The murmur of i n t e r s t i c e s

This is a collaboration across centuries between the 13th century Persian mystic and poet known as Rumi, whose silky lines of poetry appear beneath Zahra Safavian’s 3 by 3 grid of tiles with short looping videos and words— an interface for meditation on this poem’s idea. Rumi is credited with inventing the meditative poetic practice of “the turn” by dancing to the rhythm of the hammering of the goldsmiths. Rumi’s poems are usually organized into couplets, not necessarily rhyming, clustered into variable stanzas, and tend to establish a conversation between self and other, self and the world. Each tile can be clicked to reveal another word and video, representing perhaps some of the dualities expressed in the concept of the “turn,” though we are not dealing with binary opposites— the associations are more diverse than that. The three lines that appear after interacting with the short videos on the grid reinforce that idea, separating awareness of the head and the feet, each turning on its own, uncaring what the other does, as with a baby nursing. Lose yourself in contemplation of this beautifully meditative piece, considering the relation between videos and words, words and their pairs, word combinations, and the relation between the tiles and the lines by Rumi. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)