Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."
The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Chris Crawford
"The personal computer has been with us for twenty-five years now, and it has revolutionized the world around us. But in the arts, the computer has yet to approach its potential."
"Yes, the computer has dramatically changed the execution of ecisting artistic fields (...). These, however, are matters of applying the computer as a tool rather than exploiting it as a medium of expression."
"Yes, many artists have attempted to express themselves directly through the computer, but their efforts, while laudable extensions of existing artistic media, do not begin to use the computer as a medium in its own right."
All quotes were directly rewritten from the essay.
What does a cutting-edge collaboration between music, visual, and literary artists look like and how did it evolve? This ongoing, transdisciplinary collaboration between said types of artists evolves a born digital interactive poetry application for every presentation and exhibition opportunity. Our mission as collaborators is to open up creative workflows for interactive technologies and artists interested in using them to benefit the presentation and experience of the visual, musical, or literary arts. We developed an interactive, live-streaming poetry web app that takes audience response to trigger improvisations, sensory experiences, and create an event-specific poem collectively. The user acts as collaborator by sending word selections that resonate with individual users by tapping text from a born-digital “seed poem” on their mobiles to trigger Markov chain reactions, which enables succinct recombination of massive amounts of language as source material. The app that creatively data mines +2500 TED talks as a found text corpus to send improvisational stanzas to the poet on stage as well as acting as a multimedia sound installation and interactive performance enhancer for poets. ELO2019 University College Cork #ELOcork 51 We will adapt our interactive performance web app to become a more open tool for parameterized poetry performance—to become a container, stand-alone installation as well as a tool for other literary and multimedia artists to utilize and explore using their own “seed text” and “found text corpus” for unique, interactive performances. This way one need not be a developer to perform heightened text collaboration—with the opportunity for generative input from an audience and a dynamic set of texts—or create unique, new media collaborative poetry from mobile interactivity. This new system would be attractive to contemporary poets, performing artists, and audiences seeking more engagement from readings as well as scholars curious about language processing to creative datamine subtexts. Our precedent for this adaptation is from the first iteration of our interactive poetry application, Causeway, which was exhibited in the “Louisiana Contemporary 2016” Juried Exhibition at the Odgen Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans (http://thehelisfoundation.org/what-we-fund/louisiana-contemporary/). Diamonds in Dystopia is a clustered Node.js application that is served and balanced between Google Cloud Compute and a custom OpenStack installation for interactive art. Users connect to an Express.js HTTP server that displays the original manuscript. They click on individual words that resonate with them which get passed along to a server via WebSockets. Each time a user taps a word the collection of texts, hosted on a Redis server, are searched for the top results that contain that word. Those texts are used as source material for generation through something such as a Markov chain algorithm to generate a new stanza of found text. These new stanzas are fed to the performer who can choose via a "controller" interface running on their own mobile device which to read and display on a theater view.
The transformation of physical phenomena into data —the pass from analog to digital— has played an important role in expanding our understandings of what is art and what it means to be an artist. This transformation has also changed the way we understand and perform with media and has opened innumerable avenues for experimentation within and across different forms of representation. The outcomes of this experimentation could illuminate our knowledge of creative processes. As part of our research on glitch pedagogy and transmediation over the last two years (Peña, James & DLC, 2016), we have experimented with the functionalities of raw data by comparing patterns of mis/representation between textual, aural and visual data. Our inquiries have allowed us to engage in the intervention and purposeful disruption of these patterns while shedding light on the underlying processes behind these disruptive practices. Delivered as a performance, this paper will demonstrate a few such practices. In our role as noise-musicians, we will improvisualize a transmediatic piece while describing the process behind it. This performance/presentation will start with the production of a natively visual digital artifact (i.e., a digital photograph). This artifact, produced during the session involving attendees, will be then translated into while modifying the sound with analog synthesizers. Simultaneously poetry will be performed, recorded and interpolated with the raw data of the pictures' sound file. This step will effectively involve passing digital data through an analog channel before its re-digitization in real-time. Finally, the intervened artifact will then be re-presented in its visual form. Our presentation will not only contrast between performance as a process and performance as a product, it will allow participants to compare the aesthetic properties of an artifact when presented both in a native and in a non-native format, and will reveal the patterns-in-common between these different media by merit of disrupting them.
Sources: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/854/Trans…; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327163262_Transmedia_an_improv…
A roundtable organized by Lucile Haute at the Galerie Rhinocéros et Cie in Paris on November 13, 2014, posing three questions to each author.