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.