Performance

TXTual Healing was created in the early days of 2006 by Paul Notzold and has become an ongoing exploration in how mobile technology can transform public action into theater. Using a laptop and projector, speech balloons and/or graphic context are projected onto buildings, with a phone number to which anyone with a mobile phone can text a response. Typically a private form of communication, in this project text messaging becomes an open, anonymous, and uncensored dialogue; a means to engage, rather than to escape. A way to create community through spontaneous performance.

TXTual Healing contextualizes text messaging into user generated story telling, whether in public space or as an indoor installation. Projects include displaying text messages in speech bubbles pairing them with graphic content, writing messages out in the hand of graffiti artists, interactive movies where the audience text’s the dialog and triggers the movie to play forward, mixed media pieces using permanent graphics with projected messages, and live performance pieces such as freestyle rapping your text messages.

(Source: http://www.txtualhealing.com/ About Page)

Flocks of books open and close, winging their way web-ward. A reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by lines of longitude, of latitude, of graph, of paper. The horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean paragraphs. These fluid texts are continuously recomposed by JavaScript files calling upon variable strings containing words and phrases collected from a vast literary corpus – Deleuze’s Desert Islands (2004), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Bishop’s Crusoe in England (1971), Coetzee’s Foe (1966), Ballard’s Concrete Island (1973), Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries (1598–1600), Darwin’s Voyages of the Beagle (1838), and many other lesser-known sources including an out-of-date guidebook to the Scottish Isles, and an amalgam of accounts of the classical and quite possibly fictional island of Thule. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of islands. In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts a reader will never wash ashore on the same island twice… and by islands, I really do mean paragraphs.

(Source: Author's description)

This is a presentation with commentary of two experimental original, collaborative digital poems: one with variora in two voices; and the other somewhere between a translation and a multilingual composition in English, Italian and French. “Digital Poetry” is understood to be language-based, formally structured art to which the digital dimension is indispensable in at least one of the following elements: composition, performance, or reception. We are two published poets who have worked for many years with translation in literature. This collaboration takes us into an exploration of the continuous re-invention of the speaking Subject through traversing languages in digital space. It breaks new ground in opening on to potential poetic conversations across cultures, even where interlocutors are far from fluent in each others’ languages. It is potentially an immediate way in to the kinds of discovery that can make translation so rewarding, but that are not generally easy to access without relatively long experience, especially in a literary context. The poems in our presentation were/are being composed through an email version of the corps exquis, where we agreed some simple ground rules, and then sent each other a couple of lines at a time. The ground rules were not rigid, and we soon loosened our initial attempts to include formal frameworks such as poetic meter. The most enduring agreed rule was not to open an email until ready to read and respond, and then responding immediately. These poems form the source texts. They are being programmed by Penny in close consultation with Paolo by means of digital Readers, part of the Readers Project with which the ELO will be familiar, and within which Penny has presented several times with John Cayley. John describes the digital Readers that are the basis of the Project as “distributed, performative, quasi-autonomous poetic ‘readers’ – active, procedural entities with distinct reading behaviors and strategies”. “Inextrinsix” is the nominal form of the epithet Penny coined to characterize how she programmes the Readers. The reason we have called these digital poems “inextrinsix” is that the idea of the “inextrinsic” embodies a contradiction, or tension (“in-ex”). This is because it concerns an essential property of digital poetry, that of its capacity to go deeper into poetic language, and translation, than was possible before it (intrinsic), but also because it then moves to foreground associative, or metonymic, traces (extrinsic). To give an example of a related linguistic element: paranomasia, or punning, is a feature of much digital poetry. Punning is an inextrinsic figure because it works by taking the reader into a figure of language, the direction of which then goes outward. It is also useful as an example because it has a visual element that transposes to sound, an attribute much more foregrounded in digital poetry than in the generality of printed poetry. Lastly, it is right on the edge of consciousness, which is perhaps the most important when it comes to digital Subjectivity. To elaborate a little: innovative language is necessarily oblique in terms of what is currently known. The joke work, like the dream work, can enable perception of the unconscious or preconscious, or that in which reason or the Symbolic is embedded. This is the terrain of the speaking Subject in process, and this is where moving between natural languages in digital form opens on to new potential. The electronic, inextrinsic Readers work on this threshold. The “completed” texts on screen start with a static version of the poem, which serves as a frame, part of which remains on screen throughout. The human reader then interacts with the digital Reader by pressing specific number keys on whatever device s/he is using. These works take my earlier collaborations with John forward mainly in the following ways: they are original poems, composed collaboratively via email; translation is treated almost as part of syntax in the programming; and the same goes for multiple voices. That is, the analytic strategies according to which the movements and “Readings” traverse the source texts are treated as if there were no distinction between a change of speaker, a change of language and the kind of grammatical or structural move native to poetry. The effect, however, is to expose where they overlap and where they do not, thereby revealing a differential comparable to a partial palimpsest. Digital Reading is what creates and opens this space. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

