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The premise for the motion collage came from various different sources. I’m a huge music lover and the rise in visual albums, or the older take on rock operas and concept albums, led me to wonder why nothing similar had ever been done so far as poetry is concerned. After all, music is rooted in two things on a base level - instrumental and words – and, equally, poetry is rooted in two things on a base level: emotional response and words. Music is composed for various reasons: a storytelling device, a tool to relay a social or political message, to serve a purpose such as lull a child to sleep or hype people up in the club, as escapism, to simply be enjoyed without having to think too hard, or as accompaniment for a visual. Poetry is also composed for various reasons: a storytelling device, a tool to relay a social or political message, to serve a purpose such as teach a child to count or spark an individual’s brain, as escapism, or to simply be enjoyed without choosing to think too hard about meaning or metre. So why is it so seldom used as accompaniment for a visual?
But the thinking behind the images and audio I chose to use can be traced back to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art. Like Warhol, I consciously chose to (on the whole) reject the natural world and focus primarily on cultural movements, figures, or events. Warhol used Pop Art as an intertextual blanket doused in pastiche appropriation, reproducing the same figure over and over again so as to drain it of its authenticity through reproduction. Whilst my motion collage is not as intricate as this, I chose to draw upon popular culture, shocking events, and recognisable moments to devalue the extraordinary rather than elevate the ordinary. Similarly, I chose the jarring instrumental to accompany the intense visual contrasts between frames to create tension for the viewer.
Why? To what end? Because there is no shame in embracing ordinariness since everyone, at their core, goes through struggles. Some are universal: loss, pain, heartache. Some are individual: mental health, trauma, the way we process our emotions. The more we see a face or an event or a historic freeze-frame, the more we can choose to humanise or dehumanise these people and situations. For me, Karen Carpenter becomes more humanised in her segment where she claims not to have the disease that will go on to kill her. On the other hand, 9/11 (in its blatant heinousness and despicable disaster) risks being reduced to statistics and conspiracies; it is hard to comprehend that each individual existed, that they were human with all their complexities and eccentricities that make them unique, when all we see are explosions and four-figure death tolls. And though it should be made clear that I am not trying to romanticise horrors by juxtaposing them with the mundane, or compare mass tragedies to a stubbed toe or a splinter, or compare the qualms of the privileged to the sufferings of the oppressed, this notion ties back into the poems the motion collage accompanies; my collection hopes to shed light on and normalise our ordinary emotions and extraordinary emotions, the circumstantial and the consequential, the objective and the subjective. We are all human, after all.
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