Abstract

‘iAmbic Pedometer’ is a durational iPhone video that records Brennan’s walking through Sunderland, its suburbs and semi rural surroundings. In the first instance the video walk was made with a specific exhibition location in mind: with semi-coherent mumblings that refer to both Wordsworth’s compositional strategy and to the sonic poetry of Kurt Schwitters.
iAmbic Pedometer revolves around the report of Wordsworth¹s mode of composition in which he would walk and utter aloud for hours on end. The work is an iPhone video of a walk made by the artist from his home in Sunderland. Moving through inner city, suburban and open spaces, Brennan¹s mumblings emerge from the sound of the traffic, shifting between
semi-cogent announcement to that of the concrete poem. They collide Kurt Schwitter's 'ur poetry' (another Cumbrian resident) with that of the pentameter. The artist sees this fusion as proposing Wordsworth¹s early writing mode as bearing a relation to that of the Shaman, who, once induced into a separate reality may then speak in a variety of tongues to
provide insight.

The work also refers to the notion of the ‘ur’ as a source of origin. It is Brennan’s attempt to complete the 25 years of methodological innovation into the guided walk form as art (what he terms as ‘the manoeuvre’) by uncovering fundamental sonic ingredients of language and tying them to the meter of walking, and poetry whilst framing them within a technological context.