Call on Water
2016
Aluminum and steel tank, ultrasonic atomizers, water, computer, custom-made electronics and software
Courtesy of the artist and bitforms gallery
This fountain acts as an interactive poetry machine from which emerge, fragment by fragment, poems by the celebrated Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998(, who was also the artist's uncle. The poems quoted all involve language: the way we see the world through words, and the way words reflect our own image back to us. Our experience of language is always deeply felt, the poems seem to say, implying the visible as much as the tactile and audible, as well as the passage of time. The work suggests that words materialize in the air, carried by the breath of those who speak them, then dissolve or remain mysteriously lodged there and are physically incorporated by those who hear or read them. These metaphors also appear in other works in the exhibition, such as Airborne Newscast, 2013, Vicious Circular Breathing, 2013, Babbage Nanopamphlets, 2015, and Volute 1: Vicous.
Au clair de la lune, 2016.
A Draft of Shadows (excerpt)
(Translated by Eliot Weinberger)
To see the world is to spell it.
Mirror of words: where was I?
My world watch me from the puddle
of my memory. Syllables of water
shine in a grove of reflections
stranded clouds, bubbles above a bottom
that changes from gold to rust.
Rippling shadows, flashes, echoes,
the writing not of signs, but of murmurs.
My eyes are thirsty. The puddle is Stoic:
the water is for reading, not drinking.
In the sun of the high plains the puddles evaporate.
Only some faithless dust remains,
and a few intestate relics.
Where was I?
Here
Translated by Charles Tomlinson
My steps along this street
resound
in another street
in which
I hear my steps
passing along this street
in which
Only the mist is real
Writing
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them
and does not return
Call on Water
2016
Aluminum and steel tank, ultrasonic atomizers, water, computer, custom-made electronics and software
Courtesy of the artist and bitforms gallery
This fountain acts as an interactive poetry machine from which emerge, fragment by fragment, poems by the celebrated Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998(, who was also the artist's uncle. The poems quoted all involve language: the way we see the world through words, and the way words reflect our own image back to us. Our experience of language is always deeply felt, the poems seem to say, implying the visible as much as the tactile and audible, as well as the passage of time. The work suggests that words materialize in the air, carried by the breath of those who speak them, then dissolve or remain mysteriously lodged there and are physically incorporated by those who hear or read them. These metaphors also appear in other works in the exhibition, such as Airborne Newscast, 2013, Vicious Circular Breathing, 2013, Babbage Nanopamphlets, 2015, and Volute 1: Vicous.
Au clair de la lune, 2016.
A Draft of Shadows (excerpt)
(Translated by Eliot Weinberger)
To see the world is to spell it.
Mirror of words: where was I?
My world watch me from the puddle
of my memory. Syllables of water
shine in a grove of reflections
stranded clouds, bubbles above a bottom
that changes from gold to rust.
Rippling shadows, flashes, echoes,
the writing not of signs, but of murmurs.
My eyes are thirsty. The puddle is Stoic:
the water is for reading, not drinking.
In the sun of the high plains the puddles evaporate.
Only some faithless dust remains,
and a few intestate relics.
Where was I?
Here
Translated by Charles Tomlinson
My steps along this street
resound
in another street
in which
I hear my steps
passing along this street
in which
Only the mist is real
Writing
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them
and does not return