algorithmic

Talk with Your Hands Like an Ellis Island Mutt is a recombinatory cinema project that utilizes video material from my digital lyric memoir DADDYLABYRINTH, which appeared in the ELO 2014 exhibition and later premiered at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore, to create an interactive, polylinear narrative cinema experience. From the video “selfies” of DADDYLABYRINTH I have culled individual hand gestures and, through image manipulation and repetition, created sixty-four separate videos eight to twelve seconds long that can be recombined using a variety of strategies, from the performative to the algorithmic. A three-minute video describing the project is at https://vimeo.com/113867362. The sixty-four building blocks that make up Hand/Mutt are compiled at https://vimeo.com/113860613 and the original source videos can be found at www.daddylabyrinth.com. This interactive cinema project uses associational thinking to reach beneath common storytelling tropes and into the proto-narrative subconscious, where story is born in the collision between one image and another. My approach is indebted to the contrapuntal editing of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories, and informed by two more contemporary theoretical approaches. Walter Fischer’s Narrative Paradigm posits that the human mind will create narrative from any stimuli that are offered to it; Eugene Dorfman’s concept of the narreme sees narrative as consisting of discrete, recombinable building blocks – just as linguistics sees language as a combination of morphemes. My approach to recombinatory cinema rests on the faith that what we call “film” can be a polylinear narrative environment in which narremes, brought together into a variety of lines by the interactive viewer, can generate story experiences unique to each individual and thus be bound, by the co-creative process of interactivity, to each viewer’s psyche. In time for the Bergen conference I will develop, from the visual elements of DADDYLABYRINTH, interactive recombinatory cinema experiences using (1) the touch-screen based interactive narrative platform Opertoon (http://opertoon.com) and (2) the database-driven VJ software program Isadora (http://troikatronix.com). Hand/Mutt is the prototype project for a database-driven interactive and performative cinema system, and I will use it to explore how databases and interactivity let us conceptualize new ways in which the fundamental building blocks of cinema are capable of colliding – and what stories our minds create when they do. THE PROJECT IN THE CONTEXT OF ELO 2015 As evidenced by the 2014 ELO exhibition, which featured several projects that were cinematic in nature, it is clear that a branch of electronic literature has been heading toward film – and thus that film is indeed one of its “ends.” A forthcoming panel I organized for the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, “The Experimental Cinema/Electronic Literature Frontier,” directly addresses this relationship. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) suggests a coming art in which “the computer becomes an indispensable component in the production of an art that would be impossible without it” and in which “the machine makes autonomous decisions on alternative possibilities that ultimately govern the outcome of the artwork.” What Youngblood presaged has been fulfilled in electronic literature, and it is this cusp that I would like to explore. (source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Series of eight works created with computer programmer and pioneering computer artist Ken Knowlton. Each film is created using a FORTRAN-based programming language designed by Knowlton, and is a linear sequence of a few minutes combining sound, voice overs and computer-generated text and graphics. The film was output on black and white 35 mm film and then coloured postproduction.

Source: Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 132-133.

We tend to overlook that mathematics is, in fact, a language; and it is a dynamic system of communication that has been largely ignored as a vehicle for textual translation. ‘Algorithmic Translations’ attempt to acknowledge this vehicular disregard by utlising the mathematical functionality found in graphic imaging software. This utilisation adds an element of dimensionality to a textual work by mutating a text into a kind of graphic, nonlinear entity. Through a series of algorithmic calculations, the computer program expels an abstract image based upon the original topographical placement of the type on the space of the page. This algorithm transforms each letter, each mark of punctuation, into dendrites that extrude into the continuum of the page. Each page is inimitable; the image can never be recreated in the same way twice due to the program’s seemingly aleatory function during the algorithmic transformation. This act of visual creation through mathematical calculation serves to challenge the reader’s notion of comprehension, perceptibility, and language, through visual poetics.

STRUTS is an algorithmic narrative collage created from a collection of fragments of facts and fictions pertaining to a place and its people, history, geography and storm events. Narrative resonates in the spaces between the texts horizontally scrolling across the screen, the flickering updating of monthly tide gauge averages, the occasional appearance of live weather weather warnings pulled in by RSS feed and the animated set of photographs of the ends of the struts that support the seawall that protectsa portion of foreshore from the rising tides of the Northumberland Strait. The photographs were taken on May 23, 2011 the second day of a five-week stint as Open Studio Artist in Residence at Struts Gallery and Faucet Media Lab, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, May 22 – June 26, 2011. The Saxby Gale of 1869 is the storm we compare all possible storms to. The tide gauge data represents the monthly tide gauge averages for Shediac Bay from the month I was born to the month I moved from Canada to England. The gauge that measured these averages was destroyed in the same storm surge that damaged the struts in the photographs, onl the night of 21 December 2010. The Tantramar Marsh text is excerpted from Writing Coastlines: The Operation of Estuaries, Islands and Beaches as Liminal Spaces in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop, a paper written in residence at Struts and presented at "It Must Be Nova Scotia: Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop" which took place at University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, June 10-12, 2011.

exquisite_code is an algorithmic performance system for heterogeneous groups of writers. The writers generate prompts and responses for var1 minute session at the end of which computational devices select/mangle text according to var2 edit. Mangled text outputs get displayed to writers who, in unrelenting sessions, generate further prompts and responses, with chunk on chunk piled up to create a c[ad]aver[n]ous exquisite_code life-work.

(Source: Work website.)