The Critical Sections interface enables you to sketch pieces of architectural and cinematic history, along with related commentary, onto virtual pages whose content and composition are under your control. The primary interface element is the "cluster".
Spine Sonnet” (the app) is an automatic poem generator in the tradition of found poetry that randomly composes 14 line sonnets derived from an archive of over 2500 art and architectural theory and criticism book titles.
“Spine Sonnet” (the website) combines images of scanned book spines into stacks of 14 titles. Each time you refresh the browser you get a new combination.
(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Show)
This e-poem describes a historical event during the winter of 1945 in which German families who lived in Brno were forcibly evacuated and marched 40 miles to the Austrian border, resulting in many deaths. A descendant of survivors from that march, Saemmer draws on those experiences and through her poem evokes the difficulty of grasping and reconstructing this traumatic portion of family history by writing, positioning, and mapping a way through a spatially arranged text using a presentation software called Prezi. Prezi is a spatial presentation tool, which allows for placement, scaling, and visual navigation of textual and other objects on an “infinite” canvas. Saemmer uses it to place a textual layer over a video of a march in Winter with thunder-like sounds of war in the background. The arranged texts can be explored as the reader desires, but to better appreciate Saemmer’s vision use the autoplay function on full screen.
“Three Rails Live” (2011) by Roderick Coover, Nick Montfort, and Scott Rettberg is an experiment in combinatory poetics, a generative system that results in the production of short narrative videos, stories with a moral to them.
The three collaborators put the system together at some remove from each other. Coover sent a selection of short video clips and images to Rettberg and Montfort. Rettberg viewed the clips and sorted them arbitrarily into themes (Landscape and Fate, Tourists, Death by Snake, Industrial Sites, Trains, Flood, Toxic, Flight, Stripped, and Third Rail), wrote short three short narrative segments for each theme, and then recorded readings of each of these narratives. Montfort selected particular images, and, borrowing a technique from Harry Mathews, wrote “perverbs”—remixes of two different proverbs that subvert the original—for each of the texts paired to an image. Montfort also constructed a title generator that arbitrarily creates a title for each run of the work. The system the authors constructed selects two image sets and two of the narrative recordings from a constrained random selection. A perverb with a moral to the story is then assigned and the process begins anew. The system thus results in short narrative videos with new juxtapositions of images, texts, and perverbs each time it runs. All of the texts and images emerge from this aleatory but thematically determined method.
Voice acting: Scott Rettberg (stories)
(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show)
HTML and javascript, with H.264 Quicktime video and MP3 audio.
This Webyarn frames an argument between husband and wife about having children. The wife wants to keep trying, while the husband doesn’t seem to want children at all. The piece is structured around a wedding: its imagery (cake, dancing, food), vows, institutions, and symbols. The surface of the text responds to the reader’s mouseovers, rewarding exploration by triggering multiple layers of language and musical phrases in short loops. The circularity of the wedding ring structures the poem as the argument goes round and round the topic, replaying sounds, images, words, and their movements. A small cluster of squares slowly gets colored in a non-linear sequence near the bottom of the window, suggesting the passage of time for this relationship, yet the questions continue throughout. Will this disagreement ever get resolved? The Buddhist touches interspersed between mostly Christian wedding vows suggest a way out of the endless cycle: the cause of suffering is craving and both characters have desires they could let go of.
(Source: Leonardo Flores)
The piece is a short poem written using a nested series of file folders on a computer desktop. The process of composition is animated, with a total run time of two and a half minutes followed by a pause before repeating. A scripting agent running on the command line controls a Finder window view of the desktop as folders are created, renamed, reshuffled, and nested within one another, forming the poem. What is presented is not a video recording - it runs live on the desktop file system in the gallery. The viewer watches as the poem is written in folders, expands, is dated and sorted into its final form, and finally disappears to start again.
The work "Eight was where it ended" explores one story from the community of "Angel Baby" mothers - online communities dedicated to grieving for their unborn children in ways not afforded by society at large. It explores this identity position through the medium of digital file systems, in particular their embedded modes of representing temporality, the visible, and the hidden.
