Performance

"StoryFace" is a digital fiction based on the capture and recognition of facial emotions.

The user logs onto a dating website. He/she is asked to display, in front of the webcam, the emotion that seems to characterize him/her the best. After this the website proposes profiles of partners. The user can choose one and exchange with a fictional partner. The user is now expected to focus on the content of messages. However, the user's facial expressions continue to be tracked and analyzed… 

What is highlighted here is the tendency of emotion recognition devices to normalize emotions. Which emotion does the device expect? We go from the measurement of emotions to the standardization of emotions. 

StoryFace was re-published in The New River in 2018.

Artistic reenactment of the speech “Against Poets” from Buenois Aires from 1947 with using digital media 

Witold Gombrowicz (one of the most important Polish writers and an icon of XX century European literature) spent almost 25 years in Buenos Aires. In 1947 he gave a talk "Against Poets" at Fray Mocho’s bookshop, then in 1951 he publish the text in "Kultura" in Paris, which provoked a lot of poets and scholars to respond, e.g. Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel Prize winner). In this well known statement Gombrowicz attacked the very institution of Poetry (Form), as a kind of religion. The institution of Poetry attacked him back. Such controversies give a kind of new energy and awareness to the field and get artists out of their routine positions. The point of departure for this project is to reenact his statement in the new digital context. 

Nowadays there are a lot of attacks, controversies in the public sphere, and also in literary, artworld circles (on the Internet). We are going to research and mix some „attacking-” and „against-” poetics. Using words, phrases, sentences which we find in a selected cultural contexts (European, Argentinian, American) we will produce a generated speech reenactment in a new context in which artists, writers, and also anonymous Internet haters attacked eachother. To produce such an output we will create an archive which will provide input for the generation of speeches. This project has one goal: to unify the community through controversy. We hope to give rise to a variety of emotions among the e-poets (support, rejection, disgust, lack of interest). 

"In 2015, E-Poetry, which is headquartered in Buffalo, New York, organized its festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Spanish and Portuguese languages seemed to take a leading role during research presentations as well as artistic events. During the festival segment titled NEW PATHS, NEW VOICES/NUEVAS RUTAS, NUEVAS VOCES, a coalition was forged against the domination of the English language in the field. During a performance (an intentionally antagonistic one, dedicated to trolling) presented in Spanish and Polish and abiding by the spirit of major Internet trolling strategies, it was established that the name of the coalition would not be announced in English, and the performance also was expressly forbidden from being translated to English. This was a gesture aimed at opposing the most significant type of domination in the field—namely, language domination and all the hegemonic practices that stem from it. It was a move modeled after that of the Coalition Against Gringpo5 and assumed this sort of trolling approach as a reply to having languages and practices identified as being at the ‘end(s)’. "

Piotr Marecki, Nick Montfort, Renderings: Translating literary works in the digital age  https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/32/suppl_1/i84/3077164

“En una sala a oscuras, de espaldas al público, un hombre de estatura media, pelo canoso y un cuerpo de apariencia frágil recita algo en una lengua que no existe pero en la que se distinguen rasgos de todas partes: sonidos nasales franceses o polacos, morfemas en español, aglutinaciones de consonantes de ecos indoamericanos, entonaciones tangueras, vocales cerradas anglófilas"

