Weronika Lewandowska and Agnieszka Przybyszewska in conversation: on creating poetry in VR

“You are not supposed to call it a subject, but an avatar. There’s no reality being portrayed, no setting, but a simulation!” That is what Polish poets from the Rozdzielczość Chleba group, experimenting with new technologies, proclaimed. Imagine, then, that instead of reading a poem and recreating a lyrical situation in your imagination, all of a sudden you simply become its subject. You can hear, you can see and you can move. You can feel how your surroundings affect you, and you can see how you affect your surroundings. The “here and now” of the speaking “I” becomes your “here and now”, the literary work is no longer an “artefact” but an “event”, one in which you participate with your whole body and all your senses.

Now, don’t imagine it. Just put on your VR headset, get your hands on the controllers and immerse yourself in “Nightsss”, a VR work directed by Weronika Lewandowska and Sandra Frydrysiak. Yes, virtual reality can be a literary platform, too. Yes, you can experience poetry in VR. “Nightsss” VR (the original Polish title is “Noccc”) debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2021 and has been presented at many festivals around the world (recently, it premiered in the UK) and is an extraordinary piece of work. However, it dovetails the realm of new-media activities sometimes referred to as VR or XR literature, including a long tradition of poems that are, in a way, written or re-written into VR experience (from Samantha Gorman’s “Canticle”, created using the CAVE environment, which also integrated poetic experience in VR with dance, to Andy Campbell’s “Water Cave”, in which the author applies the first-person point of view in the experience of landscape co-created with the use of typography). It is not the only romance between literature and VR with a Polish touch either (for instance, Anna Nacher co-created one of Mez Breeze’s VR collaborations). 

On the other hand, neither Weronika Lewandowska nor her poem “Nightsss”, which is (as the directors put it) the “narrative axis” of the VR experience, appeared “out of nowhere”. The work on “Nightsss” VR was preceded by years of artistic practice, creative violation of the boundaries of the poetic language and blazing trails on Polish and international spoken word stages, as well as her involvement in the creation of multimedia poetry publications and work on performances (also using VR) as part of artistic residencies and scholarships abroad.

The interview presented here is a record of conversations between The Writing Platform editor  Agnieszka Przybyszewska and Weronika Lewandowska about some aspects of creating poetic experience in VR.

“Nightsss” VR directed by Weronika Lewandowska and Sandra Frydrysiak (trailer). Check the whole “Nightsss” VR team here

Agnieszka Przybyszewska: An average fan of the art of words would not say that virtual reality and literature  have much in common. And, yet, we are here to talk about the “Nightsss” VR, which I would describe as poetry in VR, or VR poetry. Could you tell us what a “reader” who ventures into putting on goggles to experience a poem should expect?

 Weronika Lewandowska: “Nightsss” VR immerses you in an interactive and computer-generated space of images, words, sounds. It is an immersive piece of work, an experience of spatial metaphors, which come into being not only between words and meanings, but also between virtual representations of various elements written in the script, then put into motion and action in a virtual environment.

AP: All right, but most people would ask “where is the poetry here?” and “how will I find myself in all this?”

Weronika Lewandowska’s “Nightsss” as a spoken poem

WL: Everything is constructed around the axis of the “Nightsss” text, which was created sixteen years ago. It is a spoken word poem that I wrote with an international poetry slam in mind and presented many times before foreign audiences. My works created at that time took into account the spatial experience of a poem, the impressionistic quality resulting from the manner in which the body performs the text. I wanted to bring not only the words but also the performative nature of spoken word poetry into VR. Therefore, by immersing yourself in the virtual reality of “Nightsss/Noccc,” you can expect to “enter” the corporeality of the person performing the text, but also to experience the poem broken down into different elements in space, to spatialize the text through sound, visual, interactive actions. The text of “Nightsss” is about a real situation (the experience of love, intimacy, contact with nature and man that preceded the creation of the poem), which came back to me while writing the script. “Nightsss” VR also makes use of this memory, which can be seen in how the virtual world is constructed.

AP: Your explanation will probably reassure  those sceptical about VR poetry. Still, it is probably worth pointing out one more thing. Shortly after the Sundance Film Festival premiere, comments were voiced that your experience was visual poetry. The common understanding is that visual poems are made up of letters. Yet, in “Nightsss” VR, there is no typography at all. Your poem functions as a text to be listened to, the viewer is immersed in a visual soundscape. What did you want to achieve in this way?

WL: In VR, the poem functions not only as a text to be listened to, but also as an interactive audio element linked to visual change and the immersant’s activity. Through the movement of the hands, one layer of the vocal can be deformed. Thus, the person immersed in the virtual world has some extent of agency – they can deform the sound environment with a visual action linked to the movement of the body in space. They also immerse themselves in a very specific domain of impressions. Images activate certain areas of memory. So do sounds. The different impressions you get – from memory and from what you are experiencing at a given moment – mix together.

AP: Is this the very moment you meant when you and Sandra talked about “mind hacking” in one of your interviews, about creating new memories in your audience?

WL: VR experience, which engages you on various levels of perception, is able to “detach you from yourself” for a moment, from various developed ways of acting and perceiving. This is what I see as a mind-hacking experience. Charles Davis talked about the de-automatization of perception. For her (and for me too), VR changes the logic of perception and shatters habits, thanks to which we are able to change (because we allow into ourselves a different path of sensory experience). Virtual space reopens us, and this “fresh” experience gives us a new memory.

“Nightsss” by Weronika Lewandowska and plan.kton

AP: All your artistic activities seem to me to be related not only to space, but also to the de-automatization you mentioned, including the  de-automatization of reception. You offer slam poetry to the audience rather than traditional book volumes. On top of that, you work with plan.kton on audiovisual poetic performances. I’m also thinking of the video for “Nightsss”, which arranges the space with typography. It all seems like a test of which medium will allow you to best convey this spatial experience. Why did you decide that “Nightsss” VR should be a six degrees of freedom (6DoF) experience and not the more “classic” cinematic VR?

