aisyalam

Today’s performance at IIUM was a real success and probably my best gig yet—no doubt the previous two stage ventures helped to cultivate the presentation of materials. Amidst another hectic day of this and that—running around settling various matters—I made it to Gombak, set everything up without any trouble, and had a large audience who were very interested in what was going on (partially, of course, because their poetry teachers were requiring them to make multimedia poetry, which none of them had experienced before). I started without introduction, with a brief overview of the trajectory of the modes of poetry from an oral tradition to a postmodern free-for-all. I did a brief demo of the eBook to orient them a bit, playing a sound poem, an animated poem, and a poem of interlinked passages. Then I read three poems that were accompanied by animations (“How Fast Can a Zebra Run,” “Why do Durians Smell,” and SPAM poems). The rest of the show was similar to Saturday night’s set of Malaysian poems, except I left out the Cyberjaya/backwards piece and had to stand on a table (in front of 100+ young, impressionable students and some faculty) in order to get the projector to project the images on to me (draped in a sheet). The timing was exactly perfect: the poems, images, and soundtrack all ended at the same moment. The reading was followed by Q&A, which got off to a slow start but eventually the students warmed up and asked about how to approach acquiring and balancing content, the implication of letting the machine create and project emotions, asked more about the historical background of digital poetry. I handed out a number of cd-roms, and a few students took down the url of the “13 States” website (http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/13states). Now I’m beginning to wonder how the work is going to translate on the other side of the world, and guess I’ll begin to get a sense of that at September’s “BIOS: the poetics of life in digital media” in West Virginia (http://www.as.wvu.edu:8000/clc/bios_flyer).


Afterwards the gig went to a café with my host Tanja, which was nice, and ended the day by attending a lecture by Lee Kian Seng (http://www.leekianseng.com/) at the 153 Gallery, in which he presented an overview of his work from the 60’s onward and discussed the politics and inaccuracies regarding Malaysian installation art in the history books.