PhoneMe vs The Great Migration

PhoneMe connects the world through poetry. PhoneMe is social media for spoken word. Join the global lyrical revolution. Search the world and get a poet’s eye view of specific locations where poems have been pinned to the interactive PhoneMe map. Hear fantastic compositions and performances of texts. Read along or explore the virtual panoramas. Check out recently published poems, poems pinned to places near you, find your favourite poems and follow favourite poets from around the world. PhoneMe is also about what you have to say. Use any language you can speak, even a made-up language! Leave your own lasting legacy, leave a trail of poems that tell of your adventures, real or imagined, and compel the listener to check out more. Imagine the world as it should be or tell it like it is. Give the world words to remember. Phoneme provides a creative space for you to write poems and record them. You can save drafts or publish the poem instantly. Choose the perfect Street View panorama or take a photo of the location, add hashtags, and put your new poem on the map. You can share notifications with your whole network. You can retain copyright of all your poems or choose a creative commons licence so others can sample and remix your words. You are the curator of your PhoneMe experience. If you change your mind about a poem that you already pinned on the map, you can delete it or revert it to a draft at any time. Save drafts to rework later on. When you have your poem the way you want it, record yourself speaking the words aloud. You don’t need a quiet place: background sounds give the recording an authentic appeal. Or you can accompany yourself, spin beats in the background. Read it aloud with your friends. Record poems even in public places, after all, you are just talking on your phone! And you can re-record your poems as many times as you like. Get it right, then put it on the map. You can also filter your viewing experience so that you only see poems on a particular topic, by a particular poet, or only your own poems. Use PhoneMe to connect with people, commemorate events, riff about places where you get together with friends or like to be alone with the earth and all its wonders. Use PhoneMe to give historical insight or respond to current events. Select a location and a Street View panorama to showcase your poem on the map. If you love to go off-road and explore the wilderness where cameras on vehicles cannot go, then you can take a photo of your poem’s location and upload it, to give a unique viewpoint on natural environments you want the world to know about and to remember. Even if you are beyond wifi connection, your poems will be stored on your phone and you can publish them to our servers when you return to civilization. Remember, poems don’t have to rhyme or even make logical sense. Inverse reverse! PhoneMe poems put the magic and emotion in the way you feel about a particular place, event, or time in your life. PhoneMe poems immerse you in a location and give insight into why it matters. Leave your mark on the PhoneMe map in any manner of speaking. Tell the world about it. PhoneMe can be used by anyone, anywhere, in any language. This is poetry going global. Create a specific hashtag and publish to your group. Travellers, adventurers, explorers. Teachers and students. Language learners who want to listen to the way people speak in specific locations. Community groups interested in literary self-representation. Lovers. Fighters. Rappers. Activists. Environmentalists. People filled with joy or outrage. People with vivid imaginations. People who want some inspiration. People who love to play with words. Poets of all nations. PhoneMe is a global audience for what you have to say, in a memorable way, about the places that matter. PhoneMe is about living life poetically.

The Great Migration (Best experienced on the iPad) The Great Migration is a poem about leaving, about the excitement of heading out into a great unknown. It's also a poem about expulsion, about diaspora, about being forced to from home, in some sense about my emigration to Canada. Yet it's also a poem about surrendering to the excitement and the compulsion, about the reluctant realization that perhaps fundamental change is needed to keep on living. The exhibition version of The Great Migration is a diptych consisting of a 42" two-point touch surface + a 60" x 168" digital print text-image. The work was developed for the Words on an Empty Beach solo exhibition, presented as part of the Objet Indirect Object project. The work was developed for the Words on an Empty Beach solo exhibition, presented as part of the Objet Indirect Object project.