performative

IVANHOE is a pedagogical environment for interpreting textual and other cultural materials. It is designed to foster critical awareness of the methods and perspectives through which we understand and study humanities documents. An online collaborative playspace, IVANHOE exposes the indeterminacy of humanities texts to role-play and performative intervention by students at all levels.

While we often refer to IVANHOE as a ?game,? it is important to understand that the concept has broader implications for humanities pedagogy and research, and that many modes of sophisticated, scholarly gamesmanship are possible in the IVANHOE environment. The ?rules? of the game are up to its players and initiators. IVANHOE can foster both competitive and collaborative interaction, well suited to research and teaching.

No, really: what is IVANHOE?

In simple terms, IVANHOE is a digital space in which players take on alternate identities in order to collaborate in expanding and making changes to a ?discourse field,? the documentary manifestation of a set of ideas that people want to investigate collaboratively.

Conceived at SpecLab and developed by ARP, IVANHOE was released to open-source developers under an Educational Community License in late 2006.

(Source: http://www.ivanhoegame.org/?page_id=21)

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)

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)

The Broadside of a Yarn is a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with naught but a QR reader and a hand-made map of dubious accuracy. This project may perhaps be best understood as an assemblage of interrelated narrative elements mediated across a continuum forms - a collection of stories, a folio of broadsides, or an unbound atlas of impossible maps composed of a combination of historical sources, interspersed with "found" images, quotations from well known sailors’ yarns, and my own drawings and photographs, and fiction. These printed maps are embedded with QR codes link mobile devices to computer-generated narrative dialogues which may then serve as scripts for poli-vocal performances, and/or suggest a series of imprecise pervasive performative walks. This project is, in a Situationist sense, a wilfully absurd endeavour. How can I, a displaced native of rural Nova Scotia (New Scotland), perform the navigation of a narrative route through urban Edinburgh (Old Scotland)? How can any inhabitant of dry land possibly understand the constantly shifting perspective of stories of the high seas?

The Internet Text is a continuous meditation on "cyberspace," emphasizing language, body, avatar issues, philosophy, poetics, and code-work. It is written daily and presented on several email lists including Cybermind and Wryting. Many of the pieces within it were created through CMC, interactions with computers and online protocols, and programs.
(Source: Author description, ELC 1).

Textual instruments make text playable in a new way. At first, as one encounters their workings, they are toys for exploring language — more flexible than link-node hypertext, more responsive than batch-mode natural language generators. With growing experience, these instruments can also become tools for textual performance. Regime Change begins with a news article from April 2003, following the bombardment that began the U.S. invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush cites "eyewitness" intelligence that Saddam Hussein was assassinated by targeted U.S. bombing and clings to the contention that the Iraqi president was hiding "weapons of mass destruction." Playing Regime Change brings forth texts generated from a document that records a different U.S. attitude toward presidential assassination and eyewitness intelligence — the report of the Warren Commission. This instrument operates using the statistics of n-grams, a technique used for textual games for more than 50 years, beginning in Claude Shannon's 1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication. These n-grams are chains of words, and this instrument uses shared chains between documents as "bridges," allowing movement from the text of one document into a body of text created from another and back. (Source: Author description, ELC 1).

_cross.ova.ing ][4rm.blog.2.log][_ is a "netwurk repository" that's been in operation since 2003. these "wurks" r inscribed using the infamous polysemic language system termed _mezangelle_. this language evolved/s from multifarious computer code>social_networked>imageboard>gamer>augmented reality flavoured language/x/changes. 2 _mezangelle_ means 2 take words>wordstrings>sentences + alter them in such a way as 2 /x/tend + /n/hance meaning beyond the predicted +/or /x/pected. _mezangelling_ @tempts 2 /x/pand traditional text parameters thru layered/alternative/code based meanings /m/bedded in2 meta-phonetic renderings of language. _cross.ova.ing ][4rm.blog.2.log][ /m/ploys a base standard of code>txt in order 2 evoke imaginative renderings rather than motion-based>flashy graphics.

(Author description from Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2)