"A work between reality and fantasy, where the Brazilian Regina Célia Pinto offers an interpretation of Lewis Carroll's world from the perspective of the balcony of her house, a metaphor for the artist's own life." -- El País, April 21st, 2005 (auto-translated).
This is a performance by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, involving a strong sonic and musical element interwoven with text. It includes sampled text and sound, electronics and live coding of text and sound. The performance will include two pieces, Metaphorics and Bird Migrants.
These two works were performed earlier this year in the UK and Australia, but have undergone considerable development. Every iteration and performance of them (particularly of Metaphorics) is substantially different.
Metaphorics (2014) for voice and coded sound
This piece employs live voice, live-coded sound (using the platform Gibber by Charlie Roberts, University of California at Santa Barbara), and live algorithmic sound. It involves samples from a recording of parts of the text, together with electronic and sampled instruments.
The piece is about metaphor: it also employs metaphor while at the same time deconstructing it. Historically metaphor has been one of the main tools of poetry. Attitudes towards metaphor have been very important in contemporary poetry and poetics, but have caused divisions in the poetic community. Some poets have clung to metaphor as a traditional mainstay of their craft. Others have reacted against the idea of metaphor because they felt that it was always working at one remove, or was being used to stitch the different parts of a poem together into a fabricated unity. This piece works with that dichotomy.
The first section of Metaphorics, “metaphor”, takes a stance to writing a poem adapted from contemporary conceptual poetry. It was written by cutting and pasting from the Internet – with some modification – statements about metaphor. The other two sections, “the unanswered question” and “windfall”, consist of a short poem and a poetic monologue that are freely written. They employ different kinds of metaphor, but in ways that are somewhat unorthodox.
The live coding and live algorithms allow events to prefigure or react to the performed voice and musical components: this provides another layer of metaphor. Live coding is the process of constructing computer code to perform a task in real-time (in this case a range of sonic and text processing). Live algorithms on the other hand are preformed interactive platforms and, of course, they are written by the creators themselves; in our case usually in MaxMSP.
Metaphorics reacts against the idea that metaphors in a poem should be consistent and unified; the metaphors keep changing and there is no obvious through-metaphor (except, perhaps, metaphor itself).
Bird Migrants (2014)
Bird Migrants 2 is a piece for voice and through-composed electronics. It is a development of Bird Migrants 1 which was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for the Radio National Program Soundproof and is in podcast form on their website at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/bird-migrants/5…. Bird Migrants 2 adds some live performance, and visual images treated in Jitter/MaxMSP, so is substantially different.
The piece uses bird and environmental sounds, transformed voice samples and instruments. In Bird Migrants there is a cross-species evocation of voice. The piece is based on the poem by Hazel Smith, “The Great Egret”. The poem was inspired by the wedding scene in Theo Angelopoulos’s film The Suspended Step of the Stork, where a couple marry each other from the opposite banks of a river that flows through a divided country. The great egret can be seen to represent the tragic history of the country, but also the longing for flight and freedom. The poem was written for the Bimblebox project, a developing project around the 153 bird species that have been recorded on the Bimblebox Nature Refuge in central western Queensland. The home of these birds, and the ecosystems that support them, is in the path of a proposed coal mine.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
This hypertext fiction presents three characters: Sofía, Mara and Carlos. Through a poetical language full of metaphors and philosophical thoughts the reader clicks on links to follow the fragmented and disorganized story. The story is incomplete and open to the reader's interpretation. Why Sofía wants to abandon her life? Mara and Carlos have a relationship but what is the relationship between Sofía and Carlos? Why are they so depressed when they think about the past? The readers must find the answers (Maya Zalbidea Paniagua)
Esta ficción hipertextual presenta tres personajes: Sofía, Mara y Carlos. A través de un lenguaje poético lleno de metáforas y pensamientos filosóficos el lector/a hace click en hipervínculos para poder seguir este fragmentado y desordenado relato. La historia está incompleta y abierta a las interpretaciones del lector o lectora. ¿Por qué Sofía quiere abandonar su vida? Mara y Carlos tienen una relación pero ¿cuál es la relación entre Sofía y Carlos? ¿Por qué se deprimen tanto cuando piensan en el pasado? Los lectores deben encontrar las respuestas (Maya Zalbidea Paniagua)
The installation consisted of a six foot ladder and a chalk outline of a body on the floor, with two audio soundtracks, one of people talking about "up" times in their lives and one of people talking about feeling "down". When visitors climbed the ladder, the "up" soundtrack was played more loudly, and vice versa. Utterback writes in her 2004 essay "Unusual Positions": "Through its interface, this piece explores the embodiedness of language itself.
Look up the book's content: http://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9781577663188.pdf
Understanding the processes of rhetorical criticism--the systematic investigation and explanation of symbolic acts and artifacts--creates opportunities for more effective communication. When we are aware of the various options available in the construction of messages and how they function to produce effects, we have the tools needed to question the messages in artifacts rather than responding uncritically. Sonja Foss, who has an enviable talent for synthesizing complex rhetorical concepts and processes into clear explanations, presents nine methods of rhetorical criticism. She carefully explains and illustrates the theory behind each method with abundant examples of applications. Interesting and lively essays, some written by students, encourage readers to develop their critical skills. Useful bibliographies list additional samples for each type of criticism. Rhetorical criticism is not a process confined to a few assignments in a rhetorical or media criticism course. It is an everyday activity we can use to understand our responses to symbols of all kinds and to create our own symbols to generate the responses we desire.
