A metric below distance

Transmedia project, with artworks:

Poemetrics, 2024
Realtime generative video installation, 16:9 color, infinite loop
Realtime weathercam streams, open data, Adelheid von Stolterfoth’s poems, code

Rheinischer Sagenkreis, 2024
Digital print on paper, 1x3.5m
Adelheid von Stolterfoth’s poems, Johann Gottfried Tulla’s map, algorithm

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 at the banks of the Rhine in the 19th century.

Through the speculative encounter between poetess Adelheid von Stolterfoth and engineer Johann Tulla in time as a point of departure, the project addresses the present ecological effects of the engineer’s rectification of the river Rhine by re-appropriating Stolterfoth’s poems from their metric. Face to face with a climate in transition and increased environmental uncertainty at the Rhine, led partially by its rectification, 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 ecological reverie?

Poemetrics consists of a real-time visualization of Stolterfoth’s poems being generatively altered by real-time data from the river Rhine. By means of open-access data and imagery gathered along the river by weather stations, the poems gradually lose their feet in search of a metric akin to an environment in transition. As poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite suggests: “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters” (Brathwaite, 1984). As the river land sinks and its temperatures rise, the work re-appropriates the past idealized image of a river trapped in form to compose new ones as they unfold in a new climate.

Rheinischer Sagen-Kreis departs from a cartographic map of the river Rhine before and after its engineered rectification by Tulla, portraying an algorithmic transposition of this map and Stolterfoth’s poems. Here, the river’s lines and flood areas become a poem’s concrete form: at times sinking in meaningless breaks, at times acquiring new poetic force in reverie.