The poetry anthology (also called florilège or album) remains one of the most effective ways of getting in touch with poetic works for a wide audience. The short format, the guided circulation around a theme or form, as well as the selection made by an informed editor, encourage a less intimidating encounter with the poetry practices of certain periods or cultures. In the form of a printed book, the anthology has made it possible to disseminate diverse traditions in the West, but generally reduced to silent reading, which has often removed their oral, gestural or ritual characteristics. Today, it seems impossible to produce an anthology of poetry in Switzerland without taking performance or even slam into account. The video anthology lends itself particularly well to exploring contemporary practices, and can also serve as an archive for poets reading their works.

Technique

This anthology is based on sixteen videos made in January 2018 at the University of Lausanne by Nadejda Magnenat (shooting and editing) and Antonio Rodriguez (concept and selection). The constraint was the naked voice, in a stripped-down setting, without artifice. Among the thirty in the selection, each poet had seven minutes. The entire anthology is published in free access on the poesieromande.ch website. (hyperlink: www.poesieromande.ch/anthologie)

This series of videos was designed to show how large format presentations can be used as an ideal medium for an exhibition. We wanted to achieve an object that could give the impression of power and quality that rivals a beautiful double-page print. In view of the geographical unity of the anthology, the screens evoke a Swiss flag with a cross on a red background, without however constituting a Swiss cross per se. It was indeed important that the language of the screens corresponded to that of today's ordinary screens, usually in 16:9 format. Like beautiful paper, the range of screens is among the most expensive on the market. These freeboard (brand) screens are generally used for advertising at trade fairs for the luxury industry, watchmaking or perfume. As in the world of printing, such a choice underlines how much poetry can highlight the precious materials of each era.

The design medium was created by Patrick Donaldson for the Laboratory for Experimental Museology, directed by Professor Sarah Kenderdine at the EPFL. This team had already worked on the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival. Care was especially taken in the interaction and the distribution of the videos: Patrick

Background

In January 2018, Nadejda Magnenat and Antonio Rodriguez shot in a few days just under thirty videos with poets based in French-speaking Switzerland. This anthology aroused great interest from the press, particularly the newspaper Le Temps, which not only covered the launch, but also served as a springboard for the first two videos. Narcisse's split-screen, which featured the lead voice and backing vocals of "Toi, tu te tais", attracted more than 10,000 views in one weekend. Initially posted on the poesieromande.ch website (founded in 2011) from March 2018 to April 2019, these videos have been viewed more than 35,000 times to date. Without claiming that each click corresponds to an attentive viewing, this scale of contact via internet corresponds to contemporary digital relationships. From now on, the video anthology finds a physical object that best embodies it and allows collective public viewing, with impressive effects and possible sharing.

 

Rather than electing a poet to represent a territory, we start from a rigorous observation of the contemporary poetic network and the different actors that make it up. This project is part of a "literary geography" that is particularly important today. In order to have reliable data, the project is based on an annual poetry festival that has covered the whole of Western Switzerland since 2016, the "Printemps de la poésie". Although the term "cartography" has become fashionable, it is still often used metaphorically. However, in its methods, it implies a rigorous work of reconnaissance of the terrain to represent the activity in a territory, based on both quantitative and qualitative data. The poetic cartography of a territory has thus become an original project led by the University of Lausanne, based on data collected since 2011. In addition to the events that took place during an edition of the festival, the dynamic map first of all makes it possible to deploy the development of the four editions to highlight the rise in strength of a project, but above all the places and the main actors of poetry in Western Switzerland.

 

Technique

The statistics at the source of this mapping were collected by the University of Lausanne, from the Printemps de la poésie festival. Criteria for a network map were selected on the basis of the events carried out: location, organization, partnership of institutions, type of institution. Several quantitative criteria were then selected: audience, budget. Finally, the whole involved a weighting by qualitative criteria: scope of the host institution (from local to international, regional to national), media recognition, prestige of the guests. The "statistics" part of the project was supervised by prof. François Bavaud (Faculty of Arts).

The second part of the work was carried out by a team from the Faculty of Geosciences of the University of Lausanne. Prof. François Bavaud (Faculty of Arts). Christian Kaiser was able to create an interactive network map based on the developed statistics.