Also by Sonja K. Foss and available from Waveland Press:
with Karen A. Foss and Robert Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, Third Edition (ISBN 9781577662051);
with Karen A. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, Feminist Rhetorical Theories (ISBN 9781577664963); with Mary E. Domenico and Karen A. Foss, Gender Stories: Negotiating Identity in a Binary World (ISBN 9781577667919);
with Karen A. Foss, Inviting Transformation: Presentational Speaking for a Changing World, Third Edition (ISBN 9781577667216);
with Karen A. Foss and Robert Trapp, Readings in Contemporary Rhetoric (ISBN 9781577662068);
with Karen A. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory (ISBN 9781577664970).
Titles of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Hauser, Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577662211) and Sillars-Gronbeck, Communication Criticism: Rhetoric, Social Codes, Cultural Studies (ISBN 9781577661719).
Memmott's work reveals the co-originary status of subjectivity and electronic technologies. Instead of technologies being created by humans, this work imagines digital technology present from the beginning, with subjects and technologies producing each other through multiple recursive loops. To develop this idea, Memmott devises an idiosyncratic language, a revisioning of classical myths, and a set of coded images that invite the reader to understand herself not as a preexisting self with secure boundaries but as a permeable membrane through which information flows.
A szerző széleskörűen mutatja be a művészet és a világháló kapcsolatát, igyekezvén egyensúlyban tartani e két terület összefonódásának pozitívumait és negatívumait egyaránt. Olvasmányos stílusa minden érdeklődőt kielégítően vezet be egy modern világba, s a világhálón megszületett „újszerű tudás” bemutatásával fontos térképe lehet mindazoknak, akik nem találják helyüket a mediatizált művészet útvesztőjében.
A creative website that contains more than can be easily labelled as poetry, art, or narrative, though it certainly contains that and more. Launched in 1998, the site incorporates multiple Web technologies in very coherent fashion to create a hypertext of musings, anxieties, joys, searches for companionship, yearnings, and more navigable through interfaces populated by a variety of insects. Each page in this hypertext is a discovery: a thoughtful exploration of an idea through art, language, and metaphor. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
Lo·go·zo·a n [fr. Gk logos word + zoia animals] (2005) 1 : word animals : textual organisms 2 : a phylum or subkingdom of linguistic entities that are represented in almost every kind of habitat and include aphorisms, anti-aphorisms, maxims, minims, unapologetic apothegms, neokoans, sayings, left-unsaids, shamelessly proverbialist word-grabs, epigrammatological disquisitions, lapidary confections, poemlets, gnomic microtales, instant fables, and other varieties of conceptual riffs
Words change everything. We create poems and stories to free the world from itself, to reveal the many feral faces of life. But ironically these liberating words are usually imprisoned on the page or computer screen. Out in the “real” world of day-to-day activity, we use words more bluntly. We put labels and signs on things to tame them—identify, categorize, explain, instruct, proclaim ownership. What if instead the labels could liberate the everyday world from the literal, proclaim rather than cover up the mysteries? What if they could become Logozoa—textual organisms that infest the literal with metaphor and give impetuous life and breath to meaning?
Adopt-A-Zoa
Find out what happens when you let word animals infest your daily life. Download Logozoa, print them onto your own stickers, and let them loose in your home or neighborhood. Bring a little metaphor into your routine. Keep them around the house and discover why they make fascinating pets or release them into the wild. You have 379 different creatures to choose from.
E-Dopt-A-Zoa
E-dopt a Logozoan and add it to your Web site. Your Logozoan will change every time it’s viewed, taking one of 379 different forms.
Logozoo
The next best thing to Logoz in your own hood is a visit to the Logozoo. Here you’ll see Logozoa in a natural-habitat preserve made from the nooks and crannies of daily routine, the unexpected exoticisms of everyday life, the out-of-the-ordinary often lurking in ordinary places. No bars and cages here. From the safety and comfort of your own browser, you can witness one of Nature’s true spectacles—the figurative overrunning the literal. Our zoo contains 1153 photos of 629 inhabitants, with more arriving almost daily from the US, Europe, and South America. One made it all the way from Hell. Another came from a place even more frightening—the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles in Waltham.
Logoshow
Some Logozoa display a remarkable ability to slip the bonds of textual stasis and achieve flights of logomotion. Come enjoy the animated show.
Save-A-Zoa
Stickers in the wild face numerous man-made and natural threats. Determined preservation efforts are necessary to ensure that these unique creatures do not go the way of so many once-endangered, now-extinct species. Photograph your Logozoa and send these offspring to us where they will find a happy, safe home in our Logozoo.
Soothbooth
Bring those vexing questions to the Soothbooth and let us turn them into vexing answers. We have a unique colony of Logozoa on duty here that responds to any sort of question you might want to pose.
Soothcircuit
If you want deeper, less direct answers than those offered at the quick-service Soothbooth, take your questions to the Soothcircuit. The Logozoa here are guaranteed to provide insights and prognostications of the most thought-provoking quality.
(Source: Author's descripiton on the project site)
