ARCHIVE: THE MEN
Submission Title: CPRG Reading of Lisa Robertson’s “The Men”
Submitted by: Joelle Levesque Participant's field of work/interest: Expanded Poetics Participant's Image Description: "The reading of Robertson’s work by members of the Contemporary Poetry Reading Group, a project of Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics and open to all, was recorded to allow for the discernment of those particular rhythmic and tonal idiosyncrasies that might indicate when a reader encountered un! usual syntax, diction, or some other speculative or logical challenge presented by the piece. These pauses and trip-ups convey the inherent difficulty of simultaneously reading and grasping a work of critical poetry during the first read-through.” “[…] I'm attaching an image of the data I've extracted from the recording of the Contemporary Poetry Reading Group.” Translation and weaving by Sophia Borowska. Date: December 2016 |
Translation to Weaving
For this collaboration, Joelle Levesque and I discussed the different types of data that could be extracted from an audio file, and the different ways that data could be visualized and eventually materialized. We chose to break the recording down into “types of sounds,” in order to represent the overlapping sounds, or sonic texture, as physical texture. Using the chart that Levesque developed, I collapsed all the rows of different sound types into one cloth with overlapping areas of each sound. The length of the cloth is a timeline (from left to right), and the blobs of different-textured yarns take place along that timeline, according to how frequently, and for how long, they occurred.
-Sophia |
Technique and Process Notes
The weaving is set up as a single cloth. For each sound type, I chose a yarn that was evocative of the sound. Voices were a shiny, slippery yarn, door sounds were a hard brown plastic, chair sounds were a black polyester mixed with a silver metallic thread, coughs were a fuzzy cream mohair, and “jangles and mystery sounds” were a bumpy metallic blue yarn. Reading voices are represented by a weave structure comprised of the first few pages of Lisa Robertson’s poem. The warp represents silence. All the structures are set up so that the respective yarn is above the cloth surface when is it “heard” in the recording, and below the surface when it is not. Since most of the threads are quite thick, they are not tacked down on the back.
-Sophia |
Outcome Notes
This piece is different from what we have done so far, in that it is faithful only to the data, and not to a submission image. With all the different yarns, most quite thick, the tension was a little unstable, which might have negative effects if the piece were longer. The most surprising outcome is how thick the piece is – it stands up almost an inch off any flat surface that it’s laid on.
-Sophia
Original Dimensions: 2840 × 1684 pixels
Number of Picks:
Woven Dimensions: 28.5" x 3.5"
Weaving Density: ppi
Threads Used: Warp is white and black 2/16 mercerized cotton, set at 60 threads/inch. Wefts are 5 different yarns of differing thickness and synthetic material.
-Sophia
Original Dimensions: 2840 × 1684 pixels
Number of Picks:
Woven Dimensions: 28.5" x 3.5"
Weaving Density: ppi
Threads Used: Warp is white and black 2/16 mercerized cotton, set at 60 threads/inch. Wefts are 5 different yarns of differing thickness and synthetic material.
Images of Final Woven Samples
FRONT, ABOVE.
BACK, BELOW.
BACK, BELOW.