An edited selection of sound poetry from two pioneers in the form.
Can you translate nonsense?
Today, near the centenary of Hugo BallÕs first sound poetry performance on June 1916, at the Cabaret Voiltarie in Zurich, the poems are easily available throughout the internet. To get there, however, they underwent a few changes. They became translated somehow: encoded. The ÔoriginalÕ dadaist poems became a surface with something added which they didnÕt have before, yet something that is still language and can be read.
The versions in this collection attempt to show what becomes of a poem, even one that is nonsensical, anarchic, when we put it through the technologies that we now take for granted, and how these technologies may affect the way we perceive the historical avant-gardes.