Approved record

In the Middle of the Room came about as a live sampling improvisation with composer, vocalist, and poet Elisabeth Blair during a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In my live sampling improvisations, I partner with one or more acoustic musicians and I bring software I created, which cannot make sound on its own: it can only capture sounds from my partner in improvisation, live in the moment of performance, and transform them into something new, to reintroduce to the performance. This highlights the liveness of the listening experience, as the audience recognizes the mediated copy of sounds the human performer just made, at once noticing how the copy lacks aura (after Benjamin) and also adding value, retrospectively, to the original moment now past. Listeners can then hear the sampled sound gain a new aura of its own as it transforms and acts as an independent voice in the improvisation, influencing the performance and the human performer in turn.Elisabeth Blair brought to our improvisation session some notes she had made while interviewing an elderly friend. Elisabeth Blair’s stream-of-consciousness navigation through and about the interview material reflected the scattered thoughts of a lonely, bored, regretful, and nostalgic aging mind that is aware of its own gradual failure—it is here that the creative work separates from a factual biography of the interviewee, instead letting a new abstract character emerge, inspired by fragments of a real life’s recollections and reflections, the dots connected in new ways by our imaginations and artistic intuition.Fascinated by how it developed, I re-entered the improvisation, this time as a performing video artist. I built a rudimentary video titler (so I could perform by typing on the screen) and fed its output to a video feedback engine I have used in previous works, which transforms any image into new abstract forms and the behavior of which is shaped by sound. I typed in real time, in response to the music, words, and the things in between. The text switches among distinct modes of interpreting, reflecting, responding to, and misreading the words I heard. This compounded pattern of chopping and rehashing also led new meanings to form as the sound and the text jumped fluidly from one statement to another.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Blair/blair…

What dreams, hopes, and aspirations were broken by the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020? The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams is an endless stream of procedurally generated disappointment, sadness, and grief.

(Author's description)

The blog Ihpil: Láhppon mánáid bestejeaddji was presented as the genuine diary of a 19-year-old, lesbian Sámi girl studying in Tromsø, using the pseudonym Ihpil. The blog starts on her first day as a student in August 2007, and lasts until she drowns in December of that year. Later the blog was published as a print book. In 2010, a journalist discovered that nobody drowned in Tromsø harbour that day, and Sigbjørn Skåden revealed himself to be the author, claiming that he had always intended to do so at some point (see NRK 4 Feb 2011). 

Climatophosis is inspired by the current climatic change in the world. In fact, the title of the poem is coined from Climate and metamorphosis. It is all about who is to be blamed for the climate change? -It is the same humanity that refuses to respect the nature. On the other hand, nature is renewing itself because it is tired. It is a call for masses to respect nature and be freed from the consequences of climate change.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/climatophosis/)

The Deer is a rhythmic, image-driven literary psychothriller about a physicist who hits — what appears — to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. This piece is an interactive text/recording and/or a performance piece which carries the user through the text line by line. As the narrator becomes more and more emotionally fraught, audio effects bend the narrator’s voice to the point of incoherence, mirroring the breakdown of language in the face of trauma.

To the Moon is an indie Adventure RPG, about two doctors traversing through the memories of a dying man to fulfill his last wish.

(Source: Webpage of To the Moon on Freebird Games website)