Born Magazine,
Multi–Media Storytelling on the Web (Continued)

Taking a leaf from the theoretical pages of the Surrealists and Futurists, the editors and technology team at Born recognized the visual potential of synesthesia in Flash animated productions of poetry. Synesthesia is an involuntary neurological condition that joins together two different perceptions. Selected words and musical sounds maybe perceived as colors or a particular taste. Poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud visually experienced certain words as an explosion of colors. While conducting, Franz Liszt admonished his orchestra, "'O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!" The physicist Richard Feynman admitted to seeing Bessel Functions with dark brown x’s and violet n’s. The painter Wassily Kandinsky saw in the joined perceptions of the synesthetes the opportunity to create a schematic map of human emotions coded by color and line. Such evocative schematics would allow the artist to produce works that created a constructed experience of synesthesia for the viewer. With a nod to synethesia, Disney Studio artists transformed classical compositions into colors and shapes in the wildly successful animated film Fantasia.

Born offers many fine examples of a synesthestic experience in collaborative Flash animated projects. Ed Hirsch’s poem "I Am Going To Start Living Like Mystic" creates a spiritual journey out of a walk in the park on a fall day, culminating in an ambiguous moment of transcendence: "I will walk home with the deep alone, a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries." The poem evokes the mythical enchantments of nature that Hirsch says can "estrange us from the familiar and signal the presence of something in us that is deep and demonic, something wild and unruly, irrational, imaginative." (One Life, One Writing!) Canadian multimedia designer Benoit Falardeau's Flash version of the poem highlights the ambiguity of the mysteries across several pages in which the imagery shifts from the startling shades of a vibrant spring–green, to trees veiled by blue snow, and last, to a brooding landscape of dark trees, tangled branches, and a glowering fall sky. The sketchy lines of the pilgrim imitate his frailty against the solid black trunks. The abstract perspective of the figure intensifies his purpose: outsized hands stretch to receive mystical knowledge at the opening, while in the moment of enlightenment, the same hands splay in fear and wonderment beside an oversized head, haloed by a fiery sunset.

In the poem"Letters to a Lover" written by Heather Lee Schroeder, designed by Luca Marchettoni and with original music by Tony Moreno, an illicit affair unfolds in alphabetized lines: "A is for the awl that sliced open the wood and, later, the head of Maggie Lawrence's lover when her husband Frank found them entwined on the front parlor couch." The lines of the poem move between the sensuality of the affair and the brutality of its eventual conclusion: "D is for the demon drink that some speculate drove Frank to his terrible act. E is for the ear, upon which Maggie's lover placed a tender kiss that would become his farewell."

Echoing the sharply contrasting emotions of the poem, the music is delicate, gentle, a romantic guitar that evokes the intimacy of the tryst. But the Flash animation as each line of the poem appears is deranged: images drawn with frantically scrawled lines, a palette of somber colors, except for deep red splotches, all set against a black background. The lines of the text appear one at a time with its corresponding illustration. Although each line of text is replaced by the next line with the click of a mouse, the illustrations remain. As the poem advances, sensual and violent images are layered one atop the other, suggesting the deepening mire of jealous rage.

Born has also produced Flash animated pieces with a rich visual lyricism. "About the Other Animals," written by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, designed by Julie Potvin with sound and music by Philippe Gully, retells the Biblical Flood in which "other animals" — wondrous and strange creatures — are denied passage on the ark and are left, "littering the shore like so many Penelopes and Ariadnes." Promising to return later, Noah abandons them on the shore to be "swallowed by the storms." A subtext slowly emerges from the poem as the wondrous creatures, left behind and forgotten in the great flood, are compared to the forsaken women of mythological and Biblical tales. Penelope remains in Ithaca to weave her shroud and await Odysseus’ return, Ariadne assists Theseus to defeat the minotaur and is then abandoned on the Island of Naxos, and Noah’s wife appears in the poem as “Noah of the nameless wife,” her name and identity forgotten. The poem pays homage not only to these women but to the virtue of “otherness” and the integrity of creatures lost in the “throat of the seas.”