The debut of the "animated" text: Lesson 3

 Lesson 3: Concrete typographies as topographies

A. Marinetti's Words-in-Freedom

Going back to Tzara's text, we notice that the words were manipulated as objects, with a focus less on the meaning of the words than in the fact that they can be manipulated as pure objects. Apart from the end of originality in art, this also marked the beginnings of the "materialist" treatment of language.

In another writer, this materiality is also beginning to take hold. Let's look at Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's famous work, "Zang Tumb Tumb." You can read more about it from the Wikipedia link here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zang_Tumb_Tumb.

Here is an excerpt:

'1 2 3 4 5 seconds siege guns split the silence in unison tam-tuuumb sudden echoes all the echoes seize it quick smash it scatter it to the infinite winds to the devil

'In the middle these tam-tuuumb flattened 50 square kilometers leap 2-6-8 crashes clubs punches bashes quick-firing batteries. Violence ferocity regularity pendulum play fatality

'...these weights thicknesses sounds smells molecular whirlwinds chains nets and channels of analogies concurrences and synchronisms for my Futurist friends poets painters and musicians zang-tumb-tumb-zang-zang-tuuumb tatatatatatatata picpacpampacpacpicpampampac uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

ZANG-TUMB
TUMB-TUMB
TUUUUUM

 (Translated from Selected poems and related prose / F.T. Marinetti ; selected by Luce Marinetti, p75)



B. Guide questions

1. What does the letter stylization of the title itself remind you of (something that we take for granted in today's print media)?

2. What do you think "concrete" means in concrete poetry?

3. Following Marinetti's idea of a parole in libertà or "words-in-freedom" in this futurist typography, why do words need to be set free? What binds or imprisons them anyway?

4. Why is his style also called "sound" poetry?

5. What current technologies do you think his style  "anticipates?"

6. How similar is his style to what we call ASCII image text or "picture-text SMS" like below:

Fresh flowers for you!

*;%*;+;*

*;*;%*%

*;/~*%*

\|//

)__(

(___)

7. Did you ever use these picture sms texts? What is the advantage of such creative use of typography and space? Does it communicate better? Why?

8. For comparison, let's read a famous poem by e. e. cummings:

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness 

9. What is the purpose of this kind of weird use of typography? Does Marinetti accomplish the same purpose?

10. In e. e. cummings' poem, what is the point of departing from traditional typography?



C. Project Output: Word Clouds Notebook

During Marinetti's time, he didn't have the computer technology to realize more dynamically the vision he had. Today, it is something we take for granted, like in the example of word clouds. Even Wikipedia uses this.

What is the difference between a text that follows traditional syntactic organization and the spatial distribution of words in a word cloud?

A word cloud sample from http://www.thrumpledumthrum.com/?p=154

Go to http://www.wordclouds.com/ and create your own word cloud. Print it and at the back, explain how similar your word cloud is to futurist typography.  Other sites you can try are:  http://www.wordle.net/, or https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/. You can also search for more generator sites via Google.

The debut of the "animated" text: Lesson 2

Lesson 2.  Introduction to Cut-up Art

From http://www.wallpaper.com/art/cut-ups-cut-ins-cut-outs-the-art-of-william-s-burroughs-ljublijana#45926

A. How to Make a 20th Century Piece of Literature:

For this lesson, our goal is to make a project following  a famous "poem" by Tristan Tzara. Here is an online adaptation from Emma DiMaggio:

Perhaps you’ve always wanted to write poetry but haven’t found the right words or ideas with which to express yourself with elegance. There’s no need to worry! Dada poetry requires absolutely no understanding of the English language. Here are the simple steps to creating your own Dada poetry.

STEPS:
1. Grab a newspaper or magazine article.
2. Get your pair of scissors.
3. Cut out a section of writing that’s about as long as you want your poem to be.
4. Cut out each word from the article separately.
5. Put your pile of words into a bag and shake the collection around.
6. Take out a word and put it down in a line. (Don’t look at the word when you take it out!)
7. Repeat #6 until you’ve emptied the bag.
8. Copy the words over onto another piece of paper.
9. Become a Dada poet!

