Poetry seen on YouTube

I have now uploaded my 'Poetry seen on Cowslip Sunday' film to YouTube. It can be viewed as nine separate films by clicking on the links below.

Public information film

Not surprisingly, the past couple of months have been really hectic - as I have endeavoured to complete the work for my MA. The good news (for me at least) is that my film project is now complete. There has been a lot of unexpected work involved in getting the film into the best format for showing at this year's NTU MA EXPO but hopefully that process is just about complete now - and the film will be shown as part of the Expo (which runs from July 19 - 28) on a large screen outside Room 002 of the NTU Campus Bonington Building.

You should also be able to view the film (as nine separate short films - the total running time is just under 60 minutes) on YouTube. Click on the file below and that should take you to the first part of the film.

One next little project for me (and intended as a little light relief from making the full film) is to produce a short film (one and a half minutes or so) in the style of a 1970s public information film - much like the one I've linked at the top of this post. I need to put that together next - and then David Longford (the director of the Cowslip Sunday play) will script the piece and have a stab at doing a voice-over in the style used on the film above.

The seasons come, the seasons go

This is the second part of my 'Cowslip Sunday' film. In this section I have used footage shot between January 1st and early March 2012 - to try to give some sense of the changes affecting the landscape in and around the Nottinghamshire village of Lambley during that period of time.


The next section of the film will then feature footage of the first rehearsal for the Cowslip Sunday play, which took place on March 11th of this year - I blogged about that event earlier:


http://poetryseen-in-lambley.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/cowslip-sunday-2012-first-play.html


The film will then feature the successive rehearsals, filmed between March and early May, interwoven with footage of the landscape during that period. This will then culminate with a sequence documenting some of the activities of Cowslip Sunday itself - May 6th.


My intention with the film is not to provide a continuous narrative of the preparations for the play and of the period of time in which they took place but instead to provide a personal reflection of that process, which will inevitably (though not willfully) be selective and somewhat fragmented - in the way that most of our experiences actually are.


I have taken the editorial decision to produce the end of the film next - and I have just completed the penultimate sequence of the film. I will post this section when my Vimeo account allows - for economic reasons I am only able to use the 'free' video hosting option that Vimeo offer (and I'm very grateful to Vimeo for allowing me a means of uploading these films). 

Anatomy of type

As part of my 'Poetry Seen at Cowslip Sunday' art installation I created two 'branches' of poetry - using lines from a Shel Silverstein poem:

The branches of the poet tree

Reach from the mountains to the sea

I was happy enough with the finished product - see pictures below - which consisted of six pieces of 'laser-cut' plywood, cut into almost cartoon-like tree branches. I knew that the location of the work would be fairly important to how the work would be viewed; ideally it needed clear sky behind it to show it to its best advantage. I have now taken down the work from its original location - with the intention of photographing it in a few different locations in fields around the village of Lambley. Hopefully these images will allow the idea of 'poet tree branches' to take root in people's minds.

One interesting aspect of the creative process involved in producing the branches was that, in order to successfully render certain letter forms - 'a' and 'e' and 'o' for example, I needed to create a link to what would be blank space in printed letters. In order to explain this problem properly I needed to delve into the 'anatomy of type' and it turns out that the empty space inside the letter 'o' is known as the 'counter'. But the blank space in the top of a lowercase letter 'e' is known as an 'eye'. Below you can see illustrations (taken from the 'Typography Deconstructed Anatomy of Type' poster) of these and other examples. I particularly like that certain typefaces (such as decorative serif fonts) give the letter 'g' an 'ear' and the letter 'r' a 'teardrop terminal':

A by-product of the production process I used are the actual letter forms themselves - and the letters that contain 'counters' and 'eyes' seem to become part of an almost imaginary alphabet. You can see these shapes (which feel almost like the bones of small animals) in the photograph below. They remind me of the 'neutral' alphabet that the writer and artist Shaun Tan uses in his book 'The Arrival'.

Mirth, and youth, and warm desire...

The past couple of weeks have been fairly hectic. The first piece of paid employment I've had in over 3 months (which amounted to about 10 days work) happened to coincide with the final week of preparations for 'Cowslip Sunday' - which itself entailed filming the increased number of rehearsals as well as trying to capture some aspects of the changes to the landscape occurring as Spring develops. There was also the little matter of getting my own 'Poetry Seen at Cowslip Sunday' art installation finalised - both in terms of production and getting it in place in time for the day itself.

