Yet another 3 ways of Looking at a Blackbird

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Edward Picot's picture

[img]http://edwardpicot.com/manandwoman.jpg[/img]

"A man and a woman
Are one.
A man a woman and a blackbird
Are one."

From a work in progress: three more short animations, based on sections of Wallace Stevens' famous poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", are now online. The first three were completed in February, the second batch in April, and there should be more to come a bit later in the year.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/blackbird/

Also available, if you visit my home page, is a one-off song/video entitled "Train Coming".

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

Edward Picot's picture
Yet another 3 ways of Looking at a Blackbird

[img]http://edwardpicot.com/manandwoman.jpg[/img]

"A man and a woman
Are one.
A man a woman and a blackbird
Are one."

From a work in progress: three more short animations, based on sections of Wallace Stevens' famous poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", are now online. The first three were completed in February, the second batch in April, and there should be more to come a bit later in the year.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/blackbird/

Also available, if you visit my home page, is a one-off song/video entitled "Train Coming".

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

Marcos Ortega's picture
Yet another 3 ways of Looking at a Blackbird

My favourite are [i]Among Twenty Snowy Mountains[/i], [i]Three Minds[/i] and [i]River[/i]. What made you create the animations in a different order than the poem? Did you make them as you had clear how to depict them?

Precisely yesterday I was reading the last issue of the MFJ about hybridization of media. Do you think "hyperliterature" will become a standard in the future? I think it will be limited to short fiction or poetry like in this case, because it is more suited for integration.

BTW, I didn't know Stevens' work, and now I'll have to check it out :)

Edward Picot's picture
Yet another 3 ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Marcos -

Thanks for the response. You've got it exactly right: the sequence in which I've done the sections follows the sequence in which ideas have occurred to me. The danger of this approach is that you may be left with a residue of sections for which you don't have any ideas at all... but I think I'm okay.

You raise a very interesting question, about what kind of thing hyperliterature suits best. I don't think there's a simple answer to it, because the form is still evolving. My own preference is to avoid great big projects which would take months or years of work before there was anything to show. It's all right to do big projects, but you have to do them in small chunks, so that they can be released bit-by-bit. What this amounts to is a form of serialisation, and it has several advantages: it's less deterring for people to be drip-fed in this way than just presented with a big indigestible chunk of new work all at once; it allows the audience for the project to build up as the instalments come out; and I find, on a purely personal level, that it suits my way of working, it's got a nice rhythm to it. But just because I favour this way of working doesn't mean it's the only thing hyperliterature can do - other people work in other ways.

I hope you enjoy Stevens' poetry. It's good stuff, but it can be quite difficult to grasp at times.

- Edward

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