illuminated manuscript

A commissioned work for Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany, the Illuminated Manuscript explores the communicative possibilities of spatialized language in the electronic media. Combining physical interfaces with purely typographical information in a virtual environment, this piece explored new types of reading in tune with human perceptual abilities.

A handbound book is set in a spartan room. Projected typography is virtually printed into the blank pages with a video projector. Sensors embedded in the pages tell the computer as the pages are turned. In addition, sonar sensors allow visitors to run their hands over and to disrupt, combine and manipulate the text on each page. The book begins with an essay on the four freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Each page explores a different text on the topic of freedom.

(Source: Project description at Small Design)

The Wave Electronic Illuminated Hypertext is a multisensory etext derived from a series of new media performances. The work explores and articulates a collection of meditations on myth, metaphor, and digital embodiment.An interactive assemblage of images, videodance, sound, animation, iconography, and text, The Wave creates an electronic architecture of hyper-dimensional poetic language. This electronic architecture expands and redefines the dramatic text as a fluid, animated, interactive infrastructure that exists in a liminal hyperspace between text and performance. The work expands and redefines the dance as dynamic, sensate, experiential process of inner transformation integrating the mind, body, and senses in metaphorical movement.Cumulatively, The Wave is an original "posthuman myth" derivative of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The dancing body of a woman warrior embodies the fundamental metaphor. She encounters gods, goddesses, enigmas and archetypes, all of which are reflections of herself in virtual space. Her psyche is reflected, refracted, expanded, and transformed into vertical, virtual dimensions. She becomes a meta-body: an elusive, shape-shifting equation of light, intelligence, rupture, and complexity."The body is not just repositioned by new technologies but supplemented, extended, and remade into a material-information entity whose boundaries are continuously constructed and reconstructed in its interactions with instruments whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge." – Adalaide Morris, New Media PoeticsFinally, The Wave is an electronic exploration of the format of the illuminated manuscript, most commonly associated with poet/artist William Blake. In traditional illuminated manuscripts, gold ink was used to represent the "light of God" illuminating the text. In this work, the light is electronic and represents the force of contemporary mythic experience through the exponentially expanding apertures of the digital.

(Source: Introduction to the project from The New River)