sampling

In the Middle of the Room came about as a live sampling improvisation with composer, vocalist, and poet Elisabeth Blair during a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In my live sampling improvisations, I partner with one or more acoustic musicians and I bring software I created, which cannot make sound on its own: it can only capture sounds from my partner in improvisation, live in the moment of performance, and transform them into something new, to reintroduce to the performance. This highlights the liveness of the listening experience, as the audience recognizes the mediated copy of sounds the human performer just made, at once noticing how the copy lacks aura (after Benjamin) and also adding value, retrospectively, to the original moment now past. Listeners can then hear the sampled sound gain a new aura of its own as it transforms and acts as an independent voice in the improvisation, influencing the performance and the human performer in turn.Elisabeth Blair brought to our improvisation session some notes she had made while interviewing an elderly friend. Elisabeth Blair’s stream-of-consciousness navigation through and about the interview material reflected the scattered thoughts of a lonely, bored, regretful, and nostalgic aging mind that is aware of its own gradual failure—it is here that the creative work separates from a factual biography of the interviewee, instead letting a new abstract character emerge, inspired by fragments of a real life’s recollections and reflections, the dots connected in new ways by our imaginations and artistic intuition.Fascinated by how it developed, I re-entered the improvisation, this time as a performing video artist. I built a rudimentary video titler (so I could perform by typing on the screen) and fed its output to a video feedback engine I have used in previous works, which transforms any image into new abstract forms and the behavior of which is shaped by sound. I typed in real time, in response to the music, words, and the things in between. The text switches among distinct modes of interpreting, reflecting, responding to, and misreading the words I heard. This compounded pattern of chopping and rehashing also led new meanings to form as the sound and the text jumped fluidly from one statement to another.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Blair/blair…

# text/sound-movies text/sound-movies are works of abstract poetry created with the means of digital video and audio. the image is extreme typography. the sound is digital sound poetry. each video is centered around a single topic or source material. please read below for a description of the 6 videos. ## vorsprung is a clip taken from the the video-performance spambot that dealt with propaganda and advertisment. ## sig all source material in this video originates from radio jingles of various broadcasting companies. ## broe sell a typographic video about stock markets. ## mmmatn a video about money and currency. ## ff oitl text and sound are taken from a sneakers commercial ## rr ii rr ii is visualized sound poetry or a sonified visual poem. the material of the acoustic and visual part consists only of electronically modified representations of the sound R. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Very little information about this work is available online. P. Sugarman writes that "Ambulance is about some Gen-Xers who run into a string of spectacularly bad luck involving a car accident and a serial killer disguised as an ambulance driver. One of the most effective elements here is the music sampling. The droning repetition of the musical phrases, over & over while you absorb slices of the story, gives the whole experience an obsessive, claustrophobic feeling." (http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/CyberCulture/ambulance.htm)

Storyland (version 2) is a randomly created narrative which plays with social stereotypes and elements of popular culture. Each sentence is constructed from a pool of possibilities, allowing each reader a unique story. The reader presses the "new story" button, and a story is created for that moment in time. It is unlikely that any two stories will be identical. Storyland exposes its narrative formula thus mirroring aspects of contemporary cultural production: sampling, appropriation, hybrids, stock content, design templates. It risks discontinuity and the ridiculous while providing opportunities for contemplation beyond the entertainment factor.The computer-generated combinatorial story is one of the oldest forms of digital writing. Storyland, with its simple circus frame, plays with this tradition by performing recombination of the sort seen in cut-up and in Oulipian work. The system repeatedly plots amusingly repetitive stories, inviting the reader to consider, to read its scheme for composition.

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