panorama

This video project explores Norwegian folk histories that return as fragments in light of ongoing volcanic eruptions. The project was recorded in Bergen following the disruptions caused by the activities of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. A folk history of disaster is set against slowly revolving images set in a contemporary landscape. This is the first of a series of works recorded in Norway that juxtapose folk histories and contemporary events to explore narrative and associative characteristics of cultural anxieties and collective memory. The project was researched and filmed by Roderick Coover in 2010 thanks to a distinguished-scholar-in-residence award from the University of Bergen.

In a slowly revolving and evolving animated double panorama that takes the form of a mobius strip, the work follows a female protagonist, a male counterpart, and other characters in a manner that suggests narrative but never becomes it; instead it's an expression of temperament or a consciousness—a searching, a longing, a loneliness. 

Passage Sets is a generative visual poem. It includes an interactive poem generator. The users of the system can position themselves in front of the screen and select words and/or phrases from four lists that become visual as they enter into differing proximities in relation to the screens. Moving forward and/or backward, then stopping in the center of the field, enables the participants to make selections from specific lists authored by Seaman. These words then flow across the screen and become part of an ever-changing line of text at the bottom of the screen."Passage" as text, "Passage" as travel, "Passage" as change over time, "Passage" as architecture. "Set" as pair, "Set" as illusionistic architecture, "Set" as device, "Set" as in mathematics... The video material is drawn from architectural images shot in and around Tokyo, Japan, and Karlsruhe, Germany, contrasting the past and the present, focusing on travel, motion and light. An elaborate collage of 150 still images with superimposed text (shot in Sydney, Australia) forms one visual layer in the work. This elaborate panorama zooms in and out in a continuous cycle. The video at times presents images of both a female and male actor generating a series of abstract gestures. This presents a poetic musing on particular interface potentials (gesture recognition). A set of "projections" dealing with notions related to sensuality and identity in cyberspace are also presented. The conceptual displacement or complex "space" engendered by contemporary communication / sensual feedback systems is one field of poetic focus. The notion that a person in one part of the world can interact in a sensual manner with another person existing elsewhere, or with phantom identities engendered by the computer is also a subject of poetic reflection. The navigation of illusionistic spaces ("sets") and historical media is also explored. The conceptual superimposition of this entirety of spaces defines an open work and generates a floating/shifting mind space for viewer/participant association.The original version of Passage Sets / One Pulls Pivots at The Tip Of The Tongue was premiered in 1995. That version has been shown internationally and is in the permanent collection of the ZKM Museum (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany.The exhibit is displayed on the LINK Mediawall, a large tiled-display, composed of 48 computer monitors driven by a Linux computing cluster. Control for the exhibit is provided by an array of cameras mounted on the ceiling in front of the exhibit.

(Source: Author's description from the project site)

(wot we will hv of wot we r smthing past)

'What we Will' utilises the potential of QuickTime interactive movie formats, particularly its photographic panoramas. This is combined with live-recorded and composed soundscapes which are embedded in the navigable movies. Structuring the piece, there are further layers of dramatic, textual and literal art elements. There is also a more familiar exploration of dramatic potential through human characters, fragmentary personal histories, memories and secrets, all helping to construct a non-linear narrative and emotional structure. As we experience the 24-hour cycle of their day, we are uncertain as to whether any particular moment follows or, rather, proceeds what we have seen before.

Designed for presentation using standard browser technologies over the Web on a broadband link, 'What We Will' provides the user with a configuration of interactive photographic panoramas and topographically associated aural and musical soundscapes in binaural stereo. Apart from navigation around the panoramas - around locations of the city associated with the characters - linked hotspots give access to other related panoramas and secret 'whispers'. The literal and synaesthetic 'whispering' graffiti of the locations and their panoramic surrounds generate a rich affective structure of image, music and text.

(Source: Press Release on project site)

This video project explores Norwegian folk histories that return as fragments in light of ongoing volcanic eruptions. The project was recorded in Bergen following the disruptions caused by the activities of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. A folk history of disaster is set against slowly revolving images set in a contemporary landscape. This is the first of a series of works recorded in Norway that juxtapose folk histories and contemporary events to explore narrative and associative characteristics of cultural anxieties and collective memory. The project was researched and filmed by Roderick Coover in 2010 thanks to a distinguished-scholar-in-residence award from the University of Bergen.

CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop's Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA).  Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities.