Blackout: the visual rendition

We've had a few storms here lately, where the power came on and off, which encouraged me (once the power was back on), to finally give Prezi a try and have a play with a poem that was indeed, as the title suggests, inspired by a lengthy blackout.  This is the result: a visual rendering of the final poem in my book Repulsion Thrust (available for less than $10 at Amazon I might add by way of a holiday gift giving prompt).  Our utter dependence on power is a notion that I'm continually reminded of every time a piece of technology (and like most people I'm surrounded by it and base my daily activities on the use of it, including what I'm doing right now) doesn't work.  Of course I do have candles in the larder, and playing boardgames by candlelight is actually a very relaxing and soothing thing to do, once the panic and sense of isolation wears off.  Nevertheless...

Kurzweil invents the future (again...)

The Singularity Hub reports on Ray Kurzweil's stunning new ebook platform, the Blio.  Blio preserves the original format of books including typography and illustrations, in full color. It also takes advantage of Kurzweil's company's own high quality text to speech capabilities and supports animation and video content. The interesting thing for me is that authors can now begin thinking about how they might create with text, voice, music, image or video as part of the overall content package.  Providing audio and video options embedded in a book might mean a whole new medium for poetry.  I know that these things are already available, sometimes in patchy combination (.pdf will read to you, badly, and online books can incorporate multimedia elements), and I often play with these notions in performance, but having them in one attractive, portable package on any Netbook, iPhone, or e-reader is pretty cool.  Free too.  That's even nicer. Now if only Ray can invent some means of expanding time so we fit in time to create meaningful content for these new tools.  I know he's working on it. 

Technological Singularity: The Movie

Yes, it's a bit odd, but you have to admit it's thought provoking and picks up just a bit on the poem's theme.

Equinox

This is a multimedia poetry piece I created about a year ago, but this blog business makes for a nice kind of compendium, so I might actually put in some older stuff from time to time, not only to buy me a little time to actually create something new (working...working), but also to keep track since I have work all over the place. This piece contains (with permission) part of a wonderful song called Kopanitsa (Version 2), which is a traditional piece arranged by Mara Kiek, Llew Kiek, Jim Denley, and Haughton. The musicians playing are Sandy Evans, Jim Denley, Steve Elphick, Llew Kiek and Mara Kiek, aka Mara. It's from their album Don't Even Think. The words are mine and the images were done by Pete Patterson and May Lattanzio (messed about by me). Spring is definitely on the horizon here in Australia.
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