Presented at conference or festival

The Cabinet Noir was the name given in France for the secret office where the post of suspected persons was opened and inspected before being forwarded to its final recipient. Governments since have used similar Black Chambers to spy on their populations communication via telegram, telephone and internet media. In order to avoid detection, some individuals have resorted to the technique of Steganography, where communications are hidden in seemingly innocent messages. This can lead to a state of paranoia where every text may contain evidence of nefarious intentions. This work takes the email exchange and data produced for the WEISE7 Labor exhibition and mixes it with the text of Edgar Allan Poe's detective story The Purloined Letter. The result is a paranoid archive of implied subtext.

Borderline is a performative piece concerned with time-based and improvisational action, in which two participants interact together within an audio-visual environment to gain a sense of the project’s latent narrative identities. Borderline will re-deploy VJ software technologies (using MIDI with MAX-MSP) to develop a dual interaction experience that uses hand-based gesture (via two graphic tablets and their pens) instead of the established hyperlink model. This will help foster a ‘computer system as instrument’ analogy in which the participants’ can ‘improvise’ ‘play’ or ‘perform’ set of narrative dualities. An often-levied criticism of VJ output is its preference for visual abstraction over content (Amerika 2005). In terms of the narrative, Leishman will both develop a new bank of non-abstract imagery, audio and animation to convey the theme of dualism. This will be based on research into borderline personality disorder (visualizing the problems of disassociation and hysteria through image, movement and narrative structure). Binary character protagonists from popular and literary culture alongside the philosophical notion of the double shadow (Jung, Neumann 1969) will also be used to frame the narrative. The borderline, the point of change between one state and another will be highlighted within the artwork. The two participants can choose to be social: to improvise / play /perform harmoniously together or be antisocial: to be in conflict with both the narrative and indeed with each other. Their expressive actions (for example fast / slow, long / short pen gestures) will significantly affect their narrative agency, immersion and comprehension. 

Small uncomfortable reading poems is a set of 4 poems based on 2 ideas; each poem is “a tool” and the poem creates an incompatibility between ergodic and noematic reading: the reader must act in order to read “now” at present time, but her action impeded reading what happens just after.

The 4 poems are:brush to dust/blow the fictionIt consists in a generative fiction the reader cannot read because the text is recovered by a picture of dust. She must move her mouse to dust the text, but doing this, she an only read few words of the fiction at each time because dust reappears. She must also circulate into the text via scroll bar without seeing the text. plane poemIt consists in a kinetic poem recovered by a flat tint. The reader must plane the tint with her mouse in order to read. Problem: the flat tint re-forms even and she must plane more and more, continuously, but she can only read fragments of the poem. a poem to stirStarting by a set of about 20 strophes, the program generates 30 renga choosing in a set of  pproximately 9000 potential generated renga using combinatory generation, syntactic adaptation and semantic  iltering. These poems are edited by the program to form a kinetic animation. The program calculates everything but don’t show it to the reader. In order to see it, the reader must create space by doing circles with the mouse, energy by doing horizontal lines and order by doing vertical lines. If she doesn’t do this, she sees a chaotic visual made by pixels of the poem. Problem: she cannot do the 3 movements at the same time and while she doesn’t do a movement, the controlled  arameter decreases, increasing the chaotic pictorial dimension to the detriment of the readable poetic dimension. What to do?

jogging poemThe poem is generated. It is shown part by part but is destroyed and disturbed by graphical process. In order to read, the reader must press a key that is changing at each time and just after she must click on an object that changes of location at each time. Problem, the speed of the process crows at each action and she must “run by hand” to read.

The SEARCH TRILOGY (search lutz!, 2006 - searchSongs, 2008 - searchSonata 181 , 2011) performes algorithmically generated texts. The consistency of this trilogy is the usage of words that are typed in real time into searchengines like Google & Co. These search terms are processed by algorithm for further use. In the first piece of work, searchLutz (2006), the search terms are processed into texts, in the second piece, searchSongs (2008), into sounds and melody, and in the latest piece, searchSonata 181, into phonetics as an acoustic bridge between text and sound. The web interfaces of search Lutz!, searchSongs and searchSonata 181 are a means to an end. The essence emerges with a live performance of the algorithmically generated texts. The texts are played back into real space: the message has to pass through the algorithm without getting caught there.

Ah articulates a simple paradox of reading animated digital literature, which is that the eye, and by extension the mind, often has no sense of the future of a sentence or line of text and, more importantly, is not given the chance to retread an already witnessed word or phrase. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's Dakota is a perfect illustration of this principle. In Ah, the central object of rumination is Einstein, but just as the physicist pondered the numberless variations between the presence of a "1" and "0," this Flash animation brings us back and forth between clever articulations and the ambiguous expressivity of single letters and syllables.

A potential polyphony is an interactive text compilation which results in an ever-changing polyphone word-image composition. The visitor can, at its discretion, turn on, play, and turn off the six sequences that make up the work. This video is part of the project Zelf worden See www.zelfworden.nl. (translation description Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

Poet Arnoud Van Adrichem and graphic designers Cox & Grusenmeyer developed under this creed a mobile browser "Money", in which hard-working taxpayers can reimburse their money by reading poems. How does it exactly work? All banks in Amsterdam are equiped by highly recognizable stickers which can be scanned with a smartphone or a tablet. These poems, who gain their visibility through the use of present-day technology, recoup about 0,11 euro each; an amount which almost accords to the taxes that someone with an average yearly income, daily loses on cultural purposes. "Money is a kind of poetry", according to Wallace Stevens. This application proves once again its purpose.