CityLife

Turning the digital into verse

Snow Mirror, by Daniel Rozin, at the Whitworth Art Gallery

Search engines, emails and information processing sound like the sort of topics normally only discussed in dingy IT departments or nerdy computing magazines – but one Didsbury-based writer has turned them into poetry.

Adrian Slatcher takes inspiration from his day job as an advisor on technology to write about how it affects our everyday lives.

One of the issues he addresses is how we deal with the mass of information that is presented to us on a daily basis.

His poem, The Colossal Machine, asks how we can be expected to understand this information, when sites like Facebook receive 250m photo uploads every day.
“The idea is that with all this mass of information we require a ‘colossal machine’ to process it,” he says.

The way technology encroaches on our lives and identities also fascinates Adrian, 44, who sees the data trail we leave as a kind of ghost.

He says: “I am very interested in the idea of ghosts in the machine, as something we leave behind, be it data or the image we leave on CCTV.”

But he also believes his poetry on technology is a contradiction in terms: “We think of art as a long-term thing which will be around for hundreds of years, but technology is always changing, so a computer from the 1980s is now obsolete. There is an inbuilt contradiction with art about technology.”

Now Adrian has been asked to write poetry as a response to the Whitworth Gallery’s Dark Matters exhibition, which explores the themes of darkness, shadow, time, illusion and memory through scientific, digital and mechanical technologies.

“I take contemporary concepts and look at them from a different angle, which is a similar thing to what visual artists are doing,” he says.

“Digital art used to be sidelined but it is great that places like the Whitworth are having major digital art exhibitions, which use technology but also question technology.

“There is a long history of people writing poems about art but when the art is more conceptual, how does one respond to that? That is the sort of question I want to ask myself.”

Art in the exhibition includes Daniel Rozin’s 2007 work Peg Mirror, where wooden pegs move inexplicably to mirror the outline of the spectator, and
another of Rozin’s pieces, Snow Mirror, where an image of the viewer slowly appears in snowflakes on a silk screen.

Adrian will read his poetic interpretation of Snow Mirror in front of the work at an After Hours event at the gallery today.

He will also perform a collage poem, written in response to the digital art in the exhibition, which will combine references to new media artists and their works, with details from a 1980s computing magazine.

Collage poetry is a form of conceptual poetry which takes existing texts and turns them into art.

Adrian says: “People make collage poems based on the spam they get in their inbox, as there is a certain weird poetry about it.

“I will be juxtaposing new digital artists and their work with obsolete early Eighties technology, from when personal computing was starting.”

The poet will also read his existing work on how technology impacts our lives, including work from his published collections, Extracts from Levona, by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, and Playing Solitaire for Money, by Salt Publishing.

He will be joined by musicians Butcher the Bar and We Are Willow (part three), and visual performers ABC Artists, who will put on an interactive work called The Engine.

Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road, today, from 7.30pm. There is free entry and a complimentary glass of Barefoot wine