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More about “CIRCULARITIES: Animated Variants“
(L)EGOIST
Pointillist
Consumptive
Piece
Variant
Phototaxis
About the Project:
CIRCULARITIES is an in-progress manuscript of hybrid visual-poetic works. These constrained, compressed poems offer up an economical, efficient space to write into, consisting of contemplative text fragments that are as much about poetic play as they are about circumnavigating life’s daily anxieties and challenges.
Short-form writings of all kinds seem to have an ever-increasing presence in our social media-influenced lives. Be it a response to an overabundance of information, the temporal constraints of increasingly fast-paced lives, or shrinking attention spans, I am curious about the social forces that are influencing this cultural shift towards brevity and compression. Conducting my own research into the possibilities of a short-form poetics through this body of work feels like a crucial way of confronting the language of our times.
Some of the formalist considerations of haiku have embedded themselves into the circle poems: short, concise wording; impressionistic brevity; the combining of distinct phrases/fragments into one holistic idea that, like a haiku, can be read in a single breath.
As I continue to work on the CIRCULARITIES book manuscript, I am also creating a selection of animated variants (6 of which are featured here) aimed explicitly at online platforms. I see explorations into versionings as a way to expand the scope and life cycle of this body of work: when creating these online ‘remixes’, I highlight pacing and motion, subtle variations of approach that make each micro-animation come alive in individual ways appropriate to its text.
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Mark Laliberte is an artist-writer with an MFA from University of Guelph. He has exhibited extensively in galleries across Canada and the USA, curates the online experimental comics site http://4panel.ca, and edits the hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL. Laliberte has had pageworks, poems and other print experiments appear in publications big and small, including Ink Brick, Lantern, Poetry, prairie fire, subTerrian and Vallum. Publications include ‘BRICKBRICKBRICK’ (BookThug, 2010) and ‘asemanticasymmetry’ (a riso-printed remixing of selected derek beaulieu’s letraset works / Anstruther Press, 2016). Laliberte is a member of the collaborative writing entity, MA|DE: 2 new collaborative chapbooks were just released at the end of 2020, A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books) and A Barely Concealed Design (Puddles of Sky). More info: marklaliberte.com ma-de.ca