Between the disciplined dress, posture, and hair of the women taking dictation and the speaker’s tighly controlled voice as he savors every line, word, syllable, and phoneme in this video, this poem seems to be inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings. The video is built from short looping clips from a 1942 film titled “Nursing: Your Life’s Work” in which nurses are taking their board examinations to be certified. The voice of Simon Shrimpton-Smith reads the lines of the poem with great gusto, and when juxtaposed with the images, makes it seem like the women are taking dictation on what seems to be a legal case. The frames of reference evoked by the images and legal language make stimulating clashes with choice words and phrases sprinkled throughout the poem that evoke completely different frames of reference. The repetitions of images and language underscore the word choices, their phonetic qualities, enhancing their cognitive and poetic impact.

Featured in ELO 2012 Media Art Show