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INTRO: SWIFT TREE (a
multimedia book)
"... because I have read you and sent you
many beautiful words that have not
rendered me all the service I expected
from them, I shall need to make of this
last writing my rearguard, and say the
best I know, so you shall judge them
mercifully.
Because even though you may not love me,
these are things that the eyes enjoy
seeing, the ears hearing and the memory
recalling..."
from "Love's Bestiary" (1250)
Richard de Fournival
1.- Swift Tree may be defined as a
multi-media book, a frame that, using the current technology,
transforms the poetry into something to be seen, heard, read and
enjoyed by any inter active operator, in his/her own screen.
Its merit is to widen, in our midst, the CDRom language to the
domain of creativity, and particularly to poetry, being the first
poetry book from a contemporary author, with these
characteristics, done in Uruguay.
It is a merit as well as a risk, for all that is implied in any
initiative to integrate the most ancient forms of creative
expression with the utmost modern techniques of creation and
production.
2.- Poetry from its origins (if we go back to the Greek epos or
the cosmogony hymns of the ancient Oriental and Occidental
civilizations) has been designed as Chant; a particular way of
blending the sound and image of words created to be recited
accompanied by musical instruments like the lire (an element that
drove to name the genre as Lyric). The Renaissance definition of
the Lire de braccio evokes a string instrument of the XV and XVI
century "used for polyphonic improvisations" (Webster's
Unabridged Dictionary). Such definition is specially adequate to
be rendered into this work of imbrication between verbal and
musical textures that make the foundation of "Swift
Tree".
The poems, previously written, began to mutate harmoniously as
the music, composed and executed by Alvaro Pasquet, was played.
Once the first takes were registered as improvisations, we begun
to shape more clearly the compositions until sound and word
became inseparable one from another. Like in the jam session or
even the payada criolla - an improvised rimed poem, sang-said
over a base of simple guitar music that has its origin in the use
the "gauchos" of the Río de la Plata did of the
"vihuela", a small kind of guitar inherited from the
Spaniards - voice and worded sound complemented each other in a
synchrony that produces an orphic result.
In this line of work "Black juice" and "Fragment
Ride" were improvised directly at the recording studio.
3.- From the nine compositions already mixed in the recording
studio surges the visual stage, integrating images and graphics
that introduce to another expressive level: the CD Rom. This way
the technological and programming approach, coordinated by
Silvina Rusinek, overflows its field and becomes in itself a
creative act.Through drawings, pictures, videos and brief
animation's, created by specialized artists in each field, we are
facing a "wholesome poetic spectacle", a small retable
or little theater to be appreciated through the screen.
The sinesthesic motivation, the hunger for images, and the
diversity of rhythms of the receptor or listener at this end of
the XX century obtains here the possibility to connect with the
ancestral poetical art.
We wanted to preserve the possibility that at the receiving end,
this multimediatic spectator with a wide perceptive development,
could also become a simple reader, so the program shall allow to
read the poems on the screen in different languages (Spanish,
Portuguese and English), taking into account the growing
universality of this format and its broadcasting in the regional
and world market.
The curious reader shall have access to a series of inter text
references that, as in an annotated book, will take him/her to
track myths, legends or poetical discourses implicit in the works
that dialogue, through association, with the poetical tradition
of the ancient times as well as the modern ones.
A lot could be theorized about this project and its applications
in the areas of literary theory incorporated the electronic
media.
As a temporary conclusion, this prologue intends to demonstrate
that poetry, through a CD Rom support far from loosing its
essence, recovers the polyphony of the signs, materializing
through sound and image. It is the word poetically opening and
becoming popular, in a world in which the variety of speeches is
highly multi-sensorial due to the current technological means
related
to the expressive forms of the contemporary and future art.
Tree: it reminds of the
prodigious work of nature, that from roots and trunk arises from
earth to a considerable height, branching away, forming a great
organic unity. Thus the poem arising from the words. On the other
hand it reminds of the elaboration of paper paste, that has been
for the past six centuries, since the print invented by Johannes
Gutenberg (1400-1468), the written support of poetry, and now it
begins to be integrated, not necessarily left aside, to new forms
of reading, through the informatic tree.
Swift: it reminds of
the sound sequence, and mainly, to the rapid transmission
peculiar to the electronic media in the informatic world, in
which the poetic word will still be present.
My warmest thanks to each and everyone of those who made possible
this encounter between root and height, that is what Swift Tree
means to the author.
Luis Bravo
april 1996