landscape

In an empty landscape a storm is announced by uprising sand, moving objects, silent people and a traffic jam on a narrow road. 

In the video, Grip's Evermore, words become landscape - in a black and white and infinite internal terrain, text defines the horizon and flattens space. It is code or a pretty pattern signifying nothing.  Destinations from literature or mythology which express a concept or still resonant cliché (like a shared longing; or home) flash in a white horizon line in the dark, providing a break from the monotony or frustration, a lucky break, a break in time and psychic space, a sudden expanse.  Named after Charles Dickens' pet raven, the inspiration for Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, artificially animated, crude and poignant like early movie monsters, cumbersome in body, a bird earthbound and relentless, Grip struggles through familiar destinations -- of the city, of stories and poems and inner journeys' ends, destinations of imagination and aspiration, in line but boundless as the fancies of flightless birds.  Grip's depicts a perpetual motion of longing and the dissonance between body and mind, the material and immaterial, here in immaterial digital form; and explores the way the meanings and associations of these words change and are changed by their context, form, space, motion and speed, through digital technology and the imagination.  Speed conflates meaning and animates the text; motion offers an illusion of liberating space and liberation. The video piece is also an experiment in randomness - edited through spontaneous bursts of play backwards and forwards, relinquishing Grip's fate and free will, a release and relief from the burdens of self-determination, the weight of self-control.  Starting and stopping, teasing promises fleeting and out of grasp, random and chaotic as a game of chance, laid bare to interpretation and yearning ascribed by familiarity or pure imagination, these landscapes of shared memory or isolation are personalized or perverted - Tom All Alone's is Tom's All Alone.  Lost in this darkness and distance, through Wuthering Heights and London Fields, The Hundred Acre Wood and Watership Down, Paradise and Paradise Lost, Eastbound and Unbound, naked and vulnerable, a tragicomic trope of slapstick and cartoons, our hero persists in his epic stuttered journey, animated through a flashing pattern of signs and sign posts in a workaday world, Grip's daily grind, a velocity fueled by hope, going home.

 In the sound piece, Revir Noom, Moon River’s longing, iconic promise flows in a melancholy reverse tide.  The lyrics of the song, portraying a yearning for escape and transformation - a dream of self-determination, of escaping one's original nature as embodied and fulfilled by Holly in Truman Caopte's Breakfast at Tiffany's, here retain a memory of their original narrative while torn from it in a digital reworking.  A bit of dialogue and the song, sung by Audrey Hepburn in the1961 movie based on the novella, are re-recorded backwards with minimal processing. By this simple process, the song makes a complete transformation: with its own distinct melody and arrangement. language and meaning, a current pulling forward (now dragging backward) as the piece ends with Holly (or Lulamae) not so much singing as swallowing her own words.

 As in Revir Noom, in the sound piece, Echolullia, digitally altered sounds, though unrecognizable as the words they once were and exposing a kind of alienation (of the words from themselves, as Holly from Lulamae) they form a language at once hermetic and intelligible through their collective role making up the whole, and through their familiarity: breath, sighs, sounds with a particular cadence. It is particularly effective, I believe, for the themes in these two pieces to be expressed by women. The interrupted, cut short, detached bits of the stories in the lullabies or novella in some sense reflect a detachment of women's voices and the modes of expression traditionally expected or not expected of them – they were not expected to have anything intelligible or of import to say, believed not to have the same capacity to contribute to discourse, literature or political speech as men, women's voices were heard in hushed tones (like the lull of lullabies), in sighs and hums and moans, gasping or singing, breath for comfort. The bits of words in these pieces are moving for what they imply and for their familiarity - in these ways, in spite of and through their electronic obliterations, the words and their expressions are clear.  

 Echolullia is a chorus of lullabies - beautiful and broken, here they represent the psychic violence of genocide - as songs to soothe and prayers for safety, lullabies are intimate evocations of what’s lost in these ravages of violence.  Made in commemoration of the anniversary of Krystal Nacht and on the theme of genocide, it features recorded words severed, moribund technology twisted, and human voices manipulated to mimic sirens and warfare in a three-part choir of tenderness and derangement. Named after "echolalia", a term describing sounds babies make to mimic those they’ve heard, echo (sonic repetition) is used in the piece to represent this mimicry, the multitude of voices, serial killing in war and a corruption of time, an aftermath of violence resonating outward in ruptures of the psyche passed on through generations. A chaos of loss remains in every lull and lullaby, it's there in every breath. 

