A metric below distance

Transmedia research project

Artworks

Title: Poemetrics
Format: 16:9 color, 1080p generative video installation
Materials: weathercam streams, data, poems, code

Title: Rheinischer Sagen-Kreis
Format: digital print on paper, 1x3.5m
Materials: Adelheid von Stolterfoth’s poems, Johann Gottfried Tulla’s map, algorithm

Title: How to free a river from its margins
Format: lecture and collective performance
Materials: river, paper, voice, pen, concrete poem

Short Description

The project investigates the poetic-technical image between the rectification of a verse and a river that occurred when a poetess and an engineer met. Taking the case study of the river Rhine and the encounter between poetess Adelheid von Stolterfoth and engineer Johann Tulla as a point of departure, the project addresses the present ecological effects of the engineer’s rectification of the river Rhine by re-appropriating its poetic form. Face to face to a climate in transition and increased environmental uncertainty, the project seeks to untame the river through language by freeing Stolterfoth’s poems from their form. At what point do the poetic image of a verse and the technical image of an engineering plan meet in reverie?

Poemetrics portrays the transformation of such poems in present vis-à-vis its images collected in real time by weather stations along the river Rhine. Whereas Rheinischer Sagen-Kreis portrays an algorithmic transposition of Tulla's engineering plan and Stolterfoth's poems, in How to free a river from its margins, we attempt to break apart from the concept of a river altogether through the collective writing of a concrete poem.

Acknowledgments

Realized within the framework of the Hydromedia residency program at HfG Karlsruhe with support from the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.