Hannah Weiner: Code Poems from The International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations (1982)

24 November 2013, dusan

“I am interested in exploring methods of communication that will be understood face to face or at any distance, regardless of language, country or planet or origin, by all sending and receiving.

For three years I have used the international code of signals to make poems and poetry events, because this code makes available and possible the translation of simultaneous equivalents:

  • Flashing light (by Morse): abstract visual,
  • Sound signaling (by Morse): abstact aural,
  • Live semaphore: motion,
  • Fixed semaphore: motion,
  • Flag hoists: concrete visual,
  • Radio: electronic,
  • Words (including equivalent translations in seven different languages.

[..] The amount of information available has more than doubled since WW2. In the next ten years it will double again. How do we deal with it?

  1. Do we use more than the 5% of the brain now in use?
  2. Do we process quicker?
  3. Do we decode information more and put it in another form (not language) so that the present brain can handle it?
  4. Is there a change in the neural circuits of the brain?

[..] At the moment I am interested in exploring methods of communication through space; considering space as space fields or space solids; through great distances of space; through small distances, such as the space between the nucleus and the electrons of an atom; through distances not ordinarily related to the form of communication used. I am interested in doing this so that we may develop methods of communication that will be understood face to face, or at any distance, regardless of language, country, or planet of origin, by all sending and receiving. For me this implies an understanding of four, five, (and six?) dimensional space; of how what can be transmitted through this space; of how these special dimensions relate to different “states of consciousness” and to different neurological patterns (if any).”

Quoted from Weiner’s “Trans-Space Communication” statement (published in July 1969) written to accompany her performances of Code Poems.

Publisher Open Book Publications, Barrytown/New York, 1982
ISBN 0940170035
28 pages
via waskleist

Weiner at EPC Buffalo
Weiner at PennSound

PDF (no OCR)


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