Gabriel Ricard: I've been reading about MEMORY: A Video Poetry Project and have to say that it sounds like a pretty groundbreaking, exciting project. What can you tell us about it?
Sara Moss: With MEMORY we're really continuing a journey of exploration in poetics and multimedia that we began over six years ago, when Scart and I began blending my poetry with his music and art to create collaborative works. Our first project Slam the Body Politik grew quite organically as we invited others to join us and we eventually produced the CD-ROM.
The seed was really sown for MEMORY during this time. Slam was a work very much in the tradition of protest art, a blend of arts and activism if you like, and that was the focus of the collective at that time. The Second Iraq war had begun, a conservative government was in power in this country that used racism and division very deliberately as political tools. Asylum seekers, including children, were locked up in desert prison camps for years on end. It was a dark time politically and the reaction to these issues is certainly reflected in many of the works included on the CD-ROM, although it was not uniformly political in content.
While we were compiling Slam, a question was emerging in my mind, about what lies beyond protest? About what happens when a particular era has passed, a war has ended or a government changes? Official histories are often works of censorship produced by a ruling class. The voices of ordinary people are rarely heard. It has become a controversial thing to say in the post-modern era, but I believe poets have always been the artists of conscience. Memory has an important place in our poetry, where we often seek to assert the truth of our own lives. Our memories are fundamentally intertwined with our identity, our sense of ourselves. I knew that we needed to follow Slam with a work that explored these questions. While MEMORY is not directly political in focus, this consciousness lies at its core.
The choice of video poetry as the medium for MEMORY also resulted from our experience with Slam. CD-ROM provided us with great opportunities for interactivity and also to include a very wide range of media, in that sense it was more groundbreaking, but it presented certain barriers that are not present with DVD. Someone needs access to a computer and must be seated at it or with it to view a CD-ROM, whereas DVD is really push in and play. We also didn't want to repeat ourselves and this was an area that we personally hadn't tried, so there was another opportunity for learning.
GR: What would you say is the biggest accomplishment you're hoping MEMORY will achieve?
SM: For the people who contribute, we can provide an outlet for their creative expressions which is not overly common in Australia as yet, although the project is open to submissions from everywhere. I know that some of our contributors are making poetry films for the first time and this is very exciting. For both contributors and audience, I hope that the project sparks some interest/discussion on the broader subject of memory. When we start to explore the theme and consider the importance of memory to our creative works, more questions are raised than answered. How do our memories define us and our relationships to others, to the society we live in, and even to the official and recorded histories? Is there even such a thing as authentic memory? How accurate are our memories? Are our memories even our own? These are some of the underlying questions that motivate us to produce MEMORY.
I don't think any artistic project can have a loftier ambition than to provoke some kind of thought or emotional response in the viewer. If that thought then leads to someone acting to explore or assert their own truth, through a creative act or by some other means, then that is success on quite a grand scale for a poetry video project.
GR: When can we hope to see MEMORY come out?
SM: We aim to produce the DVD by July next year. We'll be accepting submissions between now and the end of February 2010. We (Scart and I) have completed two films for the project to date and will be starting work on a third later this month.
GR: The project sounds like an immensely difficult one, compiling so much material from so many different writers and performers. Are you getting a lot of material? More than you were hoping for? Less?
SM: I think the challenge for us to date has been associated with producing our own video poems for the project. We are learning a new medium of expression and discovering its potentialities and limitations in the process. I don't expect the same volume of submissions as we received for our first project because of the medium. It is certainly not as simple to script, film and produce a poetry video, as it is to send in a text poem or a work of digital art. I am happy with the interest we have received to date and I hope this will result in a few more submissions down the track. We welcome submissions by anyone, including readers of this interview, who think their works would fit the project, regardless of how simple or complex those works are.
GR: Are there any artists/writers/etc that you can tell us about right now that you know will be involved in the project? Any you're particularly excited about?
SM: I have been corresponding with a poet/musician, who like us, is working on poetry video for the first time that blends poetry with music and film. I have listened to her spoken word/music soundtrack and her take on the MEMORY project is very much in tune with my own. The soundtrack is beautifully haunting and I can't wait to view the video in its entirety. We have also had support through submissions of work from established poets which is very encouraging for a grassroots collective like our own. Because we are at the beginning of the process of viewing/selecting submissions for the DVD, I won't name names at this stage. I will say that I would like to see more interest from young poets/filmmakers in this project.
GR: It seems to me that the idea with MEMORY is to shake the public's perception of poetry a little bit, present the craft in a medium that many people may not immediately associate with poetry. Would you say that's one of your primary intentions with the project? Who do you hope to surprise with the project?
SM: To take the last question first, I think we are surprising ourselves. Whenever you have a creative vision, you are never sure if the end product will come close to matching it. I am thrilled with our first foray into poetry filmmaking.
I think there are many areas where poetry is presented with other media, there is a growing interest in this country in poetry slams, which have been big in the United States for a long time. This mix of poetry with competitive performance does in some way seek to popularize the art form and enable it to reach wider audiences.
