transcription

database is an electronic reading device that deals with the inversed functionality of three electronic devices: a printer, a video camera and a database. Consequently, it raises issues about the erasure of text, the act of reading in real time (i.e., listening to a printed text), and physical databases. Through the opposition between presence x absence, recording x erasing, memory x forgetfulness, present x continuous time and reading x listening, we challenge the idea of the database as a non-linear and digital structure, and the printer as an output device as well as an information recorder. Critical for the connection of all these concepts is the idea of present time as a time that is always passing by.

(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery description)

This work takes the poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer and, transcribing it onto a "scratchable" disk, makes it into a toy, a game, and a language engine.

(Source: Author's description)

Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word I spoke during the week of April 15-21, 1996, from the moment I woke up Monday morning to the moment I went to sleep on Sunday night. To accomplish this, I wore a hidden voice-activated tape recorder. I transcribed Soliloquy during the summer of 1996 at the Chateau Bionnay in Lacenas, France, during a residency there. It took 8 weeks, working 8 hours a day. Soliloquy was first realized as a gallery exhibition at Bravin Post Lee in Soho during April of 1997. Subsequently, the gallery published the text in a limited edition of 50. In the fall of 2001, Granary Books published a trade edition of the text. The web version of Soliloquy contains the exact text from the 281-page original book version, but due to the architecture of the web, each chapter is sub-divided into 10 parts. And, of course, the textual treatment of the web version is indeed web-specific and perhaps more truly references the ephemerality of language as reflected by the book's epigraph: "If every word spoken in New York City daily / were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, / each day there would be a blizzard." In order to achieve this effect, the web version is available only to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape 6+. Unfortunately, none of the prior versions of Netscape support the CSS tag used here: "a { text-decoration: none }" ; to view the piece in web form without this function enabled would be to ruin the intended experience of this work.

(Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1)

Author description: This work originated when I was invited to exhibit at the Medway Galleries. The most interesting features of the gallery were its high ceiling and three large windows, which I was inspired to use in the work. I wanted to explore kinetic typography, the animation of images and sound. I came across a transcription of birds' songs in the book The Thinking Ear. Suddenly, I was drawn to this transcription because of the similarities with the phonemes I was using in my other works. The repetitive aspect of letters and what looked like syllables reminded me of sound poems. So, I decided to ask some singers to sing their own interpretation of the transcriptions of the songs, in order to play with the interpretative process of these translations. Having been translated first from birds' song into linguistic interpretations, now the birdsongs would be re-interpreted by the human voice. The sounds that emerged from this study were later attached to the animated birds in the shape of calligrams. The outlines and letters of the text birds corresponded to the transcribed sound made by each bird, so making the birds sing their own visual-textual compositions. Nevertheless, the sound does not correspond to the real bird. The visual character of the typographical character was another important characteristic in the making of each individual bird, which leads to the matter of the materiality, virtuality, and movement of the letter. This work has shown an incredible versatility in reshaping itself into different forms of media and possibilities of presentation and thus of exploration.

(Source: Author's description from her site)