Un coup de dés – the movie

In order to test the beta release of the new simplified Zeega editor, I thought it might be interesting to try to remix Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poetic experiment Un Coup de dés. Mallarmé’s pioneering work waited a decade and half before achieving publication. Despite its author’s attention to page layout, his expressive balancing of “empty” spaces with “full” word strings, and the delicate drift and hold of a syntax no less suggestive than elusive, the work never quite rose the absolute standard that Mallarmé set for himself. It failed to become that ideal Book qua spiritual instrument that the Symbolist master had dreamed of and theorized.

Generations of subsequent readers did not share this view, from Futurists like Marinetti, who freely appropriated Mallarmé’s revolution in poetic language all the while denouncing his cult of le mot juste, to various currents of theoretical inquiry extending from the Tel Quel group in the 1960s through American post-structuralism, all of whom celebrated Mallarmé as one of the seminal modern explorers of the boundaries of human language.

MALLARMOVIE is an edition of Un Coup de dés. It assumes the form of a multimedia animation built atop one of the standard print editions of the text. Fragments from the text have been reworked as gifs: there is no video, only gif-based animations. They have been layered with fragments from other editions of the text, including Mallarmé’s own hand-corrected proofs, flickering or hovering like phantoms. The piece reads as a sequence of pages performed by means of swipes. Which is to say that it reads like a kind of “book,” but a book in which the very action of paging/playing/scrolling/rolling/ spinning/turning creates a precarious sense of the page as a unit. Dancing about amidst the dense textual layers are found gifs and stills culled from across the internet: of sanders spewing sheets of paper, of cosmological wheels, wind patterns, games (both digital and analog), satellite weather patterns, warning lights, and mandala-like loading icons. The pages load with a bit of looseness, the result of network and bandwidth latencies that I suspect would have intrigued Mallarmé. The drone-like score is an experiment by my former collaborator from the Stanford Humanities Lab, Aaron Russell; it’s called White Prickly Poppy.

MALLARMOVIE is a roll of the dice for the post-post-structuralist era.