glossamurmur generates its visuals in real time. A custom application — developed collaboratively by Zazil Alaíde Collins and vigorish, and still a work in progress — produces interactive visualizations that respond to the poet's semantic and sonic expression, generating a reactive visual environment out of the voice itself. The project sets out to blur the lines between textual, linguistic, musical, and visual modes of expression, drawing on ASCII characters, elementary grayscale geometries, and murmuration patterns that model the dynamics of predation and attraction found in the natural world.
The name is an homage to Anne Waldman's book-length poem Gossamurmur. Where Waldman spins gossamer — the fine thread of voice and memory — into a murmur, glossamurmur turns instead on glossa, the Greek word for tongue: the murmur is the field at rest, and the tongue is what calls it into form.
In performance the work opens with the poem's title and moves through three modes, each a different way of letting language take a visible form.
ASCII field
A field of faint characters breathes at rest — slashes, dots, a low typographic murmur. As the poet speaks, waves move through the field and English lines precipitate out of it, holding a moment before dissolving back. Spoken in Spanish, surfacing in English: translation arriving with the ephemerality of the uttered word.
Grayscale geometry
A field of grayscale, rectilinear geometry builds itself in real time — lines sweeping in, tonal planes settling behind them, the whole composition periodically turning so each new diagonal becomes the next horizon. The spoken word enters the structure and multiplies across it: kaleidoscopic, locked to the angle on which it was born.
Murmuration
Fifty thousand particles move as one flock. The voice bends them toward patterns hidden in the field; spoken words part the swarm and stand a moment in the cleared space; and a breath blown into the microphone scatters everything off the edge of the world. That breath is how the piece ends.
A collaboration between Zazil Alaíde Collins — Mexican poet, essayist, and music curator, whose work is concerned with the spatiality of poetics — and vigorish, who composes the score and builds the application.