WL: You know, for me, cinematic VR is something I have already, let’s say, tested, if only by projecting visuals onto the space around me. Also, I wanted it to be an animated piece, allowing you to go beyond the framework of reality and physics. I have always been interested in abstract forms. When I worked with different VJs, I really didn’t want the body to be shown in the visuals. I didn’t want a visual reference to corporeality. Instead, I wanted to transport this corporeality, this impressionistic quality in an abstract way. For me, this is how I see poetry, too – I don’t want to speak directly. Cinematic VR was not my cup of tea. I was attracted to forms that can be made unreal, fascinated by shape shifting. I have always been interested in using very abstract means to present ambiguity and emotional states. For example, animations in which figurative forms dance together in a frame to music, synchronised or unsynchronised. This composition and dynamic, the way the objects approach each other, the way they interact with each other, the way they open way to “speaking indirectly” – this is simply closer to poetry. And the six degrees of freedom gave me exactly those possibilities (apart from the interaction space itself, of course). 

AP: What meaning, or function, does ASMR have in your work? I am asking this question, because “Nightsss” VR is often described as a piece that combines animation with ASMR. What does that involve?

WL: Usually, when someone thinks of ASMR, they think of sounds, of different textures, of the tactile sensation that sound brings. ASMR as something that characterises “Nightsss” did not come up until I got down to preparing a description for the finished VR experience.  Still, “Nightsss” VR is ASMR-like on many levels. When we talk about ASMR, we mean constructing the domain of impressions for the different senses, by getting close to the body and establishing intimacy with the body. The fact that sound can transport these tactile sensations is a feature of sensory substitution. For me, movement is also an ASMR element. I once wanted to explore what the movement of abstract forms does to us: how it engages our empathy, or what emotions and states are evoked by abstract forms dancing around us like another body. The ASMR quality of movement is created by the pace, dynamics, relations between them, tensions connected with e.g. something sliding over something else, the dynamics of changing textures. All this evokes a physical reaction of our body. That is why “Nightsss” VR is an ASMR experience for me, but this notion comes here as if post factum, only when I look at what we’ve managed to do and what means we’ve used.

AP: I also wondered about the linguistic dimension of VR “Nightsss/Noccc.” You haven’t shown your spoken word poem in translation on international stages (although there are some great translations of the text). Similarly, your VR experience is presented around the world in Polish (you can also listen to the English translation at the end). Why?

WL: This is a Polish text, while the domain of impressions (perception and how we interpret performative activities) is already beyond the linguistic barriers. Mind you, the language (and its sound) is one of the elements that appear in space and that you interpret. I’ve asked myself this question before: “what do you do with a poem when you have sound and image on stage at the same time? Would projecting a translation of the text redirect the audience’s attention, thus competing with the non-verbal, affective dimension of the poem performed by the body?” I think I actually started “doing” VR before I got to know this medium in practice. 15 years of experience collaborating with other artists, including dancers, VJs and musicians – it was learning how to create immersive experiences and work in an interdisciplinary team. Also, I learnt how to reach out into different spaces with my poem. One of those first moments was what you said about letters on paper. I also tried to construct space using typography. Later, of course, it was my body that became the medium of recording and presentation. When I couldn’t create some actions and artefacts on the computer (graphic, film, programming), I created them with my body and my actions in space.

Weronika Lewandowska with plan.kton

AP: And have you ever considered VR experiments with typography? Bringing the experience behind the spoken word scene into the VR space, in such a way that the letters are also something you can interact with?

WL: No. At the moment I am more drawn to situations in which you are immersed in something that’s in between these letters. When I was working on the script for “Nightsss”, I thought about how I would like the person experiencing it to actually write the poem themselves, so that when they immerse themselves in the VR, they feel that it’s their experience and that they are as if writing from it. I interpreted the space of my experience in such a way that “Nightsss” came into being, and now someone else immerses themselves in all these things and brings out their own potential version of this text. They find themselves in the same process and emotion that I was in. My intention was to bring people closer to this beautiful experience that I had and that was captured and stored in this poem.

AP: You told me that you keep returning to your memory, that it somehow repeated in you, too. How did you imagine the audience of your text? Did you want them to interact with this VR experience once, or did you hope for multiple “readings”?

WL: I knew there were too many elements in our experience and that you get to feel some kind of inability to read: it’s just that your perception is not able to grasp everything at once. This kind of overstimulation, perceptual chaos, was very deliberate. In general, when experiencing, we don’t break things down into elements to understand what’s happening. When you experience the VR environment of “Nightsss”, it consists of different layers. You grasp whatever you manage to grasp and in this way you construct your memory. Then, you can immerse in it once more to discover some more things. First, it is simply being that you have, just you being there. That is why I want that first entrance experience to be as strong as possible. So, referring to your question, I would like it to be experienced repeatedly. Just like when you go through a poem, you read it many times and you can have lots of different interpretations, depending on how you feel and what you direct your attention to.

AP: But you can always have a poem on paper, even a visual one. In the case of “Nightsss” VR, on the other hand, you just have to experience it again, you have no way to “take” it with you.

WL: But each successive experience of “Nightsss” means also entering into the memory of that first experience.

AP: And what do you mean when you say you appreciate the power of the first experience? Have you also been involved in designing the so-called “onboarding”?

WL: I don’t really like the word “onboarding,” I would rather call it… a form of invitation or ambient perception tuning. It is about how to properly prepare the place, how to synchronise the space that surrounds you with the space you are about to experience, so that there is no such gap. That is why some of the “Nightsss” performances were accompanied by artistic installations, whose task was to tune the senses of the audience.