Everything has been further complicated by the weather. Obviously the rain is a fundamental (and much needed) aspect of the climate - it's just slightly irritating when it all comes at once. From my point of view the real difficulties with the rain are two-fold. One has been the problem of filming in those conditions - my camera isn't waterproof and I know (through frustrating experience) that trying to set up the tripod and camera whilst sheltering the equipment under an umbrella is extremely challenging, particularly for the 'one-man-band' film-maker.

The other aspect of the heavy rainfall that impacts on my project is that my art installation is outdoors. Although the work itself is rainproof, the location (a short, woodland path close to the site of the main 'Cowslip Sunday' festivities) has become a little waterlogged over the past couple weeks - making the actual installing of the work problematic as well as seeming likely to discourage the less hardy visitor.

Anyway as it turned out the clouds parted for 'Cowslip Sunday' and the day was a great success. At the top of this post is the first edit of the start of the film I have been making documenting some of the preparations for the event. Over the course of the next few weeks I will continue putting together the film - with the intention of creating an hour-long documentary. The idea then is to upload the film – as 6 x 10 minute films – to YouTube.

Hail bounteous May that dost inspire

The artwork for the 'Poetry Seen at Cowslip Sunday' banners is finally complete. Above and below you should be able to view the finished pieces. They will now go off to print today (with any luck) and then hopefully be ready for Friday of this week. The idea then is to install the work (with the assistance of some of Cowslip Sundays participants) prior to the rehearsal the takes place next Sunday.


I'm happy with the banners on the whole; I think there is a nice variety of 'poetry' included - from Shakespeare, John Clare and Milton to pupils from the local Primary School and other submissions form Lambley residents.


Now that the artwork is finished I have some trepidation about the installation itself. It is in a reasonably secluded location and will be in place for a full week before Cowslip Sunday itself. As it turned out one of the banners that was installed last year got stolen and there is little to prevent anyone from a similar act of mischief this year - should anyone be so inclined.


But hopefully it passes off without incident - and the idea generates sufficient interest for people to feel inspired to create something similar elsewhere.

“Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.”

The Persistence of Memory 1931 Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

During the course of his research into memory, documented in his book 'Moonwalking with Einstein' (see my last post) the writer Joshua Foer meets Ed Cooke, an English mnemonist. Foer sits in on a fascinating demonstration of memory that Cooke gives to a class of students. In the demonstration the students are shown a projection of 30 different images, in rapid succession. After the projection is finished they are asked whether they think they will be able to recall all 30 images, to which one replies, not unreasonably "no chance".

A little while later the students (and Foer) are shown the 30 images again, but this time each of the images is shown alongside an alternative image. In each instance the students are easily able to recall the image that they were shown earlier - despite the fact that if they had been asked to describe each of the those images they would have almost certainly had no chance of being able to actively do so. The result of this experiment leads Cooke to make the bold claim that “Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.” Moonwalking with Einstein - page 27

In fact Ed Cooke's demonstration is based on original experiments that were far more extensive. For example Timothy F. Brady et al, from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a paper called 'Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details' in which he counters the commonly held view that human memory is fallible and imprecise. Instead their experiments showed that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image. In their experiments:

Participants viewed pictures of 2,500 objects [for 3 seconds] over the course of 5.5 h. Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen. The previously viewed item could be paired with either an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose.

This is to say that the 2,500 images were variously shown alongside a completely different image (novel); an image that was of a similar kind but sufficiently different (the exemplar) or an image much like the one they had previously seen but with a slight variation (state). You should be able to view examples of the kind of images the participants were shown below.

The research goes on to show that:

Performance in each of these conditions was remarkably high (92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively), suggesting that participants successfully maintained detailed representations of thousands of images.

I think this is fascinating from a neurological point of view - how the brain is able to store this kind of visual information without it being available to what might be called active memory.

But I also think it would make a really interesting area for an artist to explore - perhaps in the form of an interactive art installation. This might consist of a number of images (whether paintings or photographs) that are projected for a short period of time. The audience for the installation would then have the opportunity to view a brochure in which the images they had seen projected were printed alongside alternative (previously unseen images) and allowed to decide which of the images created by the artist they had seen projected.

http://web.mit.edu/tfbrady/research.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14325.full