http://reseniasbds.blogspot.no/2015/07/cronica-del-e-poetry-festival-lu…

A Brief History of Loss is a heavily mediated performative lecture that is not only an extension of deep repetition and radical sameness, but a form of (non)reading put at odds with itself. How might these differences of reading information and meaning not be reduced, but contradicted? How might a text engage the form of the page and document as a space that provides platforms for close readings as well as keeping those readings at a distance, not something to read insofar as something to be looked at and thought about. Best situated within the “Translation” strand, ABHoL aims to expose and conflate mediatic and literary reading/writing practices with an unstoppable real time. The performance itself is a translation and shifting between codes, both textual and computational. Framed as an investigation into personal mediatic histories, ABHoL aims to conflate and contradict photographic images, as objects framed to be narrated, with corresponding narration that calls on the document as a performative object and artifact. How might the agent and agency of time, assumed in the aesthetic expressions and conceptual underpinnings of a document, lend itself to a cinematic or mediatic time? A deep and unstoppable real time? What new dialogues/forms Thursday, July 20 • 549 might this tension produce/generate/negate? Loss, like all affects, is held in the face, and a face, like all surfaces, may often be read like a book. As someone else once said, the matter of reading disrupts the continuity between the theoretical and phenomenal and thus forces a certain recognition of incompatibility.

‘Throwing Exceptional Messages’ is a performative work that frames theoretical critique as practice in a gallery setting. The work uses a deconstructive methodology derived from Jacque Derrida’s practice of ‘sous rature’ to perform critique upon a particular moment in the historical formation of the field of ‘codework.’ The term codework was established in 2001 and attempted to describe literary works that were developed from or included elements of computer code. The taxonomy of this field, formalised by Alan Sondheim, was contested by John Cayley on the basis that ‘non-executable’ work should not be included into the field as ‘code’ referred to as ‘executable’ text. By bringing the thesis of this research into the gallery space the performer uses the theoretical methodology as a practical methodology to produce critical artefacts. The thesis is placed under erasure within a system that produces computational ‘exceptions’ or ‘non-executables’ as work. These exceptional texts are ‘caught’ and ‘handled’ within the performance as a mode of production and are transformed into physical ‘objects’to be ‘thrown’ into the space. The resulting exceptional texts are developed from this codework divide yet they can no longer be read along these terms.

‘Throwing Exceptional Messages’ is a performative work that frames theoretical critique as practice in a gallery setting. The work uses a deconstructive methodology derived from Jacque Derrida’s practice of ‘sous rature’ to perform critique upon a particular moment in the historical formation of the field of ‘codework.’ The term codework was established in 2001 and attempted to describe literary works that were developed from or included elements of computer code. The taxonomy of this field, formalised by Alan Sondheim, was contested by John Cayley on the basis that ‘non-executable’ work should not be included into the field as ‘code’ referred to as ‘executable’ text. By bringing the thesis of this research into the gallery space the performer uses the theoretical methodology as a practical methodology to produce critical artefacts. The thesis is placed under erasure within a system that produces computational ‘exceptions’ or ‘non-executables’ as work. These exceptional texts are ‘caught’ and ‘handled’ within the performance as a mode of production and are transformed into physical ‘objects’to be ‘thrown’ into the space. The resulting exceptional texts are developed from this codework divide yet they can no longer be read along these terms.

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

A comparative presentation of a digital poem and a video poem, both composed as complementary translations and interpretations of Rilke’s 8th Duino elegy. The digital poem moves across English, French, Italian and German, while the video poem moves between live action and the paintings of Kate Walters. If anyone would like to volunteer to translate these lines into Portuguese, and to correspond with me about their translation, I’d be truly delighted. The exploration of plagiotropy is partly to be found in the movement across languages, and partly in tracking tropes across natural languages, programmed language movements and the paintings. I have only recently returned to video poetry, but you will be able to see Doaryte Pentreath from the 1980s on my website by late January. I will send the link. This work develops out of my ongoing collaboration with John Cayley. The element of direct translation will be of the following fiveand-a-half opening lines: Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang. Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers Antlitz allein; […] (Creatures see with their entire gaze wide open space. Our eyes alone seem trapped in reverse, focused on self, sealed without escape. Through animals’ faces only, we sense What exists beyond […])

