November 14 2008 at Hexagram
When and where did you start writing poetry?
I started writing poetry as a teenager, as an angst writer lover teenager, when I was probably 13 or 14, I’m not even sure what gave me the inspiration to start writing poetry, I can only think, I mean I might have been reading poems here and there in high school, but it wasn’t a big part of my school. My family, my mother has always been serious about reading, but actually not really poetry very much, maybe sort of fictions, non-fictions, things like that. So, I am not really sure, my dad used to read the Odyssey to us, every year actually, which I haven’t really thought about before, that might be where it came from in some way, in some ideas, there is a different way of speaking, but also different ways of writing narrative than regular prose, sort of this lyrical poetic sort of way. Maybe, I don’t know… I thought of that for a while, just seems that at one point I started writing, and was writing pretty heavily for probably about ten years…
And you started with pencil and paper
Absolutely, pencil and paper and, never went to a typewriter face, I went straight from pencil and paper to the computer, when I went to university… actually, even when I was in university… actually, I didn’t go to the computer until my mid twenties, which is interesting enough, and also when I started writing much less. I think there is a correlation in there somewhere, but I sort of still haven’t figured it out.
But you still write with pencil and paper
I still do, but I don’t write much anymore, which is one of the big problems for me right now, one of the big challenges for me right now, my actual original text output is very minimal, I basically write enough to do the interactive work, but I don’t do anything more, and part of my goal over the next five years is to change that, is to go back and to spend much more time, writing just to write, and then if some of them are interesting or useful for interactive works, then that’s great, that is sort of… I’m trying to focus on writing.
In some ways coming back
Coming back, yes, because that is the core interest for me, language is the core interest for me. Clearly I’m very interested in the technology. The technology is easier, is much easier than writing
That is very funny to say
It is very true though; it is part of the reason why sort of… I roughly… I started heavily when I was between 14 -15 and when I was 25 – 26 and then I went off to, and in that point there… there was no overlap between my sort of professional career and my creative output, they are totally separated things, and then I went to the Royal college of Art to do my graduate work, and they started to converge, and I wanted explicitly to try to bring them together in some way, and I think a big part of what happened is that a lot of… I spend a lot of time on the technology, which is very fruitful and there are a lot of interesting stuffs like that, but actually much less time on the actual writing, and fifteen years since that, so I am trying to find the way. I think this year has kind of started on the good side… to find ways not spending that much time with the technology, and spend much more time with the writing, and part of that is sort of getting my ego out of the way of the technology, and letting my research assistants do that, and not feeling like I am not doing my job if I am not programming, that is going pretty well actually, letting them do the mechanics and trying to concentrate on the creative act.
And continuing the idea of time. When did you begin the process of displacement of writing, pointing to dynamic poetry?
So, I moved away, I started moving into a sort of visual component to my writing while I went to the Graduate School, because I pretty much had to, it is a Visual Arts school, I mean it goes all sort of sculpting to animation to jewelry whatever, but I mean the primary mode of expression is visual in one way or another and I had gone there originally because I wanted to learn how to become a better designer, actually, I had no idea that I was going to do art, that was not part of the plan. So the proposal I had written to get in, was for this multimedia poetry tool, so while I was there and I did the graduate foundation first year, but then I was doing a research degree, so during my second year I was doing my research while other students where doing their second year, of course, but I started investigating these ideas of concrete poetry and visual poetry, and things like that, and trying to understand how poetry is augmented or can be augmented by an attention to the visual materialization of the poetry, so concrete poetry and … the turn of the century avant-garde, so dada, futurists, people who were investigating sort of radical ways of presenting language, in the twenties and thirties… it is where my advisor at the time pointed me in the first place. Her name is G.C. Smith, she is a typographer from way back. She did typography, on some of the first computer based, typography machines… and stuff like that… so she had a pretty deep history in this sort of stuffs and she told me to go look at those peoples, go look at the concrete poets, go look at Apollinaire, at Mallarmé, you know, who all were sort of really at this moment and time… so I just did that chronological backward, so sort of Mallarmé, Apollinaire, the avant-gardes, and looking… really starting to think, ok! We don’t have to just put text, you know, and roll down a page, right? We can actually start using multiple layouts as the meaning-making component of the poem. We can start using multiple fonts, we can start doing crazy things to the letter forms, like distorting them, things like that, all as part of an attempt to augment what we are trying to say with the text, and so that’s why I started doing my own experiments with these sort of things, spatialization of text, manipulating letter forms, playing around with different fonts, lots and lots of layouts, and stuff, experiments that I did during that time, to try to test that, test those things out.
This is in that way, but more focusing in random…
Which relation did you find in the application of random process to language?
(I am especially thinking about your piece: What they speak when they speak to me)
Random process, interesting, it is very interesting to think about random process in any algorithmic process or programming, but especially in terms of art, because one of the things that I talk a lot about with my students, is this idea of randomness, and also just between randomness and noise, and too randomness is just what it says, it’s just an arbitrary selection from a group of things, and tends not to be that interesting, very rarely is it actually that interesting, in a purely random fashion, meaning that… Give me a random collection of things, and then I’m going to make a random selection into that, and present it to you, and then I’m going to do another random selection of that, and presenting to you; for me, it’s not very interesting at all, but I think that there are sort of gradations in there, meaning that, some of the ways that you could make it interesting, are: one, instead of taking a random collection of things (i.e. the internet, the web, right?), take a corpus, or a body of work within that. That’s what “I know what you are thinking” does, right, it is the corpus it is… all the text that is on my computer, which in one way or another (because it’s all in my computer), has some relationship to me, even if I didn’t write it, or if it was sent to me, it’s all stuff that for some reason came to me, and I kept, right, so I think that part of what is fascinating to me in “I know what you are thinking” is that it’s interesting for me to watch it, because first when it was up at Oboro, a year and half ago, there was, at that point, ten years of emails and word documents, and later on instant messengers histories.
Like feedback of your life
Yes, exactly, it was like this live streaming application, they have these live streaming application now that you can sort of hook in your blog, and your twitter and your flickr, and everything else, and it creates this history of everything you posted to over a certain period of time, they are quite interesting though, to look at, it is sort of like that, except on a more, for me, intimate level. Because, for me, I am actually conservative about what I expose of myself to the network, right…so I don’t have a facebook account, I just started a blog like a week ago.
All of my personal family photos on flickr are private, only by invitation can you see them, I actually have not been that much publicly exposed to the network, and so what was on the hard drive was very intimate, and that’s lots of stuff that haven’t been exposed before, so for me it was quite compelling, but I found from talking to my research assistants, but also talking to other peoples who spend some time in the exhibit. And that was very interesting, and tend to be very interesting for them as well, because there is a sense of personality that emerges from this very random collection of text, and in that case, it was pure random… right, it was basically… it scans a hard drive, it actually makes some extra list of all the document that have texts on it, and then uses a random number generator to decide which one of those texts to expose in a particular moment and time. And then randomly looks within that text and actually grab the chock (?), so there is no intelligence, there is no attempt to do semantics, there is no key-wording or anything like that, is just like: here is all my data for a decade, right? go and grab some stuff there. And I think it makes a very compelling thing, and it’s not just my stuff, I think anybody who you could find who has such a long history of data, text data, is going to produce interesting “I know what you are thinking” experience.
And the visuals are always black and white
Yes, the visuals for me where totally, as I progress I become more and more focused on text, so for me it doesn’t make any sense. It is a different piece if I was also judging images, okay…and for me not as interesting, but that is a personal thing, that is for me is very clear at this point in my life, that I respond the text that a deeper and are more meaningful level than I do to imagery, right? In the particular sense that with text I respond, but not only that I respond, but I also think: Ok now, how can I do something like that, that is a really intense emotion, that it is evoking to me, how can I maybe do something like that, how can I work with something like that? Whereas with imagery I can have really intense reactions to, but I very rarely really sit down and think how can I do something like that, it is sort of a distance for me, I don’t know why, right?
