concreat/visuel
staring blocks
Through Through. The thread finds its optic hole.
To have visual poetry be housed, for a moment, in a space that can be both distinguished from and aligned with other art forms.
How to speak about vispo? For one, the relatable denominator is how we see. How language affects us visually, how staring at language is essential to reaping functionality out of vispo. In this case, we’d consider a stare to be an elongated gaze, and staring the hyper-focused verb from which we gain further insight.
The alphabet is continually morphing. It is both evolving and devolving into a periodic table of speech elements.
There is an underlying desire for the product of alphabet, of any culture, to reinvent itself. We scribe anew. It reminds us that alphabet, the letter, is a drawn experience - drawn either by hand or by the machines we have built. The physical ingredients of language, the letters, dream of how to form and reform themselves into new meaning. The meanings we live with are changing. The hierarchy of sight sense has made our engagement with the world virtually all visual. The eyes crave a refreshed approach so that they can seek and find new content. Vispo is all eyes, is the delirium of alphabet shift.
You are here, seeing language undo itself.
Staring your way into and through the letter as object.
On the other hand, public text has become ubiquitous and maligns our sensibilities. We prefer to reassess and reconfigure the visual result of our lives – to make new what’s seen – to make what’s seen new. Exploding the hinges of what holds a letter in place. To toss the known so as to venture into unfamiliar alphabetic unknowns.
The Book: staring@poetics, Essay and Visual Poetry, 2011, 5" x 8", 56 pgs, Full Color. Xexoxial Editions - $12
To read about the book or purchase a copy - http://xexoxial.org/is/staring_at_poetics/by/nico_vassilakis
To read about the book or purchase a copy - http://xexoxial.org/is/staring_at_poetics/by/nico_vassilakis
