Lyr Casper is a Seattle-based video artist whose video poem "Rotten Fruit" was featured in the Midwest Video Poetry Fest in 2020, as well as in the Cadence Film Festival. "Rotten Fruit" combines archival footage and personal footage to explore time, gender, origins, transformation, and self-actualization.
How did you come to the video poetry genre?
By accident! I generally consider myself an experimental filmmaker, and had no specific intentions with regards to format when I began creating "Rotten Fruit." The film grew out of a collection of rough vignettes, and only towards the end of the compilation/integration process did I start to understand the piece as a poem of sorts, with the vignettes as stanzas.
What do you find compelling about the video poetry genre?
I feel most compelled by video poetry's capacity for abstraction and comparison. The editing process is much like a literary metaphor; the combination of two shots next to each other (or of audio and visuals, text, etc) creates an implicit comparison or equation between the adjacent elements. I think one of the strengths of poetry is its ability to get closer to its subject material by approaching it from a seemingly unrelated context, and the multilayeredness of video makes the medium well-suited to this.
Do you have any advice for first time creators of video poetry?
Allow room for the unexpected and let the work go where it needs to go! The ideas that stick are usually the ones that emerge only after the first or second attempts don't work as anticipated. Give yourself permission to pivot and to create something that may be nothing like what you initially envisioned.
ROTTEN FRUIT from Lyr Casper on Vimeo.
