STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
-Winter 2021-
Selection from Abduct the Oeuvre
Laura Herman
2020
“Lockdown” & “Witch’s Means” by Lorcán Black
“Observations during a winter golden hour walk” by Caroliena Cabada
“It is an old story” by Peter Grandbois
“Reading to My Daughter About Rocks and Gemstones Before Bedtime” by Catherine Esposito Prescott
“We Talk More Now That You Are Gone” & “Teachings” by Alison Prine
“The Science of War” by Trey Rhone
“Letter to Gabriel García Marquéz While Sheltering” by Laura Schulkind
Above:
Selections from Abduct the Oeuvre
Laura Herman
2020
About the Artist
Laura Herman is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher, focusing on multisensory perception and creative expression. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Tate, published in the Wall Street Journal, and commissioned by several text-based art collectors. Currently, she is a researcher at Adobe, where she works on developing and testing various creative tools, and at Oxford University, where her research focuses on technology-based art practices. She has published nearly a dozen academic journal articles in the realms of perception, human-computer interaction, digital art practice, and design research. Particularly relevant to this project, she discovered the underlying frequency-based correlations of grapheme-color synesthesia. Her work on this topic has been published in peer-reviewed journal articles and presented at several international conferences. A synesthete herself, she has also written the definition of synesthesia for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
About the Project In this project, discarded palettes become fodder for poetic provocation. By unnaturally forcing a bi-directional synesthetic experience, the artist translates colors into words (typically, only words become colors). Each brushstroke contains a multitude of shades; similarly, each word contains a collection of hues for a grapheme-color synesthete. Each letter has a precise color, and the letters– and, therefore, colors– that make up a word are weighted differently, resulting in a variable algorithm of sorts. Here, the artist pores over dictionaries, searching for the lone entry that perfectly matches a given brushstroke. After each brushstroke has been paired with its semantic counterpart, the words are creatively recombined into poetry. This results in poetic word-neighbors that would be nearly impossible to predict, and are likely nonexistent in any known corpus: an abducted oeuvre, a torquing nymph, lagging tomfoolery, and kinetic pores on a zirconium quilt. [Leo Kang contributed to some pieces in this project.]