The media design was carried out by Patrick Donaldson for the centre headed by Prof. Sarah Kenderdine at EPFL. This team had already worked on the "Super-vision" project (2019), based on the 8,000 theses defended at EPFL over 50 years. This project integrated an interactive browser based on thematic and lexical comparisons.

This film presents in an edited form the vernissage of the book Le Poème et le territoire (Black on White, 2019), starting from a launch party organised on 3 June 2019 by the University of Lausanne. This book provided an opportunity to discover the considerable poetic heritage of Western Switzerland. Byron, Wordsworth, Hugo, Lamartine, Rilke, Hardy, Borges are all great figures of world literature who, in the course of their European peregrinations, have sought and found the sublime while contemplating the lakes, mountains, castles, vineyards and vast plains of Switzerland. We also find many great poets born in this region: Cendrars, Jaccottet of course, but also Gustave Roud, Anne Perrier, Alexandre Voisard, Corinna Bille, or the songwriter Jean Villard Gilles. To these authors from here and elsewhere, Western Switzerland owes an image, built up by the enthusiasm of the first travellers and then of the tourists who came on pilgrimage in the footsteps of the poets, in order to immerse themselves in the same landscapes. A true "lyrical valley", Western Switzerland has a rare aesthetic density and is a true world poetic heritage.

 

Technique

This project is not really based on technological innovations, but on how to make a transnational heritage known through a book on different media. The director then suggests a journey through the pages, highlighting the graphic components of the reading, while the voice over unfolds a narration enriched by expert interviews conducted in the studio. The film is based on the slide show developed for the occasion.

 

The Recombinatory Poetry Wheel is a reiteration of the previous installation "Infinite Line" (2014). By giving visitors the opportunity to recombine the poetic ensemble of Singaporean poet Edwin Thumboo, the installation offers a new spectator mode for poetry performance. After filming the poet reciting 27 of his best poems, the interactive design of the work offers the visitor random access to the database; it then becomes possible to intertwine segments of Thumboo's poems to create a spontaneous rereading of his texts. "Infinite Line" was first presented in a 360° immersive projection room, where visitors were then confronted with 27 full-size video performances. The "Recombinatory Poetry Wheel" is both an aesthetic and technical reformulation of this first installation. Instead of a cylindrical projection, a circular image 200cm in diameter is projected against the wall, presenting an arrangement of Edwin Thumboo's 27 videos. The visitor then uses a rotary knob to select the reading of the poem of his choice. The resulting indeterminate assemblage of readings, accompanied by the texts printed in the center of the screen, then forms new poetic entities in Thumboo's work.

The "Infinite Line/Recombinatory Poetry Wheel" creates interactive performances resulting in a new repertoire of the poet's body and literature. The most obvious analogical antecedent is that of Raymond Queneau and his "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" (1961) - a poem printed in such a way that each line can be separated from the others and rearranged. The installation is also reminiscent of the Surrealists' "exquisite corpse" and the cut-ups of William Burroughs and Brion Gyson. Today's digital systems have enabled media art to create new forms through the use of audio-visual databases, which can be accessed interactively.

While the Recombinatory Poetry Wheel offers an unlimited deployment of multi-temporal narrative conjunctions, this de- and re-construction follows a unity of thought and form corresponding to Thumboo's identity and status as an author. Thus, the installation offers the viewer the possibility of exploring a multitude of possible combinations from 27 poems, creating personal "meta-poems".

Background

Ligne infinie / Roue de la poésie recombinatoire

2014 : Festival culturel du 30e anniversaire de CityU, Gallery 360, Run Run Shaw Creative Media
Centre, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Chine
2014 : Double exposition de Jeffrey Shaw et Hu Jieming, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, Chine
2017 : L'art de l'immersion, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Allemagne
2018 :     Ramon Llull et l'Ars Combinatoria, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Allemagne
2018 :     Thinking Machines, ArtLab, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL),
Lausanne, Suisse
2019 :     Passé Augmenté x Présent Augmenté, Centre des Arts d'Enghien-les-Bains, Enghien-les-
Bains, France

 

