In a recent discussion we had, my friend Igor used the term aesthetic education to refer to being exposed to a diverse set of artistic experiences in one’s formative years. I quickly realized that was a deceptively simple term, one containing vast universes of meaning.
More importantly, I realized aesthetic education is a concept both misunderstood and (as a result) absent in modern times, where everything is about quantification and measurement.
Aesthetic education – which I will define more precisely in a moment; likely it isn’t what you think it is – has been missing in action for a long, long time.
Aesthetic education today can teach about color symbolism, what tight cropping does, or what a peacock feather might allude to. Real aesthetic education is about relating everything to lived experience as well as finding connections with other, (only apparently) irrelevant concepts.(more…)
When I make something new, such as a program, a book, or a music album, I often write a blog post about it. Sometimes this might span more than one post – think of The Perfect Gray and its review – but it’s far less often to see two different facets of the same work. Old Memories Murmured in Dreams is a young-love poetry collection I wrote sometime ago. And Dreams in 16-bit is a program I made to add another layer of experiencing this collection.
The text is identical and so is the order of the poems, however, the divisions differ and are accompanied by images stylized as retro computer graphics. Nostalgia and all that, huh?
The artistic focus in on emulating a late 80s/early 90s computer-game conceptual landscape. Note that, apart from the navigation buttons, there is no interactive element in this. Dreams in 16-bit is not an adventure game like Mansion Escape or an interactive experience like The Clock Village. It is only an artistic experience.
Here’s a screenshot of Dreams in 16-bit. A poetry collection with nostalgic tints about one’s youth has to include retro computer graphics, right?(more…)
I’ve talked before about literary translation, in a sense: In my post about translating poetry. But today there’s something more unique to talk about, having to do with what translating a novel can teach you about yourself and your writing craft.
The vast majority of my readers don’t speak Greek. Still, I decided to translate The Storytelling Cat into Greek – on a whim, almost – for two reasons: i) it completes the third part of my quasi-Greek-trilogyIf you suspect I might translate the other two novels too at some point, you might be right! (supplemented by Apognosis and The Other Side of Dreams); ii) it’s set on the island of Lemnos, and I wanted to experiment with the local idiom in literary form.
What I didn’t expect was that this literary translation – written in less than two weeks – would reveal a ton of things about my creativity, my writing, and who I am as a writer.
This is the Greek version of the cover. The art is self-evidently the same…(more…)
