Eye Dances

Disclaimer: This piece is based on a recollection of a news story from the early 00s that I've read as a kid. The funny thing is - now I can't find any verifiable information about this initiative. Zhytomyr newspapers never were into the digitization of their archives, and since I vaguely recall that it was somewhere around 2002-03 - even if I could find the source - it would have been lost to time at this point almost for sure. So it is basically a myth. Or a simulacrum, an attempt to make sense of a distant memory.

But even if it is made up - the idea is still worth thinking about for a bit. That's why I've tried to conjure it back into existence.

***
2000s were rough for the Ukrainian medical system. By then, it was still deep in the soviet paradigm, but the world around it was different, and so it was barely operating at the required level. Money and resources were always a problem. There were not enough of both. Everyone was overworked and underpaid. So there were a lot of volunteers who tried their best to make a difference.

One such group was dealing with various partially or entirely paralyzed patients in Zhytomyr City Hospital. The problem was that those patients were bored and had barely any means of passing the time in-between the procedures, which wasn't very good for their morale. What can be worse than a depressed, paralyzed person? The volunteers were there to offer moral support and some routine care.

One way or another, it all came to one particularly oddball initiative.

The idea was to make patients experience fun and the world around by moving eyes in specific patterns. It was something like eye dances. I assume that it was a part of some routine to keep eye muscles from atrophy. Albeit embellished with some sleek conceptual art presentation.

Its goal was to engage paralyzed patients who could only move their eyes. By moving them in a particular way - it would be as if they interacted with the world, digested information differently. So it would not be as sad for them to be in the permanent lockout of the world due to their unfortunate condition.

The whole thing's presentation was like an old school Fluxus score. There were randomized patterns of dots and lines with directional arrows. The sheets were probably around A4 or A5 format so that there would be quite a pattern.

One could follow it through, probably get tired by doing it and go on contemplating the experience. From this point of view - it looks like some exercise.

What is left unknowable is how it was "received" by the target audience. Or even - was it even possible to understand whether or not this thing was actually useful? For me, the whole thing seems like a huge stretch, and I doubt it was genuinely helpful. It is hard to believe that those patients were into such stuff.

I think it was one of the many ideas that were tried once or twice and then abandoned without a second thought. It is just that this particular thing was written about, and by coincidence, I happened to read it back then. Now, reading about AvantAppalachia disabled issue - the association brought it back.

Bil Sabab's got a brand new book - Da Eel (Viktlosheten Press, 2020)

I've got a new release out at Viktlosheten Press. It is called Da Eel and it is what i would like to call "bringing future back into poetry". That's a bold statement, but there is no other way to put. I mean - why even bother doing something if you don't have an ambition of making a difference?

So, what this thing is about.

Here's how my original pitch looked like:

• Da Eel is a series of abstract visual poems based on barcodes and typographic slabs.
• The idea is to create inhuman, machine-like poetry.
• The images are inspired and partially made out of Peter Saville's poster for New Order Movement.
• The original image was glitched, stretched out and squished. 
• The bits of the glitched images provided raw materials that were later edited into the presented pieces. These bits were augmented with other data visualization images like frequency heatmaps and culled into final pieces.

Later on, i wrote this:

• This series is an attempt at finding poetry elsewhere, in the poetic text transformed beyond comprehension.
• These pieces were made out of frequency heatmaps of various documents combined wth the Peter Saville visual aesthetic. 
• It an amalgamation of data visualization, enigma of inca quipu writing and the utility of industrial design. 
• It uses aesthetic qualities of the aforementioned to forge something else.

Not that hard to get around. 

The whole project took place during a tumultuous period of late April to early May of 2019. At that time i was either worried about my employment prospects or being really tired of being where i was. After 4 years spent on Roadrage - i wanted to go back to visual poetry and explore its nether reaches. Something i wasn't seeing often on vispo blogs. 

I had this thing bumbling in my head over and over again - Merab Mamardashvili's statement that there's no need to look for the philosophy in a philosophic texts - because there's none of it in them. 

So i started to look elsewhere.

The Peter Saville connection is a stretch. I was remixing his stuff back then and the whole thing started as straightforward image glitching. But as it turned out - you can't really remix the hell out of the thing by simply pulling the toggles of the image editor back and forth. It is fun but no cigar. If you really wanted to make something profound - you need to take it apart and bash bit by bit. 

But Saville provided me with the right frequency. That mess of glitches gradually turned into a blueprint. The series move away from putting together some fancy geometric shapes - now it was more or less an assumption of how machine's fairy tale book would have looked like if it went to print for some reason. That's what really kickstarted the series.

The process resembled putting together magic spells. I've figured out some sort of basic structure and started combining different elements as if it was a sentence. It was like a chant of data being captured in a moment. Something decidedly non-poetic. Exactly what i needed.

A couple of weeks later i had enough pieces for publication and that's where Viktlosheten folks entered the picture. We had a great time turning the series into a print release. 

The rest and the book you can order here. 

Vladimir Nabokov - "The Original of Laura" Index Card Reverso X's

Back in 2010 i was tasked with writing a review for then-recently published "The Original of Laura" aka unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It was a throwaway review for entertainment mag. Some context plus basic retelling of the plot. The book had a lot of buzz. Because of that it was deemed as viable for consumer review for the target audience - Zhytomyr's bohemians.

The book was terrible, mostly because it was just a jumbled mess of bits and pieces that were yet to come into any cohesion. It was raw, rough and bloody. Far from anything you can even remotely recommend or promote. You could see all of the Nabokov's style signatures but none of the grace and pace. The other problem with this book was that you can't really review it in the constraints of a 500 word piece. If you do it straight - give some context, retell the plot, recommend, not recommend, etc - it just wouldn't work because that way the book resembles a pretentious romance novel. Which it is not because it is not even there.