PROVIDING POSITIONING
"Cosmopoetics: Mediating a New World Poetics"
University of Durham, England
September 6-12, 2010
(scroll down for a related sound file)
"Cosmopoetics: Mediating a New World Poetics"
University of Durham, England
September 6-12, 2010
(scroll down for a related sound file)
“Long / Distance calls. They break sound / Into electrical impulse and put it back again…..
The connection faint. / Your voice / consisted of sounds that I had / To route to phonemes,
then to bound and free morphemes, then / to syntactic structures.”
-Jack Spicer, “Phonemics”
The connection faint. / Your voice / consisted of sounds that I had / To route to phonemes,
then to bound and free morphemes, then / to syntactic structures.”
-Jack Spicer, “Phonemics”
Thousands of miles (and the Atlantic Ocean) separate Florida from England. However, for this Writing On Air installation, created for a poetry conference at the University of Durham, such separations were imaginatively mediated by the mediations of language. This bridging was realized by using words from a 45-minute telephone conversation, conducted between the two cities, during which the view from the conference room windows was painstakingly described by British students, their recorded voices later adapted and applied for the installation.
On central windows, words describing the room’s view were printed onto images of water, the lines of language shaping into waves. On side windows, the words followed the streets and rivers of Durham and Jacksonville, twisting and turning upon the transparent maps of each city.
Through the windows, from the telephone, there was a seeing out-of-sync with itself, but a seeing nonetheless, even if time-delayed, time-tempered, with lines of sight promising, offering, to come into contact. For this installation pointed, through the warp and torque of time, toward an echo of connection where so much depends upon a “sapling,” a “drainpipe,” a “chimney,” a “bee on the lavender.”
On central windows, words describing the room’s view were printed onto images of water, the lines of language shaping into waves. On side windows, the words followed the streets and rivers of Durham and Jacksonville, twisting and turning upon the transparent maps of each city.
Through the windows, from the telephone, there was a seeing out-of-sync with itself, but a seeing nonetheless, even if time-delayed, time-tempered, with lines of sight promising, offering, to come into contact. For this installation pointed, through the warp and torque of time, toward an echo of connection where so much depends upon a “sapling,” a “drainpipe,” a “chimney,” a “bee on the lavender.”
Many thanks to the University of North Florida’s Michael Boyles and CIRT for the vital assistance with this installation.
Copyright © 2015 Clark Lunberry. All rights reserved.