PROCESS NOTE
I imported the texts into Photoshop and created visual effects by making the texts conform to particular shapes, and/or superimposing images on the words.
In these works, I’m interested in multiple layers—both textual and visual—and creating meaningful interference between them. How the visual, textual, structural, symbolic intersect. The goal is to explore how this is part of our “reading” or parsing of the world, how our brains work this way in navigating the many interpenetrating data signal. We live in the Epistocene, an age where our experience and knowledge of the world is formed by navigating intersecting information. Much of the information has been created or is mediated by human processes.
I see these works as outlining some kind of ecopoetic umwelt and that sometimes things (language, thought, experience, body) are affected by things we might consider “noise”—that is information and stimuli that we didn’t intend or wish for. Sometimes, this experiential, perceptual signal and noise are are inter-relational and, though often beginning in the human, decenter the human and point to post- or trans- human ways of thinking.
In many of these pieces, I used Python script to interleave texts, often lists of terms drawn from particular specialized language (e.g. birds, anatomical terms, cloud names as well as other longer texts which were original poems that I wrote or language adapted from a variety of historical source texts), or two distinct texts. Sometimes I used the script to create anaphoric poems (repeating a particular phrase, such as “the beehive of...” at the beginning of each line). I then edited the results to create more engaging texts.
Gary-Barwin
Gary Barwin is a writer, multimedia artist, and musician, the author of 33 books including, recently, the author of Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 (Assembly Press) and Ovaryman (a play written with Tom Prime, published in Dead Code and other dramatic entertainments, Anti-Oedipus Press). His interactive video installation, Bird Fiction, created with Sarah Imrisek, was part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2024 and his interactive multimedia poetry exhibition (created with Elee Kraljii Gardiner) ran at Massy Arts in Vancouver in the winter of 2024. Some of his text music compositions can be found at https://garybarwin.bandcamp.com He lives in Hamilton ON. garybarwin.com