audio

Last word is a literary audio walk through the forest in Amsterdam. During the walk you listen to four voices that lead you to a place where the story - a bitter sweet family history about parting, punishment, insanity, and acknowledgement - comes to a surprising end. The walker chooses his or her own direction at a crossing-point which also determines the perspective of the story: Jason, little Kees, Helga or Carlotta. What connects these four people? Do they meet each other at the end of the story at the agreed place. 

'Toilets' was meant to be read as a bathroom-book. Two young people move into the same apartment, while they have only just met each other. The odd thing about the apartment is that it has two toilets. A great luxury, but after a while the two toilets become a fort.

't Hooft uses focus blocks. If you tap on the screen a new focus block appears.

‘Snelwegsprookjes’ is a location-based audiobook app that reacts to its surroundings. It builds unique stories in real-time, around ordinary objects, seen around the motorway. There are four stories that are uniquely based on the location where you are driving right that moment. The amazing in-car family app that focuses on quality family time, less screen time for the kids, and using your imagination. Connecting family car brand Volkswagen with their target audience.

Installation was presented at the beaches of the island Vlieland.

'Describe the route you take from your parental home to your bed, where you slept as a child.' That was the question Vanhauwaert asked people who have lost their parental home. Vanhauwaert was inspired by five extraordinary stories of people whom she changed into characters. She created a mental room in which these five characters wander. 50 routes are hidden in the audiotour.

The poem has been presented in libraries.

A poetic project about the global mass extinction of bird populations in 2011.

During Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual campus event where I teach, poems written about the Holocaust—including some written by survivors—are read aloud. Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” is often read, and has been translated by multiple Arts & Humanities faculty. This work of participatory digital art is another translation of the poem as a participatory embodiment of the text. It was created for more than 200 visitors of this event, many of whom were already familiar with Celan’s poem. In Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, Pablo Helguera defines multi-layered participatory structures. This work falls somewhere between (2) directed participation and (3) creative participation. While the visitor was asked to complete a simple task (level 2), they demonstrated varying degrees of creative commitment (level 3) in their participation.Beneath the lobby’s stairway, I held a small projector a few feet from a white wall. Visitors willing to participate interacted with a projected work of kinetic typography prepared for this event. Without much instruction, most participants found a way to embody the text, “Death Fugue,” as poetry in motion. While some participants used their bodies, others held the text on rose petals, and some took control of the projector to place the text onto the bodies of others—their children, friends, or colleagues. The final result is a composite video that documents a communal enactment of the poem as a text across many bodies in its construction and interpretation. Interacting with the poem in fragments elicits the temporal space of memory. In the spirit of collaboration and memory-making, the textual bodies were edited to form a cohesive video set to a soundtrack created for this work by Natan Grande.For ELO, I am submitting the final composite, a digital video with sound. This digital video documents the participatory embodiment of the poem. The theme “(un)continuity” is expressed in this project through its discordant structure of participation, and its re-presentation of the poem by participants.See Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011, pages 14-15. 

Four monitors are placed in a row on the wall. As you walk closer an exhaled breath is heard, then a mouse click, a sigh. A voice commands, “then drag up”; a different voice, “like this”. Excerpts of Youtube typography tutorials populate the screens, complete with Photoshop, Maya, Illustrator, GIMP, etc. interfaces along with the type that is being carefully constructed. A rhythm emerges, “Rotate left, pull down, move forward, like that”. In this piece, a multimodal digital poem forms from the aural language of making visual language. Fragments of descriptive phrases are heard over looping patterns of mouse clicks, exhales, sighs and keyboard strokes amplifying the language of micro-gestures. The unseen role of the body in the circuit of human-computer interaction is ever present in this installation exposing the analog labor of creating digital type and the articulation of the physical process of making digital words. The work humorously explores the physicality of creating visual communication and calls attention to the human, social and cognitive labor behind the typography we take for granted in our daily lives. This digital poem employs a methodology and software developed over the last year as a Fellow in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT. It is a methodology that enables linguistic analysis of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across multiple monitors. Using a corpus of over two hundred tutorial videos, the software parses user defined complex language patterns, parts of speech analysis and phonetic information, creating new aesthetic possibilities for digital poets working with a large corpus of multimedia files.