Storytelling on the Web: Choreotextographies

Reading and Writing

Reading and writing are the two sides of a text. Reading opens doors and writing crosses thresholds. Reading begets writing. For me, it is a steady chase. Writing begins with an insisting image or something stirred by conversation, between pages or words exchanged with a friend. I begin with no expectation—because that is the best way—simply moving my hand across the page, writing the most mundane things and in this process from somewhere comes a word or a phrase that I follow until I’m lost. Getting lost is necessary, and so is way-finding through dreams, associations, experiments, and reverie.

In books, I find stillness and escape. The lamp on my desk shines books splayed downward and others fallen in stair-step patterns up and down. Books I’ve read are turned titles down, spines to the right, and books I plan to read have titles up, spines to the right. I love to read sitting by a window turning the thick pages fragrant with the scent of libraries and women who wear glasses on delicate gold or silver chains.

Words written in long before arrive into a new encounter, like a letter found in a bottle. While reading, an intimate and silent dialogue occurs with the past or with another life experience. Here is part of an exquisite poem by C.P. Cavafy that uses the phrase "an invisible procession"--

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.

Aside from the narrative of a leader losing his country, aside from underlining the need to face one's losses with courage and other meanings, the poem identifies an individual's cascade of images, memories, and associations. As the world changes, we might apply this metaphor to our experience with old ways of publishing books and experiencing stories.  In our imagination, an invisible procession occurs that can lead to our own creative work. I want to create new works that are evocative and have openings that invite the reader to make multiple meanings. 

In the Digital Age

E-books are static—static as a print book (although this is changing)—and they do not give the reader the sensation of a unique object that pleases the sense of touch and smell. The web provides new and different perspectives and languages: virtual reality, online gaming, multiple media and interactivity. A story that goes from print to film often contracts. The visual language and music will carry meaning as well as the words. If that same story is used in interactive gaming, it will expand. 

Digital media offer new artistic opportunities to make the invisible processions visible. With an increasing range and breadth of communication and networks, we select and arrange multiple things, people, places, and experience. We see memes, and we like to participate. We like our videos to go viral. Curation is a system of collecting, organizing and presenting. Patterns have become more apparent and necessary.

As a poet writing on paper and an artist presenting in digital online environments, I consider the reading and writing exchange. I can best describe the web films I've worked on as innovative ways of reading. The projects arrive, and they depart in code. They are mobiles of text, sound, and image. I call these choreotextographies.

Choreotextography

I look for metaphors of movement: flows of rivers, wind, and water, bird and animal migrations, human travel and migrations. Also I’m drawn to transformations—metamorphosis, organic growth and decay, alchemy. Creative work can demand this same process. People change residences, relationships, and/or activities in order to complete an artistic work. Even the language conveys how radical the process can be: one executes a piece of art or music. The verb means a successful rendering but also it carries a shadow of death. The old way of being dies, and a new one arrives. We become part of the artistic piece at the same time as separating from it. Every creative work is an act of change.

Artists court change. Virginia Woolf said, "...we can read ... with another aim, not to throw light on literature ... but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers." Writers are good readers. Readers are open to enchantment and meditation. Readers are thinkers and dreamers. In the exchange, there is a potential transmission of energy and breath and intimacy that extends beyond one's life.  

This was originally published in Proof Magazine, 2014.