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Daily Archives: October 13, 2022
Peaceful Dream
Peaceful indeed. The transitions in this piece make it feel like I’m literally waking from a dream because they’re so smooth. The images are also just as soothing as I’d expect them to e, with the exception of the middle images. However, I think it was mainly the audio that was paired with those images (of what seemed to be a man on a horse?) that gave it a bit of an edge somehow. The use of audio resembled a movie soundtrack in that sense. The author used it to intensify certain images and, because I don’t know Mandarin, I heavily relied on that. I immediately recognized the shift in sound because most of the piece is filled with meditative music. If you’ve ever tried meditation, you would know that the shift in sound is used to take you out of the meditative state & bring you back to yourself. I found it interesting and it made me hyperfixate on that certain image.
As for the imagery, there were obviously very calming images of greenery, water, and just nature in general. There were also very experimental images that looked like static, but may have been there to allow the viewer/reader to create something in their own minds.
This piece was a bit different from the rest we’d done because it felt less interactive and I’m sure that is intentional. The static images are really the most interaction we encounter and the interaction is less collaborative between the viewer/reader and the piece itself. Like I said, I’m sure it’s more intentional because it is called “Peaceful Dream,” and the lack of interaction keeps the peacefulness. I’m thinking of “Everything is Going to Be OK” as a contrast to this piece because of the overstimulation we saw and experienced in it. It’s exciting to see two opposite sides of interaction and collaboration within E-Lit, and how it influences the piece as whole.
醉詠詩 Zui Yong Shi
Facts: things that I liked about E-lit the musicality in the different works, and this was no exception. At first my normative and structured mind began to read from left to right, it made sense, but something was missing, to turn on the sound of my laptop. At that moment I saw that I had to read differently and the rhythm of the music complemented each word very well, with each rhyme, converging one and the other.
Another thing that caught my attention and I loved is the appearance of nature with the written, it demonstrates the importance of it in culture and written tradition.
For a moment I thought that the poems were repeated, but I understood that no, the first line of the third poem was the same as the first, but those that followed were no longer.
It really was a great piece and I felt inside it.
Red leaves
Appreciate
Deep
Sea
Setting sun
Side / Next to
Sit alone
Autumn leaves
Cry (for)
Early morning
Read and sing poetries
Falling flowers
Drink
Dust
Ending
Watch while drunck
Letters and books
In between / with in
Smudgin/ Shading
Green mountain
Sit and appreciate
Extinguish long trip
Big wild goose
Review of Zui Yong Shi
《醉詠詩Zui Yong Shi》is a multi-media artwork, authored by Ren Yang, that generates Chinese WuYan JueJu poetry and pentatonic melody to pair with the poetry. The poetry matches most of the strict rules of WuYan JueJu poetry and the melody follows the Chinese pentatonic scale.
Some key navigation points should be paid attention to. First is Wuyan jueju, also known as the five-line stanza, is a genre of traditional Chinese poetry, which refers to a small poem in five lines and four stanzas that conforms to the rules of rhythm, meaning that a poem is composed of four lines, each line consisting of five words, for a total of twenty words.
In terms of literary traditions, influences, and another artistic context, Wuyan jueju originated in the Han Dynasty, was influenced by the folk songs of the Six Dynasties, and matured in the Tang Dynasty. With only twenty words, the five-line stanza can show a fresh picture and convey a variety of realistic moods. It is the greatest characteristic of the poem that it contains rich content in a short chapter.
However, due to the limitation of word count, the five-line stanzas required more concise and general language and expression than other poetic genres, making them more difficult to compose. Zhang Qianyi, a Chinese litterateur once summed it up with the words “short but long in flavor, especially difficult to enter into the subtlety”. Therefore, the five-line stanza naturally became the most brilliant pearl in Tang poetry, the essence of Tang poetry. Since the Tang dynasty, there have been many famous poems and stanzas, chanting history, and nostalgia, discussing political affairs, expressing ambitions, complaining of grievances, and speaking of friendships, with a wide variety of subjects and wonderfully diverse styles.
Also, the author said he was inspired by the article The Preface to the Spring Night Banquet in the Peach Garden《春夜宴桃李園序》 by famous Chinese poet, which is a parallel text written by Li Bai, a poet of the Tang Dynasty. It is a vivid account of a gathering of all the friends on a spring night, drinking wine, and writing poems. The author laments that heaven and earth are vast, time is fleeting, life is short, and joy is scarce, and he also supports this with the ancient saying “traveling by candlelight at night”, expressing the author’s joyful mood of loving life and nature, and showing his broad-mindedness of looking up to the past and the present. The poem is written in a dashing and natural way, with a resounding tone, and the wonderful parallelism of the sentences adds color to it.
Here is an excerpt from the work:
相对夜夜半
Face each other with, night, midnight
醉看斜月前
Watch while drunk, tilting moon, before
离情清晨稀
Left alone the feelings, in the morning, rare
醉沙愁长烟
Drunk, send, worry, endless mist.
From a personal perspective, there are many interpretations.
