COLLABORATORS

• Brian Rullman, founder of OVT Visualz which provides light and projection environments for rock concerts for groups like the Cramps, Korn, Crystal Method, and events such as Dennis Rodman's birthday party, and Summer Solstice for Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art.
• Dinello, sculptor of living art.
• Mark Spybey, word artist and occupational therapist from Canada.
• Street-Level Youth Media, the non-for-profit organization providing Chicago's at-risk youth with media tools and mentors to express their views.
• Gvoon, from Germany, Europe's top new media group of programmers, designers, and visual artists who had just finished touring Europe with Can, the cutting-edge rock band.

BACKGROUND
This was the eighth year of the National Poetry Video Festival, an event that started with Chicago poets Larry Winfield, Dwight Okita and later, Kurt Heintz launching city-wide searches for other video poems to show with their own at Guild Complex. Shortly afterwards, performance poet and founding member of Chicago's Uptown Poetry Slam Jean Howard joined in to help organize annual poetry video events. Seven years later finds Howard the director of the festival, Guild Complex still the principal sponsor & the festival itself an annual international event featuring nationally recognized works.

These include the 1998 Sundance Grand Jury award-winner, SLAM!, with live performances by its stars, Saul Williams and Sonja Sohn; the film SlamNation, directed and produced by Emmy-winner Paul Devlin; poetry videos by poet Allen Ginsberg, actor Matt Dillon, Tamlyn Tomira, star of The Joy Luck Club, President Jimmy Carter, actor Jimmy Stewart, students of American Sign Language, MuchMusic (Canada's version of MTV), and Bikers for Tots.

The festival has also premiered the PBS special, The United States of Poetry and featured its producer, poet and filmmaker, Bob Holman. In collaboration with Miramax Films, the festival included a screening of the Academy Award winning film, Il Postino, followed by a discussion of poet Pablo Neruda's life and work. In 1997, Andrei Codrescu, poet, National Public Radio commentator, editor (Exquisite Corpse), and novelist (The Blood Countess) performed his poetry followed by a showing of his film, Road Scholar.

From its original screening at the Guild Complex in a bookstore at the time, to its recent years at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, the festival has taken many turns. Its primary mission: to explore the interrelationship between technology and the spoken word, for the most part through video, film and performance poetry.

This year, the organizers took a more aggressive approach. Hungry for innovation and to explore the poetic possibilities offered by the newest technologies and the Internet, Jean Howard contacted Brian Rullman from OVT Visualz, who introduced her to Steve Collins of the Lab. The Lab had an established following for its experimental events involving the Internet, and cutting edge artists of all media including video, film, sculpture, music, projection, and computers, including a telekinetic robotic collaborative performance with the Survival Research laboratories in Oakland, CA.

Stephen Collins had not yet done much collaboration with poets. His first meeting with Michael Warr and Jean Howard took place at the Lab, which is situated in an industrial corridor with housing projects just a few blocks away. Events at the Lab had ranged from Web-based radio broadcasts to Lumpen Magazine's sex party, so this would be a definite departure from the festival's previous settings at the Museum of Contemporary Art or Guild's Chopin theatre. Collins' extreme experimentation and dedication to technological exploration for art was inspiring, and his immediate enthusiasm for a collaboration with video and performance poets set the tone for the Eighth National Poetry Video Festival: this festival would be one full of risks, experimentation, ambitious technical endeavors, and collaborations not only between inter-disciplinary arts, media, and culture, but also between generations.

Howard and Warr were immediately thrown into Collins' world where the newest computer technology and the Internet rule. Collins, in turn, was introduced to poetry video, “Slam” performance poetry, and the organization of a successful non-for-profit.

BEFORE THE EVENT
Weeks before, Collins was invited to tour with Gvoon, a new media group from Germany. They were to open for CAN, the avant-garde rock band, on their tour of Europe. When Collins returned to Chicago he was on fire with ideas about how Gvoon could contribute to the Poetry Video Festival. As a personal favor, Gvoon had agreed to fly to Chicago at their own expense to take part in this one-night event. After viewing video footage of the European tour, Howard and Warr immediately welcomed this idea, but the actual process of collaboration remained vague.

Gvoon asked for several poems by different poets to be sent to them without giving a clear indication of how they were going to be used. The poets had to be willing to relinquish control of their work's format and structure. Steve Collins kept repeating, “Trust me on this.”

