Author: Allison Hoover, Second Year, English: Poetry Writing, English Education

Amount Requested: $871

 

Poetry’s role in today’s society has diminished despite its timelessness and intrinsic value, for the written word suffers in a culture no longer dependent on books.  In his essay, Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture, Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, eloquently sums up this disconnect: “poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms."

 

The Arcadia Project aims to re-present poetry through the publicly-accessible, interactive world of virtual reality technology, enveloping audiences in the sights and sounds of poets and the landscapes in which they live and have written about.  The intellectual merit of this project lies in its attempt to not only entertain audiences but also to inform and stimulate, in an entertainingly educational environment.

 

The project reaches forward in its creative technological innovativeness, but it also has an expansive historical context, harkening back to and updating the ideals of monumental art worlds and projects such as Arcadia and the Ecole des Beaux Arts.  The broader impacts of this project are far reaching in technology, education, entertainment and the arts.  With technicians and artists working side by side, this project aims to create an exhibition which uses technology in a novel way to display subject matter never before used in virtual reality.

 

The project will consist of two phases, the first being the focus of this proposal, the $871 request:

 

• Phase 1—Proof of concept: Outreach and Research— Outreach into artistic community, interaction with “content creators,” introduction to and exploration of various 3D and virtual reality technologies.
• Phase 2—Implementation.  Building the virtual exhibition.

 

By fusing poetry and technology, this project will give texture and life to an art which has lost much of its cultural appreciation.  Its significance lies in the hope that the virtual exhibition will help bring poetry out of the text book, and back into the lives of the common reader.