#projectdescription

The “Poetry Studio Practice” class took place on Mondays at the Basel Academy of Art & Design, Switzerland, in the fall-winter semester 2020, and was initiated by the Institute for Aesthetic Practice and Theory. 22 BA students from different institutes and curricula took part: Colin Barth, Brianna Deeprose-O’Connor, Laura Fonti, Hannah Furgal, Sophie Garnier, Isobel Groenke, Jonas Huldi, Maria Cristina Ionescu, Seraina Kick, Jael Ludewig-Kedmi, Nora Maritz, Lea Marong, Matilda Materni, Sinai Mutzner, Kiki Pavlovic, Jona Sciaroni, Fabienne Stucki, Jasmin Tanner, Thi Truong, Lola Willemin, Jérôme Zutter, and Sebastian Schachinger. 

This is the class syllabus: “In this class, poetry and language-based works will be conceived as forms of fine arts studio practice and conceptual processes in their own right. We will work with writing and voice as materials for book art, performance, sound art, video, painting, multimedia installation, and also just textual poetry. The class will give hints and exercises to unfold the writing process in German, French, Italian, English, and possibly other languages, and will then focus on one-to-one and group meetings with the aim of producing language-based multimedia works. ‘Poetry’ will be defined as a broad field of emotionally challenging, formally free and conceptually surprising textual objects with a certain amount of features that will be clarified during the course, starting from a seminar-like introduction around the following claim: the term ‘poetry’ comes from the ancient Greek poiein – “to make”. Poetry is first of all a way of making. How can this influence our perspective on the visual arts as a whole? Through this question, we will rediscover the artistic practice as an active manifestation of nature, conversely to traditional views of art as opposed to nature or as a representation of nature, implied by the semantics of ‘art’ as ‘artificiality’ or ‘technique’.”

During the class we worked on three exercises/inputs I proposed to the students. Several remarkable results of these exercises are published here. Here are the three exercises as they have been proposed at the beginning of the class:

Exercise 1

“Vito Acconci’s exercise: write in exploded axonometry”.

When I invited the American artist Vito Acconci to my poetry class at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2009, he came up with several fantastic exercises, one of which was to try to write a text having in mind the model of the exploded axonometry, often used in design and architecture. The response to this input didn’t necessarily have to be visual, but also conceptual, narrative, towards a multidimensional perception of writing. Given its implications, I decided to re-propose this exercise to the Multilingualmediadimensional class. 

Exercise 2

“Create a score/map as a piece and as a notational system for a piece to come, such as a performance, a sound work, an installation. How do the score or the map differ from the piece?”.

We discussed widely the poetic possibilities of nonconventional maps and notational systems, in terms of multilingualism (maps and scores as languages, as ways of translating actions and pieces), multimedia (maps and scores for multimedia projects to come), and multidimensionality (maps and scores as multiple narratives and ways of poetically and artistically reinventing space and performance).

Exercise 3

“Give words to the dancers in the following sequence from Sascha Waltz’s choreography NoBody: http://www.ubu.com/dance/waltz_nobody.html, minutes 29′ to 33′. Make a poem out of their movements. What would the dancers say? Would they all speak simultaneously, or one after the other? Would they join their voices in just one message, or would they say different things? How could this collective poem add something to the space of choreography and to the dancers’ movements, but also to the film of the performance rather than just the performance itself?”.

This exercise was also a way of exploring forms of translation among poetry, performance, space, multiplicity, collectivity, multidimensionality, voice, movement, body, perception, and so on and so forth, in the spirit of our class.

Learning & Discovery Centre: 

To learn new things and discovery kids’ new potential.

Children age: 6 -12 years old

Open for public but need to register for courses and activities

Activity: Focus on hands-on workshop (art and crafts)

Client: KEMAS (Jabatan Kemajuan Masyarakat)

Users: “Kids + Kids” “Kids + Parents”

“ Education is the key to unlock the world, a passport to freedom ” ---  Oprah Winfrey

We know that education is important for the nations especially the youth. But what actually makes our education worth with what we had spent? And what actually the kids nowadays should know and learn? 

To encourage the kids to explore and understand more, I plan to have a learning centre that focus on art and crafts making (more like diy stuffs and hands-on work). Kids need to explore more to different things such as materials, tools and the most important is to think by themselves. Giving them a question or theme, provide them tools and materials, and let them think and done by themselves.

Art and crafts not only about design beautiful and pretty stuffs, it also involve different kind of knowledge such as science, maths and many others. They will be able to find out a solution by themselves and through hands-on works.

Which non-verbal and verbal aspects (e.g. rhythm, pitch, tempo, dynamics and diction) of communication are not present in their (online) written transcription and how can they be translated into an interactive visual notation?

Why?

Nowadays the digital realm plays an important role in everyday life and our dependance on it is still growing. It should come as no surprise that it dominates the field of communication as well. This online form of communication makes social interaction easy and quick. Therefore the use of written language has increased significantly over the years as opposed to speech - whether on the phone or face to face. Unfortunately, this way of communication is not without drawbacks; a lot gets lost in translation from speech to text.

How?

First of all, the aspects of speech that are not represented in writing should be defined. Which non-verbal and verbal aspects of communication are not present in their (online) written transcription and how can they be translated into a visual notation that represents and includes those invisible aspects? Speech can be approached like having the same characteristics as music. It has various identical aspects, like rhythm, pitch, tempo, dynamics and diction. In fact, a visual notation system could be created for speech in the same way as musical notation is used for writing music; writing speech.

What?

What?

A project about a form of poetry influenced by technological developments. In a way it derives from the earlier form of visual or concrete poetry, a form of design mostly applied in the 90s. Nowadays, in this period of time in which digital technologies and programming play a more and more significant role in our society, it raises the question how these developments have their influences and impact on this form of visual poetry. What would a new contemporary form of visual poetry in today's society look like? As there has been a lot of expermenting inside the format of visual poems, how can  its concept be twisted or slightly adapted  to create a new approach to this dated form of design?

Recycling and adapting principles used in scripting languages such as HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT a new format or template for poetry can be created. This template carries its own rules in language as well as in patterns and structures of poetry. It opens up a new dimension of looping and continuity. Interesting is the balance between the poem and its visual representation.