For this project I based my work on two “Language is a virus” tools. The first one is the “Madlibs poem”. The goal is to fill a list of words, then to make a poem out of them. I went through a few of my previous works and picked words that came up often or struck me at the time.
I realised a few themes and ideas were omnipresent in my works, and it made me want to parody myself, or at least to make a project that could function as an humourous “introduction to Léna’s poetry”. It made me think of the various bots on Twitter or Tumblr, who manage to achieve a certain voice and style simply with a bank of a hundred words and a few typical sentence structures. Unfortunately I don’t know how to set up a bot, and a hundred words is an amountl I did not reachh in my research. Once I had gathered the words, I realised I had almost only nouns, and that’s where the website helped me balance out the category of words by giving me a certain number of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
The second tool I used was the “Poetry gyroscope” one. The idea is to have a base text and to take out a few words, and to replace them with other words, that’s when I used the list constructed with the Madlibs poem. I tried the exercise with a few poems provided by the website but when I went to try it with my own work, I encountered my first difficulty. The platform did not seem to be responding. I realised the process would be significantly longer.
I had picked a poem I had written a few years ago that I still liked, put it in a document, and started replacing every other word by their category, (for ex: instead of “the woman had pretty eyes” “the noun verb adjective eyes”). When I started using this old poem, which I like quite a lot, because it is related to my one of my favourite novels, I started to move away from the parody, self-mockery aspect, and it became more of a recycling project. With the word recycling came the idea of a cycle, of something that would repeat, and so I started to think of a gif as a way to present the work.
Once I had all my materials on the screen, I started a screen recording of me replacing every word I had taken out with words from my list. I went through the list three times, each time producing a different poem.
It was much longer than I had expected, and the unedited video is twenty minute long. I wanted to make it into a gif, as I felt it was the best way to capture the gradual transformation, and the workflow, rather than a simple snapshot of each different product. Unfortunately I couldn’t make a twenty minute gif, so I had to edit the video using Premiere Pro, and accelerate the video, without making it so fast that it would be unreadable. I wanted each line to appear and disappear independently of the rest of the piece, but it proved too difficult for my skill level, so I decided to keep the text as a block.
As a way to keep the element of randomness present in the poetry gyroscope. I randomly cut the video three times, and I mixed up all of the versions, so that it would not follow the order in which I had modified the poem. The poem is thus a 35 minute gif infinitely repeating, reusing words and ideas I cherish in my writing, achieving the goal of being a cyclical, recycling project. Throughout the process, I went from the idea of a self conscious project, that looks back in disdain, to the realisation of a project which accepts and embraces the cyclical and repetitive nature of writing.