AP: Why is this important?

WL: I know that people who experience VR for the first time are often intimidated by the technology and the fact that they could be observed by someone. I think it should be a space for intimate experience (just like VR is for one person). I wanted everyone who enters this space to have a sense of safety, which would translate into a relaxed and open body. You can get to another level of experiencing, if you don’t have to struggle at the beginning with the fact that someone is watching you, thinking about what is outside all the time. I wrote a manual for those who want to immerse themselves in “Nightsss” VR. I included in it information that they are not going to be photographed and they are safe, but also about what activities they can expect and how they can move in virtual reality. 

AP: You care for the comfort of your audience, you want to put them at ease. 

WL: I wanted an intimate experience. And that may not be simple love at first sight. Here, you need time to get to know the technology, time to build trust in the environment in which you are going to experience. When you start to trust the situation, then you are able to open up more to the experience of virtual reality

AP: Your first VR project was a real success. Do you have advice for authors, especially spoken word artists, who want to experiment with VR?

WL: First of all, I would recommend experiencing different things, orienting yourself to multisensory reception and space, to what the relationship between body and space is and what gets recorded and stored in your memory; this sort of working with the multisensory memory of experiencing. Once a person begins to immerse themselves in their memories, they can see that they are constructed in such a way as to create an environment. The more senses are involved, the stronger the memory is. It is worth thinking about how different our perceptions are and about when entering the intimate zone, the mental comfort zone, turns into abuse. It is very important to see the possibilities and dangers that arise from the means you use. This is thinking all the time about where the recipient is, where their sensitivity is. It is good to observe how others work, so that when it comes to directing, you know what is possible. “Nightsss” VR had, above all, a great team of sensitive creators.

AP: When you talk about the whole process of creation, you emphasise the fact that you have to have a vision, that you need to know what you want to achieve and know the ways, the means, needed to complete this task (or know how to ask for them). And to find people who will do it so that it is in line with your vision. Do I understand correctly that you don’t need to be a coder at all to write poetry in VR? That you rather need to be… a poet?

WL: No, you don’t have to be a programmer. Still, without vnLab, I would have thought that I was not the kind of person who could do something like that. There was a lot of trust there from the beginning, faith in us that we could do it and, as I mentioned, there was a well-tuned team. But first of all, you have to have a well-constructed vision, or know what kind of experience you don’t want to create. To respect the other person’s psyche.

AP: In your opinion, is such a “poetic VR experience,” as “Nightsss” VR is often referred to, “VR literature”? Is there any point in using such a category at all?

WL: “I believe that “VR thinking” has always been included in my work, because I have taken space and audience perception into account from the very beginning (but I only realised this after some time!).” VR is an experiential situation, so if your intention in making literary works is to create experience and space, then you can naturally make a literary experience in VR. It’s just that I now think that the poem “Nightsss” is not a VR piece, it was just written as a spatial experience, so it somehow settled easily in those VR techniques. It is a cool, maybe even appropriate, way of constructing texts for VR: starting from concrete moments, elements, experiences. I wonder, though, what would happen if at this point I redirected my attention to writing something for VR completely from scratch. You know what I mean, in “Nightsss” VR, we have a text that has already been there, and the question is whether I, having already had the experience of constructing this environment, with the knowledge of all these means, would be able to enter a different way of writing and create something equally strong, which could already really be called VR literature. For now, it’s just looking for means and techniques, converting one action into another, translating one medium into another.

AP: Wasn’t the difficult access to VR, the sort of hermetic nature of the medium, a kind of artistic barrier for you? VR doesn’t seem to be a popular technology among poetry and literature enthusiasts. You know, I can understand, of course, that the slam space is also a closed circle, that you don’t have a wide audience there either, but in the case of VR it often happens that even when you really want to experience something, it just doesn’t work out because of various, sometimes very basic, problems with the technology. And this is discouraging and tiring.

WL: But on the other hand, there’s something cool about it all: the fact that it is a unique situation (once you manage to experience VR), and the fact that you have the opportunity, as the author, to meet people who have never experienced VR before. This is why it is so important what you offer to them for this first contact with VR. If I were to say what VR experience is good for this, I think it would be our VR, because it just makes sure to guide the person immersed in it in a subtle way, with attention to their psyche.

AP: And it’s not too long.

WL: Yes, it’s not too long, which is why it leaves you a little unsatisfied. You can of course immerse in it a few times, if you feel the need to do so. VR is not a mass medium, but the same is true about poetry. I like working with this sense of “specialness”, the fact that there’s something magical about it, that you have to make an effort to find a VR event and get there, that you have to really want to break through your fear of the new technology. I think there will be more and more VR experiences, because people are curious; the technology will become more popular, and VR experiences will enter other spaces.

AP: I wonder if we’ll actually be talking about literature, or at least poetry, in VR in the future. Thank you, both for taking the time to have this conversation and for stimulating all the senses of my reading-loving body. The experience of your poem in VR will certainly stay long on my list of memories to return to.

The “Nightsss” VR project was realized in Visual Narrative Lab (vnLab) and financed under the Ministry of Science and Higher Education programme within the framework of the “Regional Initiative of Excellence” for the years 2019-2022, project number 023/RID/2018/19. 

The Polish version of this interview will soon be published in “Techsty” magazine.

This interview arose as a part of the research conducted within Bristol+ Bath Creative  R+D Amplified Publishing Pathfinder. Realisation of Agnieszka’s research on VR and AR as literary platform was possible thanks to the funding from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange in the Bekker programme (grant agreement No PPN/BEK/2019/1/00264/U/00001).

