Notes from Noise

After I made 'Birds talked to her' and 'Vogels babbelden met haar' for a poem by Jan Lauwereyns, I knew I wanted to make more video's for his words.
He's a great writer and a highly original voice in literature.
Jan writes a lot (I think) and once he'd send me a link to his English Blog and said : "here's another  een treasure trove of bits in English: http://dubito.posterous.com/ a reef that keeps on growing."
From that reef I picked out something rather experimental; Notes from Noise
For some odd reason it spoke to me on different levels.

Notes from Noise

Imagination, creativity, strangeness. The naming, the enigma, the moment. Lyrical investigations, the poetics of science, making sense, searching for meaning (mushrooms), intensive, Einstein sitting on a rocket, surrealism, against context, toward displacement, condensation, metaphor, metonymy, always autopoiesis, positing the presuppositions, boundaries of things, of life, seeing what’s not there, a handle on infinity, Dolly the Sheep, Prometheus, Frankenstein, reading your dreams, neuro-prosthetics, camphor, synthesis, urine, fruitflies and worms, the far side, throwing in a couple obvious, Schroedinger’s cat, the living noisy sun, beyond phenomenology, the punning, the tributes, genes and planets, the concept, the event, Sherrington’s synapse, the mirror neuron, Schultz et al. (1997), Loewi and his dream, Kubla Khan, the man with no name, the narrative, the volta, Higgs boson, Crick & Watson, ignoring the lady, the movements and manifestos, the cults, the aberrations, Alamo, Oppenheimer, 731, twins, scientology, the notion that Karadžić was some kind of poet, those TED talks, song and dance for the king and queen, cherry picking, Snow’s two cultures, the popularizers, the Chinese notebook, the echo maker, versed, those Jacket2 parasites, compare that to the oval window, Goethe’s subjective experiments, Holub’s cancers, Vroman’s blood, systems life sciences. I happen to doubt, writing, not writing, what will be written, this week, imaging the impact of single oxygen atoms, spin-transistor action, diversity of interaction types and ecological community stability.

I went to work with it and constructed a soundscape with this poem in mind;


It was the track that led me to the footage of the Department of Defense about arctic explorers.
Footage I found on Prelinger.
Reading or recording the poem was no option...
It wouldn't work. I needed to see the words 'floathing' slowly, using the pace of the music and the images.
Giving them time to interact with the sounds and the images.

Anyway have a look and listen for yourself...



Words: Jan Lauwereyns
Concept, editing, music: Swoon
Footage: 'Arctic Explorers' (1955-157)