Description #
In this performance, I intend to present my practice of digital literature through a visual poetry performance. As a PhD student in Research and Creation in the Department of French Literature at the University of Montreal, I essentially explore the potential of the digital text, designing it as inextricably linked and determined by the medium. For the past few years, I have been creating video narratives using Shotcut video editing software where the poetic value emerges from the layout of the text in a space of moving images. The writing practice I wish to perform is as follows: to design a piece of writing that cannot be conceived outside of its inscription in a place that is a technical place. The screen thus enables us to think of its writing interface as a new plasticity to the text, a kind of hybridity that reminds of Surrealism and Dadaism, from which I will take my inspiration for the creation. These theories and experiments convey the idea of a modernity of digital literature where the text is no longer to be designed as a only textual and linguistic environment but also as a visual and technical one. I intend to implement this perspective though a live creation of a visual poem: I will make a digital text-video edition of //Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard// of Mallarmé. I chose this poem in particular because it is an experiment on the paper page that aims to go beyond the limits of the sheet: the project of remediation to another medium sounds promising for understanding how Mallarmé’s poetry had already foreseen a digital literature before the screen. It will involve me sharing my screen to show my creative process. The performance will therefore be the product of all my technical manipulations of the tool to compose a text-video. The composition will put in tension editorial research mechanisms (typography and layout) with video editing methods (addition of filters, movements) in addition to an immersion in the intimate space of creation.. The final product will be a technical poetry.
Work Materials #
Photos of the original manuscript:
And the Wikisource monospaced edition
Inspirations #
- Alan Lee-Hurtig Edition
- Pichler Work
- Series of remediations for this 125th anniversary of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1897).
About Performance #
Could there be any relevance to, or at least fun in, a livestream involving sharing one’s computer screen online? Watching somebody else’s computer screen on one’s own in order to watch a performance that requires apps one might not have access to? (Tanasescu #GraphPoem)
Work Space #
Screenshots
Outside Performance #
Moreover, performance (and the performativity of the digital per se) presupposes inter/intra-activity which generates communities, in their turn performative, networked, and ontologically hybrid, involving and generating poem-user-machines. (Tanasescu #GraphPoem)