I was asked by the Foundation Carmen Conde-Antonio Oliver to create a digital piece based on a collection of poems by the Spanish poet Carmen Conde. I stubbornly insisted on reading the poems in Spanish only, even though my Spanish is only intermediate. Since I was working with someone else’s text, which I have never done before, I felt uncomfortable imposing some of the spatial techniques I’ve used in the past when creating 3D poetry. It didn’t seem right to force Conde’s words, written almost a half-century ago, into perpendicular intersections and geometric configurations. With my other works, such as open.ended, the arrival of the beeBox, and contract, development of the spatial structure and the writing occurred simultaneously, with the structure influencing the writing and vice versa.
I procrastinated for weeks and months, not knowing what would “fit” Conde’s poems. I knew only that I wanted to evoke a journey, especially travel over the water. Carmen Conde traveled between her native Cartagena to Nicaragua’s capital and Puerto Rico, each city is on the coast. In my visits to South America, first Cuba and later Venezuela, the beaches made a profound impression on me. I would just run through the sand to greet the sea. To evoke the journey, the allure of the sea, I needed movement in the words. No fancy animation, just a sense of moving through something. I came upon some open-source code that fit nicely with the vision beginning to form in my head, and began to pick out phrases of Conde’s and plug them in. Originally I wanted to weave her words and mine, but I didn’t see the point – her phrases don’t need me as a connecting thread. Furthermore, my intended audience was primarily native Spanish-speakers. The phrases I picked stood out for me not only for their beauty, but for the practical reason that I didn’t have to look them up in a Spanish dictionary! Image and sound were added in to strengthen the emotional experience of the piece. When I finally sat down at the computer to produce the piece, it came together very quickly. I didn’t make numerous iterations, the only major change was switching from a still image background to video. The video was more interesting, with the still image it was too reminiscent of a “what I did on my summer vacation” slideshow. Creativity thrives on constraint, the barrier of an imperfect knowledge of Spanish and respect for the poet’s writing led to a simple but effective solution.
Credits
* text drawn from Jaguar Puro Inmarchito (1963), by Carmen Conde
* sound from personal recording at Malibu, California
* code based on jtarbell’s www.levitated.net
* video source: Stanford Psychophysiological Library
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~psyphy/Movs |