# text/sound-movies text/sound-movies are works of abstract poetry created with the means of digital video and audio. the image is extreme typography. the sound is digital sound poetry. each video is centered around a single topic or source material. please read below for a description of the 6 videos. ## vorsprung is a clip taken from the the video-performance spambot that dealt with propaganda and advertisment. ## sig all source material in this video originates from radio jingles of various broadcasting companies. ## broe sell a typographic video about stock markets. ## mmmatn a video about money and currency. ## ff oitl text and sound are taken from a sneakers commercial ## rr ii rr ii is visualized sound poetry or a sonified visual poem. the material of the acoustic and visual part consists only of electronically modified representations of the sound R. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Co-teaching an online course at UnderAcademy College, Chris Funkhouser and Sonny Rae Tempest co-authored the libretto Shy nag by applying a series of intensive digital processes to a piece of hexadecimal code (derived from a .jpg image). Shy nag, after a year of intensive deliberations with regard to media application in a performance setting, is now a multimedia, “code opera” that transforms (repurposes) the same piece of code to add visual display (scenery) audio component(s) to the work. In Shy nag, Microsoft Word and numerous other programs and processing techniques have a non-trivial presence in the composition. Software serves as a type of interlocutor that sustains the writers’ experimental objective – a time-consuming process blends creative and uncreative. The exercise also contains destructive qualities as the code migrates to language, image, and sound – although the authors prefer foregrounding its multi-level transformative properties. Allowing the software to dictate and steer the direction of this type of writing serves to endow the dialog with unexpected vocabulary and unforeseeable textual encounters in which compositional decisions must be made. Combining authorial rules with subjectivity, one “text,” through programmatic filtering, expands into another and is also applied to create media effects. Despite the use of software programs (and different versions of programs) to conduct text, the number of hours humans spent shaping it is extensive. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

This is a performance by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, involving a strong sonic and musical element interwoven with text. It includes sampled text and sound, electronics and live coding of text and sound. The performance will include two pieces, Metaphorics and Bird Migrants.

These two works were performed earlier this year in the UK and Australia, but have undergone considerable development. Every iteration and performance of them (particularly of Metaphorics) is substantially different.

Metaphorics (2014) for voice and coded sound

This piece employs live voice, live-coded sound (using the platform Gibber by Charlie Roberts, University of California at Santa Barbara), and live algorithmic sound. It involves samples from a recording of parts of the text, together with electronic and sampled instruments.

The piece is about metaphor: it also employs metaphor while at the same time deconstructing it. Historically metaphor has been one of the main tools of poetry. Attitudes towards metaphor have been very important in contemporary poetry and poetics, but have caused divisions in the poetic community. Some poets have clung to metaphor as a traditional mainstay of their craft. Others have reacted against the idea of metaphor because they felt that it was always working at one remove, or was being used to stitch the different parts of a poem together into a fabricated unity. This piece works with that dichotomy.

The first section of Metaphorics, “metaphor”, takes a stance to writing a poem adapted from contemporary conceptual poetry. It was written by cutting and pasting from the Internet – with some modification – statements about metaphor. The other two sections, “the unanswered question” and “windfall”, consist of a short poem and a poetic monologue that are freely written. They employ different kinds of metaphor, but in ways that are somewhat unorthodox.

The live coding and live algorithms allow events to prefigure or react to the performed voice and musical components: this provides another layer of metaphor. Live coding is the process of constructing computer code to perform a task in real-time (in this case a range of sonic and text processing). Live algorithms on the other hand are preformed interactive platforms and, of course, they are written by the creators themselves; in our case usually in MaxMSP.

Metaphorics reacts against the idea that metaphors in a poem should be consistent and unified; the metaphors keep changing and there is no obvious through-metaphor (except, perhaps, metaphor itself).

Bird Migrants (2014)

Bird Migrants 2 is a piece for voice and through-composed electronics. It is a development of Bird Migrants 1 which was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for the Radio National Program Soundproof and is in podcast form on their website at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/bird-migrants/5…. Bird Migrants 2 adds some live performance, and visual images treated in Jitter/MaxMSP, so is substantially different.

