Jingwen Yuan

Based on this formula, I ‘calculated’ the poems of Oscar Wilde, John Keats, John Betjeman and Samuel Johnson. Then I plotted the results as a scatter diagram in mathematical rectangular coordinates.

These dot patterns are their ‘writing style’. So, I presented these dot patterns on organically shaped silver sheets as their ID cards.

It was like picking up a random fragment from the paper, a fragment of the poet’s poem. As the sunlight passes through the holes, the light forms new dot patterns. At the same time, the light and the projection connect us to the poet's poem.

Poetic language is different from our daily language.

When we read a poem and try to understand it, there will always be a gap in our understanding between the original poem and its translation in our mind. This gap can also be said to be the unfamiliarity of poetic language from everyday language. I think the gap comes from the sense of poetry.

In this project, I used my formula to calculate the 'value' of the original poem and the 'value' of the poem when translated into daily language, and drew their line charts in rectangular coordinate. Clearly, there is a gap between the two lines. 

That is poetry.

After putting the calculated data into Matlab, this image was obtained, which can be seen as the writing style of each poet. Each grid point represents data and a poem. The whole pin looks like a text box, so on the back I have used the shape of a typing cursor. 

With the cursor and the text box, we can imagine what will happen next.

H=logz y/x, which is a three-dimensional formula with 3 mathematical variables. This formal has its own 3D shape. I use Grasshopper in Rhino programming to establish the 3D shape of this formula.

From there, my work moved from two dimensions to three dimensions.

Grasshopper is more like a tool for me. With it, I can express the poetic shape of a poem. Each poem has its own unique curved surface and crosshatch...

I use those crosshatches in my work, they are poetic shapes, poetic translations, and poems at the same time.

The crosshatch on these three sheets of ‘silver paper’ is all from the famous poem by Tang Dynasty Chinese poet Ruoxu Zhang called ‘A Moonlit Night On The Spring River’. This poem describes the beauty of the river in the spring moon and the change of time. It is the poet's reflection on time and space.

In a way, the poem takes us to another world. Are we in another time and space, another dimension, when we appreciate poems? 

By folding the ‘silver paper’ and allowing the mirrors to reflect off each other, I expressed this poem in mirror crosshatch on plain white ‘silver paper’. Through the reflections, the poetic mirror crosshatch then creates another poetic dimension.

I combined punctuation and the moon, and found a poem describing them for the moon in each phase, and made their shapes with Grasshopper and printed them on rice paper.

Here, the work incorporates the moon phase as a concept of time, could it be described as 4D?

I've always liked this story — Chicago has no sea, but the oyster brought the sea.

My work begins with the story of oysters and sea, and aims to show the feeling of those invisible words. I put this story into the silver floppy disk that can be read, and let the story return to the work.

I have always been fascinated by the 'sense of words'. Words seem to me to be more like vessels for the imagination. The narrative nature of words gives me space to imagine.

Paper, books, mobile storage devices, we can naturally associate them with text, even if no text appears on it. Words are to them like Chicago's oysters and sea. Can be seen? Can't be seen? Doesn't seem so important.

In 1954, biologist F. A. Brown dug up a collection of oysters (Ostrea virginica) from the shores of Connecticut and placed them in an aquarium in a basement in Chicago, thousands of miles away. He was a biorhythm researcher, and he knew that oysters lived with the ebb and flow of the tide.

Nothing changed in the first two weeks. The oysters still went about their normal routine, reining in and opening their shells to catch the plankton in the water and feed themselves, following the ebb and flow of the distant coast of Connecticut.

But over the next two weeks, something inexplicable happened. They still rose and fell like the tide, but their high-tide behavior no longer matched that of Connecticut. It's not Florida, it's not California, it's not Dover, it doesn't fit into any of the tidal tables that science knows of.

After repeated calculations, Brown realized one thing: it was high tide in Chicago.

But there is no sea in Chicago.

These oysters lived in reinforced concrete basements, in glass boxes of artificial seawater. But they knew the sea existed. Their ancestors had lived by the sea for hundreds of millions of years. They can leave the sea, but the sea will not leave them. Brown speculated that the oysters may have sensed the change in air pressure, which in turn extrapolated the timing of the tides and their own rhythms. No oyster is consciously doing all this — but in some deep sense they are imagining a sea like this. A sea that does not exist anywhere on earth, where the tides rises and falls, and they open and closed to its rhythm.

Chicago has no sea, but the oyster brought the sea.

References: F. A. Brown, Jr., Persistent Activity Rhythms in The Oyster. The American Journal of Physiology, 1954.