Poetry of Perception [link & animation]

James SchminckeUncategorized

Part 1/8: Poetry of Perception:
PUBLISHED BY HARVARDX NEUROSCIENCE

An eight-part series on representations of perception and sensation made for fundamentalsofneuroscience.com. “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one.” Erwin Schrödinger.

Words by Walt Whitman
Animation by Sophie Koko Gate
3D Floater Animation by Tomas Kemp
Narration by Peter Blegvad
Sound + Music by Oswald Skillbard
Produced by Nadja Oertelt


Note from Carey Dunne
at HYPERALLERGIC

Since Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, the famously banned poetry collection has inspired all kinds of contemporary artistic homages, including Breaking Bad subplots, illuminated manuscripts, Lana Del Rey songs, and a typeface made from images of naked men, to name just a few. London-based animator Sophie Koko Gate‘s mesmerizing cartoon rendition of “Song of Myself” is the latest in this slew of Whitman tributes, and perhaps the most accessible for the internet age.

Narrated in baritone by Peter Blegvad, with suggestive, psychedelic graphics, the animation gives fresh life to the 160-year-old epic poem. Set to Oswald Skillbard’s spastic electronic music, Whitman’s words sound as radical and contemporary as ever. Even those who have read and reread the poem “Song of Myself” will find it strange and new here, thanks to colorful visualizations of “love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine” and strange alien creatures mouthing “the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind.” It’s basically a Walt Whitman music video, with a bit of a Tom Waits vibe. | READ MORE


Video at Vimeo | Link To Source

Civil War Musical 01 – Prologue [Audio]

James SchminckeUncategorized

Via YouTube | On the twelfth of April, 1861, Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, thus beginning the bloodiest conflict in American History — 620,000 dead — more than all other American wars combined. The Civil War remains this nation’s single most definingexperience, ultimately giving new meaning to the word Freedom. Walt Whitman, a young newspaperman destined to become America’s greatest poet wrote: “Future years will never know the seething
hell and the black infernal background of this war — and it is best they should
not– the real war will never get in the books.”


From the MSR Archives | Link to Source

Crossing — Matthew Aucoin [Opera]

James SchminckeUncategorized

Excerpt from the Boston Globe | Link to Source


“Crossing” takes its name and its first line — “What is it, then, between us?” — from Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which Whitman is asking about both what comes between us and what connects us. Aucoin’s libretto draws on Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” as well as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; it even quotes from Federico García Lorca’s darkly exalted “Ode to Walt Whitman” (“your voice like a column of ash”). At such moments, it becomes an epic sweep across centuries of humanity past and future, since, as Aucoin has Whitman say, “neither Time nor Space/?Can keep us apart.” | Read More

Listen to an excerpt:

A Lecture/Recital
with Matthew Aucoin:


A Collection of links and media related to Matthew Aucoin’s Civil War Opera, “Crossing”

Matthew Aucoin
Official Site