This installation plays the keys of a piano based on the movements and shapes of the clouds. A camera pointed at the sky captures video of the clouds. Custom software uses the video of the clouds in real-time to articulate a robotic device that presses the corresponding keys on the piano
Be a hollow reed
Waiting for melodies
And the notes that breathe skies
And the skies that breathe navy blue
And the navy blue that breathes sea
And the sea the breathes woman
And the woman that breathes of your unveiling and peeling away
That skin of your ego loosening and falling
The cocoon the morn
In Badasht last century
The morn.
By June Perkins
Recently I have been enjoying discussions with Baha’i writers and artists online. I asked an abstract specialist Meg Sloss how she would illustrate this poem and she sent me the above image. Thanks Meg. You can find more of Meg’s abstracts on at this link MEG’S ABSTRACTS
Another friend in that same group as suggested making the above poem into a dance, which really has me thinking. I’d love to have a dancer interpret this and then film it. So many creative ideas, hoping I will get around to doing them all.
Art in the city, not shut away in galleries, but everywhere you look.
It’s on power boxes, telegraph poles, railway station walls.
climbs onto walls and alleyways.
chalked, painted, sprayed, and poster papered.
It’s murals with messages from Martin Luther King
everytime I used to catch the bus in Marrickville
I’d see his face with an Aboriginal flag behind it.
It’s pieces that make you think, smile, wonder remember nature.
Driving past telegraph poles to the Gold Coast
we catch nature wrapping itself around telegraph poles,
birds and trees just in case we don’t see the real
they’re there in art.
I would love to go back and photograph these artistic poles.
I think of the artists commissioned or perhaps underground ones.
What are their names?
Are their signatures there?
Is there a guidebook somewhere to tell me the story of the street art?
This street art tells stories – it’s symbolic and straightforward
it’s naive and surreal.
It doesn’t advertise, it’s an invitation to think, as diverse as the artists in the city.
And when street artists paint, what is going through their minds about the setting
their work will live in everyday.
Do they look at the trees, and the walls and reflect what is there
Or do they represent a dreaming beyond walls beyond the boundaries
of the city and the forest ?
I want to write a spoken word poem all about the street singing forart
and the art calling out on the street,
maybe it would be be performed by a pied poet walking the street with a busking guitar
with people flash mob dancing in the streets?
(c) June Perkins
Image Credit Alex Aboud, Creative commons some rights reserved.
The poster words were recorded by Nat King Cole. Nature Boy“is track #10 on the album The World Of Nat King Cole. It was written by Ahbez, Eden but made famous by Nat.
This poster is my artistic tribute to this song, which has become a jazz standard.
Eden was a singer songwriter, Hippy nomad, beat poet, who lived in a park in LA.
Online I found recordings by Cher, Celine Dion and American Idol contestant in 2011 Casey Abrams. Furthermore, it was used in the movie Boy with the Green Hair.
I like the Ella Fitzgerald version of Nature Boy because of the beautiful background guitar.
I often enjoy writing with music in the background to find a rhythm and tone. As a young writer I loved jazz. Not many people in my household like it. But secretly, I still love a bit of jazz,especially something as haunting as this, which can be sensitively interpreted by the artist and has an interesting background story.
Toni Morrison wrote a book called Jazz that two university class mates bought for me one birthday, a sad tale but with a beautiful use of language that I have never forgotten.
Perhaps I’ll write some Haiku with this melody running through my head. Perhaps I’ll write a novel with someone as a jazz musician (wrote a poem called that once).
What books do you know which are greatly inspired by music for their structure and language?
June Paisa Perkins 