What a fascinating discussion.
The empty page of the poet, like the white canvas of the
painter, brings to the 'nothingness' of Antarctica. This space
attracts artists and scientists to understand and find
expressions for the forces that can be so clearly perceived
and measured there.
I have recently completed research for a PhD which involved
working with scientists and artists to answer the question: How
can animation be used to combine scientific data with
subjective responses to Antarctica?
Since graduating I have made the completed thesis
(including animations) available online at
www.antarcticanimation.com
The following passages relate to the idea that 'keep an open structure
of words and thougths'.In Antarctica, as in the Arctic, that is often
perceived as an empty space can stimulate creative responses:
'Appearing and disappearing forms
in the choreography of Bronwyn Judge reflect her experience of the
'nothingness' of Antarctica; of the world itself seeming to vanish:
"Because of the silence, weather seemed to quietly come upon you. One
minute there was cloud on the horizon and the next mist swirling in a
disorientating fog about one so it was difficult to distinguish land
from sky. The world disappeared" (Judge, 2009).
...
The mirroring of clear body lines [in her choreographic response] work
as a metaphor for sharpened perceptions. An actual duet can work to
mirror responses between people. Judge's dancer dances with herself in
an otherworldly space. This creates an impression of intense isolation;
of being alone. And yet, as if from within the isolation, connection to
the environment seems extended.
...
After working on Antarctica's inland plateau for weeks at a time,
glaciologist David Carter remarked on 'the nothingness that is
Antarctica' (Carter in Roberts, 2008). Poet Stephen Wallace described
Antarctica as 'the nothingness that is not there and the nothing that
is' (McIntyre, 2005, p.3). Poet Rod Mallory uses the word 'Antarctic'
to describe its topsy-turvy nature.
The Antarctic,
So unarctic,
So Antarctic (Mallory in Hince, 2000, p.vii).
After two months of working as an artist in Antarctica, Chris Drury
wrote, 'I have tried to find ways of talking about the absolute
nothingness of various experiences deep in Antarctica. In a sense this
nothingness contains everything' (Drury in Gooding, 2007, p.5).
Fox describes Antarctica as an environment where human desire for
landscape is most evident because it is a void (Fox, 2007, p.253). He
observes that some artists have transformed space into place there by
cataloguing, abstracting, and physically placing objects into Antarctic
space itself (Fox, 2007, p.253). The human form is used as a measure of
human presence.'
Lisa
On Thu, 02 Dec 2010 21:40:02 +0000
Vítor Reia-Baptista
> Hi jared and all the others.
> Yes the poem as a content and a form to fill the empty page - the
> empty space, trying to keep an open structure of words and thougths,
> seems to be a never ending vertigo into the void of the awareness of
> the emptiness.
> That is probably why you can never translate a poem, since each time
> you put any words in any languge in that open page, you start a new
> vertigo process.
> That's why many times I prefer the spoken word form, filling the
> interspace of freejazz than the written word filling the open space
> of the empty page. You cqn listen to some exqmples of that in:
> http://www.myspace.com/flajazzados
> Best.
> Vítor
>
> Quoting Jared Smith <smithjrw@comcast.net>:
>
> > Hi, Vitor and other Yasminers,
> >
> > 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.
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> >>> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> >>> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
> >>>
> >>> Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
> >>>
> >>> HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to
> >>> subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter
> >>> e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further
> >>> down the page.
> >>>
> >>> HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down
> >>> and enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password
> >>> if asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will
> >>> appear ("options page").
> >>>
> >>> HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find
> >>> the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> >> This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> >> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> >> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
> >>
> >> Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
> >>
> >> HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to
> >> subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter
> >> e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further
> >> down the page.
> >>
> >> HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and
> >> enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if
> >> asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will
> >> appear ("options page").
> >>
> >> HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find
> >> the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
> >>
> >> -----
> >> No virus found in this message.
> >> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> >> Version: 10.0.1170 / Virus Database: 426/3287 - Release Date:
> >> 11/29/10
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> > Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> > http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
> >
> > Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
> >
> > HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to
> > subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter
> > e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further
> > down the page.
> >
> > HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and
> > enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if
> > asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will
> > appear ("options page").
> >
> > HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the
> > "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
>
> Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
>
> HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe
> to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address,
> name, and password in the fields found further down the page.
>
> HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and
> enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked.
> Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear
> ("options page").
>
> HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the
> "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
---------------------------
Lisa Roberts
www.lisaroberts.com.au
www.antarcticanimation.com
Post:-
73 Camden Street
Newtown NSW
Australia 2042
_______________________________________________
Yasmin_discussions mailing list
Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further down the page.
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
