collaboration

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.

On the Internet, it’s not how you feel, but how you look that counts. We create perfect lives full of perfect friends hanging out on perfect vaycays (think Fyre festival). At the same time, the internet is full of people ready to give you advice on how to fix what’s broken in your life: your car, your computer, your hair, et cetera.

In #fixurl8tionship, we imagine a fictional world of influencers who give you superficial advice on how to fix the appearance of your broken relationships.  As with most people giving advice, the person who gives it is generally the person who needs it the most. Still, hypocrisy needs no URL, just a hashtag.  In this netprov, you will join the community to give and get advice on how to fix your relationships [for the camera].

An (e)stranger is invisible, exotic, unidentifiable, rude, hybrid, 
blurry, deformed, subversive, incomprehensible, complex, pliable, lonely, abject, harder and more fragile at the same time … they are more resilient, more inventive, know how to protect themselves, are good observers, look around a lot, see and ask questions about things that seem to be selfevident …

“There is so much to enjoy in this book. It is all-at-once instruction manual, poetry and a series of vignettes of contemporary encounters in language-less places.” Ruth Catlow 23-09-2014

“Welcome to Air-B-N-Me.” In this exchange economy, we share our cars, our homes, and all our stuff. What if we could share our lives? If you ache to be anywhere but here, welcome to Air-B-N-Me, a new experience in lifeswapping. When you feel like checking out of your own life, check into somebody else’s. Why not turn your downtime into a timeshare?

Ah articulates a simple paradox of reading animated digital literature, which is that the eye, and by extension the mind, often has no sense of the future of a sentence or line of text and, more importantly, is not given the chance to retread an already witnessed word or phrase. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's Dakota is a perfect illustration of this principle. In Ah, the central object of rumination is Einstein, but just as the physicist pondered the numberless variations between the presence of a "1" and "0," this Flash animation brings us back and forth between clever articulations and the ambiguous expressivity of single letters and syllables.

MathX (Metadata-Eye) is an audiovisual software program with an infinite duration that is built using the open source processing programming environment. It is a navigator in a meta-symbolic space, that travels a 3D network of codes and text contents.

A collaborative piece by André Sier and Álvaro Seiça, MathX (Metadata-Eye) was developed for Sier's solo exhitibition 02016.41312785388128 at Ocupart Chiado, Lisboa, from May 19 to June 4, 2016. The navigator presents a poem by Álvaro Seiça made as an invitation to create a text based on the philosophical-archaic-metaphysical references of André Sier's work.

Sier's initial navigator, MathX, was developed in 2010.

Seiça's text departs from Sier's works, MathX Java code, Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye (1924), and Ted Rall's Snowden (2015).

The collaboration branched out into sound, text, and visual pieces.

(Source: Adapted text from https://thenewartfestival.wordpress.com/catalogue/)