Performance

In this performance, an intersemiotic translation occurs between the visual artist’s demoscene videos and the performer’s live text generation. The performance continues the tradition of looking at electronic literature as something that is also created in front of a live, physically present audience. It challenges the notion of digitally native writing in that, as long as the writing is being performed by a human and not by a machine, there is always an organic, bodily dimension to everything natively digital. How can human writing then be born digital, if we are to take the term literally? In this sense, the performance re-situates the human performer. In another version of the performance, shown earlier in 2017, a robot writes in parallel and on stage with the human performer. In Porto, though, we'll leave the robot at home or have it only telepresent to bring attention to the contrast of human and machine embodiment in electronic writing. The human does not embody a privileged author in any unproblematic way, as we know from poststructuralist theory and more recently from the deconstruction of the author performed by digital media, and yet the human writer-performer continues to act as a source or node that contributes to the textual transformations that happen in and through digital media. In addition to language and video, here the two main media are machine translation and speech recognition software. The performance does not invite its audience to participate, but it is as open and transparent in its structure and implementation as possible.

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

Working with Nicolas Sordello, Lucile Haute posted square images to Facebook with the date, and then deleted it. The image would still exist for some time, accessible trough a direct link to the Facebook server. After this time, only text remained (comments and image text). This started Haute and Sordello's digital ghost hunt. The project started April 17th 2010 and ended September 14th 2011. Users may still access it through the project's website.

This performance was done in French.

Common Spaces is an experimental performance that translates spatial poetry into a multidisciplinary collaborative environment that gathers the physical and the virtual spaces. This performance mixes in realtime distinct types of media in a sort of multi-modal orchestrate. A multi-sensorial performance based on our hand gestures (Leap Motion), vision (camera) and voice (microphone).The common-space derives from the notion of common ground as the medium and the process of communication. It can be understood as a mutual understanding among interactors – as the iterative process of conversation for exchanging evidences between communicators – as an interface.

(source: http://www.grifu.com/vm/?cat=74) 

“All Hands Meeting” is a live performance that uses aestheticized speech to engage conceptually with human/ machine entanglement. The piece consists of a monologue delivered by a semi-synthetic boss to an audience of interns. Three new strategic initiatives are presented: an app, a poem, and a political movement. This version of “All Hands Meeting” is site-specific to ELO 2017.

(Source: ELO 2017 Book of Abtracts and Catalogs) 

Poetry is Just Words in the Wrong Order (2015) proposes an unconventional way of creating and presenting poetry based on improvisation, language/sound experimentation, fragmentation and randomness. Poetry as a social practice is here developed in an anti-narrative manner. Built with custom code, a computer chooses random phrases from a predetermined Twitter hashtag (e.g. #Syria) and a database of verses which are selected by the two artists (e.g. verses from poems by Arab women writing in English). The phrases and the verses from the two sources are combined partly randomly and partly following a given pattern. At the same time, sound events are being produced by estimating the number of the letters of every incoming word as well as the total volume of the incoming data. When the project is presented live, the three artists build and improvise on the poem that is created by the computer. (Source: Adapted from authors’ text)

Ian Hatcher’s online and kinetic poem ⌰ [Total Runout] (2015) critiques corporate and governmental black boxing, at the level of its code, text, visual output and live sound performance. The poem is part of the series Drone Pilot, and it is presented in different versions: a Web-based work, a sound piece and a performance. It remixes appropriated text from a WikiLeaked manual by the UK Ministry of Defense, essays on artificial intelligence, and Hatcher’s own text. The overall versions of the work, understood as variable events, boldly problematize communication and cognitive processes in networks—whether they are implemented in computer systems by secret agencies or corporations. Hatcher’s critique to black boxes entails recreating issues of security, control and surveillance, as controlled systems are increasingly paving the way for less privacy and less knowledge about their inner workings. As a result, the poem questions the essence of privacy, redaction, and systemic violence, when access is a privileged asset of agents with security clearances or those with a deep knowledge of programming.

(Source: Álvaro Seiça)

MathX (Metadata-Eye) is an audiovisual software program with an infinite duration that is built using the open source processing programming environment. It is a navigator in a meta-symbolic space, that travels a 3D network of codes and text contents.

A collaborative piece by André Sier and Álvaro Seiça, MathX (Metadata-Eye) was developed for Sier's solo exhitibition 02016.41312785388128 at Ocupart Chiado, Lisboa, from May 19 to June 4, 2016. The navigator presents a poem by Álvaro Seiça made as an invitation to create a text based on the philosophical-archaic-metaphysical references of André Sier's work.

Sier's initial navigator, MathX, was developed in 2010.

Seiça's text departs from Sier's works, MathX Java code, Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye (1924), and Ted Rall's Snowden (2015).

The collaboration branched out into sound, text, and visual pieces.

(Source: Adapted text from https://thenewartfestival.wordpress.com/catalogue/)

This hybrid print- and web-based work work aims to address the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ computing through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not. Fragments from Luke Howard’s classic “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” (1803) as well as more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services. The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of “The Gathering Cloud” shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste. (Source: Author's description)

In collaboration, two become one, but the process isn’t always easy—it requires constant negotiation. Who speaks and who is silenced?In “June 17th” two figures attempt to tell one story, in the process raising questions about how we narrate and construct our lives, who we are, and what we know. Based on Borsuk and Andy Fitch’s As We Know (Subito, 2014), an erased and redacted diary that presents the most unmediated-seeming idiom—the diurnal, journalistic record—as itself the consequence of methodical and whimsical extraction, this project foregrounds the tensions of authorship that arise within the text.

SimpleTEXT is a collaborative audio/visual public performance that relies on audience participation through input from mobile devices such as phones, PDAs or laptops. SimpleTEXT focuses on dynamic input from participants as essential to the overall output. The performance creates a dialogue between participants who submit messages which control the audiovisual output of the installation. These messages are first parsed according to a code that dictates how the music is created, and then rhythmically drive a speech synthesizer and a picture synthesizer in order to create a compelling, collaborative audiovisual performance. SimpleTEXT was originally funded by a commission from Low-Fi, a new media arts organization based in the UK.

(Source: http://www.coin-operated.com/2010/05/01/simpletext-2003/)