The End is Near: “The Counter of Babel”

We are not all that near. Just nearer.

In the end: infinity. The Counter of Babel is incrementing its way upward through the integers. It reads 5069208 as I begin my post. It’s going up as I write. Now, 5069666. I want to write. Must check though…

Steve Shaddick, the creator of this intriguing installation, explains: it only counts when someone is on the site, and if there are multiple people on the site at the same time, the numbers will increase faster. Help us break the chains of infinity’s tyranny by visiting often and remaining on the site for as long as possible.

Why not? There is a curious sense of “time” at play here, a curved time that accelerates the more it is looked at. And, Mr. Shaddick is right–we can be the revolution that breaks time’s back. So what happens if we all go to the Counter of Babel right now? Click here now. 5183377! No I mean, really, if we ALL clicked there RIGHT now. 5184144. Are we there yet?

5185422. About 20 minutes and I haven’t once checked to see if the light in the fridge is on when the door’s closed!

Schizo/graphie

While pondering the poetics of new media space, I stumbled across Christophe Réprimel’s remarkable short film Schizo/graphie (2007, France, 8:15). It is a 21st century kind of “silent” film, developing parallel narratives launched from the same experience. Through the use of such devices as variable split screens, grainy video, deliberate diegetic “silence,” and, importantly, a nondiegetic music track, Mr. Réprimel’s film significantly perturbs our sense of time. The multichannel presentation keeps the viewer constantly reassessing the status of “now.” When, for a time late in the film, part of the screen goes dark, the viewer may find himself or herself communicating to the film about that which is not seen.

At this level of perceptual engagement, it seems to me there is little difference between a good film and a good poem. If so, what poetic devices correspond to montage–traditional and vertical–and the stabilizing/destabilizing potential for nondiegetic sound? Eisenstein’s characterization of montage as collision brings some poems to mind, which I’ll need to re-explore soon.

Mr. Réprimel cites the help of friends, a paucity of means, and the influences of films by David Lynch, Mike Figgis, and Virgil Waldrich. His Schizo/graphie is receiving some rave reviews and he is currently working on another story which may be ready later this year. Bonne chance–we’ll be watching.

 

Soft Cinema and the Soft Cinephiliac

How to assess the potential audience for an exciting recent development in cinema? The development is already here and is called Soft Cinema. The audience of interest to me, does not yet exist, or, at least, is not evident. That audience is typified by the Soft Cinephiliac.

Soft Cinema (SC) is a collection of three films created by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky, shown as loop installations and later released on DVD in 2005 for viewing on personal computers. The films exemplify concepts for cinema in the new media that Manovich had presented in his 2001 book The Language of New Media and in a variety of papers he’s written since. Each film constructs a fictional narrative out of modules (e.g. graphic images, animation, video streams, and scrolling text) collected from a database termed the Global User Interface (GUI). The modules are presented inside (and between) smaller frames that partition the screen in a way similar to Mondrian’s partitioning of the canvas. The selection and juxtaposition of those modules on the screen can be random, though Manovich and Kratky tend to synchronize sequences of randomly assembled montage in a nonrandom way, linking subsets of the GUI to synch points in a generally fixed narrative (voiceover or scrolling text).

What can we say about the audience for SC? Certainly, the kind of vertical/spatial (or within-frame) montage implemented in SC acknowledges the pervasive shifts in visual habits and norms as well as the changes in perceptual filtering and remixing of information that have occurred in recent decades. The visual norm for computer screens and the world news is decidedly compartmental and modular. Though we often think of technical innovation as reshaping our visual norms, excellent arguments have been made that the process may work the other way around—that changes in technology reflect prior changes in visual norms.

Cinema scholars and critics have been slow to weigh in on the merits of SC. Even the more enthusiastic reviewers are cautious, tending to treat SC as a curiosum and tempering their response with skepticism about the viability of SC’s relatively fixed narrative structure. In particular, Carlota Larrea, concludes her review: “There are some exciting and even impressive elements in this project…However, one wonders how many times one would want to watch the shorts … before getting bored, in view of the repeated storyline.”

What an interesting criterion for metering audience response to cinema—a film’s effects on repeat viewings. While I disagree with Dr. Larrea’s particular assessment of SC (I watched the films a number of times and, in each case, my urge to see the film again was undiminished by repeat viewing), I want to outline a segment of the potential audience for SC in particular, and, more generally, new media cinema that acknowledges changing visual norms.

 

How do we get to the Soft Cinephiliac? If we extrapolate the activity of repeat viewing to a kind of “fetishization” of cinema—repeat viewings, harvesting perceptions from repeated viewings, collecting and classifiying those subjective “moments”, and curating and exhibiting those “moments” to others in blogs, websites, and journals–we are nearing the province of the Soft Cinephiliac.

 

For the soft cinema, this province is uncharted territory. But the cinephiliac is already well documented in standard cinema histories, and contrasting soft cinema with traditional film may help identify overlaps between the traditional (hard) cinephiliac and the future soft cinephiliac. To the extent we can implicate shifts in visuality and mass culture with the historical appearance (and gradual disappearance) of the hard cinephiliac, we might extrapolate from those relations and imagine a soft cinephiliac associated with our new multi-channel and simultaneous visuality and our new remix urges and social norms.

 

I’ll close with a conceptual exercise built around a single widely-held distinction between traditional film and soft cinema and its possible implications for cinephilia. Traditional film is indexical (an imprint of physical presence) while the digital “live action” elements of soft cinema are not. Indexicality is central to an understanding of the hard cinephiliac: he/she collects apparently aleatory elements from the periphery of the frame, and identifies subjectively with the indexical traits of those elements. Those “collectibles” are extremely important to the cinephiliac because he/she has “seen something” that, as Paul Willemen put it, was not intended to be seen.

