spoken word

The reading of any text, or the translation from one language (or mode) to another relies on a process of interpretation. Following Derrida, in his theory of translation, Lawrence Venuti writes that ‘Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain (polysemous, intertextual, subject to infinite linkages), it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity’ (Venuti 2008: 13). These plural and contingent relations that have the capacity to produce different meanings were played out in Ana Cavic and Sally Morfill’s animation for ELO 2016 (Rules that order the reading of clouds). Lines, as signifiers, developed through gestures of drawing, reformed repeatedly to create different relations, and produce new meanings that shifted between the contexts of image and text. In the process of making Rules (2016), the active space where interpretation occurred and meaning was produced lay between the frames of animated movement. This between space, or gap - prone to perceptual failings - is at the core of a new collaboration between Cavic, Morfill and Tychonas Michailidis. I am not listening is an interactive installation in which the interpretative space between the aural, visual and haptic is exposed and activated. The audience is witness to what Roman Jakobson describes as ‘intersemiotic transposition’ (1959): verbal signs are interpreted by means of non-verbal sign systems, and vice versa. Where Jakobson stated that ‘poetry is untranslatable,’ a creative transposition provides the listener with vibrating sensory feedback that is in fact a direct translation of the text. A chain of translation processes begins with simple drawing gestures from which a ‘kit’ of lines is developed. These lines, translated into a material form (initially adhesive vinyl), are physically arranged and rearranged to construct a series of poetic texts or ‘sculpture poems’ that in turn provide the content for audio recordings of spoken word. While preparing the adhesive vinyl lines, the process of weeding (removing the unwanted shapes from the vinyl sheet) produces remnants that are rolled into spherical sculptural objects. These are reinterpreted in their final material form to incorporate vibro-haptic technology, providing an object-interface through which the audio recording can be manipulated. In this work, therefore, literature is mediated by technology. The inclusion of alternative sensory formats to support the listening/reading of a text both augments the experience of the audience, and underlines its incompleteness within a chain of signification.

if-notNow, if-then-when-else www.alintakrauth.com/ifthen is an interactive 3D html5 piece that looks at the theme of climate change as an environmental disruption, through the lens of glitch art and code poetry. The piece opens on a page of movable squares, purposefully reminiscent of digital pixels, but moving and squirming, much like watching people move through a city from above. These boxes can be clicked on to zoom in and back out again, in order to read the coded and glitched poetry.
Both glitch and code are clear visual examples of what goes on behind the scenes in a digital world, and here this is juxtaposed with real-world human-made disruption. In the artist’s native home country of Australia, where the glitched footage is taken, this constant tug between too little and too much rain is now experienced on a yearly basis, and the poetry within this piece reflects that sense of too little vs. too much through the cause and affect relationship of “if-then statements” – a particular cause and affect coding statement.
Visually, if-notNow, if-then-when-else is an overload of visual stimulation – flashing colors and fast-moving text that simultaneously shows disorder within order, and order within disorder. It is, at times, difficult to read, as it purposely forces the reader to stay on each box for some time in order to read each line and de-code the glitch, making for a more intimate and longer-lived experience. It includes metatextual and self-referential layers—the code that shows itself through text and image.
if-notNow, if-then-when-else also includes a glitch sound poetry soundtrack created by the artist, made from glitched spoken word. In this way, this piece explores ideas of meditation within over-stimulation and synesthesia, and how this relates to our changing environment.

(Source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Traces is a collage of text, spoken word, sound, and digital projection. The text forms durational video and audio composed into 17 sections (excerpts included), which are triggered over the course of an hour in a continuous fashion. The video was designed to be incomplete and unfold over time--drawing attention to the chance encounter each person may have with it. It does not reveal the totality of its content, part of which falls outside of the frame. I worked with archival materials as I built this project (oral histories and personal collections). I was interested in these sorts of personal collections being displayed and open for perusal. As private spaces become redefined by digital possibilities, information is readily transferred from one form into another and meaning is subtracted and added along the way. Traces is my own collection. Photographs become data, which initiate recordings that are transcribed and then re-recorded. These then become projected text, and finally transform into granulated rhythmic pulsations and fragments of words, which becomes a vastly layered resonant soundscape felt as vibration through the body.

(Source: ELO Conference: First Encounters 2014)

11 Ways to escape the Symbolic Field is a hybrid work consisting of various Internet accessible pieces in which texts found on the Internet are combined with original digital art works. The texts are presented on the screen in different, mostly hermetic ways, to emphasize the eroding effects the internet has on the literacy of the ‘general audience’. The author intends to question the ‘authority’ of the found texts by deforming them and to render them illegible. Together with each – projected–piece is a sound track with recordings of spoken poetry in English and Dutch from the artist. The poems juxtapose each piece with political driven subjectivities. This series of work is building upon previously created works such as Semantic Disturbances (2005) and La Resocialista Internacional (2011) by the same author. (Source: GalleryDDDL description)

On the occasion of the ELO 2010 conference celebrating Robert Coover, I have devised a 24-channel sound installation/performance.  Given the theme of the conference (Archive & Innovate), I chose to investigate the sonic literary archive, utilizing recordings of Robert Coover in the reading his own work as a framework for this composition.  Through a computational process of spectral analysis, editing, and re-synthesis, solo speech is transformed into a chorus of diffused instrumental timbres.  Time is stretched, allowing the ebb and flow of the original readings to be heard very slowly - creating an ambient, electro-acoustic arena.

Attempting Ziggurats 4 is an installation based on a story by John Barth entitled "Glossolalia," which is made up of a set of oblique and somewhat desperate words that have a familiar ring to them. As each section of the spoken text of the story unfolds, underlying sounds of social activities are gradually folded into its rhythm.

The various versions of Attempting Ziggurats find their basis in the story of the Tower of Babel and its ongoing reverberations in American culture. The pivotal moment of the story, the instant that language becomes noise, is one that is forever enshrined in American society through its incorporation of cultural difference as a central component of the concept and fabric of the nation. Here, that babble of noise repeatedly coalesces into the rhythms of the Lord's Prayer, a text which, prior to 1962, was recited daily in United States public school classrooms.

(Source: Artist's description, ELO_AI)

Mann provides access to both written and audio texts in a minimalist interface that takes a little getting used to— both online and in the iOS app. It invites clicking around, which results in fascinatingly incomprehensible speech, as the audio files become layered and words jumble together. The great thing about this layering is that, while we lose individual words and their meanings, we gain a heightened sense of the rhythms and musicality of Mann’s speech. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

"Training missions" employs a tabular-format, three-part poem as a gateway to discussion-demonstration of three online activities, so defined: imagining, imaging, and logging. Through the use of relatively simple graphics and a few carefully chosen links, the piece lampoons the functional overkill that often under- (and over-!) writes the wholesale use of imagining and imaging technologies. The final section, "logging," begins by foregrounding many of the semantic and syntactic disparities latent in our word processing age---an age in which grammatical niceties are often taken for granted---and concludes by exploring the more seductive implications of media (televisual and Hollywood) culture via a Flash sequence of loglines (with voiceover).

One aim of the work is to draw reader attention back to the title poem, with the hope that readers might spend more time with initial conditions (i.e., the tabular poem that serves as gateway to the piece) in order to think through the conceptual and often conflicting aspects of media work.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)