christoph /project /500

Christoph Girard is fascinated by the marginalized identities of poets who are disconnected from life in ways he is not. Like the poet Clark Coolidge, who is interested in geological rock patterns, absorbing the population is how he connects with nature. He is interested in the chaos of communication as a journalist, artist and poet; and chooses to spend his free time as a recluse immersed in the bizarre psychodynamics of social interaction. How identity works itself into technical poetics is hard to articulate yet he believes there is a parallel between the components of a marginalized identity and the poetics of fragmentation.

He is interested in how the evolution of language can transform public texts into poetic artifice. The transition from original source material to the realm of disembodiment presents how process can be subverted into literature as linguistically challenging as poetry while it undermines the original grammar and syntax that commodifies different environments and mood sets into the illusion of a uniform experience. A common thread in the process is to show how textual manipulation can transform semantics to occupy a space between the tangible and fantastic.

In order to expand the semiotics of form, he approaches electronic literature with media like video to show the sustainability of the poetic medium by going from a linear-based interface into accessible applications. A sustainable form for uncommercial and experimental literature that inflects poetry through photography, video and hypertext can only be accessed through web-based applications. Most contemporary poets consider themselves lucky if they can find a small press that will publish their work for free but the dire reality is that the distribution of small presses can only reach a limited audience at best. The antiquated medium of dead tree editions are often inaccessible as almost all bookstores offer only a limited selection of poetry.

Two self-published and web-based projects that embrace text appropriated from web-based media include online chapbooks entitled TRY ME. and Ten and One Left. TRY ME. is a series of lexical anagrams translated from unsolicited bulk email collected over an eight month period and collaged with embedded literature. Excerpts include passages from Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Ten and One Left is a convergence of 11-line poems in which the number 11 functions as symbol for the imperfect and has a symbolic relationship with the exterior. Eleven is derived from the old english word "Endleofan" which means the base of one plus a second element. The second element is an appropriation of the author's teenage poetry posted on abandoned public blogs.

The struggle against the limits of symbolic representation in his semantic form parallels the anarchist critique of political representation. There are thematic links between anarchy and the historical influences of art and poetics that divert from the idea of fragmentation. The dialectic between two polar opposites provides a stimulus to revolt by engaging the spectator and poet in a process of change. Poetry essentially examines politics with the goal of subverting what is thwarting progress, and replacing its absurdity with ideas that have been marginalized through consumer complacency. The subversion is created in a way that brings acknowledgment of the world's disorder in the current structure as a step toward advocating both anarchism and poetry.

He graduated with an MFA in Writing from Otis College of Art & Design in 2008 and is currently pursuing his second MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz. His installations appeared at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, San Francisco State University and Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles; and at coffee shops in Southern California.