[-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity: Introducing DIrk Vekemans

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Hi -empyre-

another guest is artist/poet Dirk Vekemans  Dirk writes:

"In 1979 I  very much wanted to be a writer/ poet. I noticed i didn't  
have much to write about that made any sense, so i quit. I had a  
great time working in bars and kitchens, enjoying an unlikely  
personal dérive that lasted some ten years.

From 1989 onward i did have (or at least presumed to have) something  
to write about that made sense, so i started to learn how to write  
decently, following Horatius’ adagio ‘nonum prematur in anno’ rather  
strictly. The birth of my eldest daughter in 1993 and my other two  
darlings later on  marked and ensured my re-entry into society as a  
‘responsible’ worker unit.
When i got to a stage that i thought my literary work had reached  
some maturity (let's say 1996, the same year that i organised a  
poetic manifestation in my hometown Louvain – “Leuven per Vers”,  
featuring poetic performances on several locations in the city, it  
was quite a success), i discovered that (trying to) publish(ing) it  
would render it meaningless in the fastest way possible. Moreover I  
didn’t feel very related to the current literary scene engaged in  
publishing collections of verse.  Instead i chose to make everything  
i wrote so far available on the internet, and started investing my  
spare time in researching ways to make text 'work' on screen.  
Gradually, partly because i thought the available techniques weren't  
up to it yet but mostly out of economic necessity my interest in  
making IT work the artistic way faded and i endulged myself in the  
day to day practice of producing commercial websites and multimedia  
products.

Nowadays i’m still active as a professional web-designer/programmer,  
but i have to admit i'm basically and inevitably a poet/writer trying  
to find ways to contribute to establishing a transvergent, meaningful  
form of digital writing.
Basicly I recently (end 2004) decided that I do want to tune down the  
importance of my commercial work and spend more time on my  
‘artistic’  exploits by re-initiating and trying to update Kurt  
Schwitters’ Merzbau to my personal and present views. The Neue  
Kathedrale des erotischen Elends is conceived as a highly personal  
‘Gesamstkunstwerk’, a procedural form of art whose primary form of  
expression at this moment may be located most visbly in the virtual  
plane of its digital existence at http://www.vilt.net/nkdee, but the  
process incorporating these networked events also lead to material  
expressions outside the digital grid and unfoldings in time through  
performance. These days it appears to be predominantly a rather  
monstrous growth on the www."



-cm