Looking back over John Giorno's career – from his involvement with the beat poets and Pop Art in the sixties to his AIDS activism in later years – the picture unfolds of an artist who never stopped trying to level the border between art and life. In 1965 Giorno declared: "I thought that a poet could reach an audience by all kinds of ordinary means of amusement: watching television, listening to records and telephoning". And so his work includes not only poems, but also posters and pamphlets, records, films, videos and especially live performances. All his expressions, all his pronouncements, all the sources in his work seem, thus, to be of equal importance. To do justice to all the creative facets of Giorno's work and person, Baethe and Omar decided to make a multimedia CD-Rom collage. Giorno's voice sets the tone from the outset, the rhythmic style of his performances set the tempo as always present sound. The interface developed for the CD leans heavily on associative collages and aleatoric operations. No obvious chronological structure here, but rather a 'jumpcut' strategy by which the user can skip through Giorno's work and statements. A structure which is as unpredictable as life itself. No relentless framework, no unambiguous beginning or end and no clear-cut role for the user. The user intuitively looks for a path through a network of spoken text, image and sound collages and video fragments of Giorno's performances and takes on, in turn, the role of viewer, listener or reader. New paths and routes open up, apparently at random, and lead to unexpected experiences. 'Stretching it Wider' is visually set by a popular iconography, derived from material found in which the ideas of Pop Art and 'found poetry' resound. In this way Baethe and Omar evoke an audiovisual environment in which Giorno's spirit is done full justice.
– Geert-Jan Strengholt
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With: John Giorno
Hanno Baethe ° 1947, Anhlt (Germany)
Zaki Omar ° 1962, Kuwala Limpis (Malaysia)
Live and work in Berlin (Germany)
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