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

The Book of Hours
by Lucy English

A book of hours describes an anthology of illustrated sacred and devotional texts, popular in the middle ages. Divided into the canonical hours, they contained psalms, prayers and gospel extracts and were designed not to be read in sequence, but rather to be consulted as per the calendar. These were books developed for lay people who wished to incorporate elements of monasticism into their devotional life.

The Book of Hours is an anthology of poetry films, collaborations between poet Lucy English and filmmakers from around the world. Thanks to handheld devices and the ubiquity of internet connectivity, it can be carried in a reader’s pocket and consulted at any time of the day. Divided (roughly) into the canonical hours, it serves the current film based on the time in the reader’s location. Though very much secular, the structure of The Book of Hours recalls the same contemplative mood that its sacred counterparts no doubt inspired.

Being film-based means that such contemplation can never be silent, though, and there is no option to read the texts, either independently of the films or inline as closed captions. However, this does not ultimately detract from The Book of Hours as a beautiful and reflective experience. Its navigation and design are never intrusive and the poems are well matched to the accompanying visuals.

https://thebookofhours.org

Image by George Margelis, 2019

This article has been adapted from a talk delivered at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol (26/10/18), as part of the Friday lunchtime open talk series.

This book was written in an urge to remember, reflect, mourn, overthink, celebrate, and seek meaning in the transparent, or otherwise irrational dynamics of human relationships; while extending the sense of self and feelings. Please treat it with the greatest of care and respect, it is fragile and alive, it feels and it breathes like any other soul.

In this book, the human hand is as important as love. The words on these pages reflect the way by which the idea of you often haunts corners of my mind, echoing the transition and ephemerality of your effect on me; revealing the diminishing value of words expressed on impulse that vanished into the aether, as they were never intended or belonged to anyone, not even to us. My writing will greet your eyes with the same sensuality as the palm of my hand once gently pressed against your face.

(opening text, To You by Yiota Demetriou)

I have created an interactive artist’s book that combines elements from performance, philosophy, creative writing, experience design, tactile art, science, and pervasive technology. It responds to the reader’s body heat. In it is a series of love letters that were never sent, addressed To You, the reader. It is a quasi-semiotext (e.g. books like I Love Dick), poetry written in prose, interweaving philosophical notions of love, attachment, loss (Sartre, Barthes, Camus,  et al.), with autobiography and fiction. I have been contemplating human contact, communication, closeness, and tactictility/materiality for a while now (thinking postdigital).

The book is presented as an intimate reading experience hidden in the pages of an apparently unreadable book. The content draws parallels between the intense erotic delusions played out in the exchange of love letters, and the dynamics of human relationships. Imbued with warmth from a reader’s gentle touch, its black pages gradually become translucent. The writing becomes visible, and traces of fingerprints are left on its pages. Unlike many reading experiences, this book responds to body heat by inviting the reader to lovingly caress it.

The book’s design and the way it invites the reader to engage with it reflects its very content and the way in which it was conceived. It makes visible all those ritualistic and performative aspects experienced when writing a love letter. If you have never written a love letter, I urge you to write one now and return to this article later.

Image by George Margelis, 2019

Creating a book was not my intention. It became a book. The narrative was born out of something highly personal: love letters, as mentioned, that were never sent. A conversation with myself attempting to rationalise and put into perspective what had happened in a relationship. A mode of healing I suppose, by questioning the human condition, the different dynamics at play, and simultaneously negotiating vulnerability with oneself.

At the time, I was conceptualising my performance project, Love Letters (2012-), which some of you might have encountered through an article that was previously published here on The Writing Platform, or might have even participated in: http://thewritingplatform.com/2017/03/love-letters-performance-creative-technologies-audience-participation/

Whilst writing the former article, I reencountered and refamiliarised myself with schools of thought around the ritual of reflective and reflexive writing, writing letters (not only love letters!), autobiography, attachment theory, etc. These notions influenced my writing, not at least the conceptualisation of my performance project, but also my letters, the way in which I discussed, and wrote about my own situation.

Within the intuitive process of the content itself flourishing into a collection, and further into a book, the content was re-written, re-configured, layered, reconstructed, and interrogated several times. It eventually became something that was less about me, or what had occurred, and instead something about being human; finding a space where so-called ‘vulnerabilities’ can live in their raw form, without having to apologise. In the book, I use a Greek word to describe this experience, Apogymnomeno/(a). I couldn’t find a suitable term in English to deliver the depth of its meaning, another untranslatable viscerality. I suppose it’s because I communicate in English, I think in English, but I feel in Greek.  The challenge was to navigate and distance myself from the content without the writing losing its emotionality or rawness.

Image by Yiota Demetriou

The other challenge was the presentation of the content. I wanted the book’s material form to reflect its content; a love union between form and text that work together, responding to each other through exterior interaction. The book had to be alive. It had to resonate with the erratic eruption of feelings, the non-linearity of life, the difficulty of relationships, the chaos and irrationality of emotions, the vulnerability and rawness of things.

While I was thinking about love letters, particularly how love letters are written and encountered, I was inspired by Sartre:

“Love letters are awaited with impatience: it is not so much for the news they bring (supposing of course that we have nothing special to fear or to hope for), but for their real and concrete nature. The stationery, the black signs, the smell, etc., all these replace the weakening affective analogon […]” (Sartre, p.145).

