There are two kinds of visualisation processes. One process starts with the word and the word leads to a visual image. The other takes the visual image as the starting point; the visual image leads to verbal expression (Italo Calvino). Poetic films and their video equivalent use both processes simultaneously. They combine the verbal power of the poetic art with the visual richness and diversity of experimental video and film. Using this synthesis, successful poetic films and videos produce associations, connotations, metaphors and symbols which can be found neither in verbal nor in visual art. The Striders is a poetic video. There are two dolls in a washing machine. The machine fills with water and starts its cycle. The dolls swirl with each cycle of the wash programme. Slowly back and forth. "And search for certain thin-voicemed, bubble-eyed water bugs. See them perch on dry capillary legs, weightless on the ripple skin of a stream. No, only prophets walk on water. This bug sits on a landslide of lights and drowns eye-deep into its strip of sky". The water runs out. The Striders bridges the gap between traditional and modern, stationary and moving, speaking and remaining silent, the beginning and the end, life and death.
– Marieke van Hal
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Production Tata Institute of Social Sciences
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