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Matthew Hollett
Biography
Matthew Hollett is a visual artist and poet from Newfoundland. His recent work incorporates digital photography, PHP scripting, and poetry, particularly constrained writing. His work has been anthologized in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2005) and The March Hare Anthology (Breakwater Books, 2007). He is currently a graduate student at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Artist's Statement for index of first lines
A digital image is essentially a stream of data, and can be represented as a string of ones and zeroes. With a bit of ingenuity, a digital image can be 'translated' into other forms of digital data, such as text. I'm interested in adapting digital photographic data into information systems usually associated with language and literature, such as an index of first lines.
An index of first lines, occasionally found in anthologies of poetry, eschews authorship, title and chronology and lists poems alphabetically according to each first line of text. The idea is that a reader might not always recall the title or author of a poem, but is likely to remember how it begins. I've always found indexes of first lines amusing as exercises in found poetry - reading the lines sequentially often results in a charmingly garbled, wandering diatribe, full of false starts.
The inkjet print index of first lines (32 months) contains the first row of pixels from every image created with my first digital camera, from April 2003 to November 2005. The lines of pixels are stratified in chronological order, with the earliest photo at the top. The resulting image contains 2048 x 5197 pixels - 2048 pixels being the width of the photos my digital camera took (3.2 megapixels), times 5197 photos.
Rather than using PhotoShop (which imposes a film-photography metaphor onto digital imaging), I wrote a PHP script to automatically copy and compile the images. PHP is a programming language designed for producing dynamic web pages, and can be used to generate and manipulate digital images in a direct, systematic way. index of first lines is a product not only of a digital camera, but of computer code. It is composed of a series of sequential images that are never perceived individually. Its horizontal lines can be likened to the lines that jitter across the screen when one fast-forwards a video.
While it's impossible for me to identify individual photos, looking at this image does bring back memories. Thicker bands of colour indicate distinct sessions of photographing, when I snapped many photos with similar backgrounds. For instance, a certain band of white near the centre is the trace of the overcast sky on the afternoon I first visited Stonehenge. In this way, index of first lines is an accurate cross-section of my memory, or at least my photographic habits. Examining it is an act of reading.
Robert Frank once said, "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." He might have said, "the way they do when they want to pause and rewind a film." index of first lines is full of these small instant replays, from near-identical rows of pixels which indicate a photo taken twice, to my reading of it as a kind of rewound / fast-forwarded version of my life. Like an index of poems, its usefulness as a reference device depends on my memory. Taken out of context, it has a certain surreal quality.
"The still photographic image has circulated [...] predominantly alongside the meanings of the printed word," writes Martin Lister in his Introduction to the Photographic Image in Digital Culture, and "with the emergence of digital technology this convergence is exponentially increasing." In my blog adaptation of index of first lines, which uses a new series of photos commencing on January 1 of this year, I have attempted to return the project to its roots in poetry. Each line of pixels has been paired with a line of text which appears momentarily as the user's mouse moves over the image, hovering on the screen for a small span of time. The result is a shifting, ever-changing poem.
Each line of text corresponds to certain constraints which make use of the metadata recorded by my camera. The aperture of each photo determines the number of syllables, while the camera's shutter speed is used to calculate the amount of time before each text disappears. The words themselves are written while looking at the original photos, and, like haiku, offer a poetic sense of location in space and time.