What is a soul? by Luisa A. Igloria

On 12 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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I recently returned to Pennsylvania after a summer in London, and on my way out of Newark, New Jersey, I shot a brief cellphone video through the dusty window of a Greyhound bus, capturing some remarkable murals on a wall beneath a train line. After I got home and recovered from jet-lag a bit, it occurred to me that the footage might make an interesting pairing with a short poem by Luisa A. Igloria, which she’d just posted to the literary blog we share, Via Negativa. Footage shot from car, bus and (especially) train windows is of course exceedingly common in videopoetry, but I’m hoping my use of moving text saves this instance of it from cliché. I liked the juddering racket of the bus, preserving it as-is in the soundtrack even after I slowed the clip down.

When a Wiggly-Monster Was My World by David Olimpio

On 31 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation
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An animated poem with text and voiceover by David Olimpio and animation and direction by Efrat Dahan. It was made as part Moving Words, a project from the New Jersey-based organization ARTS By The People pairing American writers with animators from the Shenkar School of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv. The international premiere of the 2017 animations in Tel Aviv has already happened (August 11), but the US premiere is still up-coming on Sept. 9 at Drew University. (Reserve tickets.) Olimpio told me in an email:

What ABTP is trying to do with the “Moving Words” project is to not only make these stand-alone animation pieces, but also to integrate them with live performances. Here’s the video of me performing this piece live at the Animix Animation Festival in Tel Aviv, where this animation was one of many featured the day before.

Integrating multimedia with live readings is something poets don’t do nearly enough, in my view, and I’ve also long felt that there ought to be more efforts to get university film and animation students to collaborate with poets, so I was excited to learn about Moving Words. (I also really like their name, for some reason.)

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Fucking Him by C.O. Moed and Adrian Garcia Gomez

On 30 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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“Love and fucking may sometimes be the same. But not when it counts,” reads the synopsis for this 2015 poetry film directed jointly by Claire Olivia (C.O.) Moed and Adrian Garcia Gomez.

Last year, Fucking Him won Best Experimental Film at the Manhattan Independent Film Festival and Curator’s Choice for Best Sound/Music at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, was the Grand Prix Winner for Found Footage at the 2015 Interference Festival in Gdansk, and has been screened in a number of other festivals as well.

Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second by Paul Farley

On 29 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A black-and-white poetry film from 2011 which somehow escaped my attention until now. Paul Farley recites his poem in the soundtrack. The film was edited by Sam Meech, one of four people who share the credit for making the film. The others are Tim Brunsden, Steve Clarkson and Markus Soukup.

This was actually the second film to be made with this poem. The first came out in 2009, a performance-style video imaginatively shot by Paul Beasely.

(Hat-tip: ZEBRA Poetry Film Club.)

Cuerpos de Agua (Water Bodies) by Lilián Pallares

On 11 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Musical settings, Videopoems
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Half videopoem, half music video, this new film from antenablue — director Charles Olsen and poet Lilián Pallares — features Pallares acting and supplying the voiceover together with a musical arrangement of her poem by Nestor Paz and Manuel Madrid from Poesía Necesaria. Be sure to click the closed captioning (CC) icon to access Olsen’s English translation.

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Colour Poems by Margaret Tait

On 10 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A classic poetry film by the Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999). It’s one of “Five Filmpoems: Curated by Susannah Ramsay” in the first issue of an online journal dedicated to “exploring and showcasing the milieux, methods and madnesses of contemporary poetry in all its emergent myriad forms,” All These New Relations. Ramsay has this to say about Colour Poems:

Margaret Tait was known as a filmpoet and experimental filmmaker. Her approach to filmmaking was remarkably similar to the ethos of the avant-garde, generally self-funded, non-conformist, uncompromising, non-commercial, with distribution and exhibition being select. I think Colour Poems (1974) depicts some of the more thought provoking images within her oeuvre. There is a wonderful poetical moment, which begins with the poppy fields where Tait questions the true essence of the image through juxtaposing shots of the Scottish oil industry and related capitalist iconography and a sequence of images relating to a return to the earth. Nature is brought into being through spoken word. The narrator willing the viewer to look beyond what can be seen, to ‘look into all that is illuminated by the light’ […] ‘the own person’s own self perceiving the light and making the music’ suggesting that we are the beholders of (our) true vision.

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What would you do? by PXVCE

On 9 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A new video by YouTuber PXVCE, who writes in the description,

In this short piece i ask questions about the future of humanity, pointing out systematic oppression in today’s society! Encouraging listeners to wake up and reverse the cycle!

