Week8 Blog: One Breath Poem

During this week’s class, we listened to Xtine Burrough’s presentation about her work about social practice art and met her in person. We sat in the sculpture garden and participated in the workshop in which we learned about one breath poem and wrote our own one breath poems. It was pretty intriguing to learn how art could influence social practice in so many ways, which I had never really thought about before. It is also interesting to think about how social practice art evolves as technologies become more and more advanced, especially during the covid quarantine period.

 

 

Xtine Burrough is a hybrid artist and a professor in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication (ATEC) at The University of Texas at Dallas. She mainly focuses on Media Art, Installation, Conceptual Art Practices, Remix, and Participatory Art. According to her website, Xtine Burrough is passionate about creating “participatory projects” by using digital tools to “translate common experiences into personal arenas for discovery”. She is the Area Head of Design + Creative Practice and the Creative Director of LabSynthE. LabSynthE is laboratory for the creative development of synthetic and electronic poetry. There are some projects related to art and social practice posted on this website: http://www.missconceptions.net/, such as Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change; Wordle Lighght, a digital poetry NFT; Hindsight is 20/20: Tarot Cards for Working Women in a Global Pandemic; One Breath Poem: Message for a Revolution (LabSynthE). It is valuable to click into each link and learn about these projects!

 

Regarding the One Breath Poem project, it was initiated in 2020 in response to police brutality. In this project, anyone can make a phone call to 205-551-8577 and speak their message in a single exhale. The message could be anything that one wants to share with the public, and it could be either poetic or not poetic. According to the guidelines, it can even be a poem, a memory, a scream, a release, etc. The purpose of this project is to collect people’s voices and provide a platform for the public to hear these voices. One could also call this phone number to listen to other’s messages. The form of this project through telephone call is truly attractive to me. A lot of people I talked to and sometimes including myself is a little afraid of making phone calls. I feel more comfortable using social media, emails, and texts to communicate with others. The main reason is that I could have several minutes or even hours to think about how I could reply to the message if it is relatively complicated, or I do not know the answer immediately. However, I have to respond immediately within seconds to messages sent to me while making phone calls. Instead of using certain online visual platform to present this project, I feel that the implication of telematic calls could bring people closer and feel more relaxed while sharing their own opinions or listening to others comfortably. Additionally, I like the concept that “a breath is the first calibration of life and expression.” The artists suggest that “breathing is a metaphor for the unsaid, infused with what has been said and what is still to be said.” Breathing representing silences. It separates activities and indicates resting. “LabSynthE considers the breath as a universal performative unit, used in One Breath Poem as an auditory fingerprint.”

 

Image by Maedeh Asgharpour, 2020; from https://labs.utdallas.edu/labsynthe/projects/

 

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