direct link: An Ecology of Earth. Watch in HD if you can.

A visual poem. The central part, the mandala section, the core. A visual metaphor for earth, the energy of earth. Shot in natural colour.

An Ecology of Earth

we become
what we pretend

what we promote
becomes true

beware of
irreversibilities

earthquaking mandala

how do we evolve

in patterns that connect
without destroying

perhaps the earth is
a fertilized egg

_
I used clips from the last song in "The Dreamer's Paradox," by JT Bruce: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/3317

The mandala sequence and the music matched with little editing, a synchronicity that amazed me. As I worked on expanding the piece, I added more clips from the same song.
_
This is the second video I have made from the same 20sec of original camera footage. It's of the tree outside my window and that is rooted in the urban clip of land that accompanies my apartment. I feel connected to that tree. The first video using the original 20sec footage, One Hand Clapping, a collaboration with AlphaCore, is so different to this one that you won't believe they're from the same clip.

(Soon I'll upload the original tiny clip of unadulterated, raw, unmanipulated footage, too. And post all three together.)

The poem, an edit of Relevant Knots, posted a week ago, is influenced by a reappraisal of the ideas of Gregory Bateson, particularly in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, and Mind and Nature: a necessary unity.



(I think I will use the tiny clip at the end as a 'signature' ending on my future videopoems - have to work on it a bit, see, if maybe, or maybe not, I do like it, though, and edited in the feel of a blinking earth eye.)
                                                        

Happy Solstice to everyone! It's my favourite time of year... may the sun shine on you with golden glorious goodnesses!

She's brightly coloured, in hot rainbow hues, but the neon filter makes her so sunshiny! I started working on her in my hammock yesterday... :-)


                                                        

direct link: One Hand Clapping. Play in HD if you can.

"Often when he collaborated with John Cage, Cunningham would create a dance and Cage would compose the music — separately. Cunningham made no attempt to fit the dancers' movements to the music. Sometimes the performance was the first time they heard the music.

"Given a certain length of time, let’s say 10 minutes, I could make a dance which would take up 10 minutes and John Cage could make a piece of music that occupied the same amount of time, and we could put them together," Cage recalls.

"When Cage would play the piece, there would be moments when in the other way of working, I would have thought there should be a sound, but his sound would come perhaps just after what I had done. And it was like opening your mind again to another possibility. As John Cage said once, 'He does what he does, and I do what I do and for your convenience, we put it together.' I thought that was a remarkable way of thinking about it.""

from "Merce Cunningham: Dance at the Edge," an article by Renee Montagne on NPR.

Two autopoetic systems: my short film, Alphacore's music score, without any reference to each other as we separately created them. Each of our autopoetic systems closed from each other, selectively referring to their own environments.

Mine, abstracted footage of a tree at dusk when the light dims and the camera acts like the retinal cells, the rods, seeing essentially in black and white. Alphacore's a slow, simple, quiet, meditative piano solo with a dim voice in the background whose words we cannot quite hear - or is it yelping dogs or a bird call? To my ear the background chant sounds like 'help me.' The letters falling like rain in my film do, in the slow roll of credits, line up at the end as SOS. An accidental correlation in two separate creations brought together.

I titled our collaboration, without hearing the music, One Hand Clapping, since, I, in Toronto, and Alphacore, in Seattle, each creating our component to an agreed on time span, were like the clapping of one hand - the famous Zen koan meant to sent the logical mind into an impossible spin.

Our final product, the mix, matches in the way all aspects of the universe correlate, by accident. Only this is a designed accident.

And it doesn't match in the way each of us might have originally envisioned.

My video is uncharacteristic of my work thus far - it is abstract rather than figurative; a natural black and white rather than colour; the speed is slowed down to just above frame-by-frame and thus a little jerky while the letters fall so quickly as to be almost in fast-forward; and the letters in One Hand Clapping fall continuously carrying random meanings, unlike my usual work with whole poems or sections of poems.

