(S)PACING

(S)PACING is a poetic performance piece that reflects upon the nervous habit of pacing and ideas of internal dialogue while walking as a source of poetic inspiration and contemplation, if not procrastination. The application for performance can either be played on the keyboard, or use live video motion tracking to access and combine screen-based still image, video, text, and audio content. The title of the piece refers not only to the act of pacing but also to pacing as a measure of time. The addition of the (s) at the beginning of the title, rendering the title spacing, could be said to refer not only to the locative and defamiliarizing spatial variations in the piece but also to formal aspects of poetry such as meter, feet, line breaks and stanzas. Though the performance, the actions of the performer may be fundamentally pedestrian they are put in contrast with mental and poetic machination in terms of the poetic output generated by the movement. In effect, the performer develops a system of, and has live action control over the scansion of the generated poem while handing over control of the vocalizations, imagery, and textual display to the application. The work made its debut at ePoetry 2009 (Barcelona), and was presented in installation form at ePoetry 2011 (Buffalo)