Project #2: Pre-Planning

I decided to work with a theme I've been exploring for a while, which is how to transfer the full range of meanings and understandings to be found within logographic poetry to alphabetic poetry (concentrating largely on the Asian tradition, specifically China and Japan). I've adapted a bit of what I normally do to fit the parameters of this project, so I've started working on an interactive site that will present the characters with a poem in Chinese with a digital collage of English words/images/songs/videos related to the meaning of the character. I chose to translate a Chinese poem called Night Mooring At Maple Bridge to do this, largely because I like the subject matter and also because I was studying this summer in the town where this work was set.

Right now I'm compiling resources for each image and still need to finish collaging about half of the characters. I've already translated the work and started editing.

Difficulties I'm having include ease of use and transitions, choosing resources and resources, and whether or not to have the characters always link to the same collages in the same way, or rather to have a mutable collage that reorganizes with each attempted access. I like the later idea but am concerned at how to enact it (in addition to elevated work load and time commitment to the project).

Response #4: Sound Poetry

I honestly sat and thought about this project last night (which I didn't realize we had to compile a sound clip for until yesterday), and I just seriously couldn't come up with any idea to pursue. I'm not sure I like most of the sound poetry we've been studying - it's certainly interesting as a theoretical exercise, but lacks some essential attractant in my mind - and the poetry I do like is more ethno-musical or simply plain music than it is poetry. I'm not a musician myself, so sound is a hard expression for me and something that will take some thought and practice. Whenever I think of something, even if it's late, I'll post it on here, but to be honest nothing more than a vague impulse has come to me thus far and I doubt that will change. I'd be much more comfortable mixing music itself than sound poems - the one example I did mix turned out to sound much more like music than any poetry. :(

Anyway, here's what I came up with...I'm going to be adding it to my project for a soundtrack...

Reading Response #3

This Week - On The Night of Melvin's Murder
I enjoy the non-linear storyline of Melvin's Murder, how different perspectives exist simultaneously and imply a plethora of sensation, perception and experience that loops endlessly in upon itself. I also enjoy the drawings that are simplistic and seem geared more towards implying a mood rather than a reality of the physical appearance of the subjects. I enjoy the prominence of longer texts and narrative pieces in this work, as I find the short, choppy language of most comics to be over-simplistic and distracting. Very interesting.

Last Week - Pup 15
Pup 15 from September 11 is pretty interesting to me in its lack of boxes and closure points for the images themselves - I like the atmosphere of open space and timeless that surrounds this comic whose timeline and imagery is literally floating in black space. I like the realism of the backdrop as compared with the simple pup omnipresent observer - it seems to me to exemplify amplification through simplification for me, most especially a cross-breeding between the Japanese manga styles that McCloud brings up for their structural differences. It feels to me like a continual film reel telling a story at once linear and non-linear, as some of the frames seem as if they could be reassembled almost into a different whole. I love Pup's tumultuous and wordless tumble through the cosmos, and his return to a simplified universe.