But there is a jump between that work and Intralocutor, when you can see that there is a live text, that you are talking and the words became written words, the spoken words became written words, and then there is a random, because you are improvising, and that process is really interesting, when you are in the screen, your body, the size of your body…the body of the text and the body of the speaker, and is really interesting how the written words are filling the body in a way as form and content of the word. I think that your work has a lot to do with that and like the logos, the lexis, and how you approach this kind of characteristic of language, and what influences you in that way? Because you spoke about concrete poetry, but the form and the content in the specific relation.
Well my interest in form and content is really centrally informed by poetry, meaning that for me, why poetry is interesting to look at as an art form, okay, no just his poets or his writers, or anything like that, as an art form, so whose other artists sort of looked at it as well, and designers as well, is that there’s such an intricate interrelationship between the form and the content, right, so you have these tools available to you as a poet, so you have spatialization, you sort of figure it out how the text is going to go on the page, you have punctuation to sort of help with the rhythm; spatialization helps with the rhythm as well, right… you can break punctuation rules, so you put a space in the middle of a sentence if you want, or you can, in the sentence, put a period five spaces after that. And then there is the sort of metalinguistic tools that you have; so: rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, dissonance, all these things that are part of language that you can very consciously materialize on a page to help shape a total vision, for somebody else to see, somebody else to experience. And I find that poets are some of the most conscientious manipulators of form, and really sort of explicitly looking at how they are going to arrange those things to get the result that they want, so for me it always comes back to poetry, even though doing things that… I do a number of things that don’t necessary look like they are about poetry but, for me, it is all about that really close attention to those things; and also about not using any of those tools unnecessarily, so really well wrote poem, just like any well wrote piece of work, there is nothing that can be added, and there is nothing that can be taken away, it is what it is, I find, and this is what the research is about. I find that, since such an early stage with interactive media, that there is a lot of things being moved around, and there is a lot of things that you can interact with, that don’t serve no purpose, other than the fact that it’s kind cool, or it’s novel, or it might catch somebody’s attention. But there is actually no stuffs that are happening on the surface of the work that is sort of a withbeing (?) or interesting, motion graphics, or interesting ways of interacting with something, but they are actually, totally, almost completely, disengaged from what the actual content of the work might be like. So one of the things that I talk about to my student about is… I say, this is what you are trying to do, this is what you are trying to say, and this is sort of how are you saying it right now. Now, does anything changes if I take this means of saying it away, and you use different means. Because if nothing changes, then you probably don’t need to be doing this, you don’t need this set of strategies to present your work. Just write a poem, just make a video, just make a song, don’t try to clutter it up with all this interactivity, or clutter it up with all this dynamic and changes and stuff like that, right, because: 1. it is not needed, 2. it is going to interfere with what it is you are trying to say, and 3. it gets really tedious. There is only so many times you can see flash vector graphics do some crazy things with lines and something like that, then you’re like, o.k. that is kind of a cool effect, but it’s not….
It’s distracting from the content
Yeah, it’s distracting you from the content, and then, I think you start to make people suspicious that you had no content, right, that there is actually no… there is nothing there else than the surface. I think there is a place for the surface play, right…I think that there is something very engaging about rich visual effects without a doubt, but I think that if you want to make artwork in particular, meaning for me anyways, that you want to say something to the world, about the world, that you have to get beyond that, you have to really make sure that the way you are making things changes and the interaction that you are asking the person to do are all part of the thing that you are trying to say. This is very hard, I think it is hard no matter what practice you are doing, and I think as I get older, it is one of the things that I am beginning to understand. What separates really great artists from ok artists, or maybe transcendent artists from successful artists, which are not necessarily the same thing, it’s this ability to really make everything that you say mean what you say, not have things that are just there because they are interesting, because they might attract somebody’s attention or they just look really nice, or something like that; but make everything work in service of what it is that you are trying to say.
