Cityscapes: Social Poetics/ Public Textualities

Supported by AHRC- Interactive audiovisual collage based on the social poetics and public textualities encountered in the multicultural city of Melbourne, explores a new calligram of natural language sounds and textual signs.

The aim was to integrate e-poetry into the realm of social and urban poetics by using the web as a creative and participatory environment to enable the users to (re) discover/interpret the cityscapes and to bring these compositions in real time back to the city in an LCD urban screen

The multicultural characteristic of Melbourne prompted me to inquire into the calligram of natural language sounds, the visual/textual signs from many different cultures encountered in the city as one walks around, the reasons for this diversity of cultures, why immigrants move to other places and how these cultures evolve and mix. A new calligram appeared, which engendered a poetic space of the language of intercultural exchange, of travelling words (to other languages) and the 'in-between' communicative area generated by the visual and audible qualities of these forms. This new kinetic, nomadic, ever-changing calligram of the city is that of broken human voices, fragmented realities and the composition of different languages encountered in these cityscapes in flux. Extracting visual text from the city environment, deconstructing it and re-mapping it into a different context has been part of the process of this investigation/creation of digital piece as well as gathering phonetic sounds.

Project Participants
Participating individuals (users on this site): 
Maria Mencia
Mark Bennett
Michael Day
Editors of this node:
Maria Mencia