participatory

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. 

Fish Net Stockings is a new multimedia installation project in development and is inspired and informed by historical mermaid legends and their myriad literary variants. One discovers mermaid tales clinging like barnacles onto historic seaports, sharing themes of the cross-cultural outsider, human trafficking, economic injustice, environmental imbalance, and gender inequality. Both cautionary and emboldening, mermaid tales inhabit the blurred boundary between childhood longing and adulthood regret. In variants of the little mermaid tale, we find a story of the passage between worlds. Den lille havfrue, Hans Christian Andersen’s sacrificial rite-of-passage story screams out for alternative endings. Instead of silencing the little mermaid, Fish Net Stockings aims to give e-literature sirens a space to speak up, sing out, and hook on their stockings.
In the installation, a back projection screen serves as canvas for a richly layered mix of digital video, text, and silhouettes. The participatory space allows the audience to disrupt, subvert, and make virtual waves inside this new version of an old tale. Digital projections include a mashup hybrid of historical references, video, animation, and story fragments gleaned from the project database. Fish Net Stockings also incorporates paper-cut collage images by contributing artists, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s improvised performance art of scherenschnitte, or live scissor writing. Bifurcating imagery, like that made by folding and cutting, will play a role in the aesthetics of the work. In this way, the story will unfold with multivalent versions echoing folk art patterns and digital iterations. The audience has multiple modes for interaction: by feeding text into evolving the online story thread, by uploading images to the project database, or by diving into the projections and moving their own bodies inside the colorful underwater world.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Ink After Print is a digital literary installation exhibited in public settings such as libraries. The installation allows readers-users to perform, reenact and rewrite recombinant poems written by Peter-Clement Woetmann "and you" (user-reader). AS -- Ink After Print is an interactive, participatory, digital literary installation made in a collaboration between PIT-researchers, CAVI/Tekne Productions and Roskilde Libraries initiated during the Literature Takes Place (Litteraturen Finder Sted) project and first exhibited in 2012. Ink is designed to make people affectively engage with, and reflect on, the ergodic qualities of digital literature in public settings such as libraries and events. Through their engagement with Ink, people can – individually or collaboratively – produce poems by interacting with three books embedded with a custom-made sensor system, the DUL Radio. The interactive books let people control a floating sentence in an ocean of words toward a sheet of paper to produce a poem, all visualized on a large display. The sentences, written by Danish author Peter-Clement Woetmann, are retrieved from a database. When the poem reaches a limit of 350 characters, it is printed out in a form similar to a library receipt that people can take with them. The poems also appear on a blog updated in real-time (www.inkafterprint.dk) where people can read their own and others’ poems, and comment on them. (Source: http://www.inkafterprint.dk/?page_id=45)

You and We allowed web visitors to upload texts and images, which were then randomly juxtaposed by the web-based application in time with music. As of July 2013, the piece no longer functioned in the browser.

Net art / experimental film project which includes images sent to the film-maker documenting everyday lives of generalized internet users.

FROM PROJECT WEBSITE:
Yellow Arrow began in 2004 as a street art project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since then, Yellow Arrow has grown to over 35 countries and 380 cities globally and become a way to experience and publish ideas and stories via text messaging on your mobile phone and interactive maps online.
(..)
Participants place uniquely-coded Yellow Arrow stickers to draw attention to different locations and objects - a favorite view of the city, an odd fire hydrant, the local bar. By sending an SMS from a mobile phone to the Yellow Arrow number beginning with the arrow's unique code, Yellow Arrow authors connect a story to the location where they place their sticker. Messages range from short poetic fragments to personal stories to game-like prompts to action. When another person encounters the Yellow Arrow, he or she sends its code to the Yellow Arrow number and immediately receives the message on their mobile phone. The website yellowarrow.net extends this location-based exchange, by allowing participants to annotate their arrows with photos and maps in the online gallery of Yellow Arrows placed throughout the world.

The story of three spaces is a variable story, a narrative chameleon, changing with every reader, every reading, with each media and with each use. A story to read and a story to write.

This webpage has been realised for the festival e-poetry 2007 in collaboration with Delphine Riss. During the festival, the participants were invited to vote at the following question:

Selon vous, les travaux présentés lors du festival e-poetry 2007 (performances, installations, oeuvres) sont ils des oeuvres de poésie numérique?

According to you, are the works presented at the e-poetry 2007 festival (performances, installations, piece of works) digital art works of poetry?

Participants were also invited to add precisions in creating their own buttons where their comments were written on them. Other users could then add weights to these buttons by clicking on them.

The goal of this project was to materialise the difficulty of defining what is digital art poetry and how it is received. While presenting the problem of the definition, the task was too not be closed up in only one: The different requests, potentially infinite, allowed to visualise a state of the reception of the digital poetry, skewed by our intervention.

(Source: http://cecilebucher.net/e-poetry/)

 Inspired by one of Tom Phillips' illustration for his Dante's Inferno (Talfourd Press, 1983), "Una selva oscura" is a digital visual poetry framework providing readers with different poems and the possibility to write their own.  

Artist Statement:

My work has been driven by three main themes: interpretation through adaptation, little acts of unacknowledged violence, and the expression of a sexual self. What is at stake in those themes is three aspects of the act of representation. By adapting somebody else's work, I present it anew, in a different context that has to do with the original work but also with my reaction to it, my interpretation of it. By representing little acts of violence in an absurd, cynical or sarcastic way, I provide a depiction of them that acknowledges what would otherwise be left unspoken. By expressing a sexual self that is feminine and feminist, outspoken and in charge of her sexuality, I provide the representation of a reality that is too often left in the dark because of taboos, repression and censorship. Written language is my medium of choice because it allows me to express my ideas in a detailed and subtle way, with a narrative when one is needed. Written language combined with hypermedia is my favorite playground. The combination of text with images, films, sounds, and music, plus the possibility to add animation to all that, provides a rich environment for creating complex representations that transcend the more traditional ways of experiencing a work of art. Representation has been an object of thought for many years now. I've explored it academically, intellectually, and artistically. Our access to the world, to others, to ourselves is mediated through representation. It is such a powerful tool. There are so many ways to use it, and to abuse it. My work is a way for me to address those issues and experiment with the many aspects of representation as well as the different roles it plays in our lives. "Una selva oscura" is adapted from an illustration made by Tom Phillips for his Dante's Inferno (Talfourd Press, 1983). Phillips represents Dante's dark forest by superposing layers of stencil letters in different colors using the phrase "una selva oscura" over and over. The first poem in "Una selva oscura" recaptures Phillips' piece. It shows, in a way, the "making of" of the illustration by giving the audience not only the resulting image, but the construction of the illustration layer by layer, letter by letter. It also contextualizes the piece by giving an audio excerpt of Dante's poem. The other poems use the same technique with different texts. In each case, a phrase serves as the basis for the visual part of the poem, and the audio track contextualizes this phrase by making available a larger segment of the text from which the phrase is taken. The reader is also offered the possibility of composing her own piece, choosing the phrase and the colors for the different layers.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)