And now there is a specific poetry project, or a poet…
Probably the biggest, it is funny because as I was saying in the beginning, like when I was in high school, I don’t really remember reading poetry that much, so It is hard to say what maybe an original influence was, but probably one of the biggest influences that I picked up since High School, and that is still pretty much with me is Paul Celan, who is a Czech writer who wrote in German, and writes this incredibly dense poems, which are helped a lot by the fact that in German… German has this wonderful ability to basically concatenate nouns, so you end up with these crazy thing that we will make up with adjectives, a string of adjective and then a noun, right…The Germans are just like…agggggrrrr we will just make a big noun, so you have this sense that you can create in the language… kind of making new entities in the world. Languages like English where it is: adjective, adjective, adjective, adjective, noun; the noun is pretty much the same noun, it is just… we are sort of modifying here and there, in German you get the sense like… you are going to make a new thing, that exist in the world. So anyways, when I went to Berlin and I really started learning German, he was one of the poets I was hearing of all the time, and I just sort of fell in love with the way he wrote. Also, he writes about very intense thing like the Holocaust and stuff like that… there is nothing else like that, but I mean intense things, and so, I think for me, he is really a clear example of somebody who creates poetry that has no… there is no slack in it; this sense of intense compression that he’s using exactly the number of words that he needs to use, and no more and no less. So, he is been a big inspiration for me.
T.S Eliot, so when I got in to the university, we read “The waste Land” in my first year, and after that I went out and bought more of his stuff and fell in love with the sound of his language, and the rhythms of the language that he uses, and then much later, actually, funnily enough, Langston Hughes, so there really trying to… Paul Celan comes from a different culture than me, T.S Eliot comes from a different culture for me. I don’t come from Langston Hughes culture, I am not a black men that comes from the south, but he is an American, he was an American, and I am American, without a doubt I am American; and so starting reading something that is a vernacular, that isn’t really a vernacular, only if you are sort of coming from England, and you are like “Oh that is a vernacular.” No, this is just the way a whole chunk of the country speaks, and he has managed to take that and put it into his poetry in a way that I hadn’t really heard before, he is sort of why I started ordering myself more orators, American poets. People like Simon Ortiz, who is a Navajo writer, who writes this very spare beautiful works. It’s also interesting the way he thinks about the intersection between where poets come from and in the way they’re writing, so Simon Ortiz grew up in the South West, in these huge open spaces, dry land that has a very particular kind of hard beauty to it. It’s a landscape that will kill you quickly if you are not careful, and there is a part that sort of summarize that in his language, so those are the most obvious influences to me, I mean there is lots of other people I read, but those are the ones that I sort of consciously think of when I’m writing sometimes, like when I’m trying to get myself inspired or just trying to figure out how to approach something.
And, in a position, thinking of this tradition of poetry that it stays in books, and then the ephemeral writing, how do you see your position in that, because when you are doing this ephemeral writing then there is no books where you can go and read.
