The texts of “cinque canzoni di morte e cinque di amore ” include five “ekphrastic” meditations” on death from Joyce’s hypertext fiction, Twilight, a symphony (Eastgate 1996) together with five new love songs to or about women whose names summon myth and mystery. The new texts were inspired by conversations between Joyce and Pantin as well as her preliminary video studies and involve notions of symmetries, poetic contamination (contaminación), and plaiting/weaving. These show themselves in video motifs such as brushing hair, dissolving texts and images, spectral beings, and memory. The allusive love songs weave together memories of the family of a 9/11 victim, Celtic mythology and folklore, and an evocation of Vivarini’s portrait of Mary Magdalene in the Gemäldegalerie. Berlin among other texts. The images of death proceed from the essential mortality (and eroticism, to be sure) of words, while the songs of love proceed from the essential eroticism and vivacity of images. The final interactive work weaves visions of a woman, younger, making images of love, with the words of the older man to whom death beckons like a seduction.
