Poems and Video Game Glitches

I made a set of 5 digital paintings that are satirical glitch collages of poetry and video games. More specifically, Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay, Mary Oliver’s The Uses of Sorrow, W.S. Merwin’s Separation, and Zrumi’s The Window and Call of Duty videogames.

I recorded myself reciting these poems and took a screenshot of the waveform view in Adobe Audition. I then picked photos from my camera roll of places I have been as the environment. I created a collage of the two and threw it into a glitch generator, then took lines from the poems as text.

Rumi LOADINGSCREEN; November 8, 2021

This one is based on Call of Duty’s Nuketown 84’ loading screen, a map on multiplayer.

Merwin LOADING; November 8, 2021

Older loading screen of Nuketown for team deathmatch, a type of gameplay.

These collages show time, not in a linear format, but mushed together into one. The sound waves are flipped and mirrored and placed randomly, not following any source of reason. They are put on these photos of places I have been, with poems about loss, reflection, and the passage of time while using the format of a game that just keeps on updating.

These showcase my belief that time is not and has never been linear, but a web.

We are time travelers in our own minds when we look to memories or plan for the future.

PLAYSCREEN; November 8, 2021

This is a collage of all the poems together in a gameplay screen that is almost indistinguishable.

Sound follows a timeline from start to finish, same with video, it takes a certain amount of time to listen to a recording, but a screenshot shows the whole sound in one viewing. Here you have 7-second voice recordings and 30-second recordings all being viewed at once.

Oliver SPECTATING; November 8, 2021

 I see these as self-portraits.

There are multiple variations of myself and I feel split at times. Looking at where I came from and where I am now, it feels like I've done a 180.

The game of life is trying to find a balance between all of the different versions of yourself, and if all of these variations can come together as one. These would be an example of that