Performance

It was only after I began working with Robert Coover in the Brown Literary Arts program in 1998 that I remembered my father commenting years earlier on Coover's book Pinocchio in Venice. As a foremost Scholar of the Pinocchio story and its appearances throughout history in literature and media, he was impressed with Coover's handling of the archive. My father went on to write about Coover's treatment in a co-authored book, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern: Perils of a Puppet in the United States. RC_AI consists of texts composed by myself and Dr. Thomas J. Morrissey, my father, along with several generative algorithms and loose grammars in collaboration with a substantial portion of Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice. The panoramic text is a printed array (approximately 380,000 pixels long - or 422 feet) of variable content generated by parsing through approximately 1/2 of Coover's novel using the author's name as a search string. RC_AI was created specifically for ELO_AI: Archive and Innovate the Electronic Literature Organization conference and arts program. The overall event was in part a celebration of Robert Coover who will soon retire from teaching. RC_AI was performed in the auditorium of List Art Center at Brown University with my father on June 4, 2010. For RC_AI, I utilized tesseract, an open-source tool for optical character recognition, and then created a system for text processing using python's natural language toolkit. As this is my first experiment with both tools, the implementation is basic: the former accounts for bad spelling, the latter for poor grammar (as though the puppet sold his schoolbooks for a tree of ass ears). 

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a computer-generated dialogue, a literary narrative of generations of transatlantic migration, a performance in the form of a conversation, an encoded discourse propagating across, beyond, and through long-distance communications networks. One JavaScript file sits in one directory on one server attached to a vast network of hubs, routers, switches, and submarine cables through which this one file may be accessed many times from many places by many devices. The mission of this JavaScript is to generate another sort of script. The call “function produce_stories()” produces a response in the browser, a dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference; or: Strophe, Antistrophe, and Chorus; or Here, There, and Somewhere in Between.

I have formally performed “Completely Automated” on stage at a few conferences/venues and I think it could be a good fit for HASTAC’s themes. I would be very excited to perform it as part of an evening of performances. Total run-time is a duration of 15 minutes and it occurs in three parts. In the first part, I do a performative reading of a “historical” document that I have forged. To create the language of the forgery, I programmed a computer program to run a text analysis on a group of historical law tracts. I then skimmed the results and authored my own version of an early law tract. Calling on theater training, I perform this poetic text. In the second stage, the live performance overlaps and blends in with a short video that tells the story of how this forged document is digitally archived on google books as an “authentic” text. This video is blended with voice over of poetic text taken from the document. In the last stage I give a final performative reading of the changes that were made to the document when a group of users prepared it for upload in the digital archives. I think this project is an ideal fit for a performance at HASTAC because it deals with issues central to the digital humanities: archiving, preservation, digital conversion, authenticity, etc. What is at stake when our cultural documents undergo digital conversion? What artifacts or changes might be introduced? Where is the line of document authenticity drawn, in print or digital format?

(Source: Author's abstract for HASTAC 2013)

"Canticle" was written for Brown University's CAVE immersive virtual reality environment. Like a concerto, it was composed in three movements and arranged for collaborative performance between a solo user and programmed VR environment. In "Canticle", The CAVE system and its user operate in concert: rendering the world through cooperation and opposition. The tone of "Canticle" plays upon the spectacle of VR by inducing an aesthetic environment that is overly saturated despite its basic composition of greyscale letterforms. Evocative text and audio were used to assist this effect: "The Song of Solomon" and Nico Muhly's MotherTongue. A study of "The Song" resonated with the project's themes: the seduction of spectacle and awareness of a physical body within immersive spaces of illusion. Movements were written in response to spectacles that are native to the CAVE. Description of each movement refers to the specific quality of spectacle it explores: periphery, reactivity, stereoscopy, interface, depth or immersion. Along with the author’s original poetry about spectacle, the piece is also comprised of selections from the "Song of Solomon" processed by a computer program written by the author. Output from the program was then edited for form and content. The body of the text is available in the pdf below; however, because Cave Writing promotes spatial hypertext, the text is not likely to be encountered in the CAVE in the linear order presented. In the video documentation of "Movement 1: When the Eye" Asmina Chremos dances the physical gesture of reading through the interface of the CAVE. Her exquisite movements focus on the discrepancy between what the person wearing the tracking glasses sees and what the audience reads. For example, midway through the performance, the text is programmed to evade the dancer as she tries to engage with it: the text is programmed to only be legible to the audience outside the CAVE.

(Source: http://samanthagorman.net/Canticle)

John Cayley reads John Cayley reads and discusses his poem PENTAMETERS TOWARD THE DISSOLUTION OF CERTAIN VECTORALIST RELATIONS (which examines the effect of Google on language and poetics) with discursive and conversational interrupts from Jhave.

Recorded on John's Providence, Rhode Island home as part of i2.literalart.net/ on 12 Feb 2012.

(Source: David (Jhave) Johnston's vimeo account.)

The project ‘Folgen’ looks at the publication of personal archives and the tension between the public and private experience. This is explored by the personal experience of what it is like to follow somebody, first by monitoring the videos people put online, then following this information to actual physical addresses within the city where these videos were produced. Staged as a performance and installation, Folgen draws on the existing narratives of amateur video makers found on YouTube to build a multi-layered media landscape of Berlin. A subjective approach combines fragments of images and sound from the videos with the artist’s own narration, using the traces video makers have left in the public sphere of the internet to follow people throughout the city. The videos are self-representative acts, performances and depictions of the everyday, which together form a relation with the city spaces where they transpire. The geographic locations encoded in the videos become waypoints for traversing an unofficial, unintentional map of Berlin. Through this process, the city becomes a place to be inhabited and experienced through an other’s narrative — stepping into somebody else’s shoes.

A gorge is a steep-sided canyon, a passage, a gullet. To gorge is to stuff with food, to devour greedily. Gorge is a poetry generator, a never-ending tract spewing verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire.The source code for Gorge is a hack of Montfort’s elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge.

A homolexic translation of Evgeny Evtushenko's "Bohemian Girl."