Roman Osminkin: Texts with External Objectives
Date and Time
Location
In this presentation, Roman Sergeevich Osminkin will deliver a lecture—interrupted in the most awkward moments by readings from his poems, demonstrations of his videos, and citations of the work of his friends—about the external objectives of poetry and its evolutionary development beyond the page.
The author’s somewhat paradoxical position is that true poetry always concerns itself with external objectives. For over a hundred years, poetry has been deserting the page for neighboring art forms, prolonging its relevance in our quickly changing world by surrendering its powers to more “resourceful” media—cinema, rock music, video art, performance, etc. Roman Sergeevich proposes that poetry can embrace this tendency without being reduced to the status of a poor relation. The digital age has generated an entirely new media-sphere, in which the many converse with the many, and the process of communication has become more important that any resulting artifact. Society is itself a communicative system in which art and the everyday intersect, as do language and power, politics and technology. But what remains of poetry when it leaves the page behind for the synthetic forms of video-poetry, sound-poetry, poetic performance, and so on? Is it forced to sacrifice attention to the word and its potential for renewing language? What does it gain in exchange? Roman Sergeevich has the answers.
In English and Russian with projected translations.