Yonder/Yandar: Concrete Poetry Frequencies

Yonder/Yandar: Concrete Poetry Frequencies was a collaboration between the Digital Maker Collective and community partners + Tate Neighbours LITC. The main collaborators (in alphabetical order) were Jheni Arboine, Leila Nithila-George, Julia Piekarczyk, Nicola Rae, Grzesiek Sedek and Charles Yassin. This project was part of BETA Society, which was directly influenced by Tate Exchange's lead artist during 2019, Tania Bruguera.

'Beta Society supports greater diversity and equality of opportunity in the development and access of technology, education and the arts.The Digital Maker Collective invited guest contributors and our community partners to campaign for a Beta Society. This week-long event aimed to establish a new community of creatives, students, industry and public, exploring social mobility and citizen-centered innovation through a digital lens.’ (www.betasociety.org)

Prior to the Tate Exchange event, Jheni and Nicola took part in many community meetings at Camberwell Playground and developed a collaboration with Charles and Julia from LITC through an active listening process. During one meeting a dialogue developed between Charles and Jheni concerning the sounding of dialects. ‘Yonder’ when spoken in Caribbean Patois by Charles’s Mum became ‘Yandar’, and this became the start of a Concrete Poetry project that would respond actively and participatively to audience input and community group activism during our BETA Society project.

Through a series of conversations that responded to the community focus on each day, suggested phrases were uploaded by Nicola onto Arduino OLED screens. These scrolling, glitched texts were then magnified through a digital microscope, processed through Photo Booth X-Ray and then back-projected onto tracing paper attached to Tate Exchange’s wooden tripod structures. During the early days of the Digital Maker Collective in 2016, Grzesiek Sedek had shown Nicola how to splice three different sections of open source code to create an Arduino 6-pin OLED screen of glitched text containing 872 lines of code. This code sequence was adapted for participative open source concrete poetry during this project.

About the Digital Maker Collective:'The Digital Maker Collective are a group of artists, designers, staff, alumni and students from the University of the Arts London (UAL) who explore emerging digital technologies in arts, education, society and the creative industries.' (www.tate.org.uk/)

About LITC: 'LITC aims to provide extensive social support, encourage community engagement, provide work-based training opportunities, develop skills, increase user employability and career aspirations, establish inter-organisational partnerships for the good of communities and make a real difference to the lives of individuals especially those from significantly deprived communities and regions.' (www.litc.org/)

Between 5-10 March 2019, the Beta Society event partners & guests welcomed and actively engaged 2,437 members of public.

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