procedural

Programmatic or computational art is often, although not necessarily, related to art in other media: visual, performative, conceptual, and so on. The art systems of The Readers Project relate to writing and to reading, to our encounters with literary language. This project is an essay in language-driven digital art, in writing digital media. The Readers Project visualizes reading, although it does not do this in the sense of miming conventional human reading. Rather, the project explores and visualizes existing and alternative vectors of reading, vectors that are motivated by the properties and methods of language and language art.

Visualization, especially as a function of computation, is now quite commonplace in artistic practice, but it has little culture moment unless it provides critique, and it is not art unless it conveys an aesthetic. The Readers Project is a visualization of reading but it is implicitly critical of conventional reading habits. Further, because the project’s readers move within and are thus composed by the words within which they move, they also, effectively, write. They generate texts and the traces of their writings are offered to the project’s human readers as such, as writing, as literary art; published as real-time streams of live-writing, available to anyone with internet access.

Computationally-engaged text generation has a significant, if marginal, history in literary art practice. The Readers Project is innovative, however, in having found a number of ways to display the primary source of a text generator’s inputs within this source’s typographically structured literary environment. A less obvious but equally important aspect of the project is its use of current natural language information—especially concerning the relative frequencies of words and phrases considered by the readers—culled from the largest corpus of human language that has ever existed, a universe of language no longer deep within or distant from us, but now made visible to all by the free demons of web indexing and, more recently, by active cells of the Natural Language Liberation Front (http://nllf.net/).

(Source: Artists' Statement from the project site)

Author description: The Last Performance [dot org] is a constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of community. The visual architecture of The Last Performance [dot org] is based on research into "double buildings," a phrase used here to describe spaces that have housed multiple historical identities, with a specific concern for the Hagia Sophia and its varied functions of church, mosque, and museum. The project uses architectural forms as a contextual framework for collaborative authorship. Source texts submitted to the project become raw material for a constantly evolving textual landscape.

Author description: Translation (version 5) investigates iterative procedural "movement" from one language to another. Translation developed from an earlier work, Overboard. Both pieces are examples of literal art in digital media that demonstrate an "ambient" time-based poetics. As it runs the same algorithms as Overboard, passages within translation may be in one of three states — surfacing, floating, or sinking. But they may also be in one of three language states, German, French, or English. If a passage drowns in one language it may surface in another. The main source text for translation is extracted from Walter Benjamin's early essay, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." (Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. 1979. London: Verso, 1997. 107-23.) Other texts from Proust may also, less frequently, surface in the original French, and one or other of the standard German and English translations of In Search of Lost Time. The generative music for translation was developed in collaboration with Giles Perring who did the composition, sound design, performance, and recording of the sung alphabets.

Diagrams Series 6 is the latest in a life-long series of Diagram Poems, the earliest experimentations for which began in 1968. Although I have been making interactive works since 1988, Diagrams Series 6 is actually my first work written in a fully interactive way: from beginning to end in one interactive environment where the word object is playable at every stage of its development, from temporary unassembled scrap all the way to its final location in a finished piece. This environment is part of an ongoing project which I call Hypertext in the Open Air, implemented in a programming system called Squeak. It allows the works to be played on all popular computing platforms, including Macintosh, BSD, Linux, and Windows. Diagrams Series 6, consisting of the works 6.4 and 6.10, strives to return to the intense diagrammicity of some of my earlier non-interactive works, Diagrams Series 4 and Diagrams Series 3. The diagram notation acts as a kind of external syntax, allowing word objects to carry interactivity deep inside the sentence. Interactivity, in turn, allows for juxtapositions to be opened so that the layers in cluster can occupy the same space and yet be legible. A problem we all have: a multiplicity, we must all occupy the same world space, do no harm, and yet be free. Carrying multiplicity inside the thought, inside the sentence: the thought as world. At a time when our world is in deep painful need of more multiplicity of thought.

(Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1.)