Ivan Netkachev
Alien Parts
About the Item
‘Alien Parts’ is a programme that converts poetic text into music. The video shows how the text is translated into a sequence of four parts of speech. Each of them corresponds to one group of samples:
(I) nouns — percussion
(II) verbs — chords
(III) syntactic modifiers (adjectives, adverbs, etc.) — bass
(IV) function words (conjunctions, prepositions, etc.) — special effects
Then the text is ‘played’ word by word. The tempo is determined by the length of the line, and therefore constantly changes.
‘Alien Parts’ make the hidden rhythm of the text explicit. The very syntactic structure of the poem assumes an acoustic form.
Poets have no idea that they have composed so many scores. The current version uses poems by Gennady Aigi: the breaking, disappearing rhythms of the verse turn into a confused, uneven sound. Aigi’s modernist impulse, by splitting the great Russian language, is brought to its limit: words disappear completely, leaving room for bare rhythms, syntax and randomness.
Samples by Ilya Minin.
About the Artist
Ivan Netkachev, born in 1998, lives and works in Moscow. He is involved in the study of theoretical linguistics at the Higher School of Economics. As a scientist he explores grammatical patterns in natural languages; as an artist he tries to make a grammar of things in the real world. His interests include generative poetry and the automatic generation of textual and visual images, as well as working with an archive of images and representations.
