German

A project by Johannes Auer for the ORF Kunstradio, Vienna. With: Reinhard Doehl, Sylvia Egger, Oliver Gassner, Martina Kieninger, Beat Suter und René Bauer Performer: Christiane Maschajechi, Stuttgart Peter Gorges, Stuttgart6 net authors generate a text on the others' web projects. 2 narrators/announcers perform the texts in form of a collage, remix, dialogue and (white) noise. 6 net authors form a new netart projects using the texts of the others. The radio version of this net project consists of four parts which add up to a radio play that represents different grades of (human) control: Part 1 is a kind of hand-made collage of the complete written material and, thus, is controlled "by human". For Part 2, the text modules of this collage were re-assembled by the computer (randomly "generated") - human control was abandoned. In Part 3, the announcers comment on this computer-generated collage - bringing human control back in (but at the same time infiltrating the meaning of authorship). In Part 4, finally, the announcers themselves lose control due to t heir being under the influence of alcohol ...

While concrete poetry in print combines linguistic and graphic qualities of words, in digital media time and interaction are two additional ways of expression. Words can appear, move, disappear, and they can do this all in reaction to the perceiver’s input. [...] If a still can progress into a movie, the worm of course can eat the apple as in Johannes Auer’s digital adaptation worm applepie for doehl.

Source: Simanowski, Roberto. "Concrete Poetry in Analog and Digital Media."

Commissioned to work on as a digital engagement with Eugen Gomringer by the Poesiewerkstatt Berlin. Each browser has a function that can show the source text of every retrieved website. Thus, the internet user can always see how a specific website has been programmed. That’s what G-Linie HTML plays with. Websites are layed out with HMTL-Tags. This includes for example the tag-pair

in each paragraph. A website can be created with any ASCII-editor. In these editors (and the browser's view of the source text is nothing else) line breaks and the distance between words can be carried out. However, they only become visible in the browser window when they are accordingly tagged. In other words, if an ASCII-Text is reformatted without HTML-Tags in the source text, one sees it as a sequence of words and signs without a break or gap. JODI worked with this in the piece %locationi in a virtuous way. If one accesses the website in the browser, one only sees an unstructured, disconnected, blinking sequence of signs. If one switches to the source text, then one can see ASCII-graphics.ii This is exactly what G-Linie HTML refers to, whose subtitle is quelltext-hommage aah gomringer/jodi/la monte young. In the browser, the viewer only gets to see a horizontal line of words. If one switches to the source text, these words are displayed as ASCII-Art, as poems by Eugen Gomringer. Moreover, the viewer can replace words and signs in the browser-window with an immediate impact on the source text. As a co-writer, he or she has to employ a mental strategy to change the subtext that is hidden in the source text of the hidden poem by Gomringer. In this process, he or she can extend the structure of Gomringer’s poems − line breaks, blanks, the number of words can be expanded or reduced with some skills. Yet, they always remain the basis for the considerations. This demands a lot from the collaborative author und occasionally evokes destructive forces. The G-Line HTML is then rather turned into an interactive reload of my work Kill the Poemiii from1997. It is entirely up to my co-writer and how he or she deals with my offerings to act them out. “It is really not an issue whether the viewer understands the concept of the artist. (…) Once the piece of art is out of his hands, he no longer has any control over how a viewer processes it” [transl. MP], writes Sol LeWitt in his ″Paragraphen über konzeptuelle Kunst″ in 1967. Conceptual art is the third point of reference of G-Linie HTML. La Monte Young made the great call to action: Draw a straight line and follow it (Composition 1960 No. 10). In G-Linie HTML the co-writer can potentially construct an endless line of letter. This line can, however, just like La Monte Young’s direction only be executed in one’s mind.

searchSongs captures the stream of words of Lycos' live search. This stream of words might be understood as an expression of collective desire, as the net's melody of yearning, which is played by thousands of people, who at any moment try to reach the desired by means of a search engine. This melody of yearning is made audible by searchSongs. Words contain playable tones of the musical notation system (c, d, e, f, g, a, h, c, fis, ces ...). On one side searchSongs' web interface shows the stream of words of the live search, on the other side there are lines of musical notes below which transform playable letters in musical notes. Non-playable letters define the length of a tone. In ancient Greece there already was a notation system of letters which was used for indicating the pitch of a tone, and the length of a tone was marked with a symbol written above the letter. A traditioned example is the Seikilos epitaph dated from the second century B.C. The most well known example of a word set to music by a letter notation system is the B-A-C-H motif, which Johann Sebastian Bach repeatedly used in his compositions. searchSongs refers to traditional letter notation systems like the Seikilos epitaph and the B-A-C-H motif. searchSongs accentuates the correlation between letters and notes in a more determined and concrete way. Furthermore the theme of musical improvisation is juxtaposed by a random generator, and the strict rules of the musical notation system is antagonized by algorithme. In this respect at the end the subjective search is being objectivized by the melody of the searchSongs. However the searchSongs keep their personal momentum by making it possible for visitors and listeners to interactively insert own words into the stream of words and take part in playing music. SearchSong is a highly complex mesh of language and music interaction between human being, machine and net communication, between text input, musical notation, programming and a real-time stream of words of a live search.

Language is corrupt! The subject reignes over the alienated object! Language is the code of power! Therefore "smash the surface" and concrete it in a new way. The concrete_machine™ liberates the language from the dominating code into the pictorial concrete. It was already in the last century that language seemed suspicious to numerous artistic movements. The Cubists and Dadaists collaged text-fragments into pictures. Dada dissolved words into sounds. The Lettrists reduced language which they understood as aesthetically exhausted to the single letter. The concrete poets composed letter-pictures and the utopias of the 70ies tried to convert the ruling code. The concrete_machine™ will go on this road to the very end. Compute the text: give it to the concrete_machine™ and so make a free picure of it.