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

LAMENT is a mixed reality performance that excavates sites, histories, and languages of mining in a poetics of generative telegraphy, geophysical extraction, and the multilingual hauntings of forgotten laborers. Immersed in a lush 3d point-cloud derived from Lidar scans of a defunct copper mine, two performers, I (input) and O (output), operate a custom augmented reality system to extract, hoist, encrypt and decrypt language from original and archival sources while composing through a database of 30,000 telegraph codes used for electrical communications of the mining industry in the 19th and early 20th century. LAMENT is a sited compression of the work, SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED, adapted for the Translations festival and the Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória. Translation manifests in the work through the reanimation of a mine captured by remote sensing, the use of AR to scan and transform its surroundings, and the multivalent SHUDDERING of telegraphic codes that radiate towards their linguistic surface connotations and their arbitrary meanings in codebooks and encryption techniques. From the data-void, a gap in the (point) cloud at the Thursday, July 20 • 551 center of the system, comes a raining lament that sounds the material substrate of modern network culture, spotlighting labor practices and struggles composing the transnational circuitry of copper - sought-after conductor at the heart of electricity and communications technologies - to render the data that we breathe via encrypted message mined and struck from the historical record by way of pneumatic drill - as code, blast and particulate aftermath of a cabled earth’s wireless imagination *Telegraph codes extracted from The New General & Mining Telegraph Code (1891).

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

This diptych or bi-fold work presents readers with two re-workings of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky:” on one hand, a fixed, cyclical hypertext in seven parts (Ouroboros), and on the other, an endless generative deformation that refigures the mock-epic as tennis game in Hell (Jabberwock). Both options are available at the start, but only in faint, translucent lettering. Letting the cursor dwell on one side or the other activates a sound track -- on the O side, a poetic voice whispering words of wisdom; on the J side, various monstrous re-mixes of Thursday, July 2017.This diptych or bi-fold work presents readers with two re-workings of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky:” on one hand, a fixed, cyclical hypertext in seven parts (Ouroboros), and on the other, an endless generative deformation that refigures the mock-epic as tennis game in Hell (Jabberwock). Both options are available at the start, but only in faint, translucent lettering. Letting the cursor dwell on one side or the other activates a sound track -- on the O side, a poetic voice whispering words of wisdom; on the J side, various monstrous re-mixes of those words. Dwelling on one side or the other will also cause the favored side to become more fully apparent while its opposite fades toward blankness. If the reader pursues this process to the end, which takes only a few minutes, she is invited to complete her Observation by filling out a brief survey asking reasons for the choice of monsters. Dwelling on one side or the other will also cause the favored side to become more fully apparent while its opposite fades toward blankness. If the reader pursues this process to the end, which takes only a few minutes, she is invited to complete her Observation by filling out a brief survey asking reasons for the choice of monsters.

(Source: ELO 2017 Book of Abstracts).

During our presentation, we will take on the role of the literary adept and talk with a chatbot, who we will treat as our master. We’ll ask him questions about how to write, present our works for his evaluation, and try to receive feedback. The Master will use phrases, sentences and paragraphs of texts, which until now have been used in literary discussions. The chatbot that we propose is based on texts from the history of Polish literature, foremost taking into account the exchange of views between literary critics and historians. It is said that one of the peculiarities of Polish mentality is strife, which especially in the digital age takes on monstrous proportions in the form of an uncontrolled wave of hate on the internet and verbal abuse that falls below the belt.

The starting point for our project is to recognize that the majority of existing chatbots are very nice. The available chatbots try to help, give advice and have an answer ready on how to proceed. They look good and behave impeccably. Our idea is radically different: we want to create a bot that is programmed to be unpleasant, to be a troll and hater. The first step will be to research this behavior in Polish literature and based on the literary haters and their hate, we will create a database of possible answers. We are going to use both classical texts, literary quarrels between the romantics and representatives of the Enlightenment, and the avant-gardists attacking tradition, and we will mix these with discussions on literary web portals, social media, statuses and comments. The chatbot will adjust its answer to the user’s questions by employing a simple word order analyzer and keywords. An archive of literary texts will be processed using a sampling method and Markov chains.

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)