photography

An organic photo journal detailing various and often unseen sites across the world (from Oklahoma to Italy and various place in between) including reader submissions.

A poem told through photographs of posters pasted on street corners and lamp posts, with the sound of a night time crowd as accompanying soundtrack.

“Palimpsest” is an audiovisual work exploring the space between sound and image through collaboration. Two distinct narratives, audio and visual, collide to find alternative paths and perspectives around a virtual light sculpture. The piece reinterprets one of a series of photographic light paintings taken during a drive at night [see image 1]. The photographs were experiments: improvisations with long exposures, motion and gesture. As images in themselves however, the collaborators found them to be engaging both visually and conceptually. Visually they bring to mind the poetic: the camera has captured ethereal light trails drawn by the motions of passing traffic in mid-air, giving them an almost sculptural quality. They suggest contours, energies, volumes and spaces that are open to further exploration and interpretation. Conceptually, their contradictory nature seems to suggest ideas of the interstitial - the space or place in-between things - or what Duchamp termed the “infrathin”. The light-forms captured in the image, exist in-between the real and the virtual, brought together in a moment by the camera. They occupy the gaps and breaks between events, and find form in the moment between the shutter opening and closing. It is in the idea of the interstitial that the collaboration is based. How might these forms be reinterpreted and rewritten for another context? And how might audio be used to structure our visual experience of them? "Palimpsest" responds to these questions, extending and reimagining the source image, in an attempt to articulate the interstitial. (source: http://www.duck-egg.co.uk/palimpsest/info.html)

“Substratum” is an audiovisual artwork and the first in a series of collaborations by artist-composer duo, Alison Clifford and Graeme Truslove. This collaboration combines both of their artistic practices in an attempt to explore the space “between” abstract sound and image. Truslove’s work is typically concerned with exploring the space between acoustic and electro-acoustic sound, and between improvised and fixed forms. The audio in “Substratum” is devised from samples of bowed notes performed on a double bass, multiplied and arranged into rich, deeply layered textures by digital montage processes and computer algorithms. Clifford’s artistic practice is concerned with the process of translating between different forms of visual media, exploring what is lost or gained through such interpretation. For “Substratum”, she developed computer algorithms that “translate” samples from still photographic light paintings into animated fragments. She then sculpts the fragments into multi-layered moving image works that interpret the deep textures of the audio, creating an immersive audiovisual experience. (source: http://www.duck-egg.co.uk/substratum/index.html)

This CD-ROM explores how hypertextual writing and image-making merge in creating projects with nonfiction materials such as photographs, video clips, audio recordings and observational notes. The work includes two hypertextual field projects, one concerning a wine harvest in Burgundy, France, and the other concerning a series of performances in Ghana. The project uses an html-based format to weave among differing modes of writing and image-presentation. The section "The Harvest" was selected for exhibition in the 2001 ELO "State Of The Arts" symposium gallery. Based on two months of participant observation working the harvest at a small vineyard in France, the project combines diaristic writing, visual notes, dialog, exposition, and other forms of writing alongside a fifty-four image sequence. The work also includes videos and slide shows. "Concealed Narratives" offers two routes, interactive paths by which users travel to a series of public events in Ghana. The work explores how cultural battles are imagined and how stories get expressed through performances, visual tropes, and metaphors. The work also includes a critical essay about how to merge techniques of metaphor and montage in creating artistic and ethnographic projects based on material evidence. The work bridges practices of the arts, humanities and social sciences.

(Source: Author's description in the Electronic Literature Directory)

Blue Velvet is a documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its affect upon New Orleans, LA. “Combining sound, text, photography, video, and several maps, the piece sculpts an evocative and poignant landscape that nonetheless refuses all registers of nostalgia, insisting as it does that we locate Katrina and the Crescent City among multiple trajectories of policy, memory, and representation”

(Source: “Blue Velvet”—Vectors, cited in the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue).

Blue Velvet: Re-Dressing New Orleans in Katrina's Wake" is an interactive essay enabling its users to submerge themselves in a poetic wordscape describing the contours of American racial politics post-Katrina. 

Artists' Statement

Scholars in the Humanities have long labored under the conceit of the auteur mode of production. We are taught and reproduce the illusion that we produce our work alone, in isolation, thinking great thoughts pretty much on our own, in conversation if at all with the great works produced for the most part in this way. Composing "Blue Velvet" was a stark reminder of how wrong-headed this picture largely is. The very idea for the piece came out of a conversation with Tara McPherson. It would look nothing like it does now but for the incredible design work of Erik Loyer and cartographic shaping and mediated elaboration enabled by Stefka Hristova. The final product is the outcome of intense weekly conversations over something like a year between the four of us about design, look, content, navigation, media, technological failures and fixes, in short, about New Orleans literally and metaphorically. But there were other inputs, exchanges, relations that helped make the piece come to life, from silent conversations with writers and artists who have felt the pulse of the Big Easy, in moments of health and illness, as well as with theoretical and political critics of neoliberalism. The sooner we get over the conceit of solipsistic self-production, the better off the Humanities will be. 

But the process confirmed something more than this. Much of writing in the Humanities has tended to be linear. "Blue Velvet," however, encourages connections, transversals, relationalities; a writing that is more fragmentary without being self-contained, open to play across dimensions, to interactivity between media, to a different kind of complexity. To mixing and mashups, made and remade. 

The stress on metaphoricity consequently becomes crucial. There is, as Godard once remarked, a beginning, middle, and end, but never quite in that order. One can begin again and again, and almost anywhere; while ending one's session with the material as one sees fit. So the writing—better, the composing and orchestration because it is never simply writing in such a forum—is in constant play with the reading, whether concretely or as possibility. So the medium loosens the sense of absolute control. It is as if the material writes you, rather than the reverse. The experience has been liberating, as much from the literality of the linear within the narrow constraints of one's own writing as from the tyranny of the narrowly textual more broadly. 

But then New Orleans will tend to have that effect on one too.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

Whale Hunt is “an experiment in human storytelling, using a photographic heartbeat of 3,214 images to document an Eskimo whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska”

(Source: description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition, MLA 2012)

Roman Jakobson defined the poetic function of language as being governed by principles of selection and order. Under this vision the poet is in charge of selecting and organising words in a particular way in order to achieve a poetic effect.ACITEOP is a programme that groups together different experimental tools used for constructing poetic narratives, both textual and visual, through the deconstruction of the poetic function of language using different algorithms.The result, which is different with each reading or interaction, is both a deconstructed text and a brand new piece of work generated from that same process of deconstruction.This first version is a simple example of the programme that creates a narrative based on text, sound and images, which begins with the deconstruction of the poem "Between What I See and What I Say" by Octavio Paz, who dedicated the poem to the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson after his death.

The poem combines aspects of love, death, and nature in one piece. Originally it consisted of three parts: text, photography, and sound. In the Flash version these parts are arranged in a loop completed by a minimalist interface (to pause).
(Source: author description from ELC Vol. 1)

wotclock is a QuickTime "speaking clock." This clock was originally developed for the TechnoPoetry Festival curated by Stephanie Strickland at the Georgia Institute of Technology in April 2002. It is based on material from What We Will, a broadband interactive drama produced by Giles Perring, Douglas Cape, myself, and others from 2001 on. The underlying concepts and algorithms are derived from a series of "speaking clocks" that I made in HyperCard from 1995 on. It should be stressed that the clock showcases Douglas Cape's superb panoramic photography for What We Will.

(Source: Author description).