As noted in the video title, this was shot with the help of a small drone as well as a smartphone cinematography extension that sounds pretty amazing.

PXVCE describes himself as a “Cleveland born producer and artist” who “has a goal to create poetry for the culture.”

Subliminal messages embedded in his pieces often evoke medication and a state of chill. Implementing positive vibes and witty word play PXVCE offers a nostalgic style reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance Era. While the soul takes its aural banquet from the universal language, the conscious is awakened. A Third eye is no longer dormant in the listener’s senses creating change one piece at a time ushering in new thought.

Artist as change agent is nothing new. However, it’s the way that this artist manages to use his music artistry to motivate, initiate, and spark creativity in listeners so that unity and love find a place in their lives that makes him a top-of-mind poet for this generation.

5AM by Lissa Kiernan

On 8 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A new film by Marc Neys AKA Swoon using a text and reading by American poet Lissa Kiernan, his second collaboration with her (see Witness from 2013). Marc used footage by Finn Karstens and Graham Uhelski.

Call for artists’ participation in the 6th International Video Poetry Festival | Athens Greece

On 22 July, 2017 by Sissy Doutsiou with 1 Comments - Kinestasis

poster for International Video Poetry Festival #6

The +Institute [for Experimental Arts] and Void Network

present

the 6th International Video Poetry Festival 2017

Winter 2017
at Free Self-Organised Theatre EMBROS / Athens / Greece

The yearly International Video Poetry Festival 2017 will be held for sixth time in Greece in Athens. Approximately 2500 people attended the festival last years.

This year there will be one zone of the festival. The unique zone will include video poems, visual poems, short film poems and cinematic poetry by artists from all over the world (America, Asia, Europe, Africa).

We are inviting the artists – poets, video artists, directors, producers – who want to visit the festival to present their art project at the Theatre. We can provide to them accommodation for 3 days one day before the festival, during the festival and one day afterwards.

The International Video Poetry Festival 2017 attempts to create an open public space for the creative expression of all tendencies and streams of contemporary visual poetry.

It is very important to notice that this festival is a part of the counter culture activities of Void Network and the +Institute [for Experimental Arts] and will be a non-sponsored, free entrance, non commercial and non profit event. The festival will cover the costs (2000 posters, 15.000 flyers, high quality technical equipment) from the incomes of the bar of the festival. All the participating artists and the organizing groups will participate voluntary in the festival.

This year the +Institute [for Experimental Arts] invites the artists and creators of video poems to participate from their side in our effort to cover the expenses of the festival without private or state sponsorship. For this reason we propose to the artists the suggested donation of 5 euros for the submission of their video poems. THE PARTICIPATION IS FREE. Each artist can send more than one work (1 to 3 video poems for free). You can add  the suggested donation of 5 euro (or more) to the following bank account

National Bank of Greece 04664860451 Iban GR2101100460000004664860451 Swift (BIC) ETHNGRAA

Void Network started organizing multi media poetry nights in 1990. Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] believe that multi media Poetry Nights and Video Poetry shows can vibrate in the heart of the Metropolis, bring new audiences in contact with contemporary poetry and open new creative dimensions for this ancient art. To achieve this, we respect the aspirations and the objectives of the artists, create high quality self organized exhibition areas and show rooms, we work with professional technicians and we offer meeting points and fields of expression for artists and people that tend to stand antagonistically to the mainstream culture.

We would like to thank Dave Bonta from the Moving Poems, a global site with the best video poems in the web that inspired us to create the International Video Poetry Festival in Athens and we cooperate since 2012 to spread out the announcement of the Festival each year so as to gather new video poems from all over the world.

International Video Poetry Festival photos on Flickr
You can look here and here for some photos of previous poetry nights
organized by Void Network and + the Institute [for Experimental Arts]
And visit Flickr for more photos from Void Network art, events and actions

APPLICATION FORM CLICK THE BELOW LINK:

https://docs.google.com/forms/

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: no later than November 20, 2017 (date of postmark)

SUBMIT YOUR POEM(S)

Submit your poem(s) in three simple steps:

  1. Click here to downloadand complete the submission form
  2. Your participation is FREE. Please you can add  the suggested donation of 5 euro (or more) to the following bank account

National Bank of Greece 04664860451 Iban GR2101100460000004664860451 Swift (BIC) ETHNGRAA

  1. Please, send the submission material via email as following:
  2. a)via email:
    your video poems in mp4 or mov file (all video poems in a single we transfer file)
    the submission form and photos in .jpg file

