A dance of language, the body, and meaning: revisiting the Holographic Poetics Series 2

The other 2 pieces in this series are more conventional print poetries that engage with language through the body and relation. Both (re)circulate or circumnavigate the writings and theory of Barbara Godard, Canadian feminist scholar of translation studies.

The first piece, which accompanied the hologram “Between Light and Letter,” reframes letter and line using spacial dis/orientation to interpret the page multiply. In this exploration of the potency of language and reading, an excerpt of Barbara’s theoretical writing translates through iterations of the same to become both other, and more:

“This project in turn is a semiotic translation of Barbara Godard’s words in dialogue with the language of science and poetics. “In the Drift of Language” performs a meta-collaborative event of interference and intervision: a gathering of various tesserae to explore how “lines of affiliation, of adhesion” produce a temporal smear, a Proustian shudder in those places where memory and desire collide and re-turn, reanimating the body’s errant lines in a hologram’s mercurial mirror“ (Baus and Bouman 2011).

This prose by Godard, given space to dance on the page, and to partner its own parts in unintended ways, moves multiply, colliding and responding with vectors through multiply writings in time, and space.

from “In the Drift of Language” in Open Letter: Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 14:6, Sept 2011. 22