Hear/Say

A break from the photoshoot; a one a.m. cereal break is a very special occasion indeed. I swear food tastes holier in the night.

So part of this whole digital excitement, or era of information, or whatever you call it (the innernetz are here! The innernetz killed the radio/television/music star!) is the archive of data, whether it be archive.org (BE WARNED: if you are at all prone to deadly curiosity, stay away from this site. You will be overwhelmed and cursed with a thirst to see everything), or blogs (archive of entries), or Facebook (clusterfuck of personal stuff that many strangers probably see), or Youtube/Hulu/whatevertvnetwork.com.

Extensive archival projects may be a result of another phenomenon: file sharing leads to access to private archives in order to make an inclusive pool of data and information; moving the newspaper online includes an archive section so people may pass on and continue to compare recent and more distant pasts even as the present unfolds. Throughout this process, this mess of information is a virtual universe– archive.org is the very tip of the molecule on top of a very large and infinite iceberg; so if you want your information known, you’re going to have to dress it up and take it around town, make it sexy, exciting, and easy as the village bicycle.

All sexual innuendos aside, the appeal of aesthetic is increasingly important in order to differentiate your data and information from sinking into the quick sand of unnoticed oblivion. This pressure to differentiate, innovate, distinguish, and attract has caused quite the market for creative juice and innovative capabilities: certain traditions of presentation (the paper. the pencil. the powerpoint, even) are thrown aside for more toggle-able, sleeker mediums–

My example of this? Texts in the past that were born unto mere parchment (maybe even vellum), chained to the physical world by the scrawl of ink or even born into a historical moment…

I discovered a fascinating YOUTUBE channel called “Poetry Animations” (poetryanimations) where the recording of a poem being read aloud is matched with a moving face. Usually a picture of the author is used, and the creator of this channel animates the face by manipulating a still photo– you can tell this when the lips pucker and slightly distorts the rest of the screen, but what is uncanny is the detailed expressions “reanimated” by the channel’s author– eyebrow raises, pauses, furrowed brows, etc. are all used to convey the “true essence” of the poet, or in order to recreate an interpretation of the poem’s emotional aura:

Another example of textual animation is the animation of speech to be more visually stimulating. Animations can serve to be sexy distractions or imply meaning to the words…

The Gettysberg Address, animated:

Gettysburg Address from Adam Gault on Vimeo.

Does this animation of text illustrate meaning? Does it supplicate or suffocate the imagination? Will it be increasingly harder to imagine our reality as it becomes more virtual? Did I just blow my mind with the implications of that last question?
Daylight savings just happened. I will leave it at that.

Graceee