Presented at conference or festival

Opening Sources is a poem continuously written by anonymous online authors. In live performance, the poem is projected on a screen and the audience is invited to edit the text while the reading is underway. A loop of feedback forms as the audience takes uncertain control over its collective voice.

Note: the text presented is often English, but could be in any language.

(Source: Author's description from project site)

"Signal to Noise" is a web-native hypertext designed for concurrent navigations by multiple readers, whose interactions with the text subtly influence one another's parallel readings in realtime. 

Artist Statement:

"Signal to Noise" is a web-native hypertext designed to be read by multiple people simultaneously. 

The interface is linked to a database via Ajax. A PHP engine tracks the parallel navigations and behavior of active users and responds by broadcasting relevant fragments, subtext, and other ephemera to all readers in realtime. Readers' concurrent movements through the narrative have subtle effects on one another's experiences. While readers are unable to directly communicate among themselves or evoke representative avatars in the virtual environment (with one clear exception), echoes and ripples are unavoidably left on the surface of the global text with every followed link. In time, these ripples subside and disappear. 

One cannot read "Signal to Noise" without leaving traces in its text: passive viewing is impossible. Additionally, certain crucial parts of the narrative are only displayed when someone else is virtually present to trigger them. Readers who suspect they may be alone in the work are encouraged to return later or perhaps arrange a simultaneous reading with others. 

Note: the story has an ending. Consider the logic of the narrative to locate it.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a computer-generated dialogue, a literary narrative of generations of transatlantic migration, a performance in the form of a conversation, an encoded discourse propagating across, beyond, and through long-distance communications networks. One JavaScript file sits in one directory on one server attached to a vast network of hubs, routers, switches, and submarine cables through which this one file may be accessed many times from many places by many devices. The mission of this JavaScript is to generate another sort of script. The call “function produce_stories()” produces a response in the browser, a dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference; or: Strophe, Antistrophe, and Chorus; or Here, There, and Somewhere in Between.

The Living Liberia Fabric, initiated in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia, is an interactive, web-based narrative supporting the goal of lasting peace after years of civil war (1979-2003). It links concerns for liberation, dignity, and the future with needs for cultural foundations, human rights, truth, and reconciliation. Our system is based in Liberia's culture and the specifics of the conflicts, hence representing our cultural computing perspective. (source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/living-liberia-fabric)

I have formally performed “Completely Automated” on stage at a few conferences/venues and I think it could be a good fit for HASTAC’s themes. I would be very excited to perform it as part of an evening of performances. Total run-time is a duration of 15 minutes and it occurs in three parts. In the first part, I do a performative reading of a “historical” document that I have forged. To create the language of the forgery, I programmed a computer program to run a text analysis on a group of historical law tracts. I then skimmed the results and authored my own version of an early law tract. Calling on theater training, I perform this poetic text. In the second stage, the live performance overlaps and blends in with a short video that tells the story of how this forged document is digitally archived on google books as an “authentic” text. This video is blended with voice over of poetic text taken from the document. In the last stage I give a final performative reading of the changes that were made to the document when a group of users prepared it for upload in the digital archives. I think this project is an ideal fit for a performance at HASTAC because it deals with issues central to the digital humanities: archiving, preservation, digital conversion, authenticity, etc. What is at stake when our cultural documents undergo digital conversion? What artifacts or changes might be introduced? Where is the line of document authenticity drawn, in print or digital format?

(Source: Author's abstract for HASTAC 2013)

"Canticle" was written for Brown University's CAVE immersive virtual reality environment. Like a concerto, it was composed in three movements and arranged for collaborative performance between a solo user and programmed VR environment. In "Canticle", The CAVE system and its user operate in concert: rendering the world through cooperation and opposition. The tone of "Canticle" plays upon the spectacle of VR by inducing an aesthetic environment that is overly saturated despite its basic composition of greyscale letterforms. Evocative text and audio were used to assist this effect: "The Song of Solomon" and Nico Muhly's MotherTongue. A study of "The Song" resonated with the project's themes: the seduction of spectacle and awareness of a physical body within immersive spaces of illusion. Movements were written in response to spectacles that are native to the CAVE. Description of each movement refers to the specific quality of spectacle it explores: periphery, reactivity, stereoscopy, interface, depth or immersion. Along with the author’s original poetry about spectacle, the piece is also comprised of selections from the "Song of Solomon" processed by a computer program written by the author. Output from the program was then edited for form and content. The body of the text is available in the pdf below; however, because Cave Writing promotes spatial hypertext, the text is not likely to be encountered in the CAVE in the linear order presented. In the video documentation of "Movement 1: When the Eye" Asmina Chremos dances the physical gesture of reading through the interface of the CAVE. Her exquisite movements focus on the discrepancy between what the person wearing the tracking glasses sees and what the audience reads. For example, midway through the performance, the text is programmed to evade the dancer as she tries to engage with it: the text is programmed to only be legible to the audience outside the CAVE.

(Source: http://samanthagorman.net/Canticle)

Correspondences is a translation into sound and image of the timbre of Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondances." The work is not a reading, per se, but it follows the structure of Baudelaire's sonnet closely, pivoting around the white space of the dash in the first tercet. In this experimental video + computer music work the gesture of Baudelaire's poetry serves as a scaffolding for an exploration of mutable time and memory. Correspondences is an invocation to the memory of something read, half-remembered perhaps, connected through a dream logic.

Passage Sets is a generative visual poem. It includes an interactive poem generator. The users of the system can position themselves in front of the screen and select words and/or phrases from four lists that become visual as they enter into differing proximities in relation to the screens. Moving forward and/or backward, then stopping in the center of the field, enables the participants to make selections from specific lists authored by Seaman. These words then flow across the screen and become part of an ever-changing line of text at the bottom of the screen."Passage" as text, "Passage" as travel, "Passage" as change over time, "Passage" as architecture. "Set" as pair, "Set" as illusionistic architecture, "Set" as device, "Set" as in mathematics... The video material is drawn from architectural images shot in and around Tokyo, Japan, and Karlsruhe, Germany, contrasting the past and the present, focusing on travel, motion and light. An elaborate collage of 150 still images with superimposed text (shot in Sydney, Australia) forms one visual layer in the work. This elaborate panorama zooms in and out in a continuous cycle. The video at times presents images of both a female and male actor generating a series of abstract gestures. This presents a poetic musing on particular interface potentials (gesture recognition). A set of "projections" dealing with notions related to sensuality and identity in cyberspace are also presented. The conceptual displacement or complex "space" engendered by contemporary communication / sensual feedback systems is one field of poetic focus. The notion that a person in one part of the world can interact in a sensual manner with another person existing elsewhere, or with phantom identities engendered by the computer is also a subject of poetic reflection. The navigation of illusionistic spaces ("sets") and historical media is also explored. The conceptual superimposition of this entirety of spaces defines an open work and generates a floating/shifting mind space for viewer/participant association.The original version of Passage Sets / One Pulls Pivots at The Tip Of The Tongue was premiered in 1995. That version has been shown internationally and is in the permanent collection of the ZKM Museum (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany.The exhibit is displayed on the LINK Mediawall, a large tiled-display, composed of 48 computer monitors driven by a Linux computing cluster. Control for the exhibit is provided by an array of cameras mounted on the ceiling in front of the exhibit.

(Source: Author's description from the project site)