The piece is an electronic literature work that is small, simple, novel in form, and conceptually experimental. Versions of it have appeared in various digital interfaces, print editions, and live performances (see below). This edition was specifically designed for casual viewing by an electronic literature gallery audience.
This edition is written in a mixture of delimited text, shell script, and AppleScript.
(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show.)
petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction" (small brush to dust off fiction) is a generative piece written in French. A scene of thriller is generated at each time you run the program or ask for a new scene. This scene explores different possibilities of a scenario. But the reader must continually "dust" a picture that covers the text while reading. The text is a pastiche: the scene is located at a time in a single location. Some features happen out of this room, they are computed by the program but not expressed into the narrative. The piece begins with some "adapted" poems by Jean de La Fontaine.
(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show.)
Note on the "lability of the device" and the inclusion of the work in the respective collection: viewed and accessed on a tablet, the finger-based navigation experience turns this work to be labile and does not provide the same experience as with the mouse on screen (Patricia Tomaszek).
The work was adapted to a tablet/mobile version in 2011 by Inés Laitano.
Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, re-mediated for Web. In this project different parts of the play are appropriated for cyberspace. to examine different themes including: hyperlinked narration in cyberspace, experience of reading mediated by information retrieval tools, collaboratively generated content and conformism, our desires and anxieties in cyberspace and the temporal experience across different media. (source: http://sepans.com/sp/works/waiting-for-gwodo/)
It was only after I began working with Robert Coover in the Brown Literary Arts program in 1998 that I remembered my father commenting years earlier on Coover's book Pinocchio in Venice. As a foremost Scholar of the Pinocchio story and its appearances throughout history in literature and media, he was impressed with Coover's handling of the archive. My father went on to write about Coover's treatment in a co-authored book, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern: Perils of a Puppet in the United States. RC_AI consists of texts composed by myself and Dr. Thomas J. Morrissey, my father, along with several generative algorithms and loose grammars in collaboration with a substantial portion of Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice. The panoramic text is a printed array (approximately 380,000 pixels long - or 422 feet) of variable content generated by parsing through approximately 1/2 of Coover's novel using the author's name as a search string. RC_AI was created specifically for ELO_AI: Archive and Innovate the Electronic Literature Organization conference and arts program. The overall event was in part a celebration of Robert Coover who will soon retire from teaching. RC_AI was performed in the auditorium of List Art Center at Brown University with my father on June 4, 2010. For RC_AI, I utilized tesseract, an open-source tool for optical character recognition, and then created a system for text processing using python's natural language toolkit. As this is my first experiment with both tools, the implementation is basic: the former accounts for bad spelling, the latter for poor grammar (as though the puppet sold his schoolbooks for a tree of ass ears).
Intertwining Irish history and generations of Irish American family memories in a work of polyphonic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish Poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata, the madrigal, streams and fountains, and Irish song, From Ireland with Lettersis an electronic manuscript of displacement, survival, and the role of art in the abolition of slavery.
The central place of Irish music, displacement, disrupted tradition in the work of contemporary Irish authors is paralleled in this polyphonic Irish American electronic manuscript. Each part is separate and written in a different structure and tempo, but the whole is integrated by themes introduced in the opening Prologue. Although the workings of each section are different, as a general rule, the work can be read either by waiting for the text to change on its own (as if watching a film or listening to a piece of music) or by clicking on any lexia, in which case the reader takes control of how the story is explored in the manner of hypertext fiction.
From Ireland with Lettersinterweaves the stories of Walter Power -- who came to America as an Irish slave on The Goodfellow in 1654, stolen from his family by Cromwell's soldiers and sold in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when he was 14 years old -- and his descendant, 19th century Irish American sculptor Hiram Powers, who grew up on a Vermont farm and moved to Florence, Italy, where his work played a symbolic role in the fight to abolish African American slavery in America.
Currently, there are four files of the work available: Prologue, Begin with the Arrival, passage, and fiddlers passage. The Prologue, Begin with the Arrival and passage, premiered in June 2012 at the author's distance reading and retrospective at the 2012 Conference of the Electronic Literature Organization. And mid-summer 2012, From Ireland with Letters was on display on the plasma screen at FILE 2012: Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
(Source: Judy Malloy)
