Performance

This 8-10 minute performance will feature two persons reading from a selection of bot generated output. The readers will choose several bots to read aloud, and will read them back and forth to produce a conversation between bots, much as might happen on Twitter. The resulting juxtapositions should be both humorous and thought-provoking, with the individual readers’ voices lending continuity to the bots. For variety and emphasis, there will be a few moments in the performance in which one reader focuses on the text generated by a single bot, in the tradition of a solo riff. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Vital to the General Public Welfare was a solo exhibition (Edward Day Gallery, Toronto, 2012) revolving around themes of language, authenticity and contingency filtered through the lens of my experience as an adopted-out Cherokee person. I have recently turned the interactive touchwork poems in Vital, a 30-minute performance using the Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media (P.o.E.M.M.) mobile apps as the main performance tool. The title of the show came from documents filed in a 1964 Louisiana court case seeking to ascertain an adopted child’s racial classification. The judge claimed that the proper identification of the child’s race was “vital to the general public welfare”; in other words, whichever way the child was classified, a wrong classification would endanger the fundamental fabric of White culture. The now-hyberbolic seeming claim strikes me as a powerful metaphor for any conversations we have not only about racial classification but also about any number of other issues that some group or another feels is central to their definition of a well-functioning society. All of the works performed in Vital engage the question of how we talk to one another, how we locate ourselves in wider cultural geographies, how we authenticate ourselves against our own expectations and that of others, and how matters that are once seen as so vital – so essential – can later be regarded as contingent. The performance will consist of augmented readings, whereby I manipulate the P.o.E.M.M. app while performing the text of the poem. I will also be using several text-based apps by different creators (with permission!) I use an iPad connected wirelessly to an AppleTV (via Airplay using WiFi), which then pumps HD video via HDMI to a projector. This allows me to move freely around the stage while operating the pad. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Changing Faces: An Experiment in Friendship, Ego and ID was a weeklong netprov duet by Claire Donato and Mark Marino (or Claire Marino and Mark Donato), two electronic artists who grew up in Pittsburgh, studied at Brown, and whose names end in O. Taking the ultimate leap of trust, they jumped into each other’s social media accounts from August 5-12, 2015. What they learned has something to teach us all about who we are online and how others make it so.

All-Time High was a participatory netprov (networked improv narrative) game that took place on Twitter throughout July. Based on a concept by writers Claire Donato and Jeff T. Johnson (who collaborate on Special America/Atelier Spatial America), All-Time High was developed with Meanwhile Netprov Studio founders Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig. According to the official website, “In All-Time High we find ourselves— our own high-school-aged selves—together at the same high school in July of 2015. What a nightmare, right?! And yet, what an opportunity. For comedy, if nothing else. And maybe even a bit of redemption.” Readers became co-creators of the Twitter-based netprov with the use of the #ATH15 hashtag, and chose their own adventures at All-Time High. The official Twitter account, @alltimehigh2015, operated as a PA system and make announcements over the course of the netprov. Throughout July 2015, participants will played out the differences (generational, geographical, subcultural) and the commonalities (stress, sugar, hormones) of life on a high-school wormhole. Using their own Twitter accounts or creating new ones, participants played their teenage selves and fictional or historical characters reimagined as high-school students or teachers. This hyperactive summer school was scheduled around four grand, archetypal high school events—The Talent Show, The Big Game, The Big Dance, Graduation—at which participants gathered on Twitter for an hour each week at 11:00pm EDT (8:00pm PDT). From Thursday to Tuesday students, teachers, and PTA members worked up some good old-fashioned (and new-fangled) high-school drama while avoiding the glare of the Vice Principal (@ATHvice). Special guests included Mark Amerika, Kevin McPherson Eckhoff, Cassandra Gillig, The Coup (Boots Riley), Jake Kennedy, Flourish Klink, Heidi Montag, Nick Montfort, Spencer Pratt, and The Pistol Shrimps.

Fidget is a transcription of writer Kenneth Goldsmith's every movement made during thirteen hours on June 16, 1997 (Bloomsday). This online edition includes the full text, a self-running Java applet version written by programmer Clem Paulsen, and a selection of RealAudio recordings from Theo Bleckmann's vocal-visual performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Bloomsday 1998.

Fidget attempts to reduce the body to a catalogue of mechanical movements by a strict act of observation. Goldsmith aims to be objective like the photographer Edward Muybridge. In Fidget, Goldsmith reduces language to its basic elements in order to record and understand movement in its basic form. Despite these aims, the dictates of the work like the self-observation and the duration of the act, create a condition of shifting referent points and multiple levels of observation that undermine the objective approach.