Now that you’ve got your authentic Dada poem, get ready to hit up an open mic night to show off your cryptic creation. Dada art is all about the absurdity of life and culture; this method by Tristan Tzara is sure to achieve the cacophony that makes authentic Dadaist poetry. The side-eye glances and confused head tilts mean that your audience is interpreting the poem flawlessly! Great job!

(From Emma DiMaggio , “The Art of Visual Poetry: Dadaism,” Entity Magazine, ed. Angelica Pronto, https://www.entitymag.com/art-visual-poetry-dadaism, August 4, 2016, Copyright Entity, 2017.)

 
Here is the "original" instruction poem in its English translation:

How to Make a Dadaist Poem (1920)

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

--Tristan Tzara
(From https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/tzara.html.)


B. What is Cut-up art?

This is the historic text that "began" what is now called the Cut-Up technique in art. Here is Wikipedia definition: 

"The cut-up technique (or découpé in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique).

Read up further for your personal enrichment.


C. Guide Questions:

1. Try to look for some definitions of "Dadaism" online. What is aleatory?

2.What is the significance of "scissors" being used here to cut up newspapers? Why "newspapers" specifically?

3. What other things can the "bag" represent?

4. How can the poem "be like you?"

5. Isn't there a contradiction between the (found) materials used and the concept of "originality" of the cut up thus made?

 6. Is this is "poem" or a poem about making poems?

7. What did you think when you were making your own version of a "dadaist" poem?

8. Is this a real method or the absence of method?

9. Why do you think is Tzara's idea of literature? How is it made?

10. What are your your ideas of writing and literature?


D. Next meeting, we will make our very own Cut-up project:

Bring the following materials in class:

– Scissors
– Newspaper or Magazine
– Paper
– Writing Utensil
– A Small Bag

The debut of the "animated" text: Lesson 1

Henri Michaux-Mouvements Deux encres sur papier 1950 à 1951, from https://audioguide-app-expo-museum.com/

Lesson 1. The world's writing systems


Let us review the writing systems we have in the world. Point your browser to a slideshow over at  

             Slideshare:  https://www.slideshare.net/NancyNazarian/writing-history-progretion.



A. Writing systems in sci-fi films

Next part, watch an excerpt from the film "Contact" and from "The Arrival." These two sci-fi films feature a language technology that we can use as comparison to the language technology that we will be taking up from the writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

1. Contact, 1997, "Ellie and S R Hadden scene," YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePa6eUxhkYo

From http://brothers-ink.com/2017/03/

Parts of the dialogue between Hadden and Ellie can be read here: http://staticmass.net/deconstructing-cinema/contact-movie-1997/


 2. Arrival, 2016, "Movie's Language: Talking in Circles," YouTube,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd8zT1YAUck

From http://www.blastr.com/2016-8-16/amy-adams-speaks-alien-first-official-trailer-and-12-new-posters-arrival

 

Science fiction usually employ what are called ''conlangs'' or constructed languages. This creation or invention of fictional languages is not limited to fiction but is also a method used for ''experimentation in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning, for artistic creation, and for language games.'' Check out the reference about artificial languages at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language.

B. Some questions to think about:

1. What kind of writing system do you use?

2. How different are the ways "advanced" civilizations communicate from the way we do today?

3. What components do you think are missing from our language?

4. What should human language be capable of?

5. If you haven't noticed it yet, there is an art work by Henri Michaux at the top.  What do the figures remind you of?

6. Do you use anything in today's technology that doesn't belong to the conventional letters of the alphabet to communicate or chat?

7. How do you think today's technology has changed the face of communication?


In the next lessons, we will take a look at some of the ways artists and writers have tried to reinvent language in the 20th to the 21st centuries.