“It's on its way” – Body Poetry
16.5.2021
Three intensive days in Digital Literature Hackathon.
It went very smoothly to team up in digital domains, we had very thoughtful and relaxed conversations and built up our concept ideas. I shared interests with writer, researcher Niina Oisalo and visual designer Shambhavi Singh as we found our group around gestures and poetry.
Body Poetry
Our concept briefly: “Gestures are about the moving bodies gaining social meaning, it is our original language, the primates’ language. Our mission is to explore how meanings and emotions related to gestures can evolve in the digital space.”
We shared an interest in the languages composed of gestures, words and images, how they could appear and evolve in a digital space. We were thinking of gestures as poetry of the body. This project would evolve into its own web-based platform with text fragments, moving images, coded visuals and illustrations.
Gestures as memory
Gestures are the original language, and might be born before vocational ones. This is also about language as continuous re-coding as we have learnt in the social media era.
At the same time how rapidly we might face alienation from the culture of gestures, that we cannot interpret anymore, e.g. in old paintings, and interpretations are made from today’s point of view.
Gestures are holding embodied memories, especially my own interest is in post-internet or post-literature, gestures and visual language which came through digital domains.
We want to make the digital space playground of languages. The new meanings are born from the digital space.
This artistic research is among wider picture as we forget nowadays that we are bodily attached to others, other species, other environments.
The Digital Literature Hackathon on 16th to 18th April 2021, online.
"During the event new concepts for works of digital literature will be created. Digital literature can include for instance interactive literature, hypertexts, sound art and film art, kinetic poetry, text generators and reading in virtual reality." (digitaalinenkirjallisuus.fi/en/)
