I love reading and writing poems and pondering over deep questions- ephemerality of creation, what is the process of creation to me etc. All these led me create some poetry works.
Kshann-Rachna: (ephemerality/ moment of creation) I wrote and fabricated a 3 dimensional acrostic poem with the acrostic phrase reading ‘expect wonder to just emerge’, when read by rotating it. It’s an acrostic in which the first letter of each line, and the first letters of the last words of each line become part of the phrase which is read when rotating the structure around. I wanted to combine my love for poetry writing (especially acrostics) with that of fabrication and felt an interesting way of doing that would be to take the poem out of the paper and use digital fabrication techniques to create a 3D poem. The poem is about my take on the process of creation.
This is the structure:
The poem is also meant to act as a structure to create a poem-shadow mural, with a light source in the center pointing outwards to create the shadow:
The other direction i wanted to explore was how to make the poetry reading experience richer. Poetry has got layers of meanings that make it so rich, and offer room for personal exploration and engagement and surprises each time one reads it. Poetry has such a free flowing feel to it, yet there are in some senses rules and styles to how poetry is written. Understanding basics like rhythm patterns, rhyme schemes itself can enrich the poetry reading experience a great deal, allowing one to read the right words with right stress amounts and so on. To provide this rhythm scheme as a cue to the user while he/she reads a line of the poem, by running their finger over it, i created a simple haptic feedback system.
I presented these works at the International Symposium for Electronic Arts, held at Vancouver in August 2015.