Text: Will be presented within large/medium-format photographic image, in various forms of Morse code, Braille, sound recordings, popular consumer items such as toilet paper and paper towel roles with accompanying commercial packaging, video recordings, projections, various types of commercial and industrial signage, computer displays, LED displays, nixie tubes, among other methods.
Pieces will use both analog and digital technology, machinery, and methods, sometimes in combination, to create a unique, highly controlled presentation of poetic text.
As noted, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poem is a project that presents a single piece of literary poetic text, a poem, in thirteen different multi-media visual formats. The project explores new ways of presenting poems, what I now call "literary poetic text," as multi-media art.
The first of these thirteen ways is titled "The Artist as Lord of Creation," and presents the text as a votive image in the form of photo-retablo, in which the text is merged with a live action photograph and presented in the style of a Mexican retablo, or tin painting.
The poem, instead of being text, instead of being text and image, becomes the experience of the final product. That is, the image and the text merge to create a visual and textual experience, and it is that experience that is the poem.
To produce this part of the project, I worked with several people. The project was directed and photographed by Rebecca Massey. Our model was Nyika Allen. The text in this version is in Spanish, and was translated with crucial help from Juan Massey.
The image below is an early proof of our first efforts:
