"I arrived late; Elizabeth James was showcasing some bits of net craft I think by Ted Warnell. An ASChIImmer-art version of Monet's Water-Lilies, 'Spirit of Guernica,' & 'Marko's Machine.' See: warnell.com/db11x85/machine.htm. Elizabeth is a cogent explicator in a field in which specialist vocabulary and nuance is endemic. I liked what Elizabeth said about 'Marko's Machine', working as a limit case, on the boundary between poetry and visual art. The idea as I unfold is that, rather than trying to replace the spatial metaphor on which we usually divide arts or disciplines (with what …?), we could adopt and rehabilitate it – giving it as many dimensions as necessary, & treating aesthetic objects as atoms of complex topographical space itself rather than entities which must be interpreted to determine their coordinates in pre-given, absolute space. I also more generally like the idea of trying to apply an individual artwork on the way we normally apply a genre, a mode, a medium, etc. / The bulk of Elizabeth's talk was about Jim Rosenberg's diagram poems & from talking later & notes she sent me, I reconstruct as follows: as Barthes argued (in an essay called 'Is There Any Poetic Writing?') "there is no humanism of modern poetry"; by building a separate (visual) channel for syntactic information, Jim manhandles the humane back into poetry which is otherwise still "modern" in Barthes' sense. Roland Barthes: "The Word here, is encyclopaedic, it contains simultaneously all the acceptations from which a relational discourse might have required it to choose. It therefore achieves a state which is possible only in the dictionary or in poetry […] Each poetic word is thus an unexpected object […] this poetic language radically questions Nature by virtue of its very structure, without any recourse to the content of the discourse and without falling back on some ideology […] there is no mode of writing left […] thanks to which man turns his back on society and confronts the world of objects without going through any of the forms of History or of social life […]". Jim Rosenberg: "To begin with the elemental, the "structural zero", juxtaposition: the act of simply putting an element on top of another, with no other structural relation between the two elements except that they are brought together, is the most basic structural act, the most fundamental micromaneuver at the heart of all abstraction. But consider the problem of the poet in bringing this about. When a sound is played simultaneously with another sound, the result is a sound. When a painter places a bit of colored space on top of another bit of colored space, the result is a bit of colored space […] the result of juxtaposing words […] is likely to be sheer unintelligibility: one will be lucky to make out any of the words at all. How is the poet to achieve juxtaposition with no sacrifice of intelligibility? […] how can direct juxtapositions of words be used in larger structures? […] What is the part of speech of a juxtaposition? […] One could say that syntax "has no zero": in a sentence every element has its structural role with respect to the syntax diagram, or parse tree; […] how can one keep both syntactical null relationships and much more elaborate relationships, in which juxtapositions act as elements? […] A method […] to incorporate null structures as structural elements […] became apparent long before I realized how juxtaposition could actually be implemented. By devising an explicit visual structural vocabulary – separating syntax out into its own channel, so to speak – structural roles could simply be directly indicated. The elements occupying those roles might be words or word clusters or other structural complexes. Thus began a long series of works called Diagram Poems." More: www.well.com/user/jer/VL.html. / We went elsewhere for Sharon Morris's poem-over-film. The poem was a very tentative draft she said later. Parts were a successful urban pastoral (but isn't the rule you should write neo-georgics?). She referred to a number of buildings nearby & practically played the skyline from the Tate like a comb. What do you think of that. Parts were abundant w/ nature diction; this, combined w/ the swooping cam also employed by e.g. Thompson, sent a structuralist vibe through me. The arbitrary ash or oak or plain or maple or sycamore is selected from its system, for all we know w/ purely prosodic motive, & the signifieds slip around suitably in the background like an elfy wood. Sudden situated expressions, a dictum or fragment of anecdote, violently modulate the structuralist vibe to a poststructuralist one. This effect might disappear entirely if I knew a bit more about plants. I found myself wondering how the pattern of passages of natural description & apparently muted subjectivity followed quickly by language securely anchored in a self works in relation to Wordsworth. / The film (shown in the next room: we wee watching a screen in another room) included a kite (the enormous parachutey kind, not diamond w/ bow ties) smacking on the wind, & the inane energy of a stretchy dog crouching & spinning x1,000,000; the kind of motion which is out-of-the-ordinary once attended to for a long time, but can only be attended to if the mind is elsewhere. Appropriate poem-over-film stuff then. / Then viewings of Talan Memmott's 'Self-Portrait(S) [as Other(s)]' & Maria Mencia's 'Cityscapes.' Go use them: www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/memmott/spo_Memmott/ & www.creativefromwithin.co.uk/citytoday.html. And the blog essay by Katherine Hayle: web.mac.com/shadoof/iWeb/eandeye/. / Questions to Maria included save functionality (none: clearly Maria would have liked to include it, though it's not obvious why, unless we're defaulting to the assumptions of a paint application developer) & whether she had consciously harmonised the colour palette (she hadn't; I agree with the questioner that it looked like it might be hard to go off beam with the available elements). / Afterwards Pat & I talked a little about the claim that the words were like advertising & agreed that most of it was more like signage, or archaic or naïve advertising (which has a funny way of resembling signage). / One obvious set of criteria for a recombinant art system is: magnitude of output, variety of output, & sum splendour/niceness/whatever of total set of possible artworks (weighted for probability, but otherwise divorced from the fact of recombinancy). One advantage of these criteria is that they reduce the adjudication of a configuration of variables to adjudications of configurations of definite parts; one problem with them is their tendency to privilege surreptitious overauthoring (for example, a program which randomly selected one of a set of traditionally written poems would seem likely to do OK on at least the latter two criteria), & intuitively that tendency mistakes the essence of recombinant art. Another disadvantage is that it brackets too much: it brackets the questions surrounding seamlessness. Do we want seams to appear the very first time we spin the wheel? Aspire to permanent seamlessness? Do we want seam-recognition to be a competency, gained as the recombinant system is used again and again, and if so, do we want it only to be a function of the repetition of atoms, or of other things as well? I liked the way 'Self-Portrait(S) [as Other(s)]' engaged with the background radiation of seams already present as it settles into its environment: the bumpf on each artist is plausible because the Potted Artist genre already sounds recombinant, formulaic aggregations of pseudo-research controlled on a minute level by cliché. Satire is the obvious direction to take recombinant text, also the most promising." (JL) warnell.com/ www.well.com/user/jer/ www.memmott.org/ www.m.mencia.freeuk.com/ web.mac.com/shadoof/iWeb/eandeye/
