Performance

Svaha, Tantra, Death is a shamanic operation on perceptions and inner experience. This performance does not involve showing existing work; instead, it creates a transformative event and its entangled representation. We will perform virtual generation, completion, and dance of Yamantaka, a Tibetan tantric deity. We will perform textual transformation of the world. We will be re-situating electronic literature performance practices in philosophical and corporeal register. The work moves from hi-speed text through generated clusters of Yamantaka, to ordered and disordered images of the natural world and its bodies.

(Source: http://chercherletexte.org/fr/performance/svaha-tantra-death-a-second-l…)

The Fetch is a double-reading. Projected digital texts are read by one performer while the second performer searches the net for double texts which use the same combination of four word groups to be found in the projected text. ‘Fetch’ has a double meaning here. In Gaelic folklore, it is the wraith or doppelganger which is seen as a premonition of someone’s death. Secondly, The fetch cycle is the basic operation by which a computer retrieves and executes a program instruction from its memory. Thus the reading performs the theme, « Chercher le texte ».

(Source: http://chercherletexte.org/fr/performance/the_fetch/)

Reading Club is a project started by Emmanuel Guez and Annie Abrahams in 2013. Eleven sessions were organized with more than 40 different “readers” in English and/or French based on text extracts from Raymond Queneau, from Mez and the ARPAnet dialogues to Marshall McLuhan, Michel Bauwens and McKenzie Wark. Guez and Abrahams experimented with different reading and writing constraints (color, duration, text-length, number of “readers”, etc.) and different performance conditions (online vs. live performance, with and without sound, etc.). In a session of the Reading Club, readers are invited to read a given text together. These readers simultaneously write their own words into this text given a previously fixed maximum number of characters. The Reading Club can be seen as an interpretive arena in which each reader plays and subverts the writing of others through this intertextual game.

The Operature is an interactive installation of narrative-poetic movements engaging themes of forensics, anatomy and 21stcentury embodiment. The work incorporates a range of historical and contemporary contexts of observation and anatomical analysis including early modern surgical theaters, Francis Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, and The Stud File, a methodical archive of personal evidence documenting the sexual exploits of Samuel Steward, a 20th century tattoo artist, gay pornographer, and friend of Gertrude Stein. In this iteration, 12 disks with biological symbols can be scanned by a webcam to access visual-textual movements as well as qr codes and augmented reality markers that can be examined with a smartphone. The Operature is a multi-modal project of the collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) with several large-scale manifestations including a 2-hour live performance and a 25-screen installation. This scaled-down version will include artifacts drawn from the larger body of work. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Huckleberry Finnegans Wake is a combinatoric performance work bringing together Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With both texts based around river culture, contextual imbrications can be formed by folding one text into the other and through this combinatorial engines can be developed for the texts as well as implied visual and auditory material. Though both source texts are replete with exclusive language (regional dialects, neologisms, etc.) when brought together what emerges is a fantastical environment lacking specificity, but for the rivers (the Liffey and the Mississippi) that run through both. Imagine steamboats on River Liffey, the Pike County dialect being spoken in County Dublin, or Shem and Huck on the banks of the Mississippi.

The development method for Huckleberry Finnegans Wake rests somewhere between the creative and the critical. In one regard, by combining the two source texts a sort of comparative and deconstructive textual analysis can be performed on either text, or both texts in combination. On another level, the work is creative; in that it is generative, performative, and relies on combinatoric principles that lend themselves to emergence.

The performance utilizes a number of applications to generate a multi-modal interpretation of the combined text that includes visual material, audio, and live readings from various combinatorial engines. 

A series of sound poetry recordings for which Brion Gysin was invited to perform for the BBC radio in 1960. These permutation poems include "I Am That I Am" (1959), "which is a cyclical, randomized representation of the three words contained in that phrase." (Funkhouser 2007:39).