 

The distinctively indexical nature of traditional film underlies the criticism by traditional cinema theorists of “new” media like TV, the videocassette, the DVD, and certainly now soft cinema. Taken literally, for hard cinephiliacs and their theorists, the emergence of new media has meant the death of cinephilia.

The death of the hard cinephiliac may yet facilitate the birth of the soft cinephiliac. The vertical montage of the soft cinema, the multi-media face of TV news, websites and blogs as well as the arrangement of our personal tasks across the screens of our personal computers has implications for indexicality. It is not the imprint of presence of something past (photography) but perhaps the presence of something that is very much here and now. Repeat viewing of SC, for example, refreshes memories of previous viewings. There are no peripheral or unintended details to collect in the traditional sense. However, the aleatory perceptual effects of the randomly reassigned modules as well as adherence to (that is, respect for) the visual norm of vertical montage and all the “here and now”-ness is no less a discovery (and perhaps no less collectible) for the soft cinephiliac than her 20^th century predecessor.

Adaptation: Poem to Video

This is a video produced by Baylor student Stephanie Pearson in late 2006. Ms. Pearson created her video around the reading of her favorite poem, “Death of a Naturalist” by Seamus Heaney. That’s an interesting favorite poem. And, as an added bonus, the video includes a bit of singing by Tom Lehrer.

The idea of filming an experience of reading one’s favorite poem is intriguing. Clearly, Ms. Pearson has had to address a number of basic questions about her relationship with the poem, and the poet who wrote it. For example, until I saw this video, the question of who recites a poem to us when we read it off the page never occurred to me.

How would you film your favorite poem?

Adaptation: Poem to Video

Here’s an interesting example of a golempoem: Billy Collins reads his poem Forgetfulness “over” a series of animated dream images that “illustrate” the poem. How does the animation add or detract from your experience of the poem? How does the poem add or detract from your experience of the animation? Would this work differently if someone else (say Harvey Fierstein) were reading the poem instead of Collins? Would this work differently if, in fact, no one read the poem at all, but the words appeared between or within the animation?

If you’d like to hear more, I’ve collected a number of Billy Collins poem videos in a You Tube play list. There’s a fairly wide variety of approached represented here. I’ll want to delve more deeply into particular adaptations in coming posts. But, for now, what do you think of Forgetfulness?

Adaptation: Poem to Graphic

Shmuel ben Yitzchak’s graphic image Schreib dich nicht (Nachlass)–or, Don’t write yourself (Deduction)–was completed in 2001. The title is largely taken from the opening line of an untitled poem by Paul Celan. As such, ben Yitzchak’s work is an adaptation of Celan’s poem.

How does one present the two works together? If they were exhibited in a physical gallery, they might be positioned next to one another. Even then, which one would be placed where? Would the priority of Celan’s poem (ben Yitzchak’s graphic was “inspired” by the poem) have any implications for their joint exhibition in a physical gallery? Would that mean the poem would be displayed to the left (or top) while the graphic would be displayed to the right (or bottom)?

Of course, in a physical exhibition the original size of ben Yitzchak’s (36 by 44 cm) would be a consideration as well. Or maybe the two works might be positioned in different parts of the gallery room–or even different rooms.

Many, though not all, of the possibilities for jointly exhibiting the two works poem and graphic in a physical gallery carry over to their exhibition in a virtual gallery. The virtual gallery cannot reproduce the physical presence of the two works in a physical gallery in which the observers move about while the exhibits do not. However, in the virtual gallery, the exhibits can move about. Shouldn’t that open up new possibilities?

Enough questions for now. I’ve prepared a joint “exhibition” of Paul Celan’s poem and Shmuel ben Yitzchak’s graphic in the Power Point (I know I know) shows below. If you read German try that one first, and if not, go directly to the English version that features John Felstiner’s English translation.
Celan-ben Yitzchak Exhibition (in German)

Celan-ben Yitzchak Exhibition (in English)

NOTE: Both the German text of Celan’s poem and John Felstiner’s translation are taken from Michael Hofmann, ed., Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

Welcome

Welcome to golempoem. I’ve created this space to explore new habitats for the poem.

What’s golempoem? Well, it’s part golem–that is, the complex network of digital mechanisms that link me with you this instant. The golem generally does as it’s instructed, but it tends to take its instructions quite literally, and that can sometimes lead to undesired outcomes.

While a literalist, the golem is always activated by enchantment. The enchantment is the poem part of golempoem. The German poet Paul Celan described the poem as an Atemwende, a turning of breath. The word “breath” is etymologically related to the word “soul” in many languages so it’s not at all inaccurate to think of the poem as having an action, a turning force, on the soul.

In future postings, I’d like to tap into the energy of poems by providing them with new habitats here in cyberspace. With the golem’s help, I’ll be posting poems that have been adapted into paintings, photographs, digital designs, and sound. I’ll also be posting poems that have been inspired by artistic works in other genres. The golem has offered to help, and, to take the golem up on that offer, I’ll have to learn much more about how one speaks to the golem.

I’ll need your help as well. Perceiving the energy in art is, ultimately, a subjective process. I perceive, therefore I am. You can help by telling me what it is you’re perceiving in the presentations. And, importantly, what you’re not perceiving.
I hope you’ll come back and help. For now, thanks for stopping in. And, welcome again to golempoem.