Two Brief Appreciations of Nico Vassilakis's Motion Detail Series

by Jefferson Hansen

For the past six days, we have featured Nico Vassilakis visual poetry films and a poetics statement by him. To understand what he is doing from his own conceptual framework, I suggest you read "The Seeseeing Platform" from June 22 on this blog. However, I did post two short pieces on Facebook to help orient viewers. Ideally, I believe the films should be approached raw, without any conceptual framing. However, I realize that some who are not familiar with visual poetry may need a little hand. If so, this post is for you. I give a few brief pointers as to what to look for. There is some redundancy, but each short piece gets at Nico's films from a slightly different angle.

1.

From Nico's "The Seeseeing Platform": "Hello letters! - you will leave your words, will be unattached, able to drift into all new visible features of experience." You can see this freedom for the letters in the visual poetry films themselves. Why did I accept so many films from Nico? They made me question how I receive authoritative knowledge in my culture. I receive it in black and white, in two-dimensions, physically stuck. Nico shows in various ways how letters are shapes and can be multi-dimensional, layered, in color, and moving. Watching all his movies—and all the various permutations on color, layering, motion, and shape—helped me to appreciate the contours of how authoritative language is processed and packaged. It made me wonder what is left out. More importantly, it made me wonder WHO is left out. How does our conventional way of using the alphabet impoverish and reduce our world? I suspect it does a lot. Nico's films bring back some of the wonder by exposing the edges of our understanding and enticing us to see what cannot be written about in conventional language. His video poems are freeing. They allow me to begin to see in new ways. Plus, they’re fun. And occasionally funny.

2.

In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich notes that literate peoples have a harder time remembering faces than illiterate peoples. This illustrates that literacy itself creates certain blindnesses, possibly in the very architecture of the brain. Visual poet Nico Vassilakis explores various alternative permutations for letters and literacy in his Motion Detail series of visual poetry films currently up at The Altered Scale Blog. For me, Nico uses motion, layering, color, and shapes to wrest letters from their usual black and white, stationary context. How does our relationship to such letters affect portions of our consciousness? What happens when letters and words are set free from their usual haunts? How do we then think differently? Thank you, Nico, for a great week and a half at the blog.