The piece uses bird and environmental sounds, transformed voice samples and instruments. In Bird Migrants there is a cross-species evocation of voice. The piece is based on the poem by Hazel Smith, “The Great Egret”. The poem was inspired by the wedding scene in Theo Angelopoulos’s film The Suspended Step of the Stork, where a couple marry each other from the opposite banks of a river that flows through a divided country. The great egret can be seen to represent the tragic history of the country, but also the longing for flight and freedom. The poem was written for the Bimblebox project, a developing project around the 153 bird species that have been recorded on the Bimblebox Nature Refuge in central western Queensland. The home of these birds, and the ecosystems that support them, is in the path of a proposed coal mine.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Powieki (eng. “eyelids”, also a pun on “forever”) is one of the crucial examples of Polish electronic poetry, authored by Zenon Fajfer, a contemporary Polish avant-garde poet, and creator of liberature, a literary genre integrating text and the material shape of the book (http://techsty.art.pl/powieki/). His volume of poetry is both in the form of the printed book and the accompanying CD included at the end of the volume; its on-line version premiered a year later (Szczecin: Forma, 2013). Fajfer introduced into poetry an original, interactive form called “the emanational poem,” in which he creates invisible, simultaneously coexisting dimensions of text that can be actualized in their kinetic (electronic) versions. Powieki is a multimodal cycle of such emanational poems. This textual labyrinth can be entered through different entrances and explored upwards, downwards, left and right to discover passages and openings unavailable in its printed form. Densely hyperlinked and granting the readers considerable freedom, this digital collection of poems invites contemplation, fostering “slow” reading, exemplifying Jessica Pressman’s argument presented in Digital Modernism. As Mariusz Pisarski stresses in his review of the work, it is “an oasis of zen in the world of hysterical discourses, offering us a verbal therapy on the liberatic couch, the more valuable as it is carried out by the same liquid crystal display that usually attacks us with its chaotic scream.” According to the critic, using all types of hyperlinks, Powieki constitutes an almost optimal kind of hypertext. During the reading Zenon Fajfer will present one possible passage through Powieki/Eyelids on the screen, accompanied by the voice-over giving the English versions of the poems in Katarzyna Bazarnik’s translation. To demonstrate the intricate, emanational, i.e. multi-levelled acrostic structure of the original a sample poem in English will be also presented to the audience in “Ars Poetica” http://www.techsty.art.pl/magazyn3/fajfer/Ars_poetica_english.html (source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Live performance, with recorded elements, of an audio work that explores neutral voice, artificial voice, acousmatic voice, voice and its relationship to the reader. This performance will also incorporate quasi-algorithmic, appropriative microcollage (with results from network services) particularly in the recorded passages. The performance requires that the artist is able to connect his computer's audio interface(s) to a relatively high-quality stereo PA system. A number of sample development pieces and proofs of concept are available at: http://programmatology.shadoof.net?p=contents/auralityrecordings.html.

(Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

It is overly simplistic to state that my digital poems come entirely from building/discovering interfaces. Any artist’s creative practice is a merging/melding mix of fluid events and inspirations. But with all my digital poems there is one commonality, the emphasis on interface. Rarely do I even reuse interfaces, and when I do it is only as one section of a larger work. This continual drive to create new ways to rethink the structure, organization and interactive functionality of my digital poems comes from a variety of internal influences. Most importantly is how these interfaces are not just vessels for content, they are poems in themselves. In the same way digital poetry might be best defined by the experience, rather than a description. Or similar to a digital poet and their works being described by the events and stories surrounding the creation and building process, an interface is the life, the body, and a poetic construction in itself. And through the artist performance I will explore/perform numerous of my interfaces, discussing/reading from them, eluding to how they were made, their inspirations and my thoughts on how they could be reused by other poets. But how is this a performance? This will not just be your typical reading and/or artist talks. While nearly all my digital poetry/fiction performances are highly theatric and, dare I say, engaging, I want to involve the audience more than I have in the past. Therefore, I will be shifting from interface to interface based on the audience’s commands. On the screen will be a series of titled links, around 20 total. The audience will choose which the title I read from. They can change those numbers at any time, and as often as they want. Choosing the links will happen via an ipad, being passed around the audience. The camera from the tablet will also be projected on the large screen in a small corner box. Then as the audience member changes the work, I will start reading it. And much like many of my works, the performance will be highly interactive, engaging, strange and a bit chaotic, driven, in part, by the audience’s commands. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Big data is a buzzword, as is cloud computing. But the data science and network-clusters behind both of these terms present extraordinary viable unprecedented computationally-tractable opportunities for language processing and radical poetry generation. In the summer of 2014 I took an intensive 11-week course in data science programming using Python. Based upon this theoretical and practical coding knowledge, I produced http://bdp.glia.ca, research where I apply a combination of data visualization, language analytics, classification algorithms, entity recognition and part-of-speech replacement techniques to a corpus of 10,557 poems from the Poetry Foundation, 57,000+ hip-hop rap songs from Ohhla.com, and over 7,000 pop lyrics. Currently the poems generated lack thematic structure. I propose to read extracts and reveal intricacies from http://bdp.glia.ca/ Including rapi improv-free-styling from the real-time output of the system (SPREEDE https://vimeo.com/105819691) Roland Barthes famously predicted the death of the author: yet I do not think he foresaw the cause of death as big data. And I doubt Barthes intended to imply the irony that from every death there springs new life. It seems plausible now to suggest that writers are sets and repertoires of techniques and preoccupations. And each writer writes within a cultural context, a time, a vocabulary, and a tradition. Once these traditions are mapped, propensities or paths for future writing will be either generated or grown as variations to assist authors in exploring creativity that conforms to their innate self while at the same time assisting them to see opportunities. The author will not die but expand to explore more of their potential using a computational symbiont. Data science algorithms are capable of finding topological patterns within languages, and thus poetry. By examining which patterns fit cores of genres and which are outliers, notions of creativity and modes of writing will necessarily shift: exploratory writing will swiftly outgrow the uncreative mode of pure appropriation and move toward nuanced expressive augmentation of the writer’s own persona. Big data, I claim, has equivalent power not just to depersonalise but to repersonalise.

(Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)