Summer Semester 2010,

POETRY OF THE CATASTROPHE

In the information age we live in, the question of ‘how sustainable our news are’ is inevitable. How far should we entrust ourselves to the prerogative of interpretation of a headline reality? How much is the information distributed by media related to our own reality? And how much does this information influence our reality?

The frequency and speed of information has increased significantly. The amount and density of content as well as the continually accelerated pace make absorption and deciphering of information almost impossible. Does the constantly increasing speed of information flow still allow making important decisions for the future?

The project ‘Poesie der Katastrophe’ - poetry of catastrophe – developed a unique solution, which aimed to compress daily news into poetry. Over the course of eight weeks daily headlines were summarized in a satirical-poetic way. These poems formed the base of the installation. By pressing a buzzer, the rapidly running poems could be halted, offering a random choice of prose. The resulting chance selection and the accidental new order create new connotations and interpretations thus highlighting the sometimes mundane and arbitrary nature of the original headlines and subsequently the complexity of sorting and analyzing news and information.

SHORT LIFE/LONG LIFE

Supervision Prof. Dr. Zane Berzina, Prof. Susanne Schwarz-Raacke, Prof. Heike Selmer
Project categorySemester Project