Email: theinstitutecontact [at] gmail.com
*please replace [at] with @ symbol to send email

APPLICATION 2017

HOW TO SUBMIT A WORK

  1. Complete the application form. You have to send it back to the email account   theinstitutecontact@gmail.com

Συμπληρώστε την αίτηση. Θα χρειαστεί να την στείλετε στον ηλεκτρονικό λογαριασμό   theinstitutecontact@gmail.com

  1. Attach 1 to 3 images (jpeg, tiff) of your artwork to the email containing this application form.

Χρειάζεται να επισυνάψετε 1-3 εικόνες (σε μορφή jpeg, tiff)  της δουλειά σας στο email μαζί με αυτή την αίτηση

  1. Send the digital file of your video poems through internet using the email account theinstitutecontact@gmail.com.

We propose the following Definition and File Type

Definition:

720 x 576

1280 x 720

1920 x 1080

File Type:

mp4

mov

You can use wetransfer.com or any other FREE SERVICE to send us big files.

Στείλτε τα αρχεία με τα βιντεο-ποιήματά σας μέσω email στον ηλεκτρονικό λογαριασμό theinstitutecontact@gmail.com. Μπορείτε να χρησιμοποιήσετε το wetransfer.com ή οποιαδήποτε άλλο ελεύθερο διαδικτυακό ταχυδρομείο για να στείλετε μεγάλα αρχεία.

Σας προτείνουμε τις παρακάτω τεχνικές λεπτομέρειες

Definition:

720 x 576

1280 x 720

1920 x 1080

File Type:

mp4

mov

  1. It is very important to name your files (videos and still images, photos) as it is shown below:

                           

Title of video poem
Artist’s name
Country

Είναι σημαντικό να ονομάσετε τα αρχεία που θα στείλετε (εικόνες και βίντεο) όπως φαίνεται στο παράδειγμα παρακάτω:

Τίτλος Βιντεοποιήματος
Όνομα καλλιτέχνη
Χώρα Συμμετοχής

  1. Be careful, you have to send only one email with
    • the application form
    • the link to download the video poems or the video poems archives
    • the still images of the video poems
    • any website of your art work projects

Προσοχή, θα πρέπει να στείλετε μόνο ένα email το οποίο θα περιλαμβάνει:

α. την αίτηση συμμετοχής

β. το Link που χρειάζεται για να κατεβάσουμε τα βιντεοποιήματα ή το ίδιο το αρχείο που μας στέλνετε

γ. τις εικόνες

δ. website του καλλιτεχνικού σας έργου

  1. We recommend you to add English or Greek subtitles to your video poems even if the spoken language is in English as it will be easier for people outside the English spoken world to understand it.

Σας προτείνουμε να προσθέσετε αγγλικούς υπότιτλους στο βίντεο σας έτσι ώστε να μπορεί αυτό να συμπεριληφθεί σε προβολές του προγράμματος του Φεστιβάλ σε άλλες χώρες εκτός Ελλάδος.

We suggest you to send your video poems through internet. Otherwise you can also post your DVD file in the following address / Προτείνουμε η αποστολή των βιντεο–ποιημάτων σας να γίνει μέσω email. Διαφορετικά ταχυδρομήσετε το DVD με τα αρχεία σας στην διεύθυνση

INTERNATIONAL FILM POETRY FESTIVAL

TASOS SAGRIS
159 KREONTOS
SEPOLIA ATHENS
GREECE 10443

Please post it not later than November 20, 2017 (date of postmark) to the International Film Poetry Festival, Athens.

Παρακαλούμε πολύ μην τα ταχυδρομήσετε αργότερα από της 20 Νοέμβρη2017.

+ the Institute [for Experimental Arts] will inform you about your participation in early December 2017.

Το +Ινστιτούτο [Πειραματικών Τεχνών] θα σας ενημερώσει για την συμμετοχή σας έως τις αρχές Δεκεμβρίου 2017.

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It is an Intensely Private Experience by Danica Depenhart

On 22 July, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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This brilliant, author-made stop-motion animation is featured in the latest issue of TriQuarterly. “Found materials do the heavy lifting of visual argument to demonstrate how repurposed materials might reveal something about the person who finds them,” as TriQuarterly‘s video editor Sarah Minor puts it.

