~ Filmmaker: Kevin Bleich ~

Monarchs by Carlin M. Wragg

This is a section from a longer poem, “Found Letters: Jack and Matilda.” The video is not the final product, but a documentation video of a sculpture, as Carlin M. Wragg explains in her description at Vimeo:

As part of my thesis for ITP, I’d like to create a system of expressive techniques that bring poems off the page in a way that is not quite theater, not quite art installation, and not quite public reading, but which incorporate elements of all of these. With this in mind, I’m collaborating with Kevin Bleich to identify and customize adaptive technologies that bring visual, aural, and environmental experiences together with poetry. As we iterate through a sequence of video sculptures that interpret elements of my novel-in-verse, Found Letters: Jack & Matilda, we are documenting our discoveries on a Tumblr called the Creative Tech Toolkit (creativetechtoolkit.tumblr.com). We hope this shared body of knowledge will serve as the technical foundation for our individual thesis projects.

For our first piece, Kevin and I extended the work we did in April and May of 2011 when we used a Kinect sensor, projection mapping, sound and video to animate a collection of fictional letters through readers’ interactions with an antique rolltop desk. This time we wanted to work on a smaller scale, so we projected video into a Kosta Boda snowball candleholder designed by Ann Warff. We hoped the candleholder’s rippled glass would diffuse the video imagery into the kind of flickering light one might find on a table set for a romantic dinner, as it is in the poem at the core of this piece.

(ITP, by the way, is the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.)