. Those pairs blip throughout the video…
We wrote back and forth about certain visual decisions I made;

Matt: “I like what she represents and I like her demeanor and the things she does. I’m just wondering if a man giving off a similar insomniac/doubt vibe might be bring out more of the poem’s layers. His facing us would still give a counterpoint to the man’s back in the window while also adding a kind of visual echo of the narrator. But I don’t know, there are things about the woman I like as well. What do you think?”

Me: “I specifically picked out a female face to open up that perspective. To avoid people relating the narrator to the face…”
Things like that.

I believe the idea, the poem, the track work pretty well together. We were happy enough with it to set up a few more collabs. I’ve sent Matt a bunch of unfinished video’s, raw editings, visual ideas,… to play around with. More to follow this one soon, I guess.

Orchids by Diane Lockward

On 24 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Kinestasis
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https://vimeo.com/89698273

A poem by Diane Lockward from The Poetry Storehouse, in what Nic S. calls a still image remix — the first of two videopoems she’s made so far with the digital artwork of Adam Martinakis. Nic has just posted some process notes for the two videos. A couple of snippets:

I loved [Adam Martinakis’] weird and wonderful images as soon as I saw them. His website pictures are downloadable (not everyone is so open, even though the files for online viewing are necessarily quite small), so I was able to download the ones I liked and privately get a good sense of how I might work with them before I asked Adam for permission. He gave it at once, and went so far as to say there was no need for me to clear the final version with him. (I did, though – things work better if you keep folks posted all the way, I find).

[…]

A subset of Adam’s images were more rawly sexual, almost predatory, and these came together in my mind as a great backdrop for Diane’s lush, voluptuous poem about orchids, but not about orchids. The poem is couched as a warning to the predator against obsessive pursuit of the object, and I thought I could present the corollary of that – the vulnerability to exploitation of the object, whether a woman or an orchid in the wild. Adam’s image of the falling girl in a fetal position wrapped in gold foil struck me as exquisitely vulnerable and a wonderful way to wrap up this ‘story’.

This genre, to which I have perhaps inappropriately applied the term kinestasis — basically, fancy slideshows in video form — probably accounts for 90 percent of all poetry videos on YouTube. Most, of course, are thoroughly unimaginative, so I told Nic in an email that I was happy to see her elevating the genre a bit. Much to both of our surprise, however, the four still-image remixes she’s made so far have already surpassed almost every other videopoem she’s ever made in the number of views they’ve racked up. I would suggest that’s because, when the artists whose work she uses link to the videos, their artist friends on Facebook actually go and watch them. Poets trying to get other poets to watch videos is always going to be more of a struggle. At any rate, read Nic’s full account on her blog.

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Free, three-hour screening of filmpoems at Hidden Door Festival in Edinburgh, April 5

On 23 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events

Hidden Door is a nine-day festival of art, music and poetry beginning on March 28 at Market Street Vaults, Edinburgh. It offers “FREE ENTRY to Exhibition Spaces, Project Space, Bars, Cinema” every day from noon to 6:00 PM, and this includes three, 40-minute screenings of filmpoems on the last day of the festival, April 5. Here are the details, according to the event listing on Facebook:

3pm -6pm: Alastair Cook and Luca Nasciuti are introducing, performing and talking about Filmpoem in the afternoon from 3pm – come and see previews of this year’s festivals, watch some beautiful films and enjoy the rest of the Hidden Door experience at a leisurely Saturday afternoon pace.

Filmpoem is dedicated to the filming of words and is a collaborative venture committed to attracting new audiences to new writing. Filmpoem at Hidden Door is a match made in filmic festival heaven – on Saturday April 5th, we will be bringing poets, films and performance to these great Edinburgh arches, running three forty-minute screenings:

3pm: Filmpoem Felix Screening – Curation from our archive mixed with sneak peaks at some of the work for Filmpoem in Antwerp on June 14th this year, in partnership with Felix Poetry Festival.

4pm: Filmpoem Live with Luca Nasciuti. Luca explores and performs filmic soundscapes with poetry film, with live readings.

5pm: Filmpoem Poetry Society, an exclusive curation in partnership with The Poetry Society

It’s part of a larger programme of films at the festival called Hidden Cinema — an enticing mix of animation, shorts and experimental film.

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Todos esos momentos se perderan (All these moments will be lost in time) by Dier

On 21 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Concrete and visual poetry
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In celebration of World Poetry Day, here’s a video which may not fit some people’s idea of a poem at all — but which, to my way of thinking, represents the purest form of videopoetry. In fact, it was brought to my attention by videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves (more about that in a minute). It’s the work of the Madrid-based filmmaker and graffiti artist Dier, and incorporates two kinds of found text: in the soundtrack, a monologue from the movie Blade Runner, and as images on the screen, the erased words of painted-over graffiti. The former is (eventually) translated into Spanish-language graffiti, but it’s the “lost” words that are uniquely able to communicate — or fail to communicate — in all languages, due to the universality of silence. This struck me as especially suggestive today, given the emphasis of World Poetry Day on endangered languages and censored or silenced poets, as well as on dialogue between poetry and the other arts. To quote from the UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova’s message,

Today, contemporary forms of poetry, from graffiti to slam, enable young people to become engaged in the practice and renew it by opening the door to a new space for creation. The forms evolve, but the poetic impulse remains intact. […] As a deep expression of the human mind and as a universal art, poetry is a tool for dialogue and rapprochement.

In videopoetry as Konyves conceives of it, the meshing of different media goes well beyond mere dialogue, however. In a review of this video, “Loss, Memory, Spectacle, Redemption: A Hermeneutic Approach to Dier’s Videopoem Todos esos momentos se perderan (All Those Moments Will Be Lost In Time),” he reminds us that, in his view, “the ‘poetry’ in a videopoem is not the privileged ‘text’ — it is the moment of intersection between the text, image and sound.”

In “Todos esos momentos se perderan”, Dier succeeded in discovering the collaborative properties of the elements of text, image and sound. (Not all texts, images and soundtracks can be said to have ‘collaborative properties’; a previous!y published poem, for example, may arrive complete-in-itself.) The text is appropriated and bifurcated so that its relationship to the images (supported by a soundtrack that is itself an appropriation) presents to the viewer a metaphor extended and redrawn through key ‘moments’ in the unfolding of the work. The words of the spoken text are translated to Spanish before they are “enacted”, emphasizing their adaptation and service to the real world.

Due to the difficulty of copying and pasting from the online document, I’ll leave my quoting at that, but do click through and read the rest — an illuminating analysis which, unlike a lot of theorizing, should also be of practical value to any poets or filmmakers working in the field. For credits and Dier’s found-poem text translated from Blade Runner, see the description on Vimeo.

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Deflowered by Sara Mithra

On 20 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Sara Mithra’s latest videopoem once again makes good use of old home-movie footage from the Prelinger Archives. She calls it

A story of flowers with sharp desires, set to a bricolage about women who go into the woods in search of deer and the hunters they find. The film is entirely sourced from super 8 home movies of unknown origin and authorship. The score, by Lee Gerstmann, is taken unaltered from a damaged reel-to-reel recording, adding a warped, unsettling soundtrack.

Sideshow by Lauren Wheeler

On 19 March, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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This is Crevice, a terrific videopoem I happened across on Vimeo a few weeks ago. It’s the work of Tiffany Irene, who according to her Vimeo user bio is a film student at Temple University in Philadelphia. Summer Patterson is the actor.

Lauren Wheeler has an interesting background: a video game developer who describes herself as a “recovering slam poet.” For the text of the poem, see The Nervous Breakdown.