christoph /project /old

Old Version

Updated: 10/2008

A lexical anagram is a term that is self-descriptive. If an anagram is the rearrangement of letters from a given word or phrase to another, then a lexical anagram is the rearrangement of words or phrases from a given language to another. The proposal is to be a video installation consisting of phonetic fragments from individual words that correspond with each other to produce a seamless collage with the voice of a renowned confessional poet named Sylvia Plath.

Plath is known for her personal life as much as her poetry; her writing and poetry depict her struggle with depression before she notably committed suicide by placing her head in the kitchen oven to inhale gas. Critics argue whether her poetry foretold of her impending death as themes of her own depression and mental illness lay relevant to her work. The hope is to question the canonical representation of Plath by appropriating her famously self-indulgent poetry and turning it into its polar opposite; a disembodiment of her confessional references. Hence Plath is transformed into a phoneticist for the subversion of her own semantic form.

Plath represents an iconic figure that continues to live for another fifty years because of fictionalized elements in her writing. Her poems, which are usually written in first-person, enabled her to become an iconic figure by allowing readers to believe her poetry was a historical representation of her life before she died. Autobiographical references in her poetry like the relationship between her and her husband are formally debated by many writers and critics to be highly fictionalized. Plath established her poetics and writing in such a way as to mythologize and romanticize elements of her marriage and depression which in turn strip away the popular notion that she bears any kind of stark resemblance of who she really was. How people relate to Plath's work makes her a strangely hierarchical literary figure for the relatively scant amount of work that she published during her life and after she died in her early 30s.

This project will help free the image of Plath from its self-referential associations by showing her as a disembodied voice reading dissociative text that is not her own anymore. Each muttered word will be arranged to achieve a seamless collage in a semantically correct language that sounds fragmented. To understand the project, the viewer and listener must understand the importance of process and that this poem was appropriated from its original source text. The way Plath reads her poetry is firm and steady. The steady rhythm is ideal to cut and collage in order for words not to overlap.

To ensure the poem is organized and looks and sounds semantically correct, a transcript of Plath's poem will textually be collaged into a script for the sound to follow. The cut video stills will correspond to the sounds and segue from the frames which will begin the poem as a poetry reading. A poet representing the embodiment of Plath walks to the podium to start reading over a panel and then the video will transition into visual artifice that will help inflect a resonance of connection between the words and the poem. The resulting surrealist imagery will function a response against the hierarchical organization of reading poetic artifice that is subservient to sound.

Cut-ups from public texts have always existed but specifically go as far back as early forms of Futurism when poets extracted words that were from headlines of local newspapers to talk about the effects of technology in an era that has seen monumental inventions of transportation and utilities. And nearly every avant-garde literary movement in the 20th century has direct correlations to cut-ups from Tristan Tzara to William S. Burroughs. The Language poets in the 1970s connected words in random order that have achieved the unification of sound through cadence to show the rhythm and process of language is poetry. Currently there are movements like Flarf poetry and Spoetry that appropriate source texts exclusively linked to the internet like spam email.

Plath herself used the technique of cut-up in her poetry and notably made a series of political collages that represent a response to social and political discourse which was also very relevant to her poetry. The two poems to be cut up and assembled into one will be Lady Lazarus and The Applicant. As the title Lady Lazarus suggests, it references Plath herself and a biblical figure named Lazarus of Bethany who was resurrected from the dead. Images of fantasy and spectacle help construct the poem. Plath uses vernacular language to describe her own torture and suffering perhaps a little more acutely to the listener with references to identity during the holocaust. Meanwhile The Applicant is critical of the insider who is depicted by the outsider who eggs him on to join more of a conventional role in society, for example marriage.

The theme of the resulting hybrid from both of Plath's poems will only be unintentionally referential to their original source due to repetitive words relating to marriage or death. There is a fine line of balance to create an effective poem that doesn't border on facetious, dull and too allegorical of the previous poem. A large amount of time is needed to complete the poems as the words of Plath will be preserved and not digitally altered in order for the project to stay true to the nature of a seamless and strict collage. The poems should sufficiently function as new poems and not translations or allusions to Lady Lazarus and The Applicant by the separation of all words in order to disconnect all resonance of semantic meaning. The poem will reflect stark leaps that mimic recordings of the unfamiliar, disembodied and alienated through a pastiche of disjointed symbolism that resounds through its rhythm and cadence. References to the holocaust, bible and marriage will break away from their original context and form modifiers that aid in the lyric poem and resulting spoken word. Parallels may be inevitable to Plath's original poems and the interpreter is expected to assume that all symbolic connection is physical language.

