Aaron
Tucker is the author of two books of
poetry, irresponsible mediums (BookThug, 2017 ; http://bookthug.ca/shop/books/irresponsible-mediums-the-chess-games-of-marcel-duchamp-by-aaron-tucker/) and
punchlines (Mansfield Press, 2015 ; http://mansfieldpress.net/2015/03/punchlines-2/), as well as the forthcoming coming novel Y (Coach House
Books, Spring 2018 ; https://chbooks.com/Books/Y/Y). In addition, his current collaborative project, Loss Sets,
translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that
transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com). He has also written two scholarly texts: The Militarized
Internet in Hollywood War Films (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Interfacing with
the Internet in Popular Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Currently,
he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson Universitywhere he is currently teaching
creative and academic writing.
Where are you now?
As I write just before Christmas, I’m currently in Mainz,
Germany, not far from Frankfurt, staying with my partner.
Mainz is a quiet city that I like a lot. The lights for the
Christmas markets are strung across and in every tree. We stop for glühwein often, let it warm us. Even though there is
no snow, it is wet, and we see off-duty American soldiers from the Army base
just outside the city towards Wiesbaden, walking through the puddles, speaking
English like us. I know an infinitesimal amount of German, and when someone
speaks it to me, my brain automatically responds in French. It’s strange.
What are you reading?
The two books I am reading now are Nevil Shute’s On the Beach
and Thierry Poibeau’s Machine Translation.
Machine Translation is a really terrific and
condensed history and basic theorization on machine translations that does well
to cover a lot of chronological and mechanical ground in a hurry. I have been reading it to firm up some of the
thinking around my new media projects which involve translation and computers.
My newest, O/Ô, uses the Google Translate camera function to translate
the Canadian Parliamentary Hansard from the day that “O Canada”/“Ô Canada” was
adopted as the national anthem, generating photographic concrete poems.
Additionally, Loss Sets is a collaborative project with Jordan Scott,
Namir Ahmed and Tiffany Cheung that translates poems into models which are then
3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); the
ChessBard is a project collaboratively created by Jody Miller and myself that
translates chess games into poems (chesspoetry.com). In the fall of this year,
I published a beautiful print version of the project, Irresponsible Mediums (Book*hug,
2017; http://bookthug.ca/shop/books/irresponsible-mediums-the-chess-games-of-marcel-duchamp-by-aaron-tucker/), which
translates all of Marcel Duchamp’s chess games into poems. Machine
Translation has given me a lot of vocabulary and further reading to help me
push these projects further.
In Shute’s novel,
the Northern hemisphere of the globe has been completely irradiated by nuclear
weapons and the resulting fallout drifts south to Melbourne, Australia where
the characters wait helplessly for this cloud to overtake them. In contrast to
the near-instant eradication of nuclear warfare, when I first read this book
over a decade ago, I was struck by the creeping, slow acceptance of extinction
the book shapes itself around and I have been re-reading it because of a talk I
will be giving about it in the new year at the Toronto Public Library, where I
want to argue that we having been living post-apocalyptically since the Trinity
Test, the first explosion of an atom bomb in 1945. This is a conversation I have
been returning to as I have been editing my first novel Y (Coach House
Books, 2018 - https://chbooks.com/Books/Y/Y), about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the
director of the Manhattan Project, and I’m trying to situate myself within the
current very-real climate of nuclear culture and war.
What have you discovered
lately?
Given that it is the holidays, I have had a bit more time to
read and catch up on books and have been reminded of all the great poetry and
fiction being published across Canada. In no order, the books that have come
out this year that I’ve loved:
I can’t help but be so excited by the wide range of amazing
books being published and it is really great to get to read books from people
who I love and respect. This is especially potent when I go to a local
bookstore, like the incredible and indispensable Knife Fork Book (https://knifeforkbook.com)
or Type, (http://www.typebooks.ca) to scope out the shelves: I want all the
amazing books!