In a way, the experience of reading To You and engaging with it reflects Sartre’s thoughts. For Sartre, love letters awaken an affective analogue, a physiological or psychological element that is a constituent of a person’s imaginative state. This is the ideal and subjectified reality or imaginary affection of the lover for the beloved. It is the subjective idea that the lover holds of the recipient of the love letter, which serves as a substitute when the beloved is absent. This emerges from within the person engaged in the physical and conceptual ritual of writing the love letter. For example, at the moment when the beloved becomes absent, the lover’s desire transforms into an irreal object – something produced, not by the beloved’s existing image or presence (beloved-as-real), but by the lover’s idea of them, which is trying to fill in the gaps of their beloved’s presence (beloved-as-imagined). As this irreal object becomes difficult to imagine because of the physical absence between the lover and the beloved, it confirms the lover’s desires. Due to the physical absence, the affection and love between the lovers reverts into a type of ‘deprived’ or empty love, “a love for love’s sake, a love that is in love with nothing other than itself” (Kearney, p.68). In this sense, the lover uses their ‘analogon’, their own perception, to make present to themselves that which is absent, the imagined beloved. The very practice of writing love letters makes this emotional process of a relationship between the lover and the beloved transparent.

For both Sartre and Roland Barthes, the lover’s anguish over the beloved’s absence and the longing for their presence is desire, which uses imagination to cover the voids created by an absence. In this sense, it is only the imagination writing love letters to itself, responding to its desire with its own desire. The aspects of presence, absence, and embodiment are central themes that To You engages with, and perpetually returns to and interrogates, throughout its narrative.

First Prints, 2017

The book is printed in thermochromic ink that manifests these ideas and aids their materialisation. Through a lot of trial and error I eventually ended up with an object, “that was less like reading a book and more like handling a precious treasure”, as a colleague has commented. She also said:

Somehow you already feel a personal connection. Pressing your hand to the black pages, your body heat creates a flare of white appearing between the web of your fingers, and you feel as though secrets are being shared in the dark. You see the object you are holding take the impression of your own body, and yet you see only windows onto the words below. Like a lover, there is great intimacy of a hand pressing the page, and yet the text underneath retains its enigma. Zoe Heron (†) Comedian, Multimedia Performance Maker, and Academic.

Another person, who experienced the book during its prototype testing, commented:

What’s fascinating about the overall experience of reading and touching, especially the aspect of covering and uncovering or unraveling thoughts through this type of interaction; and the way the book is put together, in concertina form, is the possibility to connect with the more ‘irrational’ aspects of being human. The moment I pressed my hands onto its dark pages, was also a moment of paying attention to the flow of emotions inside of me: the content becomes transparent from my own warmth; emotionality that is sometimes frowned upon is suddenly allowed. These seize to be dark by my own engagement with it as if reclaiming my own state of being. Like relationships, of any type, the book echoes the effort needed to sustain them – so the book can almost feel comfortable to open up and talk to you.  Francesca Prandelli, Journalist.

The design of the words in the book follows a signiconic approach. Text and image merge to provide the reader with a new perspective that has as much to do with semiology and language as it does with experience and emotions. In this way, the book attempts to materialise the emotions behind words. This emerged through conversations with my co-conspirator, (I think that’s a suitable title), Tom Abba, a well-known book artist/designer (based in Bristol), and fellow erotographomaniac. To You allowed space for collaboration, a space for another voice in the piece, where Tom’s contribution to the visualisation of the text, amongst other things, became highly significant to the work – “much as the work itself is a voice communicating with an (absent) voice”, he says…

Image by George Margelis

All components that make the book what it is, indicate the necessity of affection through touch, and thus the significance of the human hand as an organ both of performance and of perception. As I said in the beginning of this article, “I have been contemplating human contact, communication, closeness, and tactility/materiality for a while now”. For Aristotle, the hand is the “tool of tools”. It is strength, power and protection, generosity, and hospitality. For Quintilian: “The hands may almost be said to speak. Do we not use them to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, supplicate, express aversion or fear, question or deny? Do we not use them to indicate joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, penitence, measure, quantity, number, and time? Have they not the power to excite and prohibit, to express approval, wonder, shame?”. I find it interesting reading up on the symbolism of hands, and explaining how this is associated with my overall artistic practice, but this is perhaps a subject for another article.

The book’s design makes it difficult to read. You need to give it warmth, you need to give it love and attention, you need to make an effort. Sometimes it is not easy, you need to touch it… you need friction… You will put it down, pick up it, make a cuppa and warm your hands up; you won’t read it all in one sitting. That’s what it is really about; physical bodies relating to the work. The letters return to the idea of physicality, tactility, materiality. The book asks to be touched, it seeks intimacy and attention. This is revealed through its very first lines: “In this book, the human hand is as important as love.”

To You, will be made available for purchase soon! To keep updated and find out more about the book, follow Yiota on Twitter @yiota_demetriou, or visit the book’s site: www.to-you.live. Sign up to the book’s mailing list via the site above, to follow its journey.

The project is supported by Dr. Tom Abba (Bristol-based Book Artist and Designer), and Prof. Kate Pullinger (Novelist and Academic) through the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (@CCCIBathSpa), at Bath Spa University.

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Our Cupidity Coda

by Mez Breeze

To read through the text of this VR poem by Mez Breeze takes only minutes, but it would be a mistake to think of this work as slight or even brief. Our Cupidity Coda is deceptively simple, using the VR environment as an extension of a text that already carries heavy emotional resonance charting the course of a relationship from spellbound beginning to bittersweet end. The imagery experienced early in the piece gives away to arresting majesty and even moments of fear.

Press Image for “Our Cupidity Coda”: VR Literature

Created in and intended to be experienced as VR, this piece avoids the pitfalls of its technology. It emphasises emotional and intellectual immersion over the pure sensory experience and rewards multiple viewings. It was recently shortlisted for the QUT Digital Literature Award.

http://mezbreezedesign.com/vr-literature/our-cupidity-coda/

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Core Values
by Benjamin Laird

Shortlisted for the QUT Digital Literature Award, Core Values is a response to the iconic Australian poem My Country, by Dorothea Mackellar. Updating the original text, it uses technology to not only animate language but transform the experience of the poem itself. The formality of the original poem is replicated, but also cut apart and interspersed with dehumanising jargon, map coordinates, GIS data, and technobabble made to scroll endlessly within a three-dimensional box, lined by historical maps of the nation.

