~ exhibitions ~

How to exhibit videopoetry in a bookstore: Swoon’s “Gathering Light” exhibition

video screens scattered through a wall of books

Here’s a kind of poetry-film screening that ought to be more common than it is. I’d been following the Facebook event page with much interest (and not a little regret that I can’t be there), but since I don’t know Dutch, I’m grateful that Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon has put up a short blog post, complete with pictures. I lifted a couple for this post, but do click through and look at the rest, because Marc et al. appear to have implemented this really well:

The cultural centre of my hometown (Mechelen) asked me if I was interested in a solo exhibition with my video’s.

Yes.

I asked my favourite bookstore if we could set up the exhibition in their store. Putting up different screens in between and on top of books.

Yes.

After a few days of setting everything up (a big thank you to the technical team of CC Mechelen), we opened ‘Gathering Light’ last week (on my birthday, talk about a present)

No more than 20 screens (of different size and age) spread out over this fine store. A selection of what I’ve been making over the last 5 years.

a woman watches a poetry video in a bookstore

If you’re thinking of making the trip, March 6 might be a good day to visit:

The exhibition runs until march 8 and we’ll end with a finissage dressed up as a showcase on videopoetry with live readings in ‘De Kapel van Contour’ on march 6 (more on that later)

Type Motion exhibition opens in Liverpool

“FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is the UK’s leading media arts centre, based in Liverpool,” according to their website. A new exhibition should be of particular interest to fans of videopoetry and poetry film.

This November, FACT is pleased to present the UK premiere of Type Motion, an exhibition featuring over 200 outstanding examples of text and typography being used alongside the moving image. The exhibition celebrates the creative possibilities of opening up uses of text far beyond print, and seeks to showcase not only the importance of writing, but how bringing it to life with movement is an artform in itself.

Kinetic text has emerged as an important sub-genre of poetry animation in recent years, spawning some of the most popular poetry videos on the Anglophone web. This exhibition sounds as if it might really help contextualize that. It’s on from November 13 through February 8, 2015.

UPDATE (Nov. 14): See Grafik magazine for a short selection of poetry films from the exhibition. I like their thumbnail history:

The avant-garde filmmakers of the early twentieth century were interested in liberating the then-new medium from those other media that were already considered art prior to their incorporation into film — theatre and literature, language and writing. Today, however, the conceptual integration and the creative visualisation of what had once been (ideologically) rejected as ‘un-filmic’ has become a growing trend. Artists now strive to interpret literary works in animated poetry-clips, transform literary idioms into filmic language and draw attention to the form of writing to visualise the content it conveys.

(Hat-tip: ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival group on Facebook)

Call for submissions: Text(e) Image Beat exhibition at Galerie Sans Nom

(The following press release is from Annie France Noël, co-director of the GSN.)

GSN logoThe Galerie Sans Nom (GSN) in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, is organizing a screening of videopoetry with the curators Daniel Dugas and Valerie LeBlanc. The exhibition will be presented from March 20 – May 1, 2015.

The work should be screen-based poems where the text, image and sound intermingle. The maximum duration of the work cannot exceed 5 minutes and must have been realized after January 2013. The works must be in either French or English. If the language in the video poem is other than French or English, the artist is required to submit a version that is subtitled in French or English. All video poems must be received by the December 15 deadline through a file hosting service (Dropbox) or through Vimeo. A short artist bio and synopsis of the video poem must accompany each submission.

No entry fee, CARFAC rates will be paid.

Deadline: December 15th, 2014

Submissions must include:

  • Director’s name
  • Address
  • Email
  • Duration
  • Year
  • Format
  • Link (Vimeo / Dropbox)
  • Previous screenings
  • Synopsis
  • Bio
  • Artist portrait (JPEG, 300 DPI)
  • Still image of video (JPEG, 300 DPI)

Submit as a WORD .doc attachment to: videopoesieGSN@gmail.com

MIX conference to explore “transmedia writing and digital creativity”

Videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves is a featured speaker at an intriguing-sounding conference slated for July 16-18 at Bath Spa University in Britain. Registration is open for the MIX conference, which has its own website.

The conference will take place at Bath Spa University’s postgraduate centre at Corsham Court from 16th-18th July 2012. Its aim is to bring together practitioners and theorists working with writing in digital media. The purpose is to create a core of research knowledge both practical and theoretical. The conference will present academic papers as well as presentations and workshops by current digital practitioners. There will also be a public exhibition of digital work created for this conference.

The questions we will be addressing are: How can new media be used for serious artistic purposes and how can we create a suitable critical vocabulary for this? What is the relationship between digital writers and the commercial world of ‘gaming’. Who are the audiences for digital writing and how can they be accessed? There will be submissions from those who work in digital media, concrete poetry, text art, poetry and performance, poetry and film, film poems, digital poetics, poetry and art, poetry and music, digital narratives, game writing, intermedia poetry, transmedia writing, language art, visual writing and installations.

Though the deadline has passed to propose a paper, there’s an open call for video narratives to be exhibited at the conference — deadline June 1st.