A dance of language, the body, and meaning: revisiting the Holographic Poetics Series 1

3 Words

“3 Words,” the inception of the Holographic Poetics Series, was first shown on December 5th and 6th 2008 for Inspiring Collaborations: a Symposium in Honour of Barbara Godard. It is a 2×2.5 foot laser lit pulse hologram that acts as a window frame onto a 4x4x4 foot scene.

Bodies make meaning as they breathe, move and meander toward or away from the seen, seaming desire and memory into the spatial relations between letters and words as between our ( )others. We read ‘as if’ there is something to get, to comprehend, and are left in the drift of language, dancing beneath a tree of knowledge, and of time.

Does language other the body? The Holographic Poetics series recuperates reading and/as movement. It asks us to encounter language in the condition of embodiment: susceptible to both innenweldt and umweldt, as well as a seeking that reaches within and between. Holographic Poetics remind us that, far from being a transparent container of the disembodied objective flow of information, language is both receptive and responsive. A dance partner, it brings us to intimacy when we dare to be moved.

Between Light and Letter

Between Light and Letter” is a laser lit hologram generated from a 3-D model using a pulse laser. Created with the help of Alex Laverick, it is the second algorithm in Dunja Baus and Majero Bouman’s Holographic Poetics Series, which suspends words, letters, and language in suggestive relation. As the “reader” moves his or her body across the frame to view different angles and elements of the scene, the letters move in parallax, at times obscuring one another, at times revealing phonetic and associative elements of their arrangement in space-time. Different angles of the scene and unseen shift as the “reader” moves her body to view a cascade of letters playfully interrupting and insinuating significant phonetic nodes.

Between Light and Letter invites readers to consider nuances—shadows in formation—in the body and language, as both e/merge at the intersection of memory and desire. It evokes “the unthought known” [Christopher Bollas], the unsayable in the rustle of language, where art meets science meets being, on the other side of sound.

Special thanks to the Photon League in Toronto for their support.

Location: Special Projects Gallery, Joan & Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts, Main Floor.