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Checking In 2

Created by poet and media artist Adeena Karasick and vispo artist/poet/programmer Jim Andrews, Checking In 2 is a 12-minute ironic investigation of our over-saturated mediatic environment, of incessant updates and self-aggrandizement. As a “spamographics” of literary, pop culture, political, religious and consumerist references, it speaks to our ongoing desire for information while acknowledging how fraught with myth that information can be.

Language looms large. Karasick's voice, reading her poem, is synched with its text that fills the screen one word per frame. The words are filled with images randomly selected from a set of 350 images relevant to the poem chosen by Karasick—featuring a selection from Andrews's collaboration with the Canadian poets bill bissett and Daniel F. Bradley.

The visuals were created using Andrews's "graphic synthesizer" Aleph Null, an online program he wrote of computer art that generates a wide range of animated visual poetries and cinematic oddities. The background is comprised of shards of the 350 underlying images randomly sampled. Layered 80 deep before clearing the screen and re-layering them in ever-shifting ways, it highlights how language and information erupt like scattered light.

Checking In 2 follows the internationally acclaimed videopoem and book Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) which included the full text of the original poem and was prominently featured in VIDEOPOETRY: 1980-2020 at the Surrey Art Gallery in Vancouver (2022).

The text of Checking In 2 will be published in 2023 by Lavender Ink Press in New Orleans as part of Karasick's forthcoming book Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations. The new text is darker than the first version, a pandemic-era paean to drinking and dissolution, media and consumption, language and lockdown, speaking to ways we are bombarded with shattered shards of unverifiable knowledge and consumed with an obsessive need for affirmation and validation. Unlike Checking In, Checking In 2 features Karasick reading the poem. Synched word-by-word, it not only highlights the materiality / physicality of language, but with Karasick’s percussive performativity, the screen explodes in a confluence of visuality, textuality and acoustic space.

The video to the right features Tom Konyves, curator of VIDEOPOETRY: 1980-2020, in front of Checking In at the Surrey Art Gallery in Vancouver (Nov 2022), which he featured as the central piece of this significant show in the history of video poetry. Powerfully compelling, politically, poetically and aesthetically charged, together, Checking In (2018) and Checking In 2 (2023) form a significant pair of video/poetry works of the last few years, that have changed the face of what videopoetry can be.

  • Jim Andrews
    Director
    vispo.com
  • Adeena Karasick
    Director
    adeenakarasick.com
  • Adeena Karasick
    Writer
    adeenakarasick.com
  • Jim Andrews
    Producer
    vispo.com
  • Adeena Karasick
    Producer
    adeenakarasick.com
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Web / New Media, Other
  • Runtime:
    12 minutes 5 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 16, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    2,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • The first version of Checking In was featured at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2022 in a show curated by Tom Konyves
    Vancouver
    Canada
    November 17, 2022
    showpiece of the show
Director Biography - Jim Andrews, Adeena Karasick

Jim Andrews has been publishing vispo.com since 1996. It's the centre of his work as a poet, visual and audio artist, programmer, media producer and thinker. He's been creating innovative, interactive multimedia art for the web (net art) since the days of Director/Flash--and now with JavaScript/HTML/CSS. Vispo.com has been one of the main sites on the net for interactive art and writing since 1999. As a creator of videos, Andrews combines his never-the-same-twice, generative, programmed works with a more video-oriented process. He lives in Vancouver. See vispo.com/cv/ja.htm for links to his online interactive poems, generative visuals, and animated, interactive music.

Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 12 books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas, (The Institute of General Semantics Press: 2022), shortlisted for Outstanding Book of the Year Award (ICA, 2023) Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera; Salomé: Woman of Valor CD, (NuJu Records, 2020), and Salomé Birangona, translation into Bengali (Boibhashik Prokashoni Press, Kolkata, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking, and has just been appointed Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. Hot off the press is Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations, Lavender Ink Press, 2023).

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Checking In 2 is a 12 minute collection of high-charge faux social media updates from artists, writers and thinkers (dead or alive), ideas, songs, and other people, places or things. It's a status update for our pandemic and post-pandemic times. It's a poem by Adeena Karasick, who speaks/performs it in the video. Adeena selected 350 images relevant to the poem. Jim Andrews added a few from his collaborations with visual poets bill bissett and Daniel F. Bradley, and fed all the images to Aleph Null, the graphic synthesizer he wrote in JavaScript; Aleph Null created the visuals of the videopoem.