language patterns | D9 ELMCIP

Four monitors are placed in a row on the wall. As you walk closer an exhaled breath is heard, then a mouse click, a sigh. A voice commands, “then drag up”; a different voice, “like this”. Excerpts of Youtube typography tutorials populate the screens, complete with Photoshop, Maya, Illustrator, GIMP, etc. interfaces along with the type that is being carefully constructed. A rhythm emerges, “Rotate left, pull down, move forward, like that”. In this piece, a multimodal digital poem forms from the aural language of making visual language. Fragments of descriptive phrases are heard over looping patterns of mouse clicks, exhales, sighs and keyboard strokes amplifying the language of micro-gestures. The unseen role of the body in the circuit of human-computer interaction is ever present in this installation exposing the analog labor of creating digital type and the articulation of the physical process of making digital words. The work humorously explores the physicality of creating visual communication and calls attention to the human, social and cognitive labor behind the typography we take for granted in our daily lives. This digital poem employs a methodology and software developed over the last year as a Fellow in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT. It is a methodology that enables linguistic analysis of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across multiple monitors. Using a corpus of over two hundred tutorial videos, the software parses user defined complex language patterns, parts of speech analysis and phonetic information, creating new aesthetic possibilities for digital poets working with a large corpus of multimedia files.

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By Vian Rasheed, 12 November, 2019

E-locutio: stitching styles and pulling threads in electronic literature

Author

Helen J. Burgess

Publication Type

Conference paper or presentation

Language

English

Year

2019

Presented at Event

Electronic Literature Organization 2019: Peripheries (ELO 2019)

Record Status

Tags

Abstract (in English)

Classical rhetoricians have long known “style” as an integral component of Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric, where it refers to the application of compelling language patterns to achieve specific persuasive purposes: for example, the use of the chiasmus or “cross” (“ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”) as a tool that forces the reader to reflect on relationships between and reversals of concepts. From written style (what rhetoricians call elocutio) to "programming styles,” the application of technique/techne/craft to the expressive media we work in is evident, whether the medium is page, memory core, or cloth. Although we are more accustomed to viewing this process as “poetics,” reframing such activity as the application of style enables us to more fully see the suasive material dimensions of work in different media: asking not “what does this thing say” but “what does this thing do to us.” This paper explores some common stylistic elements that appear among writing, programming, and embroidery. While visual screen analogies are relatively easy to parse (for example, “resolution” in embroidery is a result of thread count--lower count, lower resolution— just as screen-based resolution is determined by pixel count), other stylistic features common to all three media occur more fully under the hood. In the course of the talk I will discuss stylistic activities that seek to optimize limited resources (fiber, memory, narrative), create patterns of expression (knots, loops, repetitions), and build networks and relations between ideas ("threads"). I'll use as my primary example the Knights Tour algorithm, used in electronic literature composition in such tools as Juan Gutierrez’ Literatronic engine, and present electronically embroidered reinterpretations of a Knights Tour storyline.

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