Mindscape In Cyberspace

Black Robert Journal is an Art and Literature Journal that defines itself by saying, “We subscribe to the notion that there is lots of vital work not being shared, from a spectrum of hills, and we intend to provide contrary voice to the mediocrity of same-same/different-different.”

In their current issue, they have published one Bangla Visual Poetry of mine, titled “Sin” (see the image below) and also an interview with me. The interview was conducted by the poet and vispo artist, Alexander Jorgensen, the Managing Editor of Black Robert Journal.

View my vispo piece here
Read my interview here

Venereal Kittens is a collective, conceptualized and edited by artist-poet Matina L. Stamatakis and dedicated to archiving and preserving innovative works by writers and artists of the 21st century, with a strong preference for experimental, avant-garde,post modern poetry and art. They say very clearly that they are not interested in mainstream writing or art.

They have already featured great artists and writers like, Alexander Jorgensen, Kane X. Faucher, Theoni Tambaki, ek rzepka, Carmen Racovitza, Ted Warnell, John Moore Williams, Angela Genusa, Javier Kronauer, Marco Giovenale, Raymond Farr, Anna Christina, Mauricette Beaussart, Drew Kunz, Nico Vassilakis, Linh Dinh, Robert Chrysler, Catherine M. Bennett, Michelle Detorie, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Mark Lamoureux, Bruna Mori, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Philip Jenks, Diana Magallon, Jeff Crouch, etc.

Recently they have added my digital paintings and visual poetry to their archive. It feels really nice to be featured on a journal with all those great artists who are shaping the art and literature of 21^st century.

Find the thumbnails of my paintings and vispos that are featured on Venereal Kittens, below:

Entangled

… and Birds and Birds

Comics

Park Street Junction

Watching TV - Emotinally Red

Take a look at my works on Venereal Kittens at following locations:
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/10/samit-roy.html
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/02/samit-roy-continued.html

… then … as sin dripped down from the sky … sin dripping down … sin dripping … and then … dripping from the sinful sky … the sins of the sinful sky … only a trickle … only … just … no more than … sins gathering sins accumulating … sins accruing sins multiplying … sins swelling sins surging … more sins piled on sins … and more sins heaped on sinful sins …

[English version of the Bengali text scribbled in the visual poetry featured above, as translated by M Mitra]

… ensuite … la pêche descendait du ciel en coulant vers la terre … et en coolant du ciel pêchant … et les pêches du ciel pêchant … qu’un chatouillage… rien que la pêche … se reunissent … s’accumulent … s’accroissent … la pêche gonflante … la pêche sautante … plus de pêches posées sur la pêche … et plus de pêches balancées sur la pêche péchante …

[French version of the Bengali text, as translated by R DOREES]

Poésie-visuelle de Samit Roy-Rouflaquettes DOREES

Few years back, while trying to understand the enormous amount of possibilities that could be generated by putting image and text together and fusing them into one comprehensive concept, I realized if I remove all direct references of the so called ‘image’ part of this unique concoction of ‘image’ and ‘text’ and use only the visual elements generated from the ‘text’ part, it might lead me to another set of possibilities. Letters do have their own visuals. A line of text has a specific visual appeal, apart from its literal meaning and literary connotations. It has specific shapes, lines and colors - the essential ingredients for an ‘image’. It is like, drawing with text.

I was trying to create a visual image of sins, constantly dripping from the endless sky and piling up forming a heap of sins. I formed a long and continuous sentence, as if it is an one-line description of the entire scene and used that text to generate a visual form which suggests something is dripping down continuously and piling up at the bottom. It worked for me!

Comics
View larger image »

Since my childhood, I have always been mesmerized by the magical world of images and text of comic books and the bikini-clad girlfriends of the super heroes with their funny speech baloons, crossing the boundaries of those small boxy frames and rigid panels. I have always wanted to create a comic strip, but it did not get done. The only thing that I could do is to bring together one of my unfinished poems about a weekend trip with a rejected photograph from the same trip, and make a conscious effort to simulate the eerie ambience of the first cell of a dark, action comics strip - still without a story, waiting for a hostile moment to begin its journey through the pages of our childhood fears.

The text on the image can be roughly translated as,

There are trucks and trucks and trucks, and more trucks, more and more trucks, truck after truck, standing still beside the yellow seat, before us, and the dark sleeves of their t-shirts wipe off from the dark, gloomy, night, the vaporized sodium of Highway no. 7!

Wild Pepper Forest (2006) - The work is inspired by a line from a Bengali poem by one of my favorite Bengali poets, Kamal Chakraborty (’80 – ‘90). The sentence goes like this, “… tomake dekhate partum buno maricher jongole thyangare ghumiye porechhe …” .

A rough translation of the line would go like this, “… I wish I could show you how the brigand has fallen asleep in the wild pepper forest …”.

The image was  used as the cover for 14th issue of Kaurab Online, the on-line edition of Kaurab, a Bengali Literature magazine founded by Kamal Chakraborty, which he also edited for 30 years.

I have written a prose piece in Bengali, along with this image, as a part of my response to this line. Rather, my work is a textual and visual tribute to the poet, Kamal Chakraborty, who has inspired me to experiment with the form and content of Bengali prose in my writings.

• Read this Bengali prose piece, “Tomake Dekhate Partum (I wish I could show you)” in Bangla UNICODE font
• Read this Bangla Prose Piece, as GIF

French and English transposition of the first paragraph of the Bengali piece has been done by Rouflaquettes.

French transposition:

Je pourrais te montrer
et je veux tellement te faire montrerles
les grattes ciels depuis les frontières de la cité… …
bric à bric
sable, bois
pierre à pierre
sur plafonds blanchis
vignes coulantes formidables de piments sauvages … …
dont l’ombre endorme le brigand faire à mesure
tel que le soleil de thésaures de notre parole
dictionnaires
examens et leurs cahiers verts
ainsi que le stylo à balle en rouges …

English transposition:

I could have shown you
and I would have wanted so much to show you
the skyscrapers beyond the city’s frontiers,
brick after brick
sand, wood
on lime-washed ceilings
flowing vines of elegant wild pepper
whose shadow shelters the sleeping brigand
like the sun of the thesaurus
and dictionaries of our speech,
exams and their green notebooks,
marked in red ball-point ink …

Later, in 2007, I reworked the image to create a cover for the printed edition of Kaurab.

The reworked image can be viewed here »