Presented at conference or festival

HD stands for Haute Densité (High Density) but also for Harley Davidson, for this is the brand of my very European designed Sportster XR 1200 bike, made in Milwaukee, WI, USA. While riding it I will film journeys from my home (Montreuil) to the Cartography Department at the National Archives (Pierrefitte-sur-Seine) near Paris, France. This motorized sign-writing journey is showed by video, enriched by the background reading of a text discussing Jorge Luis Borges’ "On Exactitude Of Science" from A Universal Story Of Infamy (1951). In this text Borges uses the tale genre to reflect on the relation between maps and the territories they represent, and eventually raises the question of the relation between Art and Technique, Science and the empirical world. I'm continuing the idea of genuinely «writing by riding» because my ride won’t be determined by the need to reach a location point, like a GPS could help me to do it, but to draw on the map of the city letters that will make words. Through this process the motorbike becomes a pen which allows me to write directly on the territory. (Source: Luc Dall'Armellina)

Transient self–portrait is an artistic research project questioning notions of reading and the electronic medium while exploring the possibilities of coding to interact with the work. I take as the point of departure two pivotal sonnets in Spanish literature that are normally studied alongside each other, En tanto que de rosa y azucena by Garcilaso de La Vega, a 16th Century Spanish poet, using Italian Renaissance verse forms and Mientras por competir con tu cabello by Luís de Gongora, a 17th Century Spanish poet from the Baroque period. Gongora's sonnet is a homage to Garcilaso's and the styles and the cultural aspects that appear on the sonnets are very different reflecting the attitudes from the Renaissance and the Baroque. This project is a response to some of the concepts that emerge from these sonnets; ephemerality of life, consummation, transient entities, fragility, which are also relevant to our age and the electronic world we inhabit. The creative process is that of producing, reflecting, programming and testing the medium to explore these notions in an electronic media society of dialogues with self-images, engaging the participant in a reading experience of ‘in’ and ‘out’ of language, via webcams and interactive aesthetics. The sonnets pass from different stages of written, visual, aural, language and code to dissipate into nothing.

Opus No. 2 of the flow series started with "flog". Flow is the text of a fiction built on both moments from my family history, of contemporary immigration, and history that is told in the film Letter My friend Pol Cèbe, 1970 Desrois Michel and Antoine Bonfanti and José Thiais, of Medvedkines groups.

Flow crosses eras and different narrative modes: family history, political history (the Medvedkine Groups) and contemporary news.

Flow strives to tell a story, the story of a band of friends workers who leave a day in 1967 to Lille by car, plan one of their films in a cinema. They take a man hitchhiking with a funny halo on your head, at their request, it tells a story. He tells them that of grandma Mireille Sangatte in 2008 which will be indicted for crime of solidarity. The text features the telescoping of these two periods, reviving one another, forty years apart ...

Flow becomes, through the same technical device as flog (a video playback teleprompter projected accompanied by a soundtrack) a fiction without pause, only a few moments of slowdown, which between the soundtrack and the voice, elasticity forms: a flow, giving the title to the piece.

Luc Dall'Armellina - 2009

Presented as part of an ELO 2014 conference panel session, "Troubadours of Information: Aesthetic Experiments in Sonification and Sound Technology," led by Andrew Klobucar. In his work, Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics, Johnson literally tracks the ways the word “trouble” passes through popular 20th and 21st century song, and the ways trouble is and is not represented via the Trouble Song. For Johnson, there is both a transmission and an anti-transmission of trouble in Trouble Songs: The singer performs an exorcism of trouble, or contributes to a discourse of authenticity with an audience of trouble voyeurs. (These are distinct but related processes, as the trouble singer can relate trouble from outside the community, and can as well—or instead—relate to the troubles of a community; likewise, the trouble singer can reflect, deflect or project trouble.) Trouble itself appears here simultaneously desired and feared, invited and expelled. “Trouble” replaces trouble as a protective spell, as a fetish, and as a generic signifier. The Trouble Song is cast as a spell that evokes and dispels trouble. If Trouble Songs travel, they are carried place to place by individuals and in migrant cultural practices. The Trouble Singer performs a social function in bringing “trouble” to town, then taking trouble away. This economy of trouble follows the lineage of the troubadour. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of troubadour via the troublesome (and questioned) verb form “from Latin turbāre to disturb, through the sense ‘turn up’” and suggests a comparison with “the form French troubler.” Perhaps, then, we can imagine the troubadour as a carrier of trouble—a troublemaker—and Pound’s love code might then relate to the transmission and anti-transmission of trouble via “trouble.” [from conference program]

We live in an age of big data, when much of what we say and do is captured and stored in vast, searchable databases. What is the future of the novel – that most personal and intimate of artforms – as private lives are increasingly turned into public data?

DataFiction v0.1 is part of a major new collaboration between myself and artist Andrew Burrell that aims to create a real-time, data-driven novel. These excerpts of generative, network-sourced prose were presented as early work-in-progress, with the aim of inciting audience interest and critical feedback.

Wish4[0] takes as its inspiration the perpetual tugging at a user’s consciousness by the digital. Each work takes as its immediate inspiration a headline (or item) drawn from the electronic news cycle of that specific day. The resulting block of poetic works: 1) Act as a digital and creative “literary snapshot” of a specific period. 2) Highlight the accelerated nature of an electronic/networked-based news cycle. 3) Illustrate the discrepancies – and perhaps similarities - between how a digital audience responds to items deemed newsworthy and creative responses to such items. 4) Echo (and partially emulate) elements of digital culture that have become seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives (including programs such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Vine, Snapchat and Instagram). This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

You're a teenage girl, connected, clued-in, but what lurks in the deepest, darkest regions beyond the screen? A first-person coming-of-age story-game. ( Source: Andy Campbell ) A first-person playable coming-of-age story, in 2D and 3D, that centres on a teenage girl, immersed in contemporary digital culture. With creeping awareness, she / the player struggles with the insidious gender stereotyping, where womanhood is rendered as malleable and polymorphic as a digital doll, that literally threatens to drain her of life. ( Source: Patricia Tomaszek ) Inkubus is a first-person playable coming-of-age story, in media-rich 3D, about a contemporary teenage girl, who’s connected and clued in. But what lurks in the deepest darkest regions beyond the screen? The story-game progresses via skewed and leading questions, designed to distort the girl's behaviour, before being drawn into a visceral labyrinth where a malevolent force peddles a destructive artificial feminine ideal. With creeping awareness, the girl/the player struggles with the insidious gender stereotyping, where womanhood is rendered as malleable and polymorphic as a digital doll, that threatens to drain her of life. ( Source: ELO 2014 conference )