Structural elements of the video will follow the rhythm of verse and line breaks to form a cohesive poem. Video poetics developed from the emission of light by artifacts found in public places will allude to Hollis Frampton's early film entitled Palindrome in which the exposed ends of film are systematically structured to demonstrate a biomorph that could allude to the rebirth of Plath. The direct emission of morning and evening light from public architecture will be recorded and collaged. The light will serve to modify and tone the association with sound and add a conceptual element of Plath's omnipresent 'ghost.' A poststructural collage of unsolicited light added to the constraint of spoken words or phrases form a dialectical element in relation to the overlap of sight and sound.

The first element of audience interaction will be an engaged debate about questions of authorship and whether the voice of the iconic figure of Plath turns into a representation of the new poem. The second element is dependent on contemplation over participation from the spectator on a fixed video screen. Although flexibility allows users to direct the articulation of the poem, the physical engagement with the poetry will not allow them to contemplate the poem as they're focus is directed to the technology and interactivity. The execution of spoken word would be most effective on a linear audio stream and without the user interacting with the verse. The second element, in order to allow more engagement, will be to add captions line by line at the bottom of the video to enable the viewer and listener to become a reader too. Other poems may be appended to the audio in order to have sufficient material to work with throughout the duration of two years.

Interactive poetics, like TRY ME should be dependent on its spoken verse and not of a phonetic chain of single words because that would emphasize on the focus of technology of creating semantics rather than poetry itself. The excess of single words would allow the viewer to embrace sound in the same way a child makes connections with poetry beads or magnets. The process would unintentionally cause the viewer to shy away from the esoteric nature of poetics by indulging in facetious and superficial connections. The solution would be to limit flexibility and allow the user to interact with previously constructed verse on an interactive screen that will enable him or her to choose a direction in which the voice may move and also enable the focus on poetics.

The project will be broken into several parts in order to establish a schedule from beginning to completion for the thesis exhibition in Spring 2010. The plan for the remainder of 2008 consists of textually collaging the two poems with a word processor with help from independent studies with faculty from the Literature Department. By May 2009, Plath's voice will be cut and fused with Soundtrack Pro aided by the script associated with the text. From June to August 2009, video will be recorded with a Canon video camera for the duration of time and video recording should be completed by the end of that summer. The video clips will then be edited and synced with the final poem by using Final Cut Pro from the UC Santa Cruz lab. Other electronics will not be used with the project unless there are logical parallels with textual inflection on the listener and viewer.

Materials for the installation will require walls for enclosure and consist of a video projector, a screen and two rows of benches. The video installation will be presented by running for about six minutes and loop from a provided projector that lights the screen from behind the audience in an enclosed room. The size of the enclosure is needed to be large enough to seat a handful of people on benches; and specific measurements are flexible and dependent on the availability of gallery space. The walls should be painted black and the lights set dim in order to symbolize a public spectacle with walls that should not attract the viewers' attention. The focal point of the projected video which will be centralized in the dark room over transparent and corrugated plastic in front of two simple benches to allow viewers to contemplate the installation. Also, a sensor might be incorporated into the installation space to allow the poem to start when it senses somebody enters the room and loop if he or she stays in the room; or if simultaneously somebody else enters inside the room.

The budget will include the cost of a Canon video camera to use off-campus during the summer quarter and materials for the installation including paint, benches and corrugated plastic. There are key issues to consider between installing in a private space and a public space. A private space represents enclosure and functions as a room outside of the public space but since the poetry depends on being heard as much as seen, the argument leans towards an enclosed space.

The hope is for accessibility more than user interaction meaning that a user may have similar experience and enjoyment of seeing the video on the internet versus in a gallery space. The gallery space is a formal and more open way for users who otherwise are not particularly interested in seeing my work to allow them the opportunity to build their awareness and perhaps support the literary movement of collage. The viewers should make their own connection to the work and their knowledge of Plath. The film and sound cut ups would hopefully enable the viewer to see poetry in a way he or she has not seen it before.