appropriated text

The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over two million people in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. Quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. On July 8th alone, there are over 100 statements included in the interface — statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and severe hardship. Unfortunately, their words are all we have. Since the first reported coronavirus infection in the US, incarcerated people have been subjected to extreme forms of isolation — visits have been suspended, phone privileges restricted, and the use of solitary confinement expanded exponentially. Prisoners are stranded in quarantine without adequate food or medication — abandoned and unseen. EXPOSED reveals the overwhelming scope and scale of this humanitarian crisis. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, and signal that the injustices they endure are structural.

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The quotes, audio clips and statistics included in EXPOSED are excerpts from a wide array of online publications and broadcasts. All excerpts are linked in the interface to the original source.

(Author's description on project site)

On January 12th, 2017 there were 113983 files on Piotr Marecki's laptop. This digital work is an attempt to lift them one by one – which takes several minutes. The work was first presented as a wild demo during the Synchrony/Recursion demoparty (NYC–Montreal, 27th–29th January 2017) and was not voted last in the competition.

Notes Very Necessary is a collaboratively authored web-based multi-media essay that aims to addresses climate change by remixing images, text, and data generated by centuries imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, and scientific exploration in the Arctic. The title is borrowed from an essay authored in 1580 by the Englishmen Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman offering detailed instructions on how to conquer new territories by taking copious notes. In 2015 Barbara Bridger and J. R. Carpenter attempted to follow these instructions by making, finding, and faking notes, images, data, and diagrams online and reconfiguring them into a new narrative. The result is a long, horizontally scrolling, highly variable collage essay charting the shifting melting North.

best.hello is a web poem, composed of original and appropriated texts. The appropriated texts were liberated from emails received by the author. Both bodies of text have been fed through a text-manipulation program to reorder the words, interleaving them to unfold new layers of meaning or interpretation. The resulting poem, best.hello, utilizes the affordances of both time-based visual media and the encounter with a ‘pop-up’ ad or alert box on the web. When combined, the two create a dialogue between them that refuses to be ignored or passively experienced: the alerts trigger the browser to jump to the front of other running applications, asserting the poem even after it has been minimized or concealed behind other applications. Even while the text obscures itself, several orders removed from its original context, shifting in and out of legibility, it demands to be read. What would be the "best" hello? Is it one that cannot be ignored? best.hello exists in the tension between restraint and release, hiding while wanting to be found in the most mundane of cultural exchanges: the greeting.

(Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

Talking Cure is an installation that includes live video processing, speech recognition, and a dynamically composed sound environment. It is about seeing, writing, and speaking — about word pictures, the gaze, and cure. It works with the story of Anna O, the patient of Joseph Breuer's who gave to him and Freud the concept of the "talking cure" as well as the word pictures to substantiate it. The reader enters a space with a projection surface at one end and a high-backed chair, facing it, at another. In front of the chair are a video camera and microphone. The video camera's image of the person in the chair is displayed, as text, on the screen. This "word picture" display is formed by reducing the live image to three colors, and then using these colors to determine the mixture between three color-coded layers of text. One of these layers is from Joseph Breuer's case study of Anna O. Another layer of text consists of the words "to torment" repeated — one of the few direct quotations attributed to Anna in the case study. The third layer of text, which becomes visible only when a person is in the chair, reworks Anna's snake hallucinations through the story of the Gorgon Medusa, reconfiguring the analytic gaze. Speaking into the microphone triggers a speech-to-text engine that replaces Anna's words with what it (mis)understands the participant to have said. What is said into the microphone is also recorded, and becomes part of a sound environment that includes recordings of Breuer's words, Anna's words, our words, and all that has been spoken over the length of the installation. Others in the space observe the person in the chair through word pictures on the screen. Readers move their bodies at first to create visual effects, and then to achieve textual ones, creating new reading experiences for themselves and others in the room. Movements range from slowly moving an extended arm in order to recreate left-to-right reading, to head or hand rotation seeking evocative neologisms at the mobile textual borders within the image. The video processing technique was created by Utterback, and has been exhibited separately as Written Forms. The sound environment was designed and implemented by Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin implemented the speech-to-text. Talking Cure was first presented at the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization symposium at UCLA. I have also presented it as a performance/reading, cycling verbally between the layers of text while my image is projected as a different textual mixture on a screen.

(Source: Author's website.)