Here is one possible situation: in ancient China, there were constant wars and the common people lived in deep water for a long time. This may depict the image of the husband on the eve of parting from his family when he must go away as a soldier for the sake of the country. Assuming tomorrow the husband will be away on a long journey, so the wife is very sad to part with him. In the middle of the night, two people look at each other face to face, drinking wine and getting drunk, hoping to remember each other forever. Since the war is in cruelty, not knowing when the next meeting will be, or if there will be another meeting. When the early morning comes, the husband is far away, embarking on a journey with no return. Remarkably, in ancient Chinese literature, Sand and smoke are generally related to the battlefield. Also, the climate of northwest China is very arid, all the deserts and Gobi Desert, and war also occurred in these places.
Above all, this piece combines traditional Chinese poetry with computer technology. When we mouse over the Chinese, the corresponding English translation appears, facilitating the reading habits of native English readers, and the individual translation of individual words rather than the full text shows the textual arrangement of the ancient poem in a more original way, avoiding the problem of switching the order of words when translating.
Discuss in groups:
What emotions do you think the poem contains?
ZUI YONG SHI
Im really enjoying exploring new literature every week. It opens my eyes to something new each time. This weeks electronic lit was very interesting. I chose to review Zui Yong Shi.
I was of course at first confused as to how to navigate through this piece but once I figured it out it was great. I liked the music that went along with the poem. Before I knew I was able to hover over the symbols and it would translate for me, I immediately thought how am I going to read this. My second thought was to search each symbol on google and read it that way.
When I figured out I was able to hover over the symbols, it made reading and understanding the poem much easier and I really enjoyed.
Exploring Peace and Harmony
This week in E-Literature had a Chinese theme and both pieces complimented each other with the idea of melodies carrying the writers ideas timelessly. Each author decided to go with poetry, but I was able to see two different styles of in within the e-lit world, which was portrayed very nicely. We look to be unique in our delivery as writers and creatives, and I could clearly see with both works how the authors chose to display their creative side.
Peaceful Dream really made me think with its bold imagery, and the use of sounds throughout the video poem. When we look at art, or even “read” different pieces of literature the author can take you on a journey, and while on that journey you may have your own thoughts and questions formulate that could be different than even what the author was thinking. Good creative pieces spark conversation and sometimes it never really has a meaning, but was just simply there to carry on the story. I felt the author wanted the readers or viewers to truly take their own journey with the images portrayed and think of what they might mean to you as an individual. Clearly the theme was peace, but in some ways some images were those that could either be peaceful, or completely the opposite. I take the image of water, and yes it can be a peaceful moment staring at the ocean with your toes in the sand and maybe a nice clear day, but the ocean can also bring on terrible storms. Storms take form in the middle of the sea and can devastate communities. I tried to look at these images and truly give them two perspectives, and I really feel this was the idea of the piece, to simply think and ponder on the images.
Zi Young Shi had a similar theme as it offers it’s own type of peaceful way of looking at poetry. The imagery in this work was interactive and gave the reader the ability to almost create what they saw on the screen. This is a big part of E-literature that I have noticed throughout the weeks, that some authors truly want their audience to feel as if they are making it happen on the screen. I feel this keeps readers engaged with the work. This author created poetry with Chinese letters that when hovered over gave phrases or words to create the poetry through words, and it also was able to give us a melody every time it regenerated, changing how each poem created was different from the other. I felt this was very interesting and offer a different take then the first work I spoke about earlier.
I enjoyed being able to see both authors offer two different ways to view poetry digitally. One was created simply with image and left a powerful statement. The other gave imagery, melody, and words and still sent the same creative powerful message. The fact that these Chinese works give off peace in two different ways was very interesting and truly I was able to see both perspectives creatively.
Peaceful Dream and Zui Yong Shi
The main thing I loved about both pieces was that they did not need to be read to consume them. I enjoyed the audio portion of the pieces.
At the beginning of Peaceful Dream, I liked the color contrasts. I was confused at first because there was no audio then after about a minute, there was audio again.
For Zui Yong Shi, I enjoyed that you could scroll over the symbols and they would be translated. I also really liked the background of the piece.
I made an attempt to translate the pieces with Bixby, my phone’s voice assistant. While I did get a translation, when I compared it to the English right under it, it wasn’t the same, so I couldn’t trust it too much. (Bixby was set to Traditional Chinese so that factored into the poor translations)
After the close to failed attempt at translating, I went back to just enjoying the audio and visual the pieces provided. My one question is what do these pieces say?
Zui Yong Shi
I chose Zui Yong Shi piece because in the author’s statement he stated it was a multimedia artwork that generates Chinese poetry paired with a pentatonic melody. I love multimedia projects. And I knew I wanted to explore this piece farther.
I also chose this piece because of the original artwork that was in the thumbnail. My ex was half Chinese and every time we would visit their mother in Los Angeles, I would be mesmerized by this Chinese painting that hung their living room. I would sit there and make up stories in my head about this painting while I listened to my ex play classical piano. It’s nice to look back and remember a simpler time before my mom got sick and everything in my life had changed.
What I enjoyed about this piece was the music that went along with it. I thought the rhythm and the tone really added an extra layer to this poem. I like that the reader can hover over the symbols to see what they mean in English. I found it interesting that it doesn’t make up a sentence. It’s more like random words on the page that the reader can make into their own poem. I look forward to the presentation for this piece so that I can get a deeper understanding of the poem and the message the author was trying to convey.