At a time when artificial intelligence intervenes in several aspects of daily life, it seemed necessary to show how it could also help us in today's creative textual processes. Poetry often passes for the place of pure inspiration in front of the blank sheet of paper, but this is to forget too quickly how much it is accompanied by traditions well known to poets, dictionaries of synonyms or rhymes, learning to calligraphy. Moreover, assisted creation does not pose any problem in photography: this is the case of digital aids in modifying the brightness, sharpness or other characteristics of the image. Similarly, the creative process can be supported by artificial intelligence or parametric fonts (developed in recent years), as well as self-generated layout.
Does this mean that artificial intelligence becomes creative? Instead of taking the illusory and frightening option of replacing man with text generators, which are still quite defective, we have opted for an intervention on the different strata of poetic creative writing. Men and machines collaborate in a constant dynamic: the machine suggests, while man constantly chooses; it never replaces him, but helps him to make the best choices. This workshop invites us to explore the path of poetry with new tools, as in an assembly line leading to a vast roller that collects and assembles the poetic energies of the exhibition.

 

Technique

This workshop uses artificial intelligence, which learns probabilities of word sequences through "formal neural networks", with several layers connected directly to each other and recursively over time.  Thus, after optimizing the connections between neurons by observing 6,000 poems (a step called "training"), the system can estimate the probability of a sequence of words presented to it.  Conversely, it is also possible to produce word sequences that maximize this probability, and will thus appear as well-elaborated verses or stanzas. The parameters of form underline constraints on the length of the sequences; themes and emotions are modulated by the combination of several models, trained on poems previously identified as representative of these same themes or emotions; rhymes are adjusted by searching among the most probable words those whose endings make it possible to obtain the desired rhyme.

Background

In order to help the artificial intelligence to generate a first sketch, two aspects are left to the visitor's choice: the form of the poem (quatrains, haiku, free verse) and the theme (love, death, war, seasons, spirituality...). In order to eliminate syntactic errors or spelling weaknesses in the text generators, which work by statistical comparison, the creator can correct the text and improve it after this first step. Then, he asks the machine to run lexical suggestions on an emotional register (with emotional degrees to choose from), as well as in the area of rhyming phonics. With the help of cursors, the creator gives an emotional colouring to the text: more joyful or melancholic?

To finish the poem, it remains to consider the calligraphic tradition, through the research of fonts. The typeface used, as well as its layout, can support the meaning of the text and give a visual idea of the content that the words convey. The last stage of the creative process as well as the final installation focuses on these aspects. The shape of the typographic typeface of the poem is determined by the choices made during the various stages of its creation. The creator may modify the typeface to some extent, in order to accentuate its radical aspect or, on the contrary, to make it easier to read. The poem follows its path: printed during the exhibition on a monumental sheet or individually consultable online, photographed on a smartphone and shareable at will.

 

Adapting to readers' preferences is the dream of digital anthologies. But how best to capture the tastes without resorting to lengthy questionnaires or meticulous observations as you read?  The exploration of new forms of anthology aims to improve and better understand the contacts of a wide public with the poetic heritage. The principles of the installation are close to music platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music, with the possibility of creating "radios" representative of our musical tastes. Rather than following a pre-selected selection composed by a poetry expert, this anthology gives way to interaction and invites discovery. The project is developed from 1,500 texts tagged and inserted into the database. The sequences of poems adapt to the visitor's taste, who can immediately share them by reading them aloud to others. Here, readers are also organizers of the logical sequences, and they discover 19th century poetry. The anthology is in French and English. It obeys two distinct principles: one by proximity of a quality (labelling); the other by artificial intelligence. In order to enhance the discovery of the two, the anthology allows reading aloud as well as the recognition of the criteria that determine the sequences.

 

Technique

This first setting up of the bilingual anthology Poetrify is based on 1,000 texts in French and 500 poems in English, that is to say more than 20,000 verses, verses or lines of prose. The first phase of the work consists of checking the texts' editing, guaranteeing their quality and labelling them ("tags") according to the author's gender, poetic form, themes and the various criteria selected. The same texts were used for the database that fed the artificial intelligence.

In this digital anthology, we offer everyone a way to explore a vast collection of poems. Arrowed, the itinerary follows the preferences identified as one progresses through the anthology. To implement such an anthology, the machine offers a range of explicit preferences that delimit the initial part of the route.  Then, a less explicit similarity, using artificial neural networks to represent the words, makes it possible to continue the journey in the logic of the beginning, with the promise of surprises and happy discoveries to populate one's personal anthology.