cinema

Distant Affinities is a work of recombinant cinema about machine intelligence attempting to process, narrate and mimic sentient being. Through subtitles, the omniscient AI narrator cycles through media that has been captured from the network and attempts a narrative interpretation of the patterns of human behavior. Disparate data points and discontinuous video loops resist being systematized or narrativized. The distances or gaps between the text and video fragments suggest what remains outside the domains of surveillance and narrative. An allegory of the vagaries of networked life existing within larger webs of living and non-living systems, the work shows a world coming apart, but also transforming into a more spacious mode of being made of errant language, creaturely life, isolated gestures and mutating interfaces.

Distant Affinities is programmed to oscillate between a probabilistic distribution of media elements and controlled narrative sequencing; between poetic montage and spatio-temporal continuity. Video, audio and text fragments appear on the screen in semi-indeterminate arrangements, depicting the chaotic flux of a technological world endlessly changing and repeating itself with each user click. Clicking on certain fragments “zooms in” voyeuristically on moments of individual lives, full of their own complex cycles of sensation, memory, thought, embodied and disembodied living. Loops, nested and at various scales, are employed to convey a fractal temporality. The intention of the work is to create an ambient and fluid experience, at times adrift in indeterminate structures and processes and at other times stimulating in the viewer a search for meaningful patterns.

The video-essay features interviews with 17 electronic literature scholars and practitioners including Mark Amerika, Simon Biggs, Serge Bouchardon, J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Cris Cheek, Maria Engberg, Jerome Fletcher, Maria Mencia, Nick Montfort, Jörg Piringer, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, Alexandra Saemmer, Roberto Simanowski, Christine Wilks, Jaka Železnikar. The production method for the video-essay is interesting in that the questions being asked of the interviewees are never explicitly pronounced. Rather, the video is divided into sections based on the general themes Futures and Foci, Platforms and Politics, The Human Problem, Senses and Screens, Reading and Writing. The answers given by the various interviewees are wide-ranging and address issues as diverse as the future of electronic literature, the ownership of data, the roles of author and scholar, and the issue of national models of electronic literature. What emerges from the video-essay is a sense of the dynamism and complexities that make up electronic literature as a field. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Everything disappears. Recordings of our voices will become archeological remains, and a spinning record yields fossil waves. Waves is based on three poems by Tor Ulven. Published as part 8 of the electronic poetry film series Gasspedal Animert, intended for electronic distribution through the internet, the film combines text, sound and digital animation. This particular film is a collaboration between the small press Gasspedal and the publishing house Gyldendal.

(Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Written for the opening of the Stavanger Concert hall and its custom built organ, the poetry film The Pipes is an ode to the industrial history and former backbone of the city. Published as part 9 of the electronic poetry film series Gasspedal Animert, intended for electronic distribution through the internet, the film combines text, sound and digital animation. This particular film is a collaboration between the small press Gasspedal and the publishing house Gyldendal. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Talk with Your Hands Like an Ellis Island Mutt is a recombinatory cinema project that utilizes video material from my digital lyric memoir DADDYLABYRINTH, which appeared in the ELO 2014 exhibition and later premiered at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore, to create an interactive, polylinear narrative cinema experience. From the video “selfies” of DADDYLABYRINTH I have culled individual hand gestures and, through image manipulation and repetition, created sixty-four separate videos eight to twelve seconds long that can be recombined using a variety of strategies, from the performative to the algorithmic. A three-minute video describing the project is at https://vimeo.com/113867362. The sixty-four building blocks that make up Hand/Mutt are compiled at https://vimeo.com/113860613 and the original source videos can be found at www.daddylabyrinth.com. This interactive cinema project uses associational thinking to reach beneath common storytelling tropes and into the proto-narrative subconscious, where story is born in the collision between one image and another. My approach is indebted to the contrapuntal editing of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories, and informed by two more contemporary theoretical approaches. Walter Fischer’s Narrative Paradigm posits that the human mind will create narrative from any stimuli that are offered to it; Eugene Dorfman’s concept of the narreme sees narrative as consisting of discrete, recombinable building blocks – just as linguistics sees language as a combination of morphemes. My approach to recombinatory cinema rests on the faith that what we call “film” can be a polylinear narrative environment in which narremes, brought together into a variety of lines by the interactive viewer, can generate story experiences unique to each individual and thus be bound, by the co-creative process of interactivity, to each viewer’s psyche. In time for the Bergen conference I will develop, from the visual elements of DADDYLABYRINTH, interactive recombinatory cinema experiences using (1) the touch-screen based interactive narrative platform Opertoon (http://opertoon.com) and (2) the database-driven VJ software program Isadora (http://troikatronix.com). Hand/Mutt is the prototype project for a database-driven interactive and performative cinema system, and I will use it to explore how databases and interactivity let us conceptualize new ways in which the fundamental building blocks of cinema are capable of colliding – and what stories our minds create when they do. THE PROJECT IN THE CONTEXT OF ELO 2015 As evidenced by the 2014 ELO exhibition, which featured several projects that were cinematic in nature, it is clear that a branch of electronic literature has been heading toward film – and thus that film is indeed one of its “ends.” A forthcoming panel I organized for the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, “The Experimental Cinema/Electronic Literature Frontier,” directly addresses this relationship. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) suggests a coming art in which “the computer becomes an indispensable component in the production of an art that would be impossible without it” and in which “the machine makes autonomous decisions on alternative possibilities that ultimately govern the outcome of the artwork.” What Youngblood presaged has been fulfilled in electronic literature, and it is this cusp that I would like to explore. (source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Phantom Agents is an episodic fiction that programmatically weaves sequential narration with random selections of text and image. Li and Pym are partner agents inside a broken augmented reality game. They solve complex plot problems in a plot that is proliferating beyond all reason. They collect data at virtual parties and forget all about their first bodies. They observe and are observed observing. Agency, identity, point of view and reality are slippery as both the fictional characters and the reader/user navigate cine-poetic juxtapositions, make meaningful narrative connections and progress, episode by episode, towards an understanding of the network that includes them.
“Recombinant poetics”, a term coined by artist/scholar Bill Seaman, refers to a techopoetic practice in which the display and juxtaposition of semantic elements are generated by computer algorithms, rather than through an author’s predetermined composition. Although inspired by traditions of combinatorial literature and the use of constraints to generate narrative or poetic forms, recombinant works of art produce variable “fields of meaning” (Seaman/Ascott) for the user/reader/viewer. Recombinant authors program discrete semantic elements, media stored in arrays or databases, to display through random, semi-random or variable processes, often in conjunction with user-interaction. Examples of recombinant poetics in works ofdigital poetry and art are abundant. Digital narratives that foreground recombinant processes are less common, because they tend to dismantle or dissolve themselves as sequential narrative in favor of more non-linear, emergent meanings. However, narrative authors since Laurence Sterne have tried to harness life’s variability and randomness inside their fictions by embedding non-narrative representations of contingent experience within a narrative framework. Through digression, semantic shock, dream logic, parataxis, meta-narrative, stream of consciousness, authors disrupt narrative logic in order to produce affect in the reader/viewer, which in turn contributes to the realization of a fictional world.
Phantom Agents is a playground of familiar identification processes inside a near-future culture that is dominated by database logic. The work is narrative and poetic, deterministic and variable, book-like and cinematic in an effort to explore a networked version of what John Ashbery calls “the experience of experience.” In this work, I create a recombinant fiction that uses computational procedures (random selections of image and text) to produce the affect of variability and randomness alongside or as counterpoint to narrative sequencing.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Six years ago, James – a demolition expert – returned from the Gulf War. Explore James’ mind as his vision fails and his past collides with his present. PRY is a book without borders: a hybrid of cinema, gaming, and text. At any point, pinch James’ eyes open to witness his external world or pry apart the text of his thoughts to dive deeper into his subconscious. Through these and other unique reading interactions, unravel the fabric of memory and discover a story shaped by the lies we tell ourselves: lies revealed when you pull apart the narrative and read between the lines.

(Source: http://prynovella.com)