RE: Talan Memmott

It’s something about the discordant piano, the horror-movie background noise (a sort of red-death waltz chamber in a vacuum), the face looking like Scrooge’s dead friend Jacob Marley, and the ghostly text—popping up across the screen at a rate that seems faster than it actually is—that has me trying to remember is Hugo Ball ever seemed this strange when I read his work years ago. Wait. Go back.

I’m researching Talan Memmott, internet artist and creator of “The Hugo Ball,” a piece of flash animation that combines all of the words from Ball’s sound poem Gadji Beri Bimba in a random remix. For those who don’t know, Hugo Ball was a Dadaist artist and poet. If you don’t know what Dadaism is, you’re hopeless. Seriously, though, you ought to know. Back to the subject at hand. Hugo Ball achieved poetic fame for writing a series of “sound poems,” poems that featured made up words and no discernible grammar. As such, these poems relied upon performance and interpretation (i.e. creative liberty with regard to inflection and speech).

Playing off of some of the tenets of Dadaism, Memmott’s piece relies on collage. The Hugo Ball reconfigures the words of Gadji Beri Bimba into new structures, juxtaposing words off of one another and injecting pauses at random. The pace of the speaker (as stated above, a sort of Jacob Marley stuck in a mirror/crystal ball) is feverish and quick. The pauses are most certainly random. The speaker’s face contorts rapidly, most likely assigned a different posture for each word or each syllable. The piece, then, is truly a collage of what it is to perform something like a sound poem.

My initial reaction to the piece is one of puzzlement. The theme the piece evokes is a hard-to-place brooding and haunting. The piece haunts you, but I can’t help but feel that it misses the point. Wait. I’m uncertain because the piece so deftly distills Ball’s conception of the collage into a piece of net art, but it subverts this by having the same exact performance of each “sound word” every time. In other words, the configuration of the poem itself is different each and every time, but the way they’re pronounced remains the same, simultaneously injecting spontaneity into the piece while negating it. One must, of course, entertain the idea that Memmott simply did not have the tools at his disposal to create several individual pronunciations of each word, in which case the aforementioned complaint would be null.

In some ways, I can’t help but feel that Memmott’s piece mocks the originator. Dadaists attempted to reject form in place of spontaneity, yet Ball’s Gadji Beri Bimba rests on the page in a static position and Memmott’s random generator, The Hugo Ball, both calls attention to its static source text while commodifying (i.e. ROLL OVER TO HEAR A PERSONAL RECITATION OF GADJI BERI BIMBA) the one element (the performance) that made/makes each version of Gadji Beri Bimba unique. Regardless, Memmott’s piece only mocks Ball slightly. One could make the case that it actually picks up where Ball left off; it further subverts any sort of stylistic “form” by creating a random arrangement of Gadji Beri Bimba and thus implements technology in a way that reinvigorates some of the loftier ideals (i.e. elimination of form, pure spontaneity, pure chance) of the Dadaists from a technological approach.

Anyway, this has been one of the most scatter-shot blogs I’ve written all semester. I’ll continue to mull this piece over and come back and edit or refine some of the musings that you’ve stumbled upon.

For those only (for now) casually interested in The Hugo Ball, here are some caps to whet your interest: