Researcher: Meizi Zhang
Meizi's research involves the experimental verification of concrete poetry using a practice-based approach: by associating digital media with visual poetry, to discover the possibilities that digital media brings to concrete poetry, and to seek out the poetic features of digital media.
In the digital technology platform, where texts and words can move around, break up, flicker, magnify and diminish on the screen, new media have indeed brought new potential and infinite possibilities for concrete poetry, but they’ve also created new problems in the need to determine how digital poetics are, in Ezra Pound’s words, “charged with meaning.”
Therefore, Meizi's research focuses on this question: what kinds of poetic expression are best served by a digital dynamic?
The exhibited work, as an interactive digital poem, attempts to explain the deep meanings under the appearance, and present an emerging visual language.
This visual language covers literature, symbolism, typography, and the three-dimensional. It also interprets an abstract meaning of language, helping viewers to understand digital poetry as language, instead of experiencing it just as a ‘fantasy game.’
'4-Minutes River' is a digital dynamic poem consisting of visual and audio effects and interactive experience aiming to explore (or test) in interactive media, how concrete poetry can express its poetic features using the soundscape of a babbling baby in an environment without languages.
'4-Minutes River' treats its readers equally wherever they are from, whatever language they speak. Everyone can understand and sense the poetry in it.
