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Kaleidoscope 6.1, Michael A. Ricciardi, “Light : videopoem”
Light : videopoem
MICHAEL A. RICCIARDI
Light
light is breaking / to
pieces / particles and waves / no one can decide /
the outcome of subatomic enterprise / will be
known /
only through disruption / the
perturbation of the form /
now manifest in a
broken world /
the patterning of the
living / already in ruin /
all symmetry
out-of-line / free energy in decline /
and this is our space-time/incoherent / but for
the light that shines /
though less than it
was / before the past ever was / before the future became /
what it is we are / ever incomplete / always about
to be /
something more to see / treading
through history /
walking the
shadow / broken / by the light /
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Kaleidoscope 6.1, Michael A. Ricciardi, “Light : videopoem”
Background
The poem Light is an automatic poem (written in one sitting, no stopping, “stream of consciousness”
style) which I composed (on a typewriter) in the mid 1990's.
At the time I composed the poem, I had been reading a mixture of quantum physics and cosmology;
much of this material revolved around the phenomenon of
“wave-particle duality”
(of light, i.e., acting as both a particle and a wave depending upon its interaction with matter, and the choice
of measurement). This “dualism” of light - a concept I was introduced to through earlier readings in the late
1980's (e.g., Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzak Bentov) - completely captivated my imagination. I would
imagine Einstein, who first posited the photon as the quantum of light, traveling on a beam of light as he
passed through various cosmic “filters,” which then transformed into a photon (the quantum of light) and
then back again, causing him to scratch his head in puzzlement. Somehow, this all got mixed up with
Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle (the inability to measure a particle's position and momentum
simultaneously), the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) and finally, the cosmological concept of
“symmetry breaking” (of both space and time), which leads to the “arrow of time” moving in one direction,
(the future) and the unfolding and expansion of the universe from a (putative) singularity to the immense
cosmos we now observe. One so vast that the light from stars and galaxies is actually light from the distant
past.
The future evolution of these cosmic phenomena is beyond our grasp, but classical physics tells us
that all manifestations of light, time, and matter will be caught in entropy's snare, doomed to an ultimate
“heat death,” and thus we all “walk the shadow”-. the product of light's broken symmetry. I am a science
writer/scholar by trade, but a poet/artist by nature. When I write poetry, it is not something I consciously
choose to do, rather, a feeling comes over me; I am compelled to write, to manifest poetry. The Science that
I read and contemplate infuses my thoughts; the poetic moment (from which comes the automatic poem)
“con”- fuses these concepts, and fuses them into a new form, or pattern, like some kind of linguistic alchemy.
In doing this, my awareness and experience of my own knowledge is transformed.
As for the “meaning” of the poem, this is, as always, a matter of subjective experience; it is better to
enter the flow of the poem and come away with a sense or impression, than to grasp at a portion or part and
attempt to dissect it, for, like Heisenberg's Uncertainty, when we try to pin down or measure the meaning of
a poem (or the position of a particle in motion), we lose the flow (the particle's momentum). Remember: a
quantum of light (a photon) has no “rest mass”: to trap the photon, or the poem, is to stymie its essential
nature.
In 2011, while doing research on solar flares and sunspots for a blog article
(blog: planetsave.com), I located a NASA website offering free public domain .GIF animations of solar activity,
and I found a short animation of solar dynamics captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite.
I immediately connected this visual to my earlier poem. Using an on-line editing service I imported the .GIF
file into the editing interface, then copy-pasted the written poem into a text-to-voice program, inserted a
female vocal effect, followed by an edited analog synthesizer track composed by my music/sound collaborator
Ffej Mandel as a second audio track. Finally, I processed the visual SDO animation through a series of wipe
and fade effects to create the “fragmenting” effect one sees in the final video, although some of the visual
“break up” of the video is native to the original NASA recording. I found the rapid cycling of the video with
the spoken word to be quite mesmerizing.
The written poem was later self-published in a small circulation chapbook collection of original poems
and drawings called Space Junk (2004) and the videopoem has been publicly screened just once, at the
Poetry Film Festival (Institute for Experimental Arts) in 2012 in Athens.
Michael A. Ricciardi,
www.chaosmosis.net
[email protected]
Michael Ricciardi won his first art (poster) contest at the age of 8, and began drawing and
“designing” various fantastical contraptions (e.g. a “Martian making machine”) by age 10. He has
been a practicing writer and media artist since the late 1980's and produced dozens of short videos
(and three documentaries), and, in 1997, produced his first “video poem”. During this time, Michael
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Kaleidoscope 6.1, Michael A. Ricciardi, “Light : videopoem”
was a regular performer at poetry open mics and began offering multi-media spoken word
performances - most recently (2001-2010) as chaosmosis, a collaboration with composer Ffej Mandel.
Michael's experimental poetry and short poetic-prose work has been published by various web and
print journals, including Lungfull, Exquisite Corpse, Farmhouse Magazine, and Tattoo Highway,
with one poem, Finnegans Elegant Universe, published in the print anthology Riffing on Strings Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory.
He has received several Arts awards (for photography, video, teaching), including a 2002-2003 Paul
G. Allen Foundation for the Arts grant. Since that time, Ricciardi's video-poems and short
experimental works have been screened internationally.
Michael is currently a free-lance science and technology writer (until April 2014 for the blog
planetsave.com). Since 2012 Michael has found success as an “open innovation” challenge solver
and concept designer (topics from a/v tech to Big Data to bio-tech) and was the sole recipient of the
recent “2013 Innovations in Arms Control” award from the US State Dept.
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