Baroque Poetry | Thirty Hand Words Thirty Finger Words

Opening Reception: September 5, 7-9:30 pm
Supercrawl: September 13 and Saturday Sept 14, 12-11pm
Kidscrawl: Friday September 13, 11:30am-3:30pm

Baroque Poetry began with a story I had read or had dreamed about Pope Urban the VIII, Maffeo Barberini, the great culture vulture of high baroque Italy. At his Papal Court there were a group of writers and poets called the Purple Swans. They engaged in poetry creation like the surrealists engaged in drawing-but with a checkerboard pattern as an underlying structure. One swan would write a bit of white on black, another would write a bit of black on white and so on. These checker boards could be arranged and rearranged into numerous poetic algorithms sometimes carrying one wagon load of associative information and sometimes another.

My Baroque Poems simulate a checkerboard, filling it with associations from inside a “haptic system”. One Baroque poem is realized by lists of “hand words” (things we do with the action of hands) another is realized by “finger words” (things we do with the action of fingers).

The poetic algorithms have been digitized and inserted into the time dependent format of video. The time-structure of video rolls out a twinned robotic presentation of an algorithm that allows associations from the tender to the terrible. This robotic presentation of time is then reinterpreted in an original sound-scape that plunges the thinker/viewer/listener/ into the transmuted, infinitely variable, territory of human hands and fingers.

- VJane Gordon