A metric below distance, exhibition view at Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Dresden, 2024. Photograph: Sjoerd Knibbeler.
Poemetrics (still frame), installation view at Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Dresden, 2024.
Poemetrics (still frame), installation view at Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Dresden, 2024.
A metric below distance, exhibition view at Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Dresden, 2024.
Rheinischer Sagenkreis, installation view at Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Dresden, 2024. Photograph: Sjoerd Knibbeler.
Transmedia project, with artworks:
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.
Realized within the framework of the Hydromedia residency program at HfG Karlsruhe with support from the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union. Support: Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe.
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