past experiments (+ thoughts)

Randomly selected text with a randomly selected printer's cut. Fun exercise, but too much is left to chance -- it's fun to find meaning where none is "intended" but I'd like to be more deliberate with image/text choices.

From really early in the semester (I'm pretty sure this is actually some of the, if not the, first thesis-related work I made). "Hero" (from Butler and others) and "Man" (from Wilson and others), both translated from the same words. They coexist -- they come from the same source and refer to the same words and the same character, but they are fundamentally different. Mashing them together made an interesting composition as well as an interesting dissonance in meaning. I'll probably do more of these very soon, but with longer selections of text.

Other thoughts before I disappear from this blog for another two weeks:

Brian Pellinen mentioned a poem he'd seen, created using Ezra Pound's Cantos as a source, in which the poet uses only words that contain the letters E - Z - R - A - P - O - U - N - D. I can't find the poem he was referring to, and he admitted he might have some names wrong, but it's still an interesting idea.

Jesse Kahn, during my review, talked about "patchwork" text, where I'd take a selection of lines (say 24) and divide them in to 24 different translations, line by line. (Also thinking about mixing them word-by-word, which could have some interesting grammatical results?)

I'm not giving up on the idea I mentioned at some point for a survey. I'd ask people to rephrase or find a synonym/antonym for a given word, probably several translations of the same word. Maybe a positive/negative connotation slider? Wily vs. lord of lies, complicated vs. ingenious, which ones feel Good or Bad? Just thinking about the ways I could lay it out without a) having questions that are too complicated or b) having too many questions.