Schwitters: Ursonography Adaptation 2005
Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin
Bates Mill [i]
6pm

When Kurt Schwitters was interned in a refugee camp after WWII, he apparently appalled fellow inmates by barking like a dog, causing them to fear for his sanity. He may just have been trying to keep sane by reciting his Ursonate (Primordial Sonata), the half-hour masterpiece of 20th Century concrete poetry which he developed over a period of ten years (1922-1932).

It is not over-reaching to state that Dutch sound poet and virtuoso vocalist Jaap Blonk, who has performed the Ursonate more than a thousand times, may be the world's foremost living interpreter of this tour de force of meticulously patterned nonsense. In this new audiovisual treatment of the Ursonate, Blonk’s performance is augmented with a modest but elegant form of expressive, real-time, 'intelligent subtitles.' Using computer-based speech recognition and score-following technologies, projected subtitles are tightly locked to the timing and timbre of Blonk’s voice, and brought forth with a variety of dynamic typographic transformations that reveal new dimensions and hidden resonances within the poem’s structure.

www.jaapblonk.com
www.flong.com

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