My proposed paper 'Between Close Reading and Liquid Writing: Word Slips Towards Movement and Materiality' has been accepted for inclusion in the forthcoming Word
into Image Symposium,
10th
July 2014: Tactic Gallery, Cork.
About the symposium: Poetry
has long constructed itself as an interface between word and image. At the turn
of the twentieth century, Mallarmé and Apollinaire’s experiments with visual
poetry launched a new investigation into poetry as image, shaping an area of
modernist and avant-garde interest that would develop throughout contemporary
poetics. Celebrating the interdisciplinary bent of the avant-gardes, this
conference will examine the point at which poetry and image meet. Taking in the
long twentieth century up to and including current practices, we will invite
speakers to interrogate the nature and effect of works that are both word and
image.
Areas
that papers might explore include: What does it mean to frame poetry as image
or image as poetry?; The interdisciplinary poet-artist/artist-poet; The
materiality of language; The artistic and political potentials of visual
poetics; The poetics of the moving image. The symposium will take place in
Tactic Gallery, Cork and will accompany the Word into Image exhibition
of visual poetry. The symposium will include a keynote address by Peter
Manson “In Stéphane Mallarmé’s late work “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le
Hasard”, the white page itself becomes a turbulent and ambiguous medium, at
once buoying up words and threatening them with erasure. For Mallarmé,
the space occupied by writing had more than the two dimensions of the (rarely
flat) page — a book, after all, is a volume — and every book opened onto an
endless series of possible books, authorised by the infinite combinatory potential
of the letters of the alphabet.
Between Close Reading and Liquid Writing: Word Slips Towards Movement and Materiality'
Drawing
on my own practice-based investigations at the threshold between word and image
(specifically the visual poetics of Close
Reading and Liquid Writing), I
propose to explore the affective and asignifying potential of language as it is
pressured towards movement and materiality, once words shift towards the
condition of still/moving image. In Close Reading, I apply close visual
attention to language, looking at the materiality of words ‘close up’ through
visual magnification, microscopic observation. Under scrutiny, text can be pressured into its component parts (ink/page), the
legibility of a word rendered nonsensical the closer it is attended to, as
writing slips towards movement and materiality. Whilst Close Reading explores the material
properties of language (rather than its capacity as carrier of ‘meaning’, as
sign), Liquid Writing tests the
potential for fluid forms of a words-in-motion, a movement-language where fixed
signs dissolve towards a condition of liquidity or incipiency. With reference
to the theoretical thinking of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Jacques Ranciere, and
Erin Manning, I propose to interrogate how the visual poetics of both projects
subvert the fixed, transparent regime of signifying language, through
strategies of asignification, incipiency and opacity.
