Oil - Dynamic Poetry

Coimbra, 2022

This project was created in collaboration with Marta Babau and Silas Sequeira, as part of the Typography in Digital Media subject, during our second year in the Bachelor's Degree program in Design and Multimedia at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra, under the guidance of professors Paul Hardman and Bruna Sousa.

Given a series of Concrete Poetry works, the task given to the students was to select and animate one, in a 1.5 minute video, while incorporating music and retaining some part of the original poem's form and "meaning".

We chose Hansjörg Mayer's 1965 poem "Oil", which stood out from all of the poems for being perhaps the most abstract of all. In our point of view, while most of the works given to us functioned as a visual experiment, "Oil" was rather an exploration of silence and rhythm, just like music.

Because of this comparison, the approach we took on our project was to animate "Oil" by syncronizing it with a song. We chose "The Typewriter" by Leroy Anderson, a 1953 musical composition that was also experimental, highly rhythmic, and even had a subtle connection to typography. To make our project more engaging, we decided to incorporate color, which was possible to do with real typewriters, and finally, to mantain the original's form, we built a grid that we used to preserve "Oil"'s harmonious order.