It’s good to see that the 152nd issue of this venerable American literary magazine continues in the pattern set since its move to the web several years ago, leading off with a short video section introduced by its own essay. The fact that they seem to have dropped the term “cinepoetry” and call everything a “video essay” now is puzzling, but may simply reflect a shift in fashion among the MFA-led American literary establishment, where it must’ve gotten a huge boost by the bestseller status of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which includes the transcripts of several video essays from the ongoing “Situations” series filmed in collaboration with John Lucas. The rise of creative nonfiction as a component of MFA programs may also have played a role. But even outside high literary culture, the video essay has certainly become a fashionable genre on both sides of the Atlantic, even if there appears to be little agreement on what it means (that sounds familiar).

At any rate, be sure to visit Triquarterly Issue 152 to watch the other two, er, non-narrative videos by Annelyese Gelman and Spring Ulmer. To learn more about video essay as a genre, this video about essay films by film critic Kevin B. Lee, from a recent opinion piece in Sight&Sound magazine, seems like a good place to start:

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O by Alejandro Thornton

On 20 July, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Concrete and visual poetry
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This videopoema by the Argentine artist and writer Alejandro Thornton is — as Tom Konyves puts it in a new essay in Poetryfilmkanal — a “silent, minimalist, prototypical ‘concrete poem'”. Konyves’ description of what’s going on in this video from a viewer’s perspective is the centerpiece of his essay, “A Rumination on Visual Text in Videopoetry,” which also mentions seven other videopoems, all embedded in the post. I’ve never been able to articulate why certain avant-garde videopoems work for me, but I think Tom nails it here: the video depends for its effect on “multiple, ambiguous meanings (the word O, the letter O, the vowel sound of O, an O shape, an expression of an emotion, a graphic representation of some concept like unity, harmony, return, etc.),” and by the video’s end, we should be able “to experience the ambiguous word-image relationship – a static O and a moving landscape – in a spatial context and therefore interpret O as a shape first, and the effect of rotation as a self-referential meaning ascribed to the entire work.”

Finally, there is the juxtaposition of text to image; O, therefore, is a demonstration of a figure-ground relationship in which the letter/shape O is the figure and the ground is – well, the ground (and the cloud-filled sky, and all in motion) of the image. In addition, the ground not only provides the best context for interpreting the meaning of the figure of the text (whose shape it reflects by its rotation) but also demonstrates the contrasted functions: image is from the world, of the world, predetermined and framed just-so or captured by chance from the environment with the function of bringing attention to and expanding the meaning of visual text in such a way that it completes its inherent incompleteness; it functions also as a device of closure, providing the context that leads to a poetic experience of ›greater or lesser value‹, depending on selection, modification, etc.

Nowhere is the juxtapositive function of the image more striking than in videopoems that feature a ›single-take‹; what appears in the frame, the content, automatically provides the context we will need to interpret the displayed text and, by extension, the entire work. My experience of O was enhanced by the recognition that the image element of the work, a found image, captured by chance from the environment, connects the visual text with the external world as the artist perceived it at that spontaneous moment; it is a recorded passage of a particular time in a particular space and, as such, it appropriates a ›slice‹ of the world against which could be written the internal world of thoughts.

Read the rest (and watch the other videos).

This was I think the first English-language essay in Poetryfilmkanal’s current issue on the theme of text in poetry film, but if you don’t know German I recommend using the Google Translate drop-down menu in the sidebar of the site to get the gist of the other recent contributions, each of which adds something to the growing international conversation. Konyves’ essay builds on insights from his manifesto and other, more recent essays. I may not always agree with him, but I admire his capacity for jargon-free original thought, which always gives the impression of being very hard-won, unlike much of the more facile, academic prose one encounters these days.

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Dark Place by Lucy English

On 19 July, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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As her ambitious Book of Hours has unfolded, it’s been fascinating to watch Lucy English‘s poetry evolve and adapt to the online video medium and to the exigencies of particular film-making styles. Here’s how Stevie Ronnie, her collaborator for this film (along with composer Jim Ronnie), describes their process at Vimeo:

Lucy and I wanted to try something different as a way of kick starting the collaborative process for Dark Place. It started from a desire to work on something that was going to become part of Lucy’s Book of Hours poetry film project. Poetry films often begin with the words or footage or sound but we decided to start from a colour palette. I created a palette and sent it to Lucy and she wrote the poem from the colours. Lucy then sent me a couple of drafts of the poem and, after spending some time digesting Lucy’s words, I decided to respond to it visually. Using the colours that I found in Lucy’s poem I rendered the poem as a painting, where each mark on the canvas represents a letter in the poem. I then captured this process as a series of still images which have been strung together into the film. The soundtrack, performed by my father Jim Ronnie, was composed and added during the video editing phase as a response to the poem’s images and the words.

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