It’s a poem and a representation of an Australia in which you are quite literally trapped, a prison. The poem’s ‘stereoscopic mode’ for viewing in a simple VR device only accentuates the feeling of being closed in, a confronting and powerful match between text and technology.

https://poetry.codetext.net/core-values/

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Generation Loss (after Alvin Lucier)
By Pascalle Burton

Pascalle Burton is an experimental poet, performer, and musician. Shortlisted for the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards, Generation Lossdraws inspiration from Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, in which speech is recorded, played back and recorded again until the iterations become unrecognisable.

Rather than tapes, Burton uses digital artefacts and glitch art to present a series of short texts and accompanying soundtrack that become increasingly compressed into blocks of pixels and noise. A fascinating meditation on preservation and repetition in the digital age, it is worth the time to read, both with sound on and off.

Generation Loss is published by Cordite Poetry Review.

In the Summer of 2017, I have found myself in the novel position of teaching a drone to write poetry. Such endeavours invariably have a story behind them, and this article will offer a short background on how my practice-led approach towards research has resulted in this latest project—which, at a still nascent stage of development, is entitled Waveform.

My focus, both as an artist and researcher, is on generating different methods through which digital media, as a diverse matrix of activities, artefacts, and infrastructures, can be investigated, explicated, and presented anew. In recent years, I have sought in-particular to engage and evaluate the formidable complexities of the contemporary digital environment from a practitioner’s standpoint—to treat it as a “structure for what does not yet exist”, to appropriate a phrase from pioneering digital author Michael Joyce (2003, p. 616), and explore what potential modes of thought and expression it might support.

My approach is informed by what has been characterised as the ‘performative’, ‘materialist’ turn of the past decade in the humanities. Here, it is understood that human knowledge-making operates not just at the level of the textual, the abstract, and the ocular, but is entangled fundamentally with the entire range of material structures and processes that both constitute and render the world observable (see Salter, 2010). This outlook emphasises how the world’s unfolding takes place at scales and durations far beyond our own native capacities of sensing and knowing—that there is always an excess of possible perspectives, sensations, and relations, which can never be captured fully.

From this standpoint, the production of knowledge always involves an exploratory, creative aspect, with the world being performed anew within the space of every enquiry, actualising yet more of its potential. Moreover, such performances necessitate the entangling of different actors, both human and nonhuman, in modulating their varying capacities of perception and action within the experimental milieu they constitute—actualising this in such a way as to specify and then measure certain processes involved. We might think of scientific equipment here, in which complex and varied apparatuses, tuned assemblies of different energies and materials, perform specific phenomena in ways that can be registered and rendered measurable from the standpoint of human perceptual and cognitive thresholds—but which, importantly, never exhaust the possible behaviours, measurements, and understandings that might be made subsequently (see Pickering, 1995; Barad, 2003). Another example can be found in the creation of new artistic works. Here, the properties of different mediums, tools, and techniques are engaged and explored through practice, establishing a dynamic whose outcome represents the crystallised trace of this exchange between human and material agency, with the impressions of unrealised possibilities being the catalyst for future work.

To understand the resonance of these critical sentiments for the study of digital technology specifically, we can observe statements made in the context of media theory and practice by writers such as Jussi Parikka (2012) who discusses how “media critique is not only about saying things, it is about design and materiality—doing critique in an alternative fashion, against the grain, so to speak” (p. 43). Here, the production of experimental, speculative, or ‘imaginary’ digital media functions not as an abstract window onto an a priori domain, but as an apparatus for entangling critical thought within the concrete structures, practices, and assumptions constituting the contemporary environment, enacting the conditions in which novel insights and alternatives might emerge.

It is visions such as these which have informed my efforts to place practice-led methodologies at the heart of my own research. Interested as I was in the creative entanglement of literary expression with the capabilities of digital multimedia—often referenced as ‘digital’ or ‘electronic literature’—this drive manifested initially in the production of what I termed ‘Solid State Poetry’ (see Carter, 2017). This involved the parsing of text into visual forms that would illustrate how digital systems, as formations that embed and sustain discrete information environments, possess a very different quality of perceptual agency from that of the human—rendering the slippages, ambiguities, and fluidity of our written communications into numerically encoded electrical signals, whose advantages stem precisely from the way they exceed the spatial and temporal thresholds by which we come to know and express the world.

It was in developing this basic agenda that I considered how I might invert these initial predicates and discover ways of parsing visual data—digital images—into a form of poetry. Such efforts would provide a catalyst for reflecting in more detail not just on the different modes by which human beings and digital systems sense and make sense of the world, but to present a vehicle for considering the material conditions in which digital sensing is made possible in the first instance—the specific hardware, imaging software, and signal extraction techniques involved. Moreover, given the popular association of digital data gathering with ever-increasing degrees of pervasiveness, resolution, and precision, an opportunity would be presented to deconstruct the genealogies of technology and discourse that enable and perpetuate these visions, outlining the basis for an alternative, more contingent depiction of the sensory in the process.

It was in pursuing these lines of enquiry that I assembled the basic components of my latest project, Waveform—a title which evokes the processing of continuous environmental signals into the discrete ‘waveforms’ utilised by digital systems. Here, a drone platform is being used to capture images of different patterns of incoming ocean waves across various Cornish beaches. This choice of location is driven by my interest in the role of digital sensors in the gathering of environmental data—part of an increasingly urgent scientific drive to map the impact of human agency at a global scale. Furthermore, in using a drone, as opposed to a conventional digital camera, I have sought to present a more explicit instance of an observing agent operating as part of a wider sensory and interpretative network, and so undercutting any notion of sensory systems as presenting a Cartesian ‘view from nowhere’.

