French

imposition was presented in an installation version at e-poetry 2007 in Paris. imposition was set up in amphiX of Université Paris VIII during the lunch-time intermission of the e-poetry symposium on 22 May from about 11.30 am until 2.00 pm.

Those visiting the installation were invited to take along a QuickTime and wireless-enabled laptop. They downloaded a 'listening' movie of their choice - one of the 'demons of imposition' - that was networked with the main installation. The main installation ran continuously at the venue and the viewer-participants played their downloaded movies and so, together, constituted a distributed, extensible, networked installation, manifested in literal and sound art, with some correlative imagery.

Simon Biggs, who participated in e-poetry 2007, wrote the following notice of the imposition installation:

"John Cayley's Imposition, based on a text by Walter Benjamin (On language as such and the languages of man), was a visually engaging work which was, by his standards, relatively minimalist. This is a work that brings language to life, a language composed of multiple languages, colliding and creating a frisson between themselves. In a sense this multilingual play could be seen as a metaphor for the entire conference, a playful cacophony of voices in distinct yet merging languages, discursively engaging one another rather than articulating in parallel. In Cayley's work members of the audience login to a common remote server and interact with a generative multilingual language machine, this in turn creating a visually simple but conceptually complex display projected on a large scale in the conference auditorium. As well as the imagery there was also a vocal soundtrack; a female voice articulating in song the phonetics involved in the textual constructions. An abstract soundscape, being essentially non-semantic, it gained great complexity and interest as more and more people logged on and their dispersed computers began to replicate, out of phase and with differing timbres, the vocalisations around the auditorium space. The result was a complex and dynamic spatialised sound sculpture composed of the human voice, evoking a sense of the multiplicity of the voice, language and the pre-linguistic." - from: 'Multimedia, multiculturalism, language and the avantgarde' originally written for the IDC listserv, available at http://www.littlepig.org.uk (accessed 16/6/07), click: textworks, then the article title

(Source: imposition documentation on Cayley's website)

“THE ABC: portrait of a city in 26 letters offers a reading in Los Angeles over the alphabet, an attempt to find coherence in what appears not to have to give shape to what is often perceived as amorphous. Beyond the clichés this portrait reveals textual and audio aspects of the city hidden behind her image hypermédiatisée”

(Source: “France Culture” as presented in the Electronic Literature Exhibition, MLA 2012)

Inanimate Alice depicts the life of a young girl growing up in the early years of the 21st century through her blog and episodic multimedia adventures that span her life from childhood through to her twenties. It has been created to help draw attention to the issue of electro-sensitivity and the potentially harmful pollution resulting from wireless communications.

(Source: Author's description from ELC, vol. 1)

A modern building. Everyone is present. Waiting for an experiment to start. A woman in a hospital bed is enjoying the paradisiacal atmosphere outside. Until she is rolled inside. Two nurses start a treatment in which injections are combined with language. 

Jean-Pierre Balpe ou les Lettres Dérangées was created as a homage to the poet and software developer Jean-Pierre Balpe. The title of the piece can be understood in a number of ways. In French, the word "letters" refers to the alphabet, mail correspondence, and also to the art of writing itself. The piece consists of a number of letters which are not all visible to the reader until the very end. The word "dérangé" has a number of meanings as well. One meaning is physical disturbance. The letters themselves are distorted, just as the meaning of letters and words became distorted when Balpe introduced the literary world to text generation. The word also means mental disturbance. Disturbed by the mouse passing over them, the letters unpredictably go in all directions without reason. The underlying algorithm brings the letters to madness. The actions of the reader turn the poem into a kind of game. The purpose of the game is to get to the end of the poem by playing with the letters without falling into any traps. Starting with a screen white as a fresh sheet of paper, the reader can, with some luck and a lot of tenacity, reach the end of the poem: "this is not the end," written in red on Balpe's bibliography. Only at the end does the text become meaningful.

(Source: author's description, ELC 1)

A collaborative fairy-tale coordinated by Roy Ascott but incorporating fragments from participants around the globe who sent in their parts of the text on the ARTEX computer network.

Roy Ascott described this piece in an interview with Südwestrundfunk that is quoted on Media Art Net:

1983—that was in 1980, I actually set it up—1983, Frank Popper invited me to do a project for a huge exhibition in Paris, called Electra, which was looking at the whole history of electricity right across the spectrum of the arts. And I got rather good funding. I set up this planetary fairytale. We had fourteen nodes across the world, Australia, Hawaii, Pittsburgh, various places, ... Vienna, Amsterdam, and so forth. And to each node I ascribed an archetypical fairytale character. [...]

Over a period of three weeks started a narrative, that could be either in English or in French, it wasn't a matter of translation, had to be just English or French because it was IN Paris, and so forth. To start it off—I played the part of a magician in Paris, so I would naturally say, «Once upon a time…» and then others from their point of view-the Wicked Witch or whatsoever—would pick up the narrative, and develop it online. So that what was happening was you would go on line, and you would see the story so far, and then input.