City Voice 2005

Multimedia poetry is in vogue. The First Moscow Festival of Multimedia Poetry 'City Voice' aims to gather and present to the public the most interesting contemporary projects that use various media and position themselves as poetic. To date, the movement has expanded beyond narrow experimental circles and has revived representatives in various cities in Russia, near and far abroad, whose (collective) works are characterized by high quality, effective presentation, and relevant meaning. The term 'multimedia' usually denotes a comprehensive presentation of information: simultaneous transmission of data in textual, graphic, video, audio, etc. formats. Multimedia poetry is an interactive combination of familiar poetic text, spoken word, visual poetry, performance, music, dance, and other border forms. The program of 'City Voice' will consist of two parts: 'Wordvision: serious rhythm-n-poetry' will be presented by A. Delfinov (texts), VJ Akla (video), M. Salnikov (drums), and S. Karapetyan (sound engineering). The general concept of 'Wordvision' looks like this: the poet selects the text based on the image. The VJ constructs the video sequence based on the declamation. The drummer synchronizes the rhythmic flows. The sound designer gives the project the necessary depth of sound, applying electronic special effects. The verbal-visual flow 'attacks' the viewer's consciousness, creating an effect of 'psychedelic expansion.' The second part of the project is 'Orbit' featuring Sergey Timofeev, Artur Ponte, Semen Khanin, and Georges Valliq (texts). It looks like this: a stage with a large screen - special poetic video clips (with music and text) are projected onto it, and there is also a video background on this screen during live readings. All texts are read to specially recorded music (several Riga projects took part in its recording – stylistically it includes electro, post-rock, downbeat, and acoustic). Four poets read (Sergey Timofeev, Artur Ponte, Semen Khanin, Georges Valliq). The styles of the texts are quite diverse – but mostly it is free rhythmic verse that allows conveying the 'plot' of the text with less formality than rhymed verse. On December 1 at the Club on Brestskaya, two parallel worldviews, two poetic perceptions of reality will intersect within the framework of one fascinating show. December 1. Club on Brestskaya. Starts at 20:00.