“Peaks and Pyramids” is a concentrated sample of how the creative “features” that Digital Artist Mark Sabb and I collaborated on were transformed from ideas to digital pages. Since this project is about memory, typically the process began with an image that I “owned,” either because:
- I was the photographer;
- I inherited the photo from my parents; or
- In the case of the image of me outside the pyramids, the image was taken with my camera by a travel companion.
Often Mark and I were working with images that I had long wanted to digitally disassemble, revise, reassemble, and inject with words. There was also visual content and poetry that I had already integrated, some of it dating back to the 80s. Along the way I was assisted by generous, patient, creative graphic designers. Out of gratitude, I want to name a few of those designers: Dana Yarak, Elizandro Carrington, Jen Arterbury and crew at Boom Design in Chicago, and Robert Farid Karimi. Dwight Okida, Kurt Eric Heintz (remember the videophone), Cin Salach, Mark Messing, Shiela Donahue, and Larry Winfield, all poets and writers who were experimenting beyond the page, were unknowingly placing other possibilities in my sight.
Mark Sabb, who I would meet years later, is from a generation of graphic designers who grew up with revolutionary advancements in digital technology. Like the graphic designers I partnered with in the past, he is a writer himself. He also writes the code that makes possible the seamless integration between text and images that I’d been pursuing.
I would meet Mark at a café, or my apartment, armed with an idea, and an image, often already digitized, because I have been digitizing my photographs since at least the late 70s. In the case of “Peaks and Pyramids,” the idea went something like:
“I see the Gantry Crane, the iconic image of Bayview Hunters Point, as a modern pyramid. Having lived in the presence of both “pyramids” links my journey from Bayview to Africa and back. I want to integrate the two.”
Once Mark came back to me with digital interpretations of the integrated images, I became an editor of those composites. For instance, in one of the variations the original placing of the Gantry Crane is towering above the “true” pyramids. In my eyes his interpretation is striking, imposing, and surrealist. I love it. However, I wanted the Gantry Crane and the pyramids to inhabit the same space (since I come from both). I also wanted the rising peak of the Gantry to mimic the pyramid, which was easier to see when they were in proximity. Sometimes it is easier to draw an idea than to speak it. I emailed Mark a drawing of what I was looking for and that became the version that I would mix with the poem.
The poem is also “living” in the sense that I may continue to edit and write it. I might even integrate different text with the variations that Mark has created. He might do the same. I consider all the renditions that Mark created as works of art in themselves. I want to incorporate more of his gold signature into the Egyptian and San Francisco images.
We have only touched the surface of what is possible in this integration of text and images – Mark and Luis have been experimenting with an augmented reality feature, using the same images, that we hope to eventually share on this site. I think of Tracing Poetic Memory as a work in perpetual progress.