Send & Receive: Poetry, Film & Technology in the 21st Century (symposium at FACT Liverpool, part of the Type Motion exhibition)

FACT, in association with the University of Liverpool, PoetryFilm and The Poetry Society, is pleased to invite you to imagine the future of poetry at our symposium Send & Receive: Poetry, Film & Technology in the 21st Century.  With presentations from artists, scientists and thought leaders, the day examines innovative platforms involved in contemporary poetic practices.

Part of the Type Motion exhibition still running in FACT. 

The symposium will include three distinct discussion areas, with audiences invited to join facilitated discussions after each segment.  Confirmed speakers include George Szirtes (poet and translator), Deryn Rees Jones (poet and director of Centre for New and International Writing), Zata Kitowski (Director of PoetryFilm), Marco Bertamini and Georg Meyer (Visual Perception Labs UoL), Suzie Hanna (Animator and Professor of Animation Education) and Jason Nelson (hypermedia poet and artist, Australia).

How has the digital age changed the way in which poetry might be written, performed, communicated and received? This symposium brings together poets and practitioners in the visual arts to think about the potentials, difficulties, dialogues and collaborative possibilities that these new forms of poetry might take on. Poetry’s long standing engagement with the space between language and material world, between an embodied voice, voice as text and a transcendent self  meets new possibilities  in the 21st century.

Tickets including refreshments and lunch: 25 GBP, discounts available. 

Venue: The Box, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool

5th February 2015, 10am – 5pm

For more information please contact aoife.robinson@fact.co.uk

Biographies:

George Szirtes

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England in 1956 after the Hungarian Uprising. He is the author of some fifteen books of poetry and roughly the same of translation from Hungarian. In 2004 he won the T S Eliot Prize for his book, Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 for The Burning of the Books and for Bad Machine (2013). Bloodaxe published his New and Collected Poems in 2008. His translations from Hungarian have won international prizes, including the Best Translated Book Award in the USA for László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (2013). 56, a book-length poem collaboration with poet Carol Watts will be published by Arc this year. Another press, MIEL, has recently published a series of chapbooks of his fragments written on Twitter with characters like Uncle Zoltán, Child Helga, Langoustine and a set of miscellaneous invented Germans, Germania. He has also worked with a variety of composers and visual artists over many years and edited a number of anthologies. He retired from UEA in December 2013.

Deryn Rees-Jones

Deryn Rees-Jones is a poet and a critic. Her collection of poems Burying the Wren was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.  Her most recent project And You, Helen (Seren, 2014) explored the life of Helen Thomas through poetry, prose and animation in collaboration with the artist Charlotte Hodes. She is currently collaborating with Hodes on a new filmpoem, ‘Questions of Travel’. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool

Zata Kitowski

Zata Kitowski is the founder and director of PoetryFilm, a research art project launched in 2002 dedicated to researching the development of poetry film, and exploring semiotics and meaning-making within the artform. PoetryFilm was founded through Zata’s personal practice as a writer and as an artist, and through an interest in the creation and perception of emotion and meaning. Since 2002, Zata has curated over 60 PoetryFilm events celebrating experimental poetry films and other avant-garde text/image/sound material at venues including Tate Britain, The ICA, Southbank Centre, Cannes Film Festival, O Miami, and CCCB Barcelona. Talks include sessions for MA Creative Writing at Warwick University, MA Filmmaking at The National Film & Television School, and MA Visual Communication at The Royal College of Art. Zata has also judged poetry film prizes at the Southbank Centre and Zebra Festival in Berlin. PoetryFilm is supported by Arts Council England, who recently funded the cataloguing of the entire PoetryFilm Archive, and is an accredited member of Film Hub London, part of the BFI Audience Network. Zata holds BA and MA degrees from Warwick University where she studied literature, poetry, film, psychoanalysis and creative writing. Alongside PoetryFilm, Zata has worked internationally on projects within the branding, marketing and advertising industries. (poetryfilm.org)

Suzie Hanna

Professor Suzie Hanna is Chair of Animation Education at Norwich University of the Arts. She is an animator who collaborates with other academics, writers and artists, and whose research interests include animation, poetry, puppetry and sound design. She has made numerous short films all of which have been selected for international festival screenings, TV broadcast or exhibited in curated shows. She contributes to journals, books and conferences, as well as teaching masterclasses for the Oxford Literary Festival and the Rothermere American Institute in 2014 and 2015.  She has led several innovative projects including animated online international student collaborations and digital exhibitions of art and poetry on Europe’s largest public HiDef screen. She works as a production consultant and as an international academic examiner, was a member of the AHRC Peer Review College from 2009-2014, is secretary on the Executive of NAHEMI (The National Association of Moving Image in Higher Education), a member of ASIFA and an active board member of Norwich Puppet Theatre. She plays the violin and the musical saw.

Jason Nelson

Born from the Oklahoma flatlands of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason Nelson stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and net-artworks of odd lives, building confounding art games and all manner of curious digital creatures. Currently he professes Net Art and Electronic Literature at Australia’s Griffith University in the Gold Coast’s contradictory shores. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around the globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list (Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize), organizational boards he frequents (Australia Council Literature Board and the Electronic Literature Organization), and numerous other accolades (Webby Award), but in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital poetry portal (www.digitalcreatures.net) attracts each year.

Marco Bertamini (Visual Perception Labs)

I was born in Vigevano (Italy) in 1966. I have studied at the University of Padua and at the University of Virginia (USA). When I moved to the University of Liverpool in 2000 I set up a visual perception lab in the Psychology Department. Today my group works on basic visual psychophysics and spatial attention, but also on the integration of information across the senses and on the link between perception and emotion. We analyse behaviour, sensitivity thresholds, eye movements and brain activity (EEG). Understanding vision can help in understanding also how people relate to works of art, as illustrated by the Venus effect (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_effect). Please see the lab’s webpage for more information about specific projects (www.bertamini.org/lab) and here for key figures in international poetry. www.poetrysociety.org.uk

The Poetry Society

The Poetry Society is the leading poetry organisation in the UK. For over a hundred years it has been a passionate source of energy and ideas, opening up and promoting poetry to an ever-growing community of people around the world. Its activities in publishing, commissioning and learning, encourage new ideas, new opportunities and new talent in poetry, in print, live performance and online. It publishes influential poetry magazine The Poetry Review, and runs awards including the National Poetry Competiton, Foyle Young Poets of the Year and the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. The Poetry Society has been an active commissioner of film poems for several years, pairing film-makers, composers and animators with poets such as Alice Oswald, Liz Berry and John Glenday. It works regularly with Scotland’s Filmpoem project. The Poetry Society has led many mass-participatory micropoetry projects, often via its online platform Young Poets Network; and is currently working with partners including the Premier League, Cape Farewell, and the Canal & River Trust. It has a long-standing partnership with the University of Liverpool, presenting lectures and performances in Liverpool from key figures in international poetry. www.poetrysociety.org.uk

Image:

Trade Tattoo, Len Lye. GB 1937. Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation and The British Postal Museum and Archive. From material preserved and made available by the New Zealand Film Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua