Álvaro Seiça & Sindre Sørensen

Artists’ Statement:
aimisola.net/hymiwo.po: a poemtrack for a yet-to-be-written dance piece departs from material produced by AIMISOLA, in respect to the project “voices of immigrant women,” and further research developed by Álvaro Seiça & Sindre Sørensen on immigration, Spanish immigration policies, cultural, social and political issues in Spain. The first-person poem addresses immigrant women in long-term unemployment living in Spain, and the social, professional, linguistic, and educational obstacles that they face. The poem intends to be a possible account and denouncement of immigration, migration, and dislocation aspects, in a broader global scope, though more specifically, in the European context: rootlessness, social and personal hopes, women’s rights, social, gender and sexual inequality and aggression.

The poem starts with an onscreen display of keywords used to write the poem, some of which are hash-tagged. As the poem unfolds onscreen, displaying a fixed line at a set temporal interval, these recurrent keywords scrape real-time tweets. The resulting display is a poetic mash-up of collective text, composed of background and foreground. The combined text can act as textual and visual texture, or active multimodal reading. However, it functions as a timely snapshot of a certain collective consciousness or, perhaps better, it provides an update debate on topics related to the poem that are happening as collective discourse in social media.

The coding mechanics create tensions by juxtaposing a fixed (non-)poetic text with an ever-changing social(-poetic) text, which might be further complicated by the way certain tweets contradict or amplify the lines, or even when the audience participates by inputting tweets as the poem is live performed. Furthermore, interactivity is keyboard-driven. Arrow keys control line display and the avatar (“silence”) progression, as well as a visual representation of duration. The reading progression through the language game questions modes and functions of reading, and roles and boundaries between viewer, reader, user, and player. The “intermezzo” game acts as a scene, or “poemscreen,” using the BSoD as glitch source. An error display screen, the side-scroll game thus critically dialogues with game mechanics, OS errors and factual ocean traversals in the Mediterranean Sea. The very act of reading/living continues only if the reader/player traverses the poemscreen.

aimisola.net/hymiwo.po was originally written in Portuguese and translated into Spanish and English. The soundtrack is “Lighthouse” (2011), by the Swedish jazz band Tonbruket.

Bios:
Álvaro Seiça’s (b. 1983, Portugal) most recent poetry works are aimisola.net/hymiwo.po, in collaboration with Sindre Sørensen (2015), langlibabex, in collaboration with Claire Donato and Luc Dall’Armellina (2015), Ö (2014) and permafrost: 20+1 zeptopoemas sms (2012). Seiça published +- poems and +- essays and 1 play, aktra (2014). In 2007, he co-founded Bypass and Bypass Editions. He is a PhD fellow at UiB, with a project about digital poetry. He edits the database elmcip.net and lives in Bergen, Norway. http://alvaroseica.net @AlvaroSeica Avatar: https://s.gravatar.com/avatar/0fca86745839b3292bba05fc938f90c9?s=80.

Sindre Sørensen (b. 1973, Norway) currently works as a software developer and systems integrator. He works as an independent contractor, delivering to the public sector as well as to the private sector. Sørensen has collaborated with many artists in developing software for installation art, natural language processing and for various systems which deal with language. His most recent collaborative work was an interactive text/video/sensor data transmission system, which was installed in two structures placed in the neighboring cities of Kirkenes (Norway) and Nickel (Russia).