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STATEMENT: "NomadLingo is an experimental poetic playground devoted to exploring mobile-text artwork. It is now possible for words to mutate into other words, flow in flocks, modulate in size and colour, overlap, fade, spin, fold, roll, shake, & bump etc...Profound signifiactions develop as words are animated in ways that humans associate visually with living organisms. The overall aim of NomadLingo is to explore and contribute to the evolution of mobile text and facilitate thru provocation the growth of a new way of reading writing. A way of reading that accurately reflects the fluid metamorphic and nomadic levels of all energy as it continually reconstructs form. NomadLingo was created (and updated monthly over a one-year period from April 1, 2000 - April 1, 2001)." (jhave) Nomad Lingo is a teeming, experimental, variegated, complex, playful and poetic work - or "mysterious," "finite," "infinite," "absurd," "immense," "immaculate," "primordial," as suggested by the words that greet readers/visitors upon entering, as by the accompanying images, by turns cosmic and earthy, of the heavens, revolving planets, deserts, or verdant forests. Another click puts us amid the year's listing of months - all twelve, from April to March -, next to the image of a fetus. The work has in fact undergone a year's gestation, each month having added its own works and days. In a theoretical text entitled Programming as Poetry1, David Johnston underlines the affinities between the programmer's work and that of the poet. Both work with language, that is with a "data flow." Digital language, however, authorizes an integration of as yet unequalled fluidity between words, images, and sounds, unifying these different data in a single base language2. By arranging them on the same plane, this language relativizes the data types in relation to each other, as in a poem, where the literal meaning of words does not, contrary to ordinary usage, prevail over their image-generating metaphorical meanings or assonances. In a sense, then, this new tool augments the potentiality of poetic text. It's not simply a question of illustration, that is, of simply decorating or adorning the poem with the addition of images and sounds. More profoundly, images and sounds, like letters and words, are henceforth part of the poet/programmer's creative arsenal, playing against and on each other, words revealing their visual potential, and images their symbolic and abstract import. The many themes broached here speak to us as much about the author's personal life as about politics, biology, physics, or philosophy. The pieces are sometimes interactive, sometimes independent of us, evolving on their own like little worlds unto themselves. Nomad Lingo acquires cosmic import in the process. Made of transmutations and metamorphoses that form, come undone, and re-form, Nomad Lingo develops along the double axis of time (with the emphasized inscription of the work in a duration marked by the passage of months and seasons) and space (of the page, screen, body, and world). The work could thus be described as a modern Book of Hours, where illuminated letters become animated, and where the earth, seasons and planets revolve, the rhythm and passage of days ensured and set by poems instead of prayers. From the image of the fetus to the representation of the universe, Nomad Lingo is both a microcosm and a macrocosm, a world that is in itself a representation of the world - both the inner world of the author or reader as the exterior world of nature, culture, and language -, a bit like those miniature domed landscapes one can shake or turn over to trigger storms and whirlwinds.
Anne-Marie Boisvert NOTES : 1- David Jhave Johnston, Programming as Poetry, 2002. |
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