Maybe more specifically, I recently returned from my first trip
to Berlin and the Hamburger Bahnhof. There is a wing of the gallery that is dedicated
to full room installations and I saw a number of incredible pieces, in
particular War Damaged Instruments by Susan Philipsz
(https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/20/susan-philipsz-war-damaged-musical-instruments-review-tate-britain)
and Bruce Nauman's Room with My Soul Left Out (lhttp://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/hamburger-bahnhof/exhibitions/detail/bruce-nauman.html).
Philipsz’s work reminded me of a Janet Cardiff piece I saw at the AGO (http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/motet.html),
and was incredibly evocative - I stood in the middle with my eyes closed and
listened to the instruments shift around me, thought of the specific history of
those specific instruments, thought of my own relationship to listening to
music, to listening in general. Nauman’s piece was surprisingly visceral - it
was cold! And the bomb-shelter structure was unnerving, stark and no-place. All
of the works, but those two specifically, pushed me to think about scale and
space (and bodily enactment within that space) in ways that I don’t immediately
think about with poetry, and have encouraged me to expand the types of work I
want to make.
Where do you write?
When I actually sit down to write creatively I tend to do it at
my desk facing my big window. However, I find myself writing all the time, just
not creatively (emails texts etc) and usually on my phone in transit, and have
struggled recently with how to focus and write when the time comes. In many ways,
my response to rob mclennan’s blog
(http://mysmallpresswritingday.blogspot.de/2017/12/aaron-tucker-my-not-writing-day.html)
was me making peace with leaving behind a certain stage of my writing life and
transitioning to a new one that means less, but hopefully sharper, writing and
creative work. I don’t write for a living and so that part of my practice has
to fit around the other major blocks of responsibility in my life and I
struggle sometimes with that.
What are you working on?
Loss Sets, described above, is an ongoing project; we are hoping
to get to nine sculptures and sculpture five has been giving me fits at the
printing stage, so the first task in the new year is to make that one, then
move to the next group.
I’ve also been asked if I might contribute a chapter for an
upcoming book about Florine Stettheimer, and so have been doing some initial
reading and thinking through her portraits of Marcel Duchamp. I’ve spent a lot
of time thinking about Duchamp over the past few years in relation to Irresponsible
Mediums and this chapter will hopefully push me into some new directions.
In terms of solo creative work, I’m writing weird little
bird-lyric poems based on some of the travelling I have been doing. I’m not
exactly sure what they are, or what they might become, but I’ve enjoyed writing
them so far. More substantially, I want
to finish O/Ô, to translate the whole proceedings and begin hosting them
online, in addition to working through a physical photographic form of the
project.
Have you anything
forthcoming?
I’ve spent an incredibly satisfying past few months editing Y
(https://chbooks.com/Books/Y/Y) with Alana Wilcox and am so excited to see it
published in the spring of 2018. About
two years ago I picked up American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J.
Sherwin, though I can’t remember exactly why now, and was struck by how
complicated figure Oppenheimer was. He was a brilliant polymath, a Communist
sympathizer, and a Humanist, yet still led the building of the first weapon of
mass destruction at Los Alamos. On top of all this, his romantic life was
incredibly tangled and he seemed to live his life split and bouncing between
the two poles of himself. So I started writing ithin this rich historical
frame, thinking it might be a short story, then a set of short stories, until
it was a novel. On the whole, I’m extremely proud of it.
What would you rather be
doing?
I really do feel I’m doing exactly what I want to do be doing.
Inspired
by this performance, Irresponsible Mediums translates Duchamp’s
chess games into poems using the ChessBard (an app co-created by Tucker and
Jody Miller) and in the process, recreates Duchamp’s joyous approach to
making art, while also generating startling computer-made poems that blend the
analog and digital in strange and surprising combinations.
machine sealed sand or
resistance, any blurred
sketch, instant
questions deserted cell or
cord
single cast or broken sand
warily measures some seashell
single silicon gobbles within
the reassemblage, dormouse
beside coherence
each speed the purposeful
decomposition
gobbles beside cloudy
redundancy
Playing White vs M. Schroeder (New York, 1922)
a
centre among drawing and
blazing
mathematics, hunches beside instant
hooded astonishment beyond
complete insult
or
texture inside deception and
washed
specimen traps
Playing
Black Vs. Anatoly Alekseevich Chepurnov (Paris, 1924)