Meanwhile, Brian Rullman from OVT Visualz resurfaced from his event in Latin America. Inspired by Rullman's work at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art's Summer Solstice (a 24-hour event featuring artists, musicians, dancers, fashion designers, poets, Internet artists, DJs, etc.), Howard approached him with an idea: to set up an area in the Lab at the National Poetry Video Festival in which people could create their own video poems.

Here a poet could perform his or her poetry with pre-selected video being projected on the walls around him or her. A selection of videos for projection could include cartoons, sci-fi “B” movies, National Geographic footage, vintage black and white films, rock videos.... A combination of good camera work on the poet's performance and Rullman's on-the-spot master mixing would create instant video poems. Any one at the festival could visit the “Make Your Own Video Poem” studio and walk away with their own video. Of course, to fire up the sessions, pros like performance poets Cin Salach, Sheila Donahue, and Marc Smith were invited to create their own video poems.

The Poetry Video Slam that was so successful at previous fests was a natural for the unorthodox aura of the Lab. Slam Master Marc Smith was invited to emcee this competition with four members of the audience judging. In this slam the whole audience participates in the judging, with an applause meter that determines which video wins the “People's Choice Award.”

OTHER SPACES
Sculptor Dinello's Theatre of the Senses with raised islands of draped seating would allow audience members to:

• See slides and video (a retro review of 8 years of the festival)
• Hear words and music
• Taste tea and poetry
• Smell incense and passion
• Touch the soul of stage (Dinello assembling sculpture, piece by piece)

On the main stage, Gvoon including Arthur Schmidt, would collaborate with Mark Spybey, Steve Collins, Jean Howard, and the poems of five other Chicago poets. Exactly how this collaboration would take place was yet to be defined. In fact, the process of that defining would become the event, Webcast to thousands.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FEST
The thirteen cases of Gvoon's electronics had cleared customs the day before. There was much rejoicing. The top floor of the Lab was dark and unlit except for the large tarps of projection screens that OVT Visualz had stretched around the room. On these, glowing letters were raining -- huge, ghostlike vowels and consonants running down the screens, pulsing with eerie other-worldiness. The air in the Lab was throbbing with the sound of words coming to life.

Gvoon had programmed the audio read of eight poems and by accelerating, extending, and manipulating their sounds, the program was creating its own symphony of poetics that synchronized with electronic visuals.

Steve Collins was holding two baseball-sized orbs in front of him. Interrelating to magnetic signals from his body, these balls created a grid-made entity like a fluorescent sea anemone on the screens. It stretched, contracted and swam along a sea of letters in response to Steve moving the orbs in his hands.

Then the rain of letters transformed into full words, then lines. An ongoing poem rolled down the screen created by Gvoon's computer program selecting random lines from the original eight submitted poems. A line from Dwight Okita's poem about a sun tattooed on his lover's chest would roll into Jean Howard's line about a daffodil's bra cup flowing over with yellow. Cin Salach's wild image of marrying her television set would intermingle with Luis Rodriguez's urban landscape. An exquisite “random poem” would create, then recreate itself, with even one or two words of various lines being constantly replaced by the program's random selection.

The resulting living breathing poem was constantly transforming itself in three dimensional physicality. Gvoon played this poem like an instrument. One moment it was a wall of words seemingly peeling off of the screen, the next, it would curve inward. Switching from the random poem, to a rain of letters, to the interactive grid anemone... an electronic performance unfolded. A whole new frontier of poetry performance presented itself. The random poem begged for a live reading by one or an ensemble of performers. The accompanying pulsing sound along with the projected imagery invited physical movement in the form of spontaneous performance or choreographed dance interacting with the movements on the screen.

Howard was determined to invite Cin Salach and Sheila Donahue to improvise with her at the event the next night. Meanwhile, Gvoon had some of their own ideas. An electronic body suit was placed on one of their members and his actions became the actions of a huge projected “Y” and “O.” Suddenly the “Y” had a mouth that spoke and eyes that blinked. Using a digital camera, Gvoon captured Jean Howard's face and mouth as she performed her poems and incorporated these images with those on the screen. Though there was only this one night to rehearse, the possibilities ran on and on.

THE EVENT
Just hours before the event, Steve Collins called Jean Howard to say that his landlord, who was cool with Collin's events, had called to tip him off to a problem. An irritated neighbor in this industrial neighborhood was determined to put an end to Collin's “happenings.” This neighbor had notified the police that Collins was putting on commercial events without a license, and was surely selling liquor without one, too. “No problem,” Collins assured Howard, “we just need to clearly state on a sign at the door that this was a non-for-profit event and ask for donations only.” This is a normal procedure for Guild Complex events, Michael Warr assured them, but for this night everyone should take extra precautions.