My position is that it goes back to the question of Form and Content, meaning that if I am writing something that makes more sense just reading in a book, on a printed page, that’s where it should go, right? And what I’ve been trying to do over the last sort of five or six years, which is very hard in some ways, is that I try to write sort of simultaneously in terms of the text and the realization of the text, so “What they speak when they speak to me”, the touch screen piece, that is the only piece that I managed to do that way in five years, meaning that, as I was writing that piece, I was thinking, the content of the piece has something to do with intimacy and understanding and sort of trying to pull a narrative out of a chaos of language, and stuff like that. So I already started to think how there might be a visual component as well as a dynamic component that would talk about those things, so these texts are developed in parallel with the way it was presented, but that is one piece in five year. I think it’s very hard to do, and I feel like there is not a massive amount of digital poetry that I’ve experienced in ways… most of the time my responses are, you should have written that down. The visual component is not actually augmenting or expanding my understanding of what your text is about, and, in a lot of ways, it’s getting in the way, because the visualizations tend to be really poor. I know people that argued that the quality and the aesthetics is part of the aesthetic, there is a sort of a conscious acceptance of roughness to the visual presentation, and maybe because I still have something of a designer in me, and also I believe in the power of beauty, in things like that… most of the time I just feel like, well… it’s ugly, and it’s not just ugly, in this sort of simplistic aesthetic, it’s ugly in a conceptual sense as well, it doesn’t do what you wanted it to do, it is not fitting with the text that you are trying to do, so just writing, print it, or just perform the text. That is another way, it just doesn’t have to be the print, it could be just somebody performing the text, and that is the main way the text is delivered, so just do that, but then why have all these videos going on behind your back; it’s a bunch of random images that are sort of thrown together and are meant to mean something about the rizomatic deconstructing nature of our modern existence. It just distracts from the words themselves.
So, I guess for me the goal is that whatever interactivity or dynamic component that’s part of this computational text, that you don’t ask why they are there. It is clear to you as a reader and to the person interacting that these are all the pieces somehow. You know, it’s just the same way that you might have to think hard, a little hard to figure it out, what the metaphors might be, right… you might have to think a little bit why am I interacting with it like this, or why is it sort of moving or evolving like this, and I think there is a big difference, the people can sense intuitively, even if not consciously, they can sense the difference between works, where there is a deep reason for those things to be happening and works, where there isn’t, where just because somebody wants to make something that is interactive, or somebody thought that they couldn’t just put some text. So, this is one of the reasons, to me… So, I don’t know if you really notice, but there is almost no sound in my work and, to be honest, it probably started out because I didn’t know that much about sound. I can do fundamental sound work, but I am not a musician, I am not a singer, it’s not part of my… like expressing myself through audio is not been part of my core, and I tried to think for a while where I would sort of add audio, because I sort of felt like there should be audio there, and I quickly realized that it didn’t work, and also it’s part of what I said earlier, increasing focus on text, so I find it interesting that it feels that people in new media work in general, the people are often reluctant to just have text. There is a sense that you are not really doing new media work then, if it is just text, there is no video, or image, there is no motion media, you know… if you are interacting with dynamic text, then why not just do a book, right?
Then, it goes back to what you’re trying to do with that interactivity and the dynamics. I think, if somebody who was a really interesting audio person, came to me and said –Hey lets do a collaboration, I would be totally opened to that, I’d be really interested in that sort of thing, and actually, even when I say that, I realize that I did some. We took the same technology that’s behind Interlocutor and we did a series of performances working with Montreal spoken word artist, three of them, same pieces, and two of those people were rappers basically, and one of them wrote his own music, the other was a poet and a designer. So I am very interested in seeing how audio can be a whole other work, it’s just that it is not what I do, I always feel like a fraud when I start to do it, because I don’t have the knowledge to do it. In synthesis with the writing and the programming for instance, like those things for me are like very melted in my mind, the audio is like this thing over here where you know, I can see some interesting work, but for me when we did the Oboro solo show, there is something really gratifying about walking into that space, and actually having it be quiet. I mean, people talking, right, but people were reading, people were interacting with the text and people were reading, and it wasn’t like this noise going on anywhere, and there wasn’t like videos flashing anywhere, it is… people were focused. So, for me, one of the big challenges is to get people to read, because reading happens in a different register, I think, than a lot of what you encounter in interactive installations; it is focused, concentrated, it’s a quiet show experience. You know, whereas there is a lot of installations were you sort of interact within parallels, doing things with your body and might be saying something and listening to things, and stuff like that, whereas with these things you’re still doing things with your body, but at the same time you are trying to pull the text out of whatever the work is, and for me that is one of the thing that I sort of extend to when I teach Interactive media in general. It is… how do you get people to focus on your work in a way that is not just browsing.
