Babel V: Dream Man

The Babel series are an optimistic retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel, positing that the multiplication of languages, instead of dispersing civilization, is a source of serene beauty: the poetry of variation. Here a poem by Russell Edson, Dream Man, is the vehicle for the exploration not only of how text sounds and what it means, but foremost a concern not often addressed: where is the text? Using a double layered composition, the text was first read one word at a time, with different people reading up to 3 disconnected words, in different physical locations around Berlin and in Italy. These were then edited as a stream, so that the text becomes a structure for travel amongst a hundred or so ambiences. The second layer is drawn from recordings of the full text read by 35 different people, of different nationalities and facility in English, cut up word by word, and sprayed in aggregate phrases, to develop an atomized rendering of the text, swirling around this helical vortex. The poem is absorbed, rather than literally understood, in an ex-temporal reading.