In an empty landscape a storm is announced by uprising sand, moving objects, silent people and a traffic jam on a narrow road.
In een leeg landschap wordt een storm aangekondigd door het oprispende zand, bewegende dingen, stille mensen en een file op een smalle weg.
The poem has been presented in libraries.
Samen met Kurt Demey ontwierp ik de installatie ‘Lezer,’. Het bovenstaande gedicht wordt daarbij op een magische wijze ontsloten in bibliotheken. (Het is moeilijk om uit te leggen, je moet het meemaken!)
Prairie Chants is part of a collection of hypermedia, narrative videos that chronicle aspects of life on the shores of Lake Michigan [called Michigami by some first nations]. In this video, a story of the prairie - and the native tribes who once lived there – unfolds. The past, the present, the future….
The tribal narrative happens to follow the historic movement of the Sauk or Sac tribe (officially Sauk and Fox), but it could be that of any one of many eastern woodland people, indeed hundreds of tribes across the country, who were forced from their homes, had their land taken by trickery or force, and walked their own trail of tears into captivity. The narrative links to the present with the development of new prairie associated with solar gardens.
Author statement:
One specific artistic choice in my train video works is that of platforms. The move to make a piece of e-lit almost transparently accessible across devices imposes significant design accommodations. Legends of Michigami can be read on a variety of platforms (mobile, tablet, desktop, screen projection). Even decisions as critical as type face and size needed to be made with various resolutions and screen sizes in mind. Moreover, as in all time-based narrative productions, the timing is a compromise between image-reading speed and text-reading capability.
The Legends of Michigami works continue my career-long experiments with narrative structure and the blending of sensory media. The layering of time and space, the merging of history and private symbolism and events, and the presence of multiple voices are all part of the storyline. Each element: text, image, sound, and structure is almost equally important in conveying information about the story world.
Distant Affinities is a work of recombinant cinema about machine intelligence attempting to process, narrate and mimic sentient being. Through subtitles, the omniscient AI narrator cycles through media that has been captured from the network and attempts a narrative interpretation of the patterns of human behavior. Disparate data points and discontinuous video loops resist being systematized or narrativized. The distances or gaps between the text and video fragments suggest what remains outside the domains of surveillance and narrative. An allegory of the vagaries of networked life existing within larger webs of living and non-living systems, the work shows a world coming apart, but also transforming into a more spacious mode of being made of errant language, creaturely life, isolated gestures and mutating interfaces.
Distant Affinities is programmed to oscillate between a probabilistic distribution of media elements and controlled narrative sequencing; between poetic montage and spatio-temporal continuity. Video, audio and text fragments appear on the screen in semi-indeterminate arrangements, depicting the chaotic flux of a technological world endlessly changing and repeating itself with each user click. Clicking on certain fragments “zooms in” voyeuristically on moments of individual lives, full of their own complex cycles of sensation, memory, thought, embodied and disembodied living. Loops, nested and at various scales, are employed to convey a fractal temporality. The intention of the work is to create an ambient and fluid experience, at times adrift in indeterminate structures and processes and at other times stimulating in the viewer a search for meaningful patterns.
Meet Me At The Station is a surreal and lyrical 10 minute experience for for 360 cinemas, domes, virtual reality headsets. A scientist is trapped in the future due to a time-travel accident. His only hope is to travel through dreams, but dreams can also turn into nightmares.
During Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual campus event where I teach, poems written about the Holocaust—including some written by survivors—are read aloud. Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” is often read, and has been translated by multiple Arts & Humanities faculty. This work of participatory digital art is another translation of the poem as a participatory embodiment of the text. It was created for more than 200 visitors of this event, many of whom were already familiar with Celan’s poem. In Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, Pablo Helguera defines multi-layered participatory structures. This work falls somewhere between (2) directed participation and (3) creative participation. While the visitor was asked to complete a simple task (level 2), they demonstrated varying degrees of creative commitment (level 3) in their participation.Beneath the lobby’s stairway, I held a small projector a few feet from a white wall. Visitors willing to participate interacted with a projected work of kinetic typography prepared for this event. Without much instruction, most participants found a way to embody the text, “Death Fugue,” as poetry in motion. While some participants used their bodies, others held the text on rose petals, and some took control of the projector to place the text onto the bodies of others—their children, friends, or colleagues. The final result is a composite video that documents a communal enactment of the poem as a text across many bodies in its construction and interpretation. Interacting with the poem in fragments elicits the temporal space of memory. In the spirit of collaboration and memory-making, the textual bodies were edited to form a cohesive video set to a soundtrack created for this work by Natan Grande.For ELO, I am submitting the final composite, a digital video with sound. This digital video documents the participatory embodiment of the poem. The theme “(un)continuity” is expressed in this project through its discordant structure of participation, and its re-presentation of the poem by participants.See Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011, pages 14-15.
“Cicatrix” is collected video from recent performances and experimentation, in Second Life, at Eyebeam, and at various other venues.
“Cicatrix” refers to scar tissue, and for his installation Eyebeam Resident Alan Sondheim juxtaposes early radio equipment with contemporary models of virtual avatars to meditate on virtuality as it relates to distortion, pain, and death. In a reflection on the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, Alan comments how in Second Life pain physically cannot occur, but therefore it also cannot be stopped. The avatars he creates, both through digital texture mapping and 3D printing, capture distorted bodies in moments of unnatural pain.
A. Bill Miller's 'Gridworks' is an ongoing body of work that includes drawings, collage, video and transmedia compositions of text-based characters.
"We exist within a built environment that is constantly mediated by the grid. Grids organize space through coordinate mapping and patterns of development. Grids compress, redisplay, and reorder information. Grids are an enforcement system imposed upon both nature and culture.
Grids can also be populated with marks that are fundamentally human — the characters of our shared alphabets. These marks — once scratched by hand, now recorded by a keypress — are not simply carriers of meaning but iconic forms in their own right. The codes of information interchange can potentially become an artist’s palette, a medium for drawing. The coldness and rationality of the grid confronts the warmth and playfulness of the human touch."
This 20-minute presentation highlights research conducted as a Fellow in the MIT Open Documentary Lab developing a methodology and software for parsing linguistic and semantic information from vast quantities of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across networked computers. The presentation will focus on the expressive potential of this methodology to create new forms of multi-modal digital poems. The goal of this research is to extend recent advances in computational text analysis of written materials to the realm of audio and video media for use in a variety of different language centered media production contexts. This methodology and software provides the ability to parse vast quantities of audio and video files for topics, parts of speech, phonetic content, sentiment, passive/active voice and language patterns and then playback the video or audio content of the search for consideration in an aesthetic context. Queries that are intriguing can be saved and sequenced for playback as a poetic remix of linguistic patterns on one or multiple monitors. For instance, an e-lit poet can create a database of hundreds of audio recordings of poems from the Poetry Foundation and parse the recordings for moments of alliteration; the search can then be played back as a generative remix of alliterations across decades of poems and poets. This new composition could then be sequenced across multiple computers in a gallery setting and spatialized with speakers playing in different locations in a room; imagine the alliteration example above but coming from a dozen locations in a gallery, sometimes the samples playing in a sequence around the room, sometimes all at once with the same phrase other times with pairs of speakers triggering simultaneously. The poetic possibilities that can be explored between the choice of material for the database, the choice of linguistic and semantic parsing and choice of spatial configurations (how many playback devices, where are they located) can foster intriguing new forms of e-literature. To make the concepts concrete I will illustrate the research with video documentation from a recent digital poem I created with the work that uses Youtube typography tutorials as its source material for a sixteen-computer composition. This humorous work demonstrates the multimodal aspect of the research. For example, when parsing for parts of speech like a superlative adjective in the Youtube tutorial database, the visual content of the word the author is constructing in their Adobe Illustrator interface is visually displayed; creating an aural and visual combination that has both sonic and graphic impact. The presentation will provide an overview of the process for making this form of digital poem as well as demonstrate creative applications of the research.