**We strongly recommend loading Caroline's website in a new window and moving through the site while listening to the interview. **
image from carolinebergvall.com
Caroline Bergvall is an internationally acclaimed writer working across media, languages, sonic and visual artforms. From published and recorded performances to audio texts, collaborative installations and critical poetics.
She is French-Norwegian, and based in London.
Language, languages, lingos, tongues, tongue, accents, lingerings: her work deals with multilingual poetics, body genres, sexual politics, new literacies, multiple platforms for writing, cultural and linguistic performativity, the role of the artist and of art.
Caroline Bergvall's projects and research alternate between published poetic pieces and performance-oriented, often sound-driven writing projects. She collaborates frequently with other artists and her books are noted for their combination of performative, visual and literary textualities. She has developed books, audioworks, visual textwork, net-based pieces, live and sited performances, both in Europe and in North America and has toured her work and readings extensively. Most recently at: MOMA (NY), Dia Arts Foundation (NY), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Contemporary Arts (Antwerp), Göteborg Poesi Festival (Sweden).
-from carolinebergvall.com
image from carolinebergvall.com
The vertical scroll/swoosh from section to section of the site fills it with movement. How does this figure into your intentions for viewer experience ... and into how you see the site's design (of movement) interacting with your work as a writer/poet?
1:40
"... that's so much part of the experience of the net that I find interesting this whole idea of temporality inscribed in the way we think about reading ... a lot of what I do as a writer deals with temporality one way or another... it's very much at the heart of the way I structure my materials...."
0:36
"I wanted to do [the website] from the point of view of a slightly more acoustic or if you like multimedia environment of the net... the site has the notion of moveable structure at its heart..."
What do you see as being the primary purpose(s) of your website?
1:29
"It was to be a kind of resource ... I was trying to find a strcuture that would respond to the fact that my practice is very disseminated across modes and environments and situations... the layering is really more because there is this sort of multi-platform aspect to the way I work anyway..."
The site is very rich--there are many layers of material and experience. Not all of them are readily apparent. How does audience-initiated discovery and exploration figure into your intentions for the design?
0:25
"...with my interest in this broader notion of an expanded environment for reading and for writing practice...which is much more an immersive environment ... and again thinking thinking a very very simple site: how can you bring something to a sense of sensory pleasure through a very simple digital means?"
This digital site is filled with what we'd call the "human trace" -- (evidence of "the human hand" in the making of chapbooks, PLESSJOR, etc.) Is this intentional? How do you see the "human trace" figuring in the digital?
2:30
"...you enter a page where there's no trace of pixxilation, so you're as close as you can possibly be to the kind of enjoyment of the visual work, so that you see, if you like, the drawing happening ....there was this idea of although we are in an environment of the screen based--a nontactile environment--of really remembering the tactility and the pleasure of ink, and of hands ..."
How did you choose your digital font?
1:13
"...it became more a question of thinking about thinness and size and color rather than thinking about the actual ... type face ... I was really thinking about efficiency ... a sense of making people wanting people to stay in rather than to spend all this time waiting for things to load, not having it come up..."
Your work is so much about language and the body. How have you tried to bring the body into play with the design of this digital site?
1:48
"Embodied practice is always part of what I do and I feel I tried to do that [with the website] in different ways .... and that happens through, for example, the audio files ... it's a very sort of clear recorded voice that you get ... there are traces of installation ... and I feel all these are traces of embodied practice if you like..."
Do you have a preferred way for people to move through the works included on the site--the sound works for example? Is the work online comprehensive?
1:02
"...the projects themselves are not organized chronologically ... it was slightly more intuitive ... there was a sense of wanting to move around more ..."
The images can be easily dragged and dropped from your site. Is this intentional? How have you thought about copyright/watermarks, etc?
1:32
"...these are not the drawings, they are representations of the drawings ... the audio that I teach on that site ... you can only stream those, that's perhaps where I placed more care at this point ... the rest is really a document of work rather than work itself."
Was building this site a generative experience for you? Has it given you ideas for new projects--digital or otherwise?
2:40
"... it really brought in much clearer to me all the time what it is that I want to continue to know and to think about as a writer: these new environments, these new socialities, but also for me personally the literacities, the new skills I have to acquire ... "
We invited you to be a guest for EMS.org's "Reading Beyond" media scan--the premise of that scan is that new media are changing what it means "to read" (text and the world as text) and new media are changing the act and experience of reading. They are making new forms of reading possible. What do you think of this premise? What draws you, as a writer, to working with digital media? Has your work with media as a poet affected how you read and how you experience reading?
3:11
"... it is a question in late 20th century literature what reading might mean because the question is what writing is and are we going to keep on limiting it to what it's been ... how do we acknowledge the very specific technological materiality that we deal with to write and therefore to read?"
Why should students in a media studies or design program listen to a writer? What can a poet bring to their work as digital designers that others can't or haven't?
3:47
"... attention to aspects of the materiality of the verbal ... an attention to the way language and its joins--which are therefore those different manipulations we do with it, and the nonverbal of these manipulations--the way they provide for a reading space ... for me, the website had become a crucial need for a broader platform because I felt the need to meet further than where I know where to go ... [students] have to think about, in relation to design, it seems to me, who and why are they using those forms or those aspects of multimedia or those aspects of animated design, who are they talking to?..."