Presented at conference or festival

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)

Redshift & Portalmetal asks: as climate change forces us to travel to the stars and build new homes and families, how do we build on this land, where we are settlers, while working to undo colonization? The story uses space travel as a lens through which to understand the experience of migration and settlement for a trans woman of color. Redshift & Portalmetal tells the story of Roja, who's planet's environment is failing, so she has to travel to other worlds. The project takes the form of an online, interactive game, including film, performance and poetry.

Talk with Your Hands Like an Ellis Island Mutt is a recombinatory cinema project that utilizes video material from my digital lyric memoir DADDYLABYRINTH, which appeared in the ELO 2014 exhibition and later premiered at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore, to create an interactive, polylinear narrative cinema experience. From the video “selfies” of DADDYLABYRINTH I have culled individual hand gestures and, through image manipulation and repetition, created sixty-four separate videos eight to twelve seconds long that can be recombined using a variety of strategies, from the performative to the algorithmic. A three-minute video describing the project is at https://vimeo.com/113867362. The sixty-four building blocks that make up Hand/Mutt are compiled at https://vimeo.com/113860613 and the original source videos can be found at www.daddylabyrinth.com. This interactive cinema project uses associational thinking to reach beneath common storytelling tropes and into the proto-narrative subconscious, where story is born in the collision between one image and another. My approach is indebted to the contrapuntal editing of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories, and informed by two more contemporary theoretical approaches. Walter Fischer’s Narrative Paradigm posits that the human mind will create narrative from any stimuli that are offered to it; Eugene Dorfman’s concept of the narreme sees narrative as consisting of discrete, recombinable building blocks – just as linguistics sees language as a combination of morphemes. My approach to recombinatory cinema rests on the faith that what we call “film” can be a polylinear narrative environment in which narremes, brought together into a variety of lines by the interactive viewer, can generate story experiences unique to each individual and thus be bound, by the co-creative process of interactivity, to each viewer’s psyche. In time for the Bergen conference I will develop, from the visual elements of DADDYLABYRINTH, interactive recombinatory cinema experiences using (1) the touch-screen based interactive narrative platform Opertoon (http://opertoon.com) and (2) the database-driven VJ software program Isadora (http://troikatronix.com). Hand/Mutt is the prototype project for a database-driven interactive and performative cinema system, and I will use it to explore how databases and interactivity let us conceptualize new ways in which the fundamental building blocks of cinema are capable of colliding – and what stories our minds create when they do. THE PROJECT IN THE CONTEXT OF ELO 2015 As evidenced by the 2014 ELO exhibition, which featured several projects that were cinematic in nature, it is clear that a branch of electronic literature has been heading toward film – and thus that film is indeed one of its “ends.” A forthcoming panel I organized for the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, “The Experimental Cinema/Electronic Literature Frontier,” directly addresses this relationship. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) suggests a coming art in which “the computer becomes an indispensable component in the production of an art that would be impossible without it” and in which “the machine makes autonomous decisions on alternative possibilities that ultimately govern the outcome of the artwork.” What Youngblood presaged has been fulfilled in electronic literature, and it is this cusp that I would like to explore. (source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

