sorry that you were not moved
the language barrier is going to be vast here
sorry that you were not moved is an interactive collaborative digital poetry publication by Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos Makris exploring space-time dimensions of travel through experimental-appropriative writing strategies and audiovisual interventions. Produced by Fallow Media. Made with support from the Arts Council Literature Project Award.
Released on 10 February 2022.
Note from the Authors
After several months navigating digital space-time in intertextual collusion with Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, we present these mementoes of what we encountered on our voyages. The engines of our digital travels were fired by diverse strategies and they landed us both nowhere and everywhere. All reflect and consequently question the traveller's gaze, which is another phrase for a lyric ‘I’ timelessly flattering and flattening lands and people. These texts are not the product of imagination, of stolen solitary time in distant bars with an open notebook and a glass of local liquor. Rather, they are the apocrypha of the internet’s flatlands, carefully extracted and preserved here, reiterating their own unavoidable and condensed violence on locations, real and imagined.
— Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos Makris
Endorsements
“When we are moved, we are transported—literally from one place to another, and figuratively from a state of self-awareness to a place beyond the self. A poem, a performance, a film, a book—those things that have the power to transport us are often elevated to the status of art. And yet it is also possible to be moved by a punk concert, by the news of a celebrity's death, by a public memorial. In this work, Makris and Campanello play with both forms of movement, giving readers hemmed in by the pandemic an opportunity to travel, via desktop tourism, and to contemplate what they call "the traveller's gaze," which often seeks to possess all that it describes. Melding 90's browser aesthetics with contemporary maps and media, the project invites us to travel across not only space, but also time—based, as it is, in memories of travel both personal and imagined. Linking what appear to be personal reminiscences with text, image, and video culled from the web, their epistolary exploration takes us to a series of cities in which the authors find legacies of poetry and art that help us think through what it means to observe and be observed, to move and be moved.”
— Amaranth Borsuk (Seattle, WA) • Poet, scholar, and book artist working at the intersection of print and digital media. Author of The Book (MIT Press, 2018).
“The title of the digital text/poem sorry that you were not moved says it all, but that makes engagement with this hybrid, fractured, globe-spanning work all the more worthwhile. It’s the experience of non-experience, a diffusion/confusion of ‘presence’, the world seen through a GoPro, packed with disposable insights frozen for posterity online. Here is the tourists’ casual, dismissive ‘doing’ of places. Here is the limit and simultaneous paucity of travel writing, the comforting non-space of armchair travel, the local beer glass half full of emptiness – this is the dynamic of sorry that you were not moved. As global travel passes its peak, listen: you can hear its engines idle, rumble, stall.”
— Nasser Hussain (Leeds, UK) • Poet and critic. Author of SKY WRI TEI NGS (Coach House Books, 2018)
“Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos Makris have created a telling tribute to the way we travel now. A lockdown word-tour, by travelling without moving, we can be moved without travelling. But wherever we go there's nowhere to escape our vocabulary: wish you were here!”
— Joanna Walsh (Dublin) • Writer. Author of Girl Online (Verso, 2022)
“Both conceptually and aesthetically it's a fascinating experience, and so well put together, and it made me thankful that there are venues for this kind of creative work in Ireland. It's beautiful and so appropriate to this cold covid-plagued January.”
— Roisin Kiberd • Author of The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet (Serpent's Tail, 2021)
What They Said
Joanna Walsh's 'Cultural Pick of the Moment'
sorry that you were not moved is an interactive collaborative digital poetry publication by Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos (Chris) Makris. It explores space-time dimensions of travel through experimental-appropriative writing strategies and audiovisual interventions. It was created in collaboration with Ian Maleney of Fallow Media, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It builds on Calvino’s novel, exploring travel and digital space-time. The digital publication is accessible online and invites audiences to travel across the world to experience poetic encounters.
The aim of the project was to ‘create a discrete digital publication’ that was intended for the digital space. Exploring literature made for the digital space and creating engaging and meaningful engagement for audiences was at the heart of the collaboration. In this context, the artists worked very closely with Fallow Media, publishing the digital literature ‘journey’ in February 2022. An element of the publication changes over time, depending on the visitor’s time/ usage throughout the publication, altering the publication over a period of time. Chris explains:
"The project is only speaking for literature that it specifically engages with digital space as a publication medium [...] it could not exist outside of the digital space as a publication. And for literature that's interesting, because [...] we talk about ebooks and we talk about other online journals and [...] online publications. Generally, what has been happening so far is that it is the text that could just as well have gone on the page, but then it gets kind of transferred into an online space and it's a digital publication. But what we were interested in is [...] to look at the project that could only exist digitally, but therefore, it kind of makes use of a moving image or kind of sound and all those things. So that is embedded in the actual making of the work."