An interactive series about the exploration, exploitation and transformation of the American West.

Following works by John Wesley Powell and Edward Abbey, filmmaker Roderick Coover creates actual and virtual explorations into the places they wrote about, the landscapes they imagined and contemporary land use.

When John Wesley Powell first navigated the Colorado River in 1869, much of the great American desert was marked on U.S. government maps as an "unknown territory" -- unmapped lands known only to native cultures. His works name, narrative and mythologize the West and his encounters within it. Ironically, later, as U.S. Geographer, Powell came to recognized perils of unsustainable development, but his calls to restrict growth to natural watersheds were rejected.

Writer Edward Abbey moved to the Canyonlands region of the Great American Desert in the late 1950s at a time when air-conditioning, access to abundant water and power from massive dam projects, a cold war boom in uranium mining, and an automobile-driven boom in tourism were transforming the landscape. Abbey worked as a ranger and fire-lookout in Utah and Arizona, and he wrote about what he saw: beauty, destruction, and rising communities of resistance. Abbey's words ignited debates about the role of direct action and free speech in local and national discourse, and they helped to forge new ways of thinking about communities, deserts, and protest.

(source: http://astro.temple.edu/~rcoover/UnknownTerritories/index.html)

Ink After Print is a digital literary installation exhibited in public settings such as libraries. The installation allows readers-users to perform, reenact and rewrite recombinant poems written by Peter-Clement Woetmann "and you" (user-reader). AS -- Ink After Print is an interactive, participatory, digital literary installation made in a collaboration between PIT-researchers, CAVI/Tekne Productions and Roskilde Libraries initiated during the Literature Takes Place (Litteraturen Finder Sted) project and first exhibited in 2012. Ink is designed to make people affectively engage with, and reflect on, the ergodic qualities of digital literature in public settings such as libraries and events. Through their engagement with Ink, people can – individually or collaboratively – produce poems by interacting with three books embedded with a custom-made sensor system, the DUL Radio. The interactive books let people control a floating sentence in an ocean of words toward a sheet of paper to produce a poem, all visualized on a large display. The sentences, written by Danish author Peter-Clement Woetmann, are retrieved from a database. When the poem reaches a limit of 350 characters, it is printed out in a form similar to a library receipt that people can take with them. The poems also appear on a blog updated in real-time (www.inkafterprint.dk) where people can read their own and others’ poems, and comment on them. (Source: http://www.inkafterprint.dk/?page_id=45)

*Pyxis Byzantium* is a digital hypertext that explores the fall of Byzantium in 1453.

Artist Statement:

*Pyxis Byzantium* developed from a trip to Constantinople and extensive reading about ancient Byzantium. The ancient city of Byzantium was destroyed in 1453. All spring, during the months before the final destruction, the citizens of Byzantium sat within their beautiful walls—knowing that they had only days or weeks to survive. Among the populace, there were those who were resigned, there were those who had reasons and explanations for what would happen, there were those who predicted miracles and wonders: but everyone was essentially paralyzed to do anything to save the city. They gathered at the beautiful St. Sophia and prayed. This piece is narrated by the people I imagine might have been waiting for the fall of Byzantium in the spring of 1453.

It is also, though, about the destruction and loss of other civilizations. What persists in the human story is the structure of decline and defeat—the narrative of predictability and surprise that accompanies the loss of a culture. The people of Byzantium sit impotent inside their walls much as the ancient Romans did, and much as we, even today, do when we are threatened with world-changing events.
 
The "layout" of the piece—the narrative access—is a map of Byzantium. But, in addition, the word Pyxis means "little box" in Greek. Thus, the architectural structure of this work is like one of those complex, little Byzantine painted ivory cases with boxes and boxes nested inside. To read the piece, one needs to keep mousing over and clicking on the images, moving from illuminated scene-box to scene box. Any screen which seems to have no clear place to click will reveal new things wherever you click or mouseover. If you are eager to move to another “scene,” all you need to do is mouse over the screen to find another "box" to open. The story will continue.

As such, *Pyxis Byzantium* represents both familiar aspects of my work over the years and new challenges in framing material story with imaginary time. This work is an experiment in fusing the coding/architecture/shape of the electronic work with the actual materiality of the landscape, the natural phenomena, and the presence of time in place. 


(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)