IT BEGINS
People were heading down the long alley leading to the Lab. Some were Lab freaks, some were poetry freaks, or Guild Complex regulars, OVT Visualz partiers, Dinello fans, and the rest a curious throng that had gotten the word about the festival. All good, all Chicago! Gvoon was warming up. Street-Level Youth Media videos started running on the top floor. Dinello was pouring tea and lighting incense. The “Make Your Own Video” studio had people signed up and waiting -- some of the fortunate early participants: Marc Smith, Larry Winfield, Dan Cleary. Things were starting to percolate!

Marc Smith began the Poetry Video Slam. Collins, having never witnessed Smith or a Slam in action, was amazed at how it engaged the whole audience. As the Slam was wrapping up, Collins pulled Howard aside with news: the cops were downstairs. By the time Howard got to the ground floor entrance, there was already a heated discussion going on between four policemen and a former Guild Complex board member, a lawyer who just happened to be walking into the Lab as the “bust” was going down.

The police were shutting down the festival because a young volunteer at the door had failed to state to an undercover policeman that the entrance money was a donation. The former board member standing in line had been stopped from entering the festival and after hearing the details from Warr, was insistent that the police did not have the right to shut down the event. The discussion was already getting ugly.

THE DRAMA
Five police cars were waiting in the alley. The police had already started clearing out the festival. People were pouring out of the Lab –- an amazing mix of cultures, age, and backgrounds. All Chicago. Michael Warr and a young female volunteer were in a squad car waiting to be taken to the station. There was some physical interchange between the head policeman, Michael Warr and the lawyer board member. Steve Collins was sitting on a stool in the alley, like an observer of the bizarre. Howard stood in the midst of several police showing Guild Complex newsletters and non-for-profit documents to a sergeant who had just arrived from the station. The police were beginning to look foolish.

Lilia Chacon, a reporter from Fox 32 Television News who had just arrived to attend the fest, called her camera crew. Pools of people were standing in the street waiting for word from the police headquarters as to whether the festival could resume. Eric Booker from OVT Visualz started shooting his own “Police Files” video of the whole scene. Gvoon continued performing upstairs as cops stared mind-boggled at their equipment and what they were doing. This whole scene was old hat for Gvoon.

THE VERDICT
After much discussion, uncertainty, and tension, the word came down from the station that the event could continue. Most of the earlier poetry crowd had dispersed, but the Lab crowd, accustomed to arriving after midnight, was just coming through. Howard was still stunned at the senseless disruption of the night's momentum and months of work.

But it was Gvoon's turn to really kick in. Mark Sybey brought up two members of a workshop held the day before where participants had written individual and group pieces, then recorded their readings on tape. Spybey had created new audio compositions by electronically manipulating these recordings and using them as background for the live readings being done at the moment. Gvoon provided engulfing visuals. One massive collaborative creature stretched its feelers to every corner of the room. The rule: “Try it.”

Across the walls a huge glowing green presence pulsed, moving panes of texture, of poems raining upon everyone near, of artists sticking their fingers into the goo of language and electronics, of communication moving like a charged storm. Into these pools people wandered throughout the night, splashed with sound, words, and light. Some just dipped, others jumped right in. Whole oceans exist waiting to be explored. This year, Chicago's Eighth National Poetry Video Festival definitely got wet trying. Try it!

Jean Howard

OTHER CITIES' VIDEOPOETRY FESTIVALS

• In San Francisco, Herman Berlandt founded the Poetry Film Workshop & hosted annual Poetry Film Festivals each December beginning in the mid-1980s. The Poetry Film Workshop evolved into something called “Literary Television” (LTV) under the directorship of George Aguilar; LTV sponsored “Cin(E)Poetry Festivals” & its Web site used to offer an online archive of cin(e)poems -- unfortunately, the last time we looked, it had vanished from the Net.
  
  
• In Vancouver, Heather Haley's Edgewise Electrolit Centre held its first Vancouver Videopoem Festival in 1999, featuring Verbomotorhead (a Vancouver improv ensemble doing a video production of e.e. cummings), Adeena Karasick's Alphabet City, Chinese Cucumbers by Kurt Heintz & Patricia Smith, and selected work from Jill Battson (host of Muchmusic's poetry video series Word Up). This annual event has become a don't-miss extravaganza of poetry film & video.