When Scart and I began working together, our aim was really to explore the possibilities of what we could create as a poet working with a musician/artist. Our thoughts were not so much on an end product as on this process of creative discovery. Now of course, we do think about audiences and how to get our work viewed by them. Producing a project in the video medium has both advantages and drawbacks. An advantage is that people are very familiar with the medium of film. A drawback is that people also tend to be passive consumers of this medium, whereas poetry is not an art form that lends itself to passive consumption. Our hope is that audiences will be entertained by the work on MEMORY but also inspired and challenged by it.
GR: Do you think concepts and approaches like MEMORY need to be utilized in order to get poetry out into the world? Do you think that with so many modes of distraction available to people, so many different venues for creative expression and thought that poetry can appeal to people with nothing to go for it but the words themselves?
SM: Ah, controversy! There will always be a place for poetry text on the page and the experience of reading it. Indeed, nothing will ever substitute for this delivery of the words alone to the eyes/ears of the reader/listener. I do have some sympathy with the views of those who say that the poem should be left alone and one of the joys of poetry is the response it evokes in a reader, who conjures their own images and emotional responses. I also think there is a place for "mixing it up" in the arts and delivering poetry in fresh and diverse ways to readers/audiences. We are not reinventing poetry, I wouldn't dare presume such a thing! We are just exploring different avenues for its expression. My view of poetry is also a very encompassing one, while we often hear literary poets bemoan the marginal status of poetry with a capital "P" we forget its overwhelming popularity when expressed in the form of song lyrics. I don't agree with a narrower definition of poetry that excludes these popular forms. Given this, I think our challenge is to find a place for our project among the many opportunities that already exist for an audience, whether poetry appears as text, song, performance or something else.
GR: MEMORY promises to incorporate so many different poetic styles. Do you have a particular favorite of the ones that will be featured? Is there that one that might best sum up the wide-reaching possibilities of MEMORY?
SM: We are in the very early stages of viewing submissions, so I will talk about our own contributions to the DVD. I have a preference for my own work to combine spoken word, music and image. The video "clip" is such a recognizable art form to public audiences and in a sense, this is what we created with our first film, but with spoken word poetry in the place of song lyrics. The first film, "Returning", has a very personal flavour. Our second contribution has a rawer feel and addresses the subject of political activism, in this sense resonating more with our early work. These two video poems, one a very personal exploration of memory and identity, and the other a spoken word//music/slideshow about activism, really do demonstrate the wide scope of the project. I don't want to be prescriptive in terms of other people's submissions. MEMORY is a very broad theme and I am expecting a lot of diversity.
We have uploaded our first poetry video to the Digital Fringe website and it is viewable here. Digital Fringe is part of the Melbourne fringe festival. We decided to upload our film here to potentially extend the audience for it and as an opportunity for promotion.
GR: I would imagine word of mouth to be pretty essential to the success of a project like this. What are some of the ways you're getting this out there into the world? How do you put together the funding for something like this?
SM: As with our first project, we are relying heavily on the web to get the word out. Social networking sites have appeared since our first project, giving us another avenue for networking and promotion. I have also spread the word to more traditional places such as writers centres within Australia. While some have been supportive, it is disappointing that many of these organizations, that are so heavily funded by government, are so unresponsive to writing projects that originate in the community.
In terms of funding, the short answer is that there is none. We take a leap of faith with our projects that we will recoup our own costs from sales of the DVD. We are considering forming an incorporated organisation that could qualify for some government arts funding in the future. One big drawback with a project that is unfunded, is that we cannot offer payment to our contributors. I would like this to change in the future, but for now we have to work with what we have — good intentions.
GR: I happened to ask someone about MEMORY, and they referred to it as "One of the most important poetry-related projects to come along in the last ten years." Would you agree with that at all?
SM: I would say it is a project with a lot of potential. I think the subject is important. I think it is important for people to realize that their experiences matter, their memories matter and they matter as individuals and as part of humanity. Creative expression is the most liberating thing we have as human beings. Poetry will always find an audience when it speaks to the human experience. Perhaps it struggles in the dark when it moves off into areas that are distanced from this.
GR: Of course, MEMORY isn't your first venture into this kind of thing. 2004 saw the release of Slam the Body Politik, which you actually mentioned earlier. Tell us a little bit more about that.
SM: It was a very open project and as a result grew large in terms of contributions. We accepted everything from single pieces of text for publication on the CD-ROM to collaborative works of multimedia incorporating image, music and spoken word. The interface was Flash based and many of the works were created in this medium. It allowed for a high degree of interactivity and flexibility in terms of the work that could be published. It took us nine months to create the CD-ROM and Scart worked with a number of people creating poetry/music pieces for inclusion on it.
GR: With Slam, I was particularly taken by the "Noise" contributions. They made what was easily the most fascinating aspect of the project for me. What inspired you to seek out this kind of material?
SM: Scart is a musician and this is a strong feature of the work we created and still create together. I also think the poetry/music combination is an accessible art form, perhaps more accessible than some of the multimedia forms that require a more technological knowledge base. Some of the people we worked with were performance poets who were used to reading with musical backing, so it was a familiar experience for them to create these pieces. We also received some wonderful "noise" from other contributors.
