"noth'rs" is composed from transliteral morphs & based on: - Marcel Proust 'Du Coté de chez Swann' & the English translation by Montcrieff & Kilmartin - Jean Genet 'Miracle de la rose' & the English of Bernard Frechtman, - with additional texts from Virginia Woolf 'To the Lighthouse,' and Li Ruzhen 'Flowers in the Mirror' ('Jinghua Yuan' translated by Lin Tai-yi). - plus 'Sixteen Flowers' by Caroline Bergvall.
r e a d i n g n o t h ' r s
"noth'rs' is a navigable constellation of nodal texts (in both French and English) and transliteral morphs between those texts. The controls available are as follows:
- The 'Show Film' option takes about 12-14 minutes for a complete run though. You can interrupt it with 'Command + .'
- After choosing the 'Read' option, if you press and hold down the shiftkey you can skip the longish opening sequences.
- If you press and hold the Option (or Alt) key down while reading, a 'help' card is displayed outlining the various controls available.
- UP and DOWN move through one of many transliteral circuits, each with four natural-language nodes.
- LEFT either discovers a (Bergvall) graft or spins to a new circuit.
- RIGHT gives access to the corresponding language for a particular text at the neighbouring upwards node.
- HOME for a sequenced, clean exit (you can also just use Command+Q to quit at any time.
- The 16 one-line 'flower' texts composed by Caroline Bergvall, appear at quasi-indeterminate points when an 'left' key is pressed. Each of these are seen once and once only during any single session.
- (OTHERWISE UNDOCUMENTED) f you are at a nodal text, it is possible to click on key words (italic words are always 'key'; others must be found by guessing) in the nodal text (if they are active they will highlight once you click them). If you click on such a word, this will reconfigure the current constellation so that the forward (UP) key will take you to another node where the keyword is morphed and moved to a corresponding/related key word in a related node. If you hold down the shift key while clicking a key word (be patient) the text will morph automatically to such a related node.
- Please note: in this new version of "noth'rs" these 'key words' are like 'key points' in graphic morphing. They are picked out in the morphs by being in italic text and you can watch them both morphing and migrating to their destination positions.
- Please note also: while navigating between nodal texts, you should hear the attempts of the speech synthesizer to pronounce the transitional phases. These should be louder when the text is most chaotic and should fade away as a nodal text is approached and reached.
Severely cut-back and earlier versions of "noth'rs' appeared on the CD ROM which accompanies Performance Research 'On Line', Volume 4, Number 2 (Summer 1999), edited by Ric Allsopp & Scott deLahunta); and on the web at "Riding the Meridian" http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/cayley.html. An initial performance version was shown at Digital Arts and Culture 1999, Atlanta Georgia, 28-31 Oct, 1999.
(Source: Project site at shadoof.net)
John Cayley’s “windsound” is an algorithmic work presented as a 23-minute recording of a machine-generated reading of scrambled texts. The cinematic work presents a quicktime-video of white letters on a black screen, a text written by Cayley with a translation of the Chinese poem “Cadence: Like a Dream” by Qin Guan (1049-1100). As a sensory letter-by-letter performance, the work sequentially replaces letters on the screen, so that what starts as illegible text becomes readable as a narrative, and then again loses meaning in a jumble of letters. Cayley calls this technique “transliteral morphing: textual morphing based on letter replacements through a sequence of nodal texts.” Sequences of text appear within up to 15 lines on the same screen, thus presenting and automatically replacing a longer text on a digitally simulated single page-a concept Judd Morrissey also applies in "The Jew´s Daughter." Unlike Morrissey’s piece, Cayley’s doesn´t allow the user to interact with the work. Instead the work appears as a self-sufficient text-movie with ambient sound, murmurs of voices, windsound and synthetic female and male voices reading the non-readable to the viewer. As with the shifting letters, narrative perspectives also morph and switch fluidly between the lyrical-I, Christopher, Tanaka or Xiao Zhang. Thus, the sentence: "‘We know,’" Tanaka had said in English/"‘Tomorrow if we meet/I will have to kill you myself/’" is, in the algorithmic process of the work, later spelled out by the I-narrator. At the very end of the work, John Cayley dedicates “windsound” to the memory of Christopher Bledowski. What remains after the black screen and a re-start of morphing letters before they vanish conclusively, is windsound. At a certain point in the movie the text says "you have to be/to stay/silent/to hear it," and it seems like the reader has to be silent, too, listening to what he cannot understand, patiently waiting for the moment of legibility.
(Source: record written by Patricia Tomaszek originates from the Electronic Literature Directory)