Goldsmith and Paulsen's collaboration has reconfigured the text of Fidget to substitute the human body with the computer. The Java applet contains the text reduced further into its constituent elements, a word or a phrase. The relationships between these elements is structured by a dynamic mapping system that is organized visually and spatially instead of grammatically. In addition, the Java applet invokes duration and presence. Each time the applet is downloaded it begins at the same time as set in the user's computer and every mouse click or drag that the user initiates is reflected in the visual mapping system. The different hours are represented in differing font sizes, background colors and degree of "fidgetness", however, these parameters may be altered by the user. The sense of time is reinforced by the diminishing contrast and eventual fading away of each phrase as each second passes.

Fidget was originally commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris as a collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann. The live performance was at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris on June 16, 1998 at 8p.m. Bleckmann's vocal interpretations of Fidget are available here in RealAudio. A gallery installation of Fidget opened at Printed Matter in New York City. Printed Matter featured Goldsmith's collaboration with seamstress Sydney Maresca. The exhibition ran from June 11-September 4 1998.

(Source: http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/fidget/about.html)

Separation: an online creation and a performance based on the separation of words. The creation entitled Separation takes two forms (an online creation - for PC, tablet and smartphone – and a live performance). It is the result of a collaboration between the ALIS performing arts company (http://www.alis-fr.com/) and the i-Trace digital collective (http://i-trace.fr/). This creation (in its versions for the stage and for the Web) deals with the theme of separation (considered as both detachment and rupture). The creation is based on the ALIS company’s work on the separation of words. Indeed, the company has invented a technique called la Poésie à 2 mi-mots (two half-words poetry or cutting edge poetry), and has been developing it for the past ten years. This technique makes it possible to create sequences based on the idea that words which are halved horizontally, contain the half of other words (http://www.alis-fr.com/site/?q=node/26). These often humorous productions raise fundamental questions about the language, the writing process and the Digital. The website (in progress): http://i-trace.fr/2013/separation/alis An online version for PC and an app for tablets and smartphones will be available in 2014. In the live performance, we will use a tablet, a PC and a Kinect device. We will make the audience participate: they will propose words that we will manipulate. (Source ELO Conference 2014)

SpeidiShow was LiveTweeting about an imaginary reality TV Show. It’s a creative social media game and a transmedia narrative that spanned Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and QuickenLoans. The project included a cast of barrel of writers including: Spencer Pratt, Heidi Montag, Cathy Podeszwa, Jean Sramek, Betsy Boyd, Skye McIlvaine-Jones, Davin Heckman, Jeff T. Johnson, Claire Donato, Ian Clarkson, Sarah-Anne Joulie, Chloe Smith. The logo was designed by Rick Valicenti, 3st, and the site was designed by Rob Wittig and Matt Olin. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Motions by Hazel Smith (text), Will Luers (image and coding), and Roger Dean (sound) is conceived as a multimedia web book, and optimized for swiping and scrolling on tablets and computers. It is also a performance piece. It is programmed in HTML 5/Javascript. Motions takes human trafficking and contemporary slavery as its focus. Human trafficking is an accelerating form of crime and is a world-wide problem. It is one of the darker outcomes of globalization, the breakdown of the nation-state, and increasing ease of travel. Static and moving, variable and sequential, the piece presents image and text fragments from different genres: documentary, journalism, poetry and narrative. These fragments are programmed to evoke the subjective experience of enslavement in motion. The sound is constructed as an interactive mosaic. It includes musical transformations of train and plane journeys. It also features two compositions that use instrumental, timbral, rhythmic and harmonic devices characteristic of very different parts of the world. These materials are compositionally transformed with electroacoustic music techniques, including a range of algorithmic compositional devices. The sound is optimally delivered in 4 channels, but can also be delivered in stereo. Motions was the outcome of an Australia Council for the Arts Digital and New Media Writing Grant, awarded in 2012. (Source: ELO Conference)

How do we perform ourselves in digital space? In Not Not 0.1, Catherine Siller uses her own custom software and a motion capture camera to generate projected text and images of herself. She immerses herself in these projections and dances between the virtual and the real in a duet with her digital double. The piece destabilizes language and gesture as it repeatedly redraws the boundary between the physical and the digital self.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

The Obsolete Book in a Post-Obsolete World as Represented by a Post-Obsolete Book About Dance is a multimedia archival rhizome ecology in ten parts, and a reflection on the obsolescence of obsolescence, documented on the cloud, and open-sourced as a defense against post-post-obsolescence. It is a performable website, a pseudo-academic lecture, and a dance about architecture, in the spirit of Michelle Ellsworth. It exists as a website, and/or an installation, and/or a 10-minute performance. The book is dead. Long live the book. (Source: ELO Conference website)