GR: Would you say MEMORY is a continuation of the themes and concepts explored in Slam?
SM: Yes, definitely. MEMORY is in the subtext of Slam. It is an answer to the question "what now, what next"? Albeit an answer that raises even more creative questions. As poets, musicians, artists, we challenge ourselves to go beyond the reaction, beyond the protest image/poem and to assert our own truth/s in the face of the overwhelming dominance of corporate media.
GR: With Slam, which contributions would you consider to be your favorites? I was personally much taken with "Freedom Poem", "Razor Wire", "Branded Child" and "Shaking the Beauty Myth."
In terms of other examples, I like Ryan Tanay's short flash pieces in the multimedia section. We used the piece "Pro-War-Rally" in a number of multimedia performances. Of the early flash pieces I created with Scart, I really like "Two Marilyn's" and "Bombs". These were among the simplest pieces, but I think they work very effectively. Other samples from the CD-ROM are available on the Synaptic Graffiti website.
GR: Five years is a long time to go between projects. Why such a wait between MEMORY and Slam the Body Politik?
SM: Our plan was to produce MEMORY two years after Slam. What do they say about the best laid plans of mice and men? Our lives took us in a different direction. On the eve of the CD-ROM launch, the right wing Howard government was returned to power in Australia. It was tough to front up the day after. It was a shock that the country had returned a government that took us to war in Iraq based on the lie of WMDs and locked innocent people, including children, up in detention centres, but it happened. Scart and I became more involved in direct political activism after this. We also faced our own personal struggles that precluded us from beginning this project, some of which were directly related to the actions of the re-elected government.
Although MEMORY was delayed, I tend to think these things happen for a reason. I think the time is right now for this project.
GR: Tell us a little bit about Synaptic Graffiti and what it has tried to accomplish over the last six and a half years.
SM: The philosophy behind Synaptic Graffiti is that of open arts collective. This means that people can choose their level of involvement. I think the whole notion of collectivism is alien to many people and I also think the arts are usually very much focused on the work and profile of the individual. Hence there is a kind of subversion inherent in the idea of an arts collective before we even get started on creating together. Slam was a project that fully expressed this notion of artistic collectivism, the CD-ROM was even organised in such a way that the focus was on the work of the collective, rather than the individual creators, with the work of the established appearing alongside the unknown.
What we have tried to do and will continue to do, is inspire people to try different avenues of creative expression. To combine their own artistic talents with those of others to create something new. There will be changes in the future, Scart and I, as the producers of SGC projects, need to take this collective in a direction that will secure us sources of funding. While I am nervous about the potential impacts of this on the work we do, we just can't eat our good intentions!
GR: Which project would you say has been more difficult in getting off the ground, Slam or MEMORY? Would you say MEMORY is a more ambitious project? I only ask because it seems to me that Slam would be the more difficult of the two since it incorporated so many different things.
SM: Slam grew so organically that I would have to say MEMORY is the tougher project. The politics provided a unifying theme in Slam whereas it is really up to the individual contributor to interpret MEMORY for themselves. I can give a little nudge here and there, but I think the strongest work will come when people really connect to the project in a personal way. I think Scart would say Slam was more difficult from a technical point of view, the work involved in creating the interface for the CD-ROM was really quite staggering in its complexity.
GR: Any plans for SG beyond MEMORY?
SM: In MEMORY, the poetry/music combination has again proved a strong area for us. I would like to produce a spoken word/music CD with Scart in the future. We have already recorded several tracks with my poetry and his music over the years, so it would be nice to bring them together. As for another major project after MEMORY? I have to be honest and say this will depend on the response to this one and to the outcome of future efforts to secure funding.
One thing I would love to do is develop a workshop project in the area of poetry/multimedia and bring our experiences in this area to younger people to inspire them to work across the arts. I am 42 and am acutely aware of a generation coming up behind us that have all the work ahead of them to solve the problems we and previous generations have created. I think as we reach middle age we begin to realise our own time to effect necessary change is limited. A lasting thing we can do is pass on our knowledge and skills to people who are in more dire need of creative outlets of expression than ever before. I think it is important for people to know that Scart and I are working class/poor, we create our projects in our own home with no funding whatsoever and no sponsorship. By doing this, we prove that the arts is not the province of the highly educated or the elite. Everyone has a voice and can learn how to use it and everyone's story matters.
Gabriel Ricard is the Assistant Editor at Unlikely 2.0. You can learn more about him at his bio page.
Comments (closed)
jayne fenton keane
2009-11-02 18:36:33
Thank you for this interview. It is nice to see Sara and Scart get some profile for this project. Slam the Body Politik was huge so this project should be really interesting. I'm looking forward to participating and seeing the finished result.
Great stuff you guys
Elizabeth Lhuede
2010-03-22 01:47:32
What a fantastic concept and a very interesting interview. Thanks, Sarah and Gabriel. It's great to see this kind of work being developed. The demand for this kind of work will only accelerate as schools extend students' exploration multimedia in their creative writing. It certainly deserves an audience.