textual architecture

Inside my gorge combines the real-time erection and arrangement of augmented reality-based textual architectures with immersive, 3d virtual environments to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct a poetics of queer embodiment in mixed reality. Drawing upon the word gorge to suggest a valley, an act of overindulgence, and a throat, the work explores gaps and excesses in language and the conflation of text, body and landscape.In the 1970’s, American self-taught artist Loy Bowlin designated himself "the original rhinestone cowboy." Adopting the persona from Glen Campbell’s hit song Rhinestone Cowboy, he intricately bedazzled his house, car, clothing, and dentures, creating a ubiquitous excess to compensate for a profound loneliness. Using Bowlin’s original unoriginality as a starting point, the performance appropriates sites of vernacular language and architecture in which all gaps are gorged. Bowlin's rhinestone habitat - rendered as a luminous environment derived from 3d scans  - is placed in relation to auction chanting where the cumulative repetition of numbers and "filler words" becomes a fluidly stuttering drone. Other sources at play include Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s collaborative The Sonnet of the Hole in the Ass and Pierre Guyotat’s 1975 novel, Prostitution. Composed in an invented mixed language dialect, Guyotat's summoning of sex acts in a gay male brothel is less narrative than linguistic secretion, a distinctive outpouring of self-same written material and displaced punctuation comprising an extravagant verbivisivoco ambience. Using solicitous flows of embodied language to create dazzling environments, Inside my gorge enacts cuts and disappearing acts between the body, language and space.

(source: ELO 2018 website)

From Marie-Laure Ryan's article "Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps":

The map created by this project, which operates on the word level rather than on the level of lexia, is not only dynamic, but animated and interactive as well. Literalizing the idea of textual architecture, the system asks the user to input words or sentences, and it creates the floor plan of an apartment to accommodate this verbal furniture. Words are assigned to rooms on the basis of semantic content. Twelve types of rooms are paired with twelve semantic categories: living room is themed around the idea of group, dining room needs glamour, kitchen holds food, closet is a place of secrecy, hall suggests motion, foyer stands for change, bedroom means intimacy, bathroom caters to the needs of the body, library is associated with truth, office is where one works, and windows afford vision. (Dillon, Writing with Pictures, ch. 6, p. 9). The various rooms are created as they are needed, and their size and the thickness of their walls increases with every new piece of furniture that needs to be brought in. Different inputs will consequently generate different floor plans. The system ignores the words that it cannot categorize (mostly articles and prepositions), and it tries to pair new words with old ones into meaningful phrases. When the components of the resulting expression come from different rooms, these rooms are made adjacent to each other, the wall between them is taken down, and the group of words floats in the area where the two rooms meet each other. The same rearrangement and tearing down of walls occurs when a word hovers between two categories. Matching the fluidity of the architecture of the floor plan, an architecture undergoing constant transformations, the fluttering of the words and phrases around the rooms suggests the polysemy of language and the impossibility to immobilize its words into rigid semantic categories. We can read the result as a kind of aleatory poetry, or as a story of daily life, with different episodes taking place in different symbolic locations.