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the need for digital publications and engagement exacerbated. In the past, Chris worked on a number of collaborations in exploring new approaches to engage with literature differently. He was primarily interested in different ways of disseminating literature, specifically poetry and how it was made to read aloud to audiences. The Literature Project Award gave him an opportunity to push this idea forward: “The way you present it kind of embeds how it was made and embeds the medium of it. So this was one of the driving impulses for this project <note: sorry that you were not moved> specifically.”
sorry that you were not moved was a collaboration from the start – from application to delivery. Chris was the lead director/artist and he worked collaboratively with Kimberly Campanello (based in the UK) on the project idea.
"In the age of digital where you scroll and everything is flattened, time is flattened, and space is flattened. So that was the original idea [...] how to present it in a way that is enlivened by the medium of presenting it so we were looking for producers of publishers or digital publishers, obviously, who are working with digital specifically."
The collaboration with Fallow Media came about through the research phase for the application and the desire to connect with a strong Irish partner. Fallow Media is an expert in digital publishing where digital is part of the writing process from the outset. Together, the artists and publishers mapped out four stages of the project:
Project Format – discussion between the three collaborators on what format the final publication would take.
Curating text – the decisions on the format gave Kimerbly and Chris a starting point for selecting texts and ‘travelling’ digitally to a geographical space to construct texts and content.
Design process – Discussion with Fallow Media on how to render text and content into the website and make it interactive.
“There are parts of the project that have a hidden element. After a certain number of hits, certain things start happening, for example, if you visit the site at certain times of the day, it would change to reflect traffic congestion in different cities. [...] after a certain number of hits certain parts of the website close so you can't go to the end [...] maybe saying that there's too much tourism. Ian's idea was also to embed the internet time into the project, it does exist, and it moves. So it’s this retro internet moment.” The project invites ‘reviews’ from users - similar to ‘tripadvisor’ reviews online. The text of these reviews is then embedded into the architecture of the project.
Promotion – sorry that you were not moved launched on 10 February 2022 with a successful online event on zoom, featuring performances from the work and discussion with the poets and publisher, chaired by Colin Herd, poet and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.
The collaboration between the artists, Chris and Kimberly and the publishing agency, Fallow Media, were the most interesting parts of the project. It was a true collaboration from the start and the exchange between all three moved the project forward tremendously. From discussing formats and what is possible to how audiences engage with the work.
The discussion in the literary space about digital spaces and innovation with the existing digital tools has not gone very far, even with COVID-19 pushing many to explore the digital space further.
"How do you use digital tools to present something rather than, or in addition to being on screen and say reading from a text or having a conversation?” Chris is interested in the developments as society has stepped back into physical spaces“[...] we have been presented with all these tools, the digital tools in the meantime. So how do we make use of them going forward and expand the way we can speak about language and speak about texts and all that stuff? So that was interesting to me."
sorry that you were not moved raised some interesting questions about digital literature and presenting this throughout literature festivals for instance. There was some resistance to engaging in these ideas of digital text as there are no books to sell for instance.
The aim of sorry that you were not moved was to engage visitors to the site and ask questions about what a digital text is and can do.
When COVID-19 hit there was a rush of artists and organisations to bring their work online.
"[...] at the very beginning it was fine to approximate the live experience through the screen. But very quickly, that became inadequate, and it became false, [...] you can approximate it, but it's not the same. So how do you use digital tools to present something rather than, or in addition to being on screen and say reading from a text or having a conversation? How else is it a digital space? What innovations can you bring in with those tools? In literary spaces, it hasn't really gone very far."
Future iterations and development of the project depend on the capacity of the creative team and collaborations. There have been first discussions with other spaces to work collaboratively. These spaces are mainly outside of the literature sector such as visual art spaces. Even travel organisations raised an interest in the project in terms of exploring digital travel and tourism in this way. Since COVID-19, literature organisations have embraced digital but have mainly focused on delivering in digital formats, not focusing on the digital means for creating literary work.
A conversation with Christodoulos Makris
Denise McDonagh for The Arts Council of Ireland
February 2024
Media:
The Arts Council of Ireland: Digital Arts in Profile
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