Alphacore's music is usually the product of computer-generated transformations of text or images into sound - they are sonic landscapes of various sounds and instruments that form unusual experimental and avanteguard abstract soundscapes - in One Hand Clapping he plays the piano meditatively note by note, a scale ascending and partially descending, we hear the touch of fingers. He is more of an embodied musician than his more usual 'Deleuzian machine' music. Deleuze writes, in Anti-Oedipus, "A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks," and this is how I might describe Alphacore's music on the whole. He creates tracks where there is no subject or object, where the sounds interact with each other in nodes, in a series of interruptions that create a syncopated flow in a minimalist rhythmic space, like the famous metaphor of rhizomes we associate with Deleuzian philosophy.

In the final product of our collaboration, One Hand Clapping, a film with music/music with a film, we have two self-referential autopoetic systems, visual and auditory, interacting. How the viewer perceives this deliberately accidental pairing will refer to yet another autopoetic system whereby the collaboration of two artists becomes one experience.
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* A defnition of autopoesis: "The generic term denoting the organization characterizing autopoietic machines / systems. The term "... simply means processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which realizing the network that produced them constitute it as a unity." (Maturana and Varela)



                                                        

My hunger,
...........pacing.
Dark battlements
of earth and stone.

No
..........milk
of kindness
here.

In my dull stare
I watch you.

You seek a
comfort of stars
I can only imagine.

Do not praise me, fool.

The maze in which you are lost
is my lair.

_____
Words from a wordle, Big Tent Poetry's prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments):



view comments on this post here


                                                        

direct link: from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

a love story...

...where Botticelli's Venus, ideal of beauty, the goddess who ushered in the Renaissance, bucks her scallop shell and in pursuit of erotic passion, experiences love in the world with its betrayals, deceptions, rejections... how our hearts of purity suffer like Venus pursuing the intrigues of passion, its tempests, for the love in her life...

...how the poetry of our life is our love...

...this love story interweaves the purity of Botticelli's Venus, and Venus Pandemos of myth, her lover Mars, the story of Psyche and Eros, a personal story, and how we clothe ourselves with shimmering presence,  'translucent robes' of poetry:

beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, scented, fragrant and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Botticelli, and

yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae

washes of colour, seaspray of roses,

translucent robes

poetry we weave ourselves with

...

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

__

This recording is a collaboration.

I recorded a poem drawn from my manuscript-in-progress, The Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems, and sent it to Buz Hendricks (whose track, 'Because' I had paired with my prosepoem, 'Light Catches Diamonds').

Buz composed a beautiful jazz/orchestral score. I listened in wonder- he is very gifted. He writes: "I started with a piano and just improvised while listening to the poem. The same for all the other tracks, just played to your voice. That's why it was able to ebb and flow with your voice."

I have a videopoem planned for this piece, too.

Buz Hendricks' website: www.somewhereoffjazzstreet.com

Buz on Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Somewhere_off_Jazz_Street

The cover is a detail of a painting of mine.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                                        

After I wrote *the worst* pantoum, I wrote this abstract little ditty to try to explain myself:

I've fallen to
playacting
anger.

Snap, shout, hiss
but the old
hot-edge
gone.

Once a
volcano-
dormant,
spent.

What used
to ignite
fiery torrents
now brings
inconsolable
clouds,
days of
rain.

(oh dear)
__
Ok, ok, onto the truly terrible pantoum (and I do think anger cliché-ridden, that there is a repetitiveness of the trite in states of rage):

Anger is a potent force. Anger is red, explosive, repetitive. An angry person has lost their rationality. Anger is a sword of destruction, a way to hurt. Anger is red, explosive, repetitive. When the victim becomes the oppressor. Anger is a sword of destruction, a way to hurt. To hurt the way you've been hurt. When the victim becomes the oppressor. Anger is a bullet. To hurt the way you've been hurt. Anger is a fire bomb. Anger is a bullet. Anger collects furies to hurl. Anger is a fire bomb. Anger destroys what took time to build. Anger collects furies to hurl. When it erupts, it tears the gaussian blur off things. Anger destroys what took time to build. Anger is a great leveller. When it erupts, it tears the gaussian blur off things. Anger sees the mark darkly. Anger is a great leveller. The raging storm. Anger sees the mark darkly. The roaring wind. The raging storm. Tears the world apart with battering. The roaring wind. The broken homes. Tears the world apart with battering. Anger transforms. The broken homes. Loss of illusions. Anger transforms. Anger is a potent force of renewal.

