Artist’s Statement

This video poem (text versions available here and here) forms part of a broader project that maps rhetorical features of foundational quantum mechanics onto large literary and cultural periodical corpora for analytical and creative purposes.

Specifically, metaphors, paradoxes, and patterns of argumentation from early quantum physics texts were computationally paired with analogous tropes and reasoning patterns in journals from AHiRA and CMoLA (the Argentine Historical Journal Archives and Cultural Magazines of Latin America). The corpora, consisting of the 1896–1959 span of the archives above, comprising thousands of issues and millions of OCRed pages of literary and cultural contributions, enabled large-scale comparative searches.

Of particular relevance to this poem is the identification and mapping of metaphors. Using LLMs, metaphors were first identified in the physics corpus (via GPT-4) and then classified (via Mixtral) as common-speech or field-specific. Automated searches then located passages in the Latin American journals where the semantic contrasts between terms mirrored those in the physics corpus—particularly where both were similarly incongruent within their contexts.

For this poem, I selected the closest matches: passages from the Spanish articles cited in the notes (see the text versions linked above), and two metaphors from a revised and expanded version of a classic physics text from Arnold Sommerfeld’s Atombau und Spektrallinien (1929)In one of the common-speech-like metaphors tagged by the LLM, Sommerfeld compared relativistic particle orbits (“relativistischen Bahnen”) to co-moving coordinate systems (“mitbewegten Koordinatensystem”). This figurative bridge lies at the core of his theoretical innovation—using relativity and quantum numbers to define orbits as processing ellipses requiring co-moving frames, a dynamic that also invoked a third term, “Modifikation.”

The journal sentences identified as most akin to these scientific metaphors gave rise to two compositional modes:

1.  “Orbiting recursions.” These stanzas foreground the contrastive nature of the metaphors through a concrete-poetic method of word decomposition and recombination across Spanish and (multilingual or Creolized) English. Their visual structure evokes Sommerfeld’s processing ellipses, enabling recursive reading and reconfiguration. (The sections from 00:00 to 00:14, 00:30 to 00:53, 01:06 to 01:24, and 01:41 through to the end of the video poem. In the textual component, these segments represent stanzas 1, 3, 5, and 7.)

2.  “Pulse_flash_spectral.” These stanzas retain full sentences from the Spanish database, paired with their English (and sporadically Aromanian and Zoque) counterparts—homophonic, . The term reflects the interplay between sonic and semantic dissonance (or, at times, aberration). (The segments in the video poem that alternate with the “orbiting recursions” ones listed above. For the textual part, see stanzas 2, 4, and 6.)

The intermedia process began with sound and evolved toward moving image. The discrete qualities of each stanza—prosodic, affective, and temporal—were converted into analog sound frequencies. Textual features such as meter, rhythmic variation/energy, and fricative/plosive density were mapped to base frequency, amplitude, noise, and transient clicks. Affective parameters (e.g., arousal or smoothness) shaped spectral brightness and filter cutoff, while temporal structures (linear, cyclical, recursive) were rendered as stereo motion, pacing oscillations, or feedback loops. These values were interpolated via SigTo and low-frequency oscillators (LFOs), translating linguistic textures into evolving sonic modulations.

The resulting embodied acoustic space—a form of mathematical machinic metasonification—set the foundation for the video component. This continuous sonic field introduced a complementary discreteness: a topological and diagrammatic unfolding of the poem as both analytical instrument and exploratory nomadism.

In orbiting_recursions—see the precise portion spans (expressed in seconds) above—this took the form of dynamic visualizations of network graphs that trace the evolving recombination of word fragments from the Latin American corpus. In pulse_flash_spectral, the visualization shifted outward—diagramming the tension between translingual sonic similarity and widening semantic divergence between each Spanish line and its English echo.

The code and the data can be found in this GitHub repo.