No-medium Poetry

The basis for the project was an incident that occurred in 2017, when writer and playwright Dmitry Retikh sent the artist a play written in a specialized screenwriting program: "Kit-screenwriter". When opening the Word file on the computer, nothing remained except punctuation marks and numbers, which was related to an encoding error when transferring the file from Windows to MacOS. In the work presented at the exhibition, the artist reinterpreted the found text glitch effect in the form of minimalist graphic works made with code (to preserve typography), the specialized Hershey font (1967), a pen plotter and technical drawing instruments. Now the basis was Dmitry Retikh's 2023 poetry collection. The poems are left without words, but even in this form words unexpectedly continue to be present, now in the role of invisible figures. Thus, through the found readymade glitch, it was possible to see that facet of poetic text that usually remains only in the form of a barely perceptible sensation that resists decoding. Moreover, any text requires time to read, and in a situation where only punctuation marks and numbers remain, one can attempt to capture it with a single glance. Turning to the elusive feeling that arises from contact with poetry, the author works in the no medium tradition, similar to how John Cage (4'33"), Robert Rauschenberg ("Erased De Kooning Drawing"), Aram Saroyan and Dmitry Prigov (in poetry) and other artists who turned to emptiness as a medium did.