Poetic Dialogues 1.0

by Yucef Merhi


In the last few years the propagation of Net Art has established a
market for the study and exploration of this dynamic field of
contemporary art. However, most of the works that are categorized
as Net Art don't make sense. Maybe this is just a reflection of
today's society, or maybe most of the net/contemporary artists are
nothing but postmodernists. Nevertheless, the Net is a fascinating
medium with enormous possibilities.

I presume that one of the biggest gaps of Net Art is the absence of
Art. Perhaps we should ask ourselves if any flash animation or java
applet is Net Art in the same way that any object showed in a gallery
or museum room is Art. The way I solve this problem is introducing
poetry as a foundation for all the works I make. I believe that
poetry transforms objects into art, in the same way that it converts
noise into music. Poetic Dialogues is an example of this belief.
If you are expecting a non-sense work full of special effects, you
are in the wrong place.

This project is constituted by 18 different flash movies made with a
high-tech wristwatch camera. Each flash movie has a sequence of images
taken frame by frame of people reciting a verse that I previously wrote.
So, even when I employed a sophisticated machine to do this work, the
process was the same that was used at the begining of cinema. When you
enter the project you will see 3 different faces that establish a
dialogue between them. The interaction among the characters generates a
poem. Also, the number of different poems/combinations that you can
get is 216. This metaphorical process of using a watch to create dynamic
poems was taken from a previous work called 'the poetic clock', a machine
that converts time into poetry which generates 86.400 different poems
daily.

Poetic Dialogues 1.0 is a 2001 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funds from the Jerome Foundation .

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