Language, Image, Music, Space, and Time: A Cutout Poem by Clea T. Waite

Language, Image, Music, Space, and Time

The following text — cutout poem in actuality — is a composite of quotations. Form, process, and content are mutually relevant to the exposition: thoughts on creating visual music. The order of the paragraphs may be read optionally: 4x3x6. Quotations are drawn from John Cage, from my own articles, from Marina Abramovic, and from an old college poetry textbook. Cage, in turn, quotes Emerson, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, Suzuki, and McLuhan. From my articles I have drawn Richard Feynman and the Bible.

I. Enhancing Artifacts

Collecting images, letting the images find you. Man is the metaphoric animal. Captured by a word, a phrase into an object without its meaning, a musical word. Meter and lines and stanzas; the structural motif for Spirals & Tangents was inspired by the data encoding system used in the ALEPH detector of the CERN particle accelerator. A few frames of image, a new poem. A scratch, a dropout, an echo from outer space: stretched, pushed, reversed, repeated, until the observer collapses the probability wave by looking. People get changed by their own experience.

Sound sample. In the language of physics, matter and energy are interchangeable: two sounds, the high — the listener's nervous system in operation — the low, the blood in circulation. The point of the Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images. Found footage. Juxtaposition of factual truth with metaphysical truth; new meanings emerge. Found word, found text. The technical devices stand in the background to the poetic intention. The direction of time is arbitrary for a particle.

What we feel in an iambic line is an interplay of two rhythms at once: the meter our mind anticipates, and the rhythm of the words as they are read or spoken. What becomes of spring fever on the first day of summer? Kinesthetic perception. Art = imitation of nature in her manner of operation, an immediate exchange of energy with the audience. The poem builds complexes of poetic structure. Letting the words, the texts find you: the proper concern of the mind (as opposed to the heart). The days are getting shorter again.

II. Redefine

Ocelot... Fuzzle... Jakarta... Diction, imagery, rhyme, line length, vowel quantities, consonant sequences, and grammatical structures are some of the principal elements: Klangfarbmelodie. People fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves. The website is a series of tangents and curves, tangential connections to the central theme of the spiral cycle. The mind, though stripped of its right to control, is still present.

Meter: Greek for measure, metronome, events in a field of possibilities. The Sumerian kur is a place of duality and contradictions; fluent, pregnant, related, obscure. A particle can spontaneously burst into a cloud of virtual particles, all interacting with one another by borrowing energy from the uncertainty principle, then subsiding back into itself. Rhythmic structure — as one chooses shells while walking along a beach — in contrast to a structure based on the frequency aspect of sound, tonality that is.

Rhythm (from the Greek word for flow) is the way the words of the poem move, sometimes coinciding with the meter and sometimes not: an activity characterized by process. Meter and rhythm are only two of the elements that may be involved. Lay them together, side by side. All the elements of a poem are engaged in a series of counter motions, a giving up of personal taste. The metaphor for causality is partially achieved through the use of compositing in depth, proportional to the original series of numbers.

III. Evoke

When is a literal a metaphor? To tell something apt — by "method", procedure. A work is always experimental (unknown in advance). Symbol and action should include its environment. And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Take a metaphor and find its literal interpretation. "If a heart is broken, can an X-ray see the break?", explored their own boundaries. The first frame and the last frame encompassing an edit should always be beautiful. These are the images that catch in the subliminal memory.

Emphasize the noise, the dirt, the errors. Find the beauty there, the universal essence, or wisdom, or love, or power. Love every frame, but be brutal when editing: composition, an activity integrating the opposites, the rational and the irrational. Nothing about the structure was determined by the materials that were to occur in it. If you let the words find you, the poem will write itself. For deviations to be felt at all, there has to be something to deviate from. A paradigm.

Making art is an act of love. When is...? Of all the aspects of sound — frequency, amplitude, timbre — duration alone is also a characteristic of silence. By "structure" was meant the division of a whole into parts, a poetry of synthesis in an age of specialization. And Lot's Wife became a pillar of Salt. Search myths for the form. The experiment of Kur was to see what it could be like to experience multiple time lines, parallel realities, simultaneously. A poem by the very fact of its existence in time rather than in space.

IV. Confront

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved, he is at play or leisure. An artwork is not about something, it is it: an anechoic chamber, sympathetic magic, "curtains" created from 2D electronic video noise. Search dreams for the content because they are the guides to the psyche. Method and material together form (the morphology of a continuity) equally the proper concern of the heart. Effects are to enhance meaning, not to substitute for it. Search everyday life for the realization.

A peculiar feeling of pastness characteristic of images as memory images; found footage is a cultural reference, nostalgia. Shoot an image that you dreamt. Coexistence of dissimilars; multiplicity, plurality of centers. Keep the length down to one you can control. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Edit a video like a poem, with rhythm and rhyme. Edit to all the instruments, not just the beat. The universe within which the action is to take place is not preconceived. Choose music you will never tire of.

The experience actually undergone was the ultimate goal, working with classical aesthetic ratios — namely the golden mean, which can be achieved by employing Fibonacci numbers as dividend and divisor in compressing and expanding a sequence. Visceral portrayal, mystery plays, telling or initiating; as personal as possible, created by de- and reconstructing from without, that is, in space and time. To live deliberately.