The images gathered by the drone are processed separately by a simple form of machine vision software, which I have developed using the open-source Processing toolkit. This software analyses the scene and attempts to draw a line where it perceives the edge of the shoreline resides. This is, by design, an uncertain process, yielding some incongruous outcomes, but any resulting errors help to articulate the functioning of the system as a constructed technical artefact, founded on the careful tuning of contingency, as opposed to a pristine, ‘black boxed’ abstraction.

The final stage of the creative process involves the data points that constitute the detected shoreline being used to inform the selections made by a poetry generation algorithm (again developed using Processing), which aims to produce outputs that are thematically responsive to the maritime aspects of the source imagery. There are multiple aspects to this final stage, but one of the most significant for me concerns how machine detected signals are remediated so as to be rendered accessible to human observers, and whether, in an artistic context, alternative strategies of data presentation can make us more sensitive to the implications of our contemporary moment.

The planned outcome of the Waveform project, ongoing through 2017/18, is the production of multiple image sequences that articulate the various stages by which the final poems emerge, compiling these into a finished artist’s book.

As a mode of research, Waveform seeks to produce a speculative media assemblage that draws together a range of technologies, techniques, and perspectives on the functioning and purpose of digital sensory systems. In so doing, it is affording me the opportunity to gain not just a practical sense of these systems as they are developed and deployed—particularly concerning how the former affects the outcomes of the latter—but also to reflect critically on what may be described as the contemporary aesthetics of the sensory. That is, to evaluate the practical and conceptual paths through which different phenomena are established as entering into a sensory relationship—of shorelines, and pixels, and poetic excerpts—and how these relations are then presented so as to be understood and rendered meaningful by different architectures of interpretation—different collectives of humans, machines, and scientific and artistic discourses.

As a creative enterprise, the technical properties of Waveform afford it a certain resonance with number of recent debates concerning the problems posed by large-scale data gathering, drone surveillance, and the algorithmic sorting and reprocessing of digital imagery. An enquiry might thus be made into the potential of Waveform to function as an activist intervention—to demonstrate the potential of drones and digital sensing to operate in ways that subvert the commercial or military impulses with which they are most commonly associated. However, as a theorist and practitioner, I remain wary of making bold claims along these lines. As much as I find it critically and creatively provoking to deploy drones to render poetry out of waves, such endeavours, at best, constitute only a very small act of resistance against the wickedly complex forces driving the social and political ills of late modernity. While I may hope that Waveform will function as a vehicle for the raising of important questions, and maybe even a source of inspiration, I would not wish to present it as a model, nor as a substitute, for the hard, difficult task of direct political engagement.

Nevertheless, this point aside (tapping as it does into perennial debates surrounding the political efficacy of art), I would submit that Waveform does offer a certain value in prototyping an alternative way of approaching and understanding the sensory. In working against the prevailing vectors of control, the absolute, and the cynical exploitation of the abstract, and pursuing lines of experimental enquiry and imagination, Waveform stands as a testament to the possibility and potential for change, reading the signals of an emerging world not what they are, or for what they should be, but for what they might be, instead.

Interested readers can follow the progress of Waveform at the author’s website, richardacarter.com/waveform, and @RichardACarter2 on Twitter.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801-831.

Carter, R. (2017). Solid State Poetry [Online]. Available at:

http://richardacarter.com/solid-state-poetry/ [Accessed 19 July 2017].

Joyce, M. (2003). Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts. In N. Wardrip-Fruin and N. Montford, (Eds). The New Media Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, pp. 614-624.

Parikka, J. (2012). What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press.

Pickering, A. (1995). The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency & Science. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP.

Salter, C. (2010). Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT P.

Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke form one of two teams we are supporting through the 2015 Writing Platform Bursary Programme, in association with Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. 

Victoria’s and Adam’s project uses Minecraft to immerse the player in the experience of a poem and expand the idea of what literature and video games can be.

The final work, titled My Mother’s House, is a poem-world built in Minecraft. Since starting this project Victoria has been caring for her mother who is in the last phase of her life and the subject and form of the poem reflect the process of letting go of someone you love. My Mother’s House demonstrates how writing and gaming can come together and help us explore and engage with aspects of life that are difficult to talk about in a way that is accessible and unintimidating.

If you have Minecraft installed, you can download the free playable map.

Watch the video walkthrough of My Mother’s House by Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke

Watch Victoria and Adam’s final video diary on the making of My Mother’s House.

Adam and Victoria will be showcasing My Mother’s House, and discussing their creative collaboration, at the MIX: Writing Digital conference on 2nd July 2015. Full conference programme and booking information is available here.

Hercules Editions is a London-based publisher of books that combine poetry and art and archival material. It emerged from a one-off creative collaboration between poet Tamar Yoseloff and designer Vici MacDonald and evolved into a small independent press.

We spoke with Tamar about how Hercules Editions came into being, her novel approach to publishing, and how she’s working to get poetry out of the ‘ghetto’.

Hercules Editions evolved out of a personal creative collaboration between you and Vici can you tell us a bit about that first project and the journey to becoming a publisher?

