Why Sonnet 116

For a friend’s wedding a couple weeks back, I was asked to read Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare. I chose to modify/brainstorming on this piece since I had a hard time learning it. Perhaps we can design a solution to make it easier to remember by heart!

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Mash up

Among the different brain storming pieces,I chose the “Mash- method” since I found it fun and inspiring. (https://www.ideou.com/pages/ideation-method-mash-up)

Started with formulating a problem statement, as described in the method: How might we make Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare easy to learn by heart?

The two categories were slightly more challenging to come up with. I thought about what the elements are of reading apoem are and then for the second category I thought about other artforms. My idea was to make the poem more tangible, in another artform.

I set a timer for 1 minutes to come up with ideas within each of the two categories.

Category 1. Elements of reading a poem

1. Reading the poem
2. Understanding the poem
3. Remembering the poem
4. Describing the poem to others
5. Reading the poem with good pronunciation
6. Reading the poem out loud
7. Reading the poem with passion
8. Starting to like the poem

Category 2. Other artforms

1. Painting
2. Comics
3. AR/VR
4. Skiing
5. Collage
6. Brainstorming
7. Acting
8. Singing
9. Playing the piano
10. Making sculptures
11. Speech/presenting
12. AI

I picked out the following three combinations – they sparked new ideas:

(a)Remembering the poem + singing

(b)Understanding the poem + digital media

(c)Understanding the poem + giving a speech

First ideas that pop to mind based on the mash ups:

• finding a melody and singing the poem as the lyrics
• Use AI as a tool to visualise the poem. Perhaps I can prompt parts of it and get a collage or series of pictures representing it.
• Describing the poem to other through a speech or presentation.

One memory technique, which I cannot remember where I know it from, is to associate something absurd with what you would like to remember. The brain can remember dramatic and crazy things easier rather than simple details. I have been wanting to try an AI artist tools for a while. I hope I can create some absurd and crazy prompts to generate the visualisations with. AI tools also happened to be a topic during the webinar ran by Givanno Rubino and Gareth Lewis. Another student mentioned this platform https://dream.ai/create, which I tried.The results below. I am definetly impressed with the outcome. I had to read up on how to write the prompts in a way to display a more detailed result.

In the end I got a bit carried away and came up with non poem related prompts - super fun!

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