__
A response to Big Tent Poetry's June 11th prompt: write an angry pantoum (and where you can read the other entries in the linked comments)

you can read comments on this post here


                                                        

direct link: Sporadic Music #1: -a crazy dance-

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein

__
The animated letters, a dancing semiotext throughout:

Ribbon squiggles:

dancing
dancing
dancing
dancing

Standard font:

wild
transmute
transform
dance

-

Scrolling text on inverted (white) screen:

Joe Travesio writes:

Sporadic music is a collection of open techniques of composition where different musical elements (rhythm, melody, tonality, modality, structure) are affected by a constant process of transmutation and instability changing through harmonic relations, games of addition and subtraction, retrogade expositions of previous schemes, logical transformations, sudden ruptures and more crazy things like this. Sporadic music compositions are very creative unpredictable, creating rules to break them, mix new rules, and so on. The result is minimalist, reiterative, expressionistic, and unstable, surrealist sometimes, always interesting.

On 'El Loco y la Nina' (Essay on Sporadic Music, No. 2: The Mad Man and the Little Girl) he writes: The music rides along two musical lines independent of each other. The left-hand - the 'mad man'; the right hand - the 'little girl.' The sporadic speech of the music is based on developing short motives and themes. 'El Loco y la Nina' is composed of minor chords with complex microstructures. A dramatic and hyperactive theme, a mix of violence and delicate care.

__

Poem at end, first screen:

Dance like a
madwoman, or
a madman
in your livingroom.

What is a
security of the self?

Without constraint, unfettered,
who would you be?

Second screen:

If we forget
we are watched,
read, observed, judged,
about the unceasing gaze
of the other,
what would we do,
who would we be?

from EnTrapped WOR|l|DS
Brenda Clews, 2007

__
Performed, videotaped, edited, conceived and composed by Brenda Clews, 2010.
Music (with permission) by José Travieso: http://josetravieso.org
'El Loco y la Niña,' 2nd track on, "Ensayo sobre Música Esporádica," re-mastered 2008: http://www.josetravieso.org/index3music_1ensayos.html

Quote: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1974), p.xiii
__

I pair the ordinary with the extraordinary. An ordinary woman with brilliant music. Though the figure as I have 'enfigured' her is a bit strange. She's a line drawing of herself, overlapping herself slightly. She seems connected to a doorway, or box. In it is one way, closer to 'the real'; out of it is another, an inverted world that is line drawn with hints of solarized colour (at least in the original, the YouTube version is a bit washed out).

The letters are randomly ordered. Swinging in on a line like a meandering riversnake, growing larger before they disappear. Yet they reverse, gliding away from her. Is she a septre of their energy like a secret Minoan snake goddess? Happily jiving up or down. Become tiny squiggles like a chorus in the corners. Splices of themselves or elongated versions. Calligraphy, semiotext, cartoon. They echo the colours of the room. They make rules to break them. They are Sporadic.

Wittgenstein says, "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."

Travesio's song, produced sporadically, like a Dada sound tone poem, he calls an 'essay.' The notes of the musician's piano are words in the imagination.

Quote: Ludwig Wittgenstein, from 'Picturing Reality,' in Philosophy of Language, edited Andrea Nye (Victoria, Australia: Blackwell, 1998), p.87
__

I find myself embarrassed by my video. It's dull, boring. The music is incredible - a tour de force by José Travieso, ecstatic, experimental, Sporadic. He is a virtuoso. An amazingly talented musician. The scroll of writings from his album cover as a visual element in the video works for me. My book-lined over-stuffed livingroom isn't fun to see. But the worst is me.

Why am I showing you this video at all?

Because, you know, 'get up and do it!' Because middle-aged women dancing in their livingrooms like crazy ladies. Because it's a take on Reality TV, and that approach to us. Because you can tell I haven't danced in 6 months and am gung ho about 'getting back in shape.' Because I've put on weight and I'm trying to 'exercise it off' (with reduction in daily food intake too of course). Because I'm happy to be jumping around like a banshee with a lit firecracker. Because I don't mind using myself as subject, in baggy around-the-house dog-walking shorts, no make-up or jewelry, everything unplanned - the video a last moment thought. Oh, yeah, tripod, the standby. And because I think my dog is adorable.