Vici and I are good friends, and so I know she is never without her camera. She has always photographed things that interest her, mainly shop fronts, ghost signs, urban detritus – things that interest me as well. One day I asked her if she would ever consider showing her photographs, and she was dismissive. She didn’t think anyone would be interested, the photos were just part of her personal archive as a graphic designer. I volunteered to write some poems to accompany them, just to see where it might go. I sifted through hundreds of photos, and selected ones that spoke to me in some way. I started to write these odd, sometimes quite irreverent sonnets to match the images, and we ended up with a set of 14 poems and 14 photos. I suggested we might think about making them into a book, which we decided to call Formerly (to suggest the fleeting nature the sites in the photographs, but also as a nod to the formal nature of the poems). But when we started looking for a publisher, we discovered the project fell between two stools – most poetry publishers were put off by the perceived expense of having to reproduce photographs, and publishers of photographic books weren’t that keen on the poetry! In the end, we had one publisher who might have been willing to take it on, but the project was so personal for us, and because Vici is a terrific designer, she had a very specific vision for the book. So we decided to publish it ourselves.

Once we decided we would self-publish, we had to come up with a name for our “press”. We both live in Lambeth, and Vici is right around the corner from the plaque that marks the site of William Blake’s house in Hercules Road. So we decided on Hercules Editions. Since Blake’s project was to combine poetry and image, we thought he was an appropriate guiding spirit, but it was also a bit of a joke, as Hercules Editions sounds so grandiose, and it was just the two of us making this funny little book!

We never expected to have the success we did. The book triggered two exhibitions of the photos and poems – one at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden, one at the Saison Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall – and it was shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. It’s now in it’s second printing.

After the success of Formerly, we felt we had located a niche, and so we decided to continue the press, with a view to publishing more books that would combine poetry and visual imagery.

What do you think sets you apart from other publishers?

Vici and I come to the project with very separate and specific skills. Vici has worked as magazine editor and art director, and she has an innate visual sense of how a book should look. For the first project, we were using her photographs, but she has worked with subsequent authors to generate imagery to compliment the poetry – not simply as illustration but as an integral part of the whole piece. I have been in the literary world for many years, so I know a lot of poets, and there were some great writers I was keen to work with. Also, both of us have had some experience in the art world, and we were interested in considering the books more as art objects, so each edition is limited to 300, and signed and numbered. We are obsessed with the materiality of the book – we want it to be a nice thing to own – but to be affordable as well as beautiful. We don’t want the books to stand alone either, and so we are programming events in venues that might not be immediately associated with poetry, such as Parasol Unit, the Black Cultural Archives and the Cinema Museum, as a way of broadening audience.

You receive some Arts Council funding but you also crowdfund on indiegogo for each book, why have you taken that route, and what has it enabled you to do?

The Arts Council encourage their clients to explore multiple ways of funding their projects, and so we considered crowdsourcing as a way of securing extra income. In this tough financial climate, many publishers are going the same route – it makes sense. The revenue we make from crowdsourcing is often earmarked for the sorts of things our ACE funding wouldn’t necessary cover, like launch events. We also find that the campaign creates a buzz around the book, it allows us to offer something more substantial to our readers, so that they feel they are more like patrons, and have an active role in each project.

Crowdfunding isn’t easy money by any means, can you give us your top tips for running a successful crowdfunding campaign for a book project?

We want to be realistic in our reach. We are not asking for huge sums, so people don’t feel burdened by a request for money, especially in these times of austerity. For each book, we offer quite specific perks. We are taking our model from the old days of fine arts subscription presses: for £20, patrons can have their names listed in the book; for £35, they are sent an additional signed poem not in the regular edition; and for £50, they are invited to an event in the presence of the author. For our last book, Ormonde by Hannah Lowe, we arranged tea with the author, and she brought along a number of original documents and photographs which formed the research for her book (which is about her father’s immigration to the UK from Jamaica). For our current publication, Silents, which presents poems inspired by early cinema, we will be arranging a screening of a film selected and introduced by Claire Crowther, the author. These events give our most generous patrons the opportunity to meet our authors, and for us to personally acknowledge their very generous and valuable support.

What do you think are the main challenges facing writers – and poets in particular – today?

The challenge is always how to sell books, how to get the material out to a wider audience. The Internet and social media are extremely valuable tools, and extend the reach of public events. I still feel that public events are the most exciting way of promoting poetry – there is nothing as exhilarating as seeing a great poet read his or her work live – but we also want to be able to broaden our scope to those outside of London. Poetry is always going to be a minority activity, so it is important to bring it into other spheres.

What next for Hercules?

As Vici and I are very much part-time, the press will always have a relatively modest output. We are still taking things on a project by project basis, but we are thinking about doing some larger-scale events in the future, perhaps a weekend-long arts festival, where we would invite visual artists, filmmakers, sound artists and musicians to participate. In the meantime, we are looking forward to the launch of Claire Crowther’s book Silents at the Cinema Museum (a wonderful hidden gem in London) on 21^st May.

You can find out more about Hercules Editions, and buy the books mentioned in this interview, on their website.

Hercules Editions is launching their new book, Silents by Claire Crowther, at the at the Cinema Museum, London on  Thursday 21st May.  All are welcome, but reservation is essential – details here. 

Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke form one of two teams we are supporting through the 2015 Writing Platform Bursary Programme, in association with Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. 

Victoria’s and Adam’s project uses Minecraft to immerse the player in the experience of a poem and expand the idea of what literature and video games can be. They are documenting the evolution of their project and their collaboration through a series of video diaries recorded in Minecraft.

In this second video diary Victoria and Adam – and their chicken, Ted Hughes – take take us through the latest developments in their Minecraft poetry project, including: using command blocks to display text in different ways, using redstone repeaters to create a visual experience of how a poem might be heard, and using frames to trigger audio. They also delve deeper into the idea of the labyrinth, both as an established poetic form and as a way of creating an environmental experience or a poem within Minecraft, and share their vision of how they might pull it all together in order create an adventure for readers, players and listeners.

You can watch Victoria’s and Adam’s first video diary here, and read about the other bursary project, created by Kelly Jones and Linda Sandvik, here and here.