What a fascinating conversation this is developing into! Your
contribution here, Vitor, opens up the whole question of thought
processes in poetry and the languages that represent those processes.
Of course, on the most basic surface level, some of us may be most
comfortable conversing in Italian or French or English or any other
language native to a particular country or region. At a somewhat deeper
level, we may be more comfortable conversing in light beams or music or
mathematical symbols All of these symbols are, of course, just that:
symbols that stand for the concrete statements we make or the
meditations we set out upon. And David Morley's "Mathematics of Light"
is a wonderful example of how one set of symbols may be merged within
another. In our time, especially, one can do this with images that are
complete pictures, as with digital poems and their interfaces, as Jason
Nelson has just discussed in his post. The shadows of Plato's cave wall
take on depth and become more interactive. And perhaps Knowledge
(science) is allowed the chance to become closer to Art than to
Craft--fact and not pretense?
But the empty page, in any case, is what all these languages line their
symbols down on. I wonder if there is value to thinking of the empty
page as a scaffolding which symbols of whatever sort that compose a
unity may be laid down. The symbols are statements. The scaffolding is
the blank space across which those symbols play out--giving them
nonlinear depth and meaning because we don't know how deep that space is
or what its shape is. Nor does the mind try to measure the size of the
paper or its infinitude. The mind does something else: it experiences
the unknown space and makes of it what it will. It turns the finite
into one or more possible definitions or discoveries of the infinite.
And the poet, then, whether in light rays or mathematics or the
contemplation of immigrants learns to convey that new possibility and
discovery to others in a valid form. The poem happens, whatever
language, within the mind, drawing from the structure on the page or
visible through other symbols. It provides a setting for the
symbols/data, and a tool for using them to create.
My Best,
Jared Smith
On 11/30/2010 1:41 AM, Vítor Reia-Baptista wrote:
> Hi Everybody.
>
> My name is Vítor Reia-Baptista and I work at the University of
> Algarve, in South Portugal, where we have a research centre on Arts
> and Communication - CIAC (Centro de Investigação em Artes e Comunicação)
> http://www.ciac.pt/en/index.php
>
> I do not have anu direct answer to Roger questions and I don't know if
> they exist in general, but I'm certain that they apply to many of our
> human kind situations: we do need poetry, in different shapes and
> different states of mind and materia.
>
> So, here are some starting contributes for a discussion maybe also
> around the way Teknè makes Poietike possible, through knowledge
> (Science) made visible by Art crafts?
>
> Dave Morley, author of the poem «Mathematics of Light»
> <http://www.liv.ac.uk/poetryandscience/poems/mathematics-of-light.htm>;
> wrote:
> «Think of an empty page as open space. It possesses no dimension.
> Human time
> makes no claim. Everything is possible, at this point endlessly possible.
> Anything can grow in it. Anybody, real or imaginary, can travel there,
> stay
> put, or move on. There is no constraint, except the honesty of the writer
> and the scope of imagination-qualities with which we are born and
> characteristics that we can develop. Writers are born and made.»
>
> This contribute may be found in the site of the Centre for Poetry and
> Science at the University of Liverpool:
> <http://www.liv.ac.uk/poetryandscience/poems/index.htm>;
>
> From another perspective the Poetry Foudation claims that there are (at
> least) 1875 Poems about Arts & Sciences, such as the «Equation for my
> Children» by Wilmer Mills:
> http://atirateaomar.blogspot.com/
>
> Best wishes.
> Vítor Reia
>
> Citando roger malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu>:
>
>> Science, Technology, Art, POETRY
>> Opening Statement by YASMIN co moderator Roger Malina
>>
>> Poetry in the Asylum:
>>
>> There have been times in my life when I have been a voracious
>> reader,
>> and sometime writer, of poetry. Sometimes this state is triggered by
>> jet lag. At those times I consume and generate poetry as if my very
>> survival depended on it. At other times I am cold to poetry.
>>
>> My Czech grandparents were both musicians and music teachers and they
>> raised my father in a home where music was almost a basic food. He
>> used to listen to music as he carried out his scientific research in
>> the 30s, and later as he created his kinetic art works in the 1950s;
>> his seminal work "Jazz":
>> (http://www.olats.org/pionniers/malina/bdd/oeuvre.php?oi=1201)
>> is a visual poem linking sound and image. It was during this time that
>> he was at personal risk, pursued by the US McCarthy staffers and the
>> US FBI. Then suddenly in his 50s, after his political problems were
>> over, he became oblivious to music and painted in silence for the rest
>> of his life. Is this a coincidence or a connection? What is it that
>> makes poetry vital for survival? We live in a dangerous age, do we
>> need a new poetics?
>>
>> In recent decades, much of the art connected to science and new
>> technologies has been non contemplative, often loud and insistent,
>> un-poetical. But other artists, and poets, as they have explored these
>> new terrains have developed new poetic impulses that have created new
>> senses of the special and even the sacred. Examples come to mind that
>> I would put in the category of poetic arts would include:
>>
>> Jeffrey Shaw's "Legible City :
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61l7Y4MS4aU
>> Char Davies "Ephemere": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa_aiw7yhpI
>> David Rokeby's "Very Nervous System" :
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrawKucSSRw
>> Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's Listening post:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD36IajCz6A
>>
>> The invited respondents in this discussion have a variety of
>> approaches to poetry that connects to the sciences and technology of
>> our age.
>>
>> When historian Robert Ilbert asked Samuel Bordreuil and I to set up
>> the Art-Science wing of IMERA:
>> http://www.imera.fr/index.php/en/organisation/101.html
>> he named it : ASIL, or the French word for Asylum, with the acronym
>> Arts-Sciences-Instrumentations-Language . Indeed the connections
>> between the arts, sciences and technology must also be mediated by
>> languages both image and word, and in particular by art forms that use
>> language as their raw material. We have recently issued a new call for
>> residency proposals :
>> http://www.imera.fr/index.php/en/becoming-a-fellow/applications.html
>> and we welcome proposals from poets that need to collaborate with
>> scientists or research engineers to achieve their artistic vision. We
>> need poetry in the Asylum.
>>
>> Ten years ago poet Tim Peterson, a participant in this discussion,
>> led a Leonardo Electronic Almanac project around the new poetics :
>> New Media Poetry and Poetics
>>> From Concrete to Codework: Praxis in Networked and Programmable Media
>> http://www.leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/tpeterson.html
>> and more recently in the Leonardo Book Series at MIT Press we published
>> New Media Poetics: edited by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss
>> http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/books/swissmorris.html
>> which documents some of the current work in new media poetics.
>>
>> In this YASMIN discussion we seek to discuss all the many ways that
>> poetry connects to the new sciences and the new technologies that
>> underpin so many of the new ways that we are becoming human.
>>
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