Locus Novus

Locus Novus is an online synthesis of text and sound of text and image. It is made by collaborating people to make movie poems. It uses the potential of the online medium to add motion, movies, soundtrack and have sometimes mutating, mobile, text is the star.
For example in life imagined as a slither of syllables, the words are by John Olson, art design by Faruk Ulay and jazz music track by Robert Ikiz & group mosaic.
The words are lists of statements bunched into paragraphs where each line doesn’t relate to the next. Some statements that struck me (from the 12 pages/screens)
“Electricity flashing prayers.”
“The brutal tattoo of a clock on the skin of a conversation. Jelly in the testicle.”
“Equations get fat with neon.”
“Please take this cow as the sincerest mirror of purgatory. I see the cowboy cradling another fetus of morning.”
A lot of work going into avoiding sense. Why not? As opposed to the efforts of a lot of work going into constructing sense when all sense is nonsense. This just shows the nonsense directly.
Words have sense of meaning yet avoidance, surreal parody of profound sounds while avoiding referencing direct world. It’s a strange mental space. Like decontextualized snippets of conversations or jingles or songs that are silly and counter to your belief yet ride neurons.
In O,P by Janis Butler Holm she says it explicitly in one of hers,
“It’s a kind of parody. Hard-edged abstractions can sweep you off your feet.”
It is movie and poetry hybridized. There’s animation and music but beyond that the medium of flash controls speed of reveal. In text I’m used to fastforwarding. In conversation I can encourage the pace, go back without restarting at the beginning. The element of control is lost. I resist that structurally similarly to how I resist movies for setting the pace. Speed and to go back and forth is a constraint I like to own. Does this impact my perception?
“In situations in which a person is not in control, they’re more likely to spot patterns where none exist.” – Hanson on bias
Back buttons can be done in flash but rarely is. I can choose when to move forward but as done, even in plague, only linearly forward, although there are two narratives overlaid with background shifting images being urban and the next meditations from countryside.
There’s nothing preventing a format of make your own mystery as well. It would still be a finite set but use the options of online more to not be as lockstepped forward. The fading and replacing and moving texts can break that up from the presentation point of view but from consumption point of view, it’s more set, less modelling life where there are always many options from any given point. The animated text behaves more as sound, not waiting for you at it would when letterpressed but will zip off like spoken word.
Interesting projects.
In O,P nothing fits together in content or tone. It’s a rummage sale of ideas and yet by not fitting together, it suits some engaging way.
“Here’s a spoiler Tinker Bell: we’re all going to die.” is set in juxtaposition to other column’s text box:
“The bloody itinerary had to be changed. These cushions beg for velveteen. Rocketing ratings kept his show in the air.”
Tone contrast gives continually clappers while inviting the reader/viewer to come look thru this keyhole of perception now.
Is it eye-candy or deeply meaningful? Meaning and value are something inherent in text or in construction of challenging text. Is there something to get out of it that was placed there? Or meaning and value are not consideration and play and pleasure are the things. Importance or use are things the viewer/reader applies or adds?
The magazine also uses the possibilities for storytelling, comparing in parallel two minds, Burma’s Suu Kyi and Giacometti.
Significance of story is based in relevance and that itself based in access, persuasion and decisions.

dreams of a certain register amount to inadvertent labor. In Giacometti’s instance. his dreams were an inadvertent, visionary labor, though he surely would have rejected the elevated designation visionary. – Harold Jaffe in Suu Kyi and Giacometti

Juxtaposition is humor or capacity to perceive out of the blur of data. Vision is based in part, in contrast. This medium aids that in a different fluid way than print.
“Art is not an unmoved mover; it is, one way or another, a reflection of and response to contemporary culture and it employs the techniques and references at hand.” – Harold Jaffe