Since this video she has figured out how to participate when I roll the carpets up and begin my crazy stuff. She gets her rope with a rubber toy on the end and we play tug of war to the rhythm. I hold it high and she jumps to the beat. When I slide to the floor and begin swinging my legs and whatnot, she is very cute and quite happy to roll around too, letting me do a little contact improv with her.

(Though I gave the musician, whose music I found on Jamendo, full rights to having it pulled if he doesn't like what I did to his music, so it might disappear, return to being un-shown.) :)

(It took days to upload, no idea why, uploads kept freezing, but finally watching it on YouTube, I can see that my cut at the end, where the letters disappear and the music stops, isn't quite right. For unknown reason, when all the letters were cut in a vertical line, some had an echo, an extra flash a second or so after they were 'gone.' Who knows why? The ensuing lines were clean, empty, I couldn't figure it out. So I cut those flash dancing letters back a bit, to end just before. Of course, then they didn't echo. And the sequence is almost ok, but not quite. Some disappearing before others. But, then, that's Sporadic isn't it? :-)
__

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
F. W. Nietzsche.

I am 58 years old.

Been watching YouTube instructional videos on rendering in FCP. I think I get it. Why it's taking so long is that I have brought together different types of files - audio, text, stills, as well as my video footage. What I should have done was batch edit everything to a single file type, which, if possible, I can't at present test this out (as my video's been rendering for almost 24 hours and I'm not interrupting it near the end!), would mean no rendering at all. Wow. Yes, taking courses would help with learning the video editing software but this I cannot afford at present. Other ways of learning, by trial and error, reading the manual (at 1200 pages!), watching instructional videos (yes, some great ones at YouTube, very helpful) can get you there, if in a zig zag slower fashion. Mostly, with the 'just do it' 'trial and error' method, is that when you hit a snag or a problem you go looking for answers.

The Internet is a vast storehouse of information, isn't it. How did we ever live without it?

I use FCE (Final Cut Express), the cheap version of Apple's video editing software. It's $199. versus $1,199. for FCP (Final Cut Pro, in Canadian prices). Besides sometimes having to use a drop down menu rather than having a button handy on screen, I haven't found anything missing in FCE compared to the FCP version. Apple has been good to us home users. FCE is a full system that more than meets most of our video editing needs.

About all I've found is that FCE only ships with one extra program, Live Type, and that's probably pared down; whereas I believe FCP ships with a whole bunch of programs. Also FCP is stronger, more of a power tool, faster. Which isn't an issue with me as a homeuser. My clips are short and the videos I make are mostly under 10 minutes.

Tonight I watched instructional videos on rendering in FCP. When my FCE finally finishes rendering the video I'm working on, I'm sure I'll find that everything the pros were talking about is possible in my version.



                                                        

What is hidden in crevices, tiny tide pools, our obscure and wayward selves? Our main narrative, who we are, what we've been through, how we think of ourselves, our stories, the way we present ourselves to others, what if that falls away? Our mainstream still, empty, non-existent. Creeping out of the shadows, slithery, bat-like things, or fairies, gnomes, sylphs and undines, or a cast of characters of every shade and tenor, or visions of sublime beings composed of light? Would the inner child – of fears and magic – creep out? Would we utter pure poetry, mad phrases? Would stray, incoherent thoughts stream by, seed fluffs floating, promising blossoms? Can we surprise ourselves? Do we know ourselves? Are we open to stories of our lives that don't fit the main narratorial road we've carved out of the mountains and sand and ocean of our experiences? Can we accommodate our minorities, submerged selves, to create an inner democracy between what composes us? Listen to stray thoughts on the edge of your consciousness – what do you hear?


____
I wrote this prosepoem 5 years ago, but edited it for Big Tent Poetry’s June 4th poetry prompt: where will our wild things be?

Sure... it's a rephrasing of the question posed by Big Tent's auteurs, but you can see from my piece, I understand what's being asked! ::grins::

(I've been all those things - sublime vision of light, and yes the slithery bat self -when I dare!)

The Lady and the Chimera, 12" x 9", 30.5x23cm, oil on canvas, 2010.