There were few social spots for women when the Chez Moi opened in Canada in 1984, and it marks a cusp moment in Toronto’s lesbian bar scene, as women moved from dark basements and women’s community centre dances to the above-ground Chez. But who can blame the fictional narrator of your walk along Hayden Street in search of both company and an elusive lesbian imaginary, for missing those basements more than just a bit? (source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Re:Cycle III is an extension of my previous generative video art piece Re:Cycle (exhibited at ELO 2012). The current version is part of an ongoing exploration into the combined poetics of image, sequence, motion, computation, and meaning. The Re:Cycle system includes a database of video clips, a second database of video transitions, and a computational engine to select and present the video clips in an unending stream. The computational selection process is driven by a set of metadata tags associated with the content of each video clip. The system can incorporate video clips of any content or visual form. It is currently based on nature scenery: mountains, rivers, ice, snow, waterfalls, trees. (Future versions will incorporate urban and human imagery.) The original version was completely committed to the aesthetic of ambient experience. Like Brian Eno's "ambient music", it was not intended to capture or hold your attention. However, it was required to give visual pleasure whenever you did choose to gaze at it. As the system is evolving, this commitment to ambience is gradually giving way to a more engaged and prolonged experience. The change is driven by the incorporation of increased semantic and visual coherence. The original version relied completely on random shot selection and sequencing. An early modification introduced a low level of semantic coherence based on simple metadata tags. The current version has taken this commitment to semantic coherence further. First, the shots are getting more varied, and the tagging system is getting more complex. This increase in the variety of the metadata textual tags is amplified by the application of more complicated algorithmic sequencing processes. The old system could present a series of short sequences made up of clips with shared visual content (e.g. -­‐ "trees", or "waterfalls"). The new system will incorporate that short-­‐term sequencing logic, but will nest it within a set of larger segments. The larger segments will be based on more sophisticated concepts of progression, arc, time and closure. The system is based on text at its most fundamental level. The decision making relies on the tags -­‐ descriptors of video clip content. The system reads, selects and sequences using these tags. The driver is text, the experience is visual. At a higher level, the work is evolving towards a more complicated sequencing logic that will combine a heightened sense of flow and progression with an increased commitment to meaning. One can see it as a visual poetry machine, one that has advanced from doggerel to a more expressive semantic and visual output. (Source: Author's Abstract)

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)

From tweets to literature From the 1,000 posted tweets with the hashtag #outofblue, I developed a literary text. Just by selecting, shortening, arranging and repeating the tweets. Without adding any kind of text written by myself. Of course, also the title of the text was taken from a tweet: “Engelvariationen” (angel variations) – nothing could be more appropriate for a text, which deals with abstraction. Because the text, just like the event in the “Haus der Kunst”, is designed to experience abstraction. The text is not a documentation of the tweetup as such, but rather an exercise of abstraction. It calls for adventure. This might be exhausting, but promises a stunning experience. Enjoy!

(Source: authors abstract)

Poetry, and the imagery found therein, has long been one of the foundations of literature across the globe. Our ability to decipher the imagery and symbols in poetic verse has long been a daunting and rewarding task for those individuals who enjoy reading and hearing verse. Bridle Your Tongue is an animated poem with a concentration on the power and longevity of destructive language. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

ION 1 is a crowd-sourced series of 111 sound poems-in-progress by mic mac (Michael MacKenzie) in collaboration with the Post Art Poets spanning Gertrude Stein's ‘Tender Buttons’ (which can be freely read here: www.bartleby.com/140/). The work layers 7 (and in later instances as many as 32) readings of the ‘Tender Buttons’ poems into single clips. To participate, unaltered found or original human voice recordings may be submitted and will appear in subsequent installments of the poem. Send submissions to my email (below). An award system (called Copycoins) provides funds for more in-depth interaction with the poems. Statistics particular to each reading will appear in the sound-files’ [Youtube] descriptions. Each of the poems here are in their seventh installment. The playlists will grow and be modified as time passes; the poem is expected to run indefinitely - until I or the community lose(s) interest in it. Thank you. (Source: Elo conference: First encounters 2014)

Rea and the Squaw is a kinetic poetry piece I created three months after my Grandma Rea died at the age of 96 on December 18, 2012. When she died, I was left with: memories, some pictures, and pages and pages of her unpublished and published poetry. So I began to dissect her poetry, dissect each word. And then I couldn’t stop. I wanted to mold her words, shift them, strain them. I wanted to understand where these words could be cornered, shaped, and colored. I cherished them, chained them, tamed, and mazed them. I sized and seized them. Who was this woman? How has she influenced who I am as a person? As a poet? The words on the digital interface are hers, and the particular shaping, movement, and coloring of the words is proof that I’ve traversed them.

(Source: ELO conference: First Encounters 2014)