literal art

The narrator of Alan Bigelow's Cody in Love may well be the most human-seeming machine (or machine-like human) viewers will meet in their lifetimes, warrantied or not. In a piece that's made for the screen (as well as about the literal and figurative ones we live behind every day), form meets content as the viewer must make a choice: Take Cody's intimate confidences at face value, or peek behind the already threadbare curtain that casts shadows over the (pre-code) lovesick musings of a man-machine's inner life.

Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/13Fall/editor.html

"pianographique" is a "multimedia instrument" created in 1993 on CD-ROM and made available on the Web in 1996 by a French webarts collective. "pianographique" is a work of "programmatical literal art," a term coined by John Cayley. Letters are "literal" here: they tumble and morph automatically, and they can also be manipulated on occasion by the reader-interactor and/or generated by the program. The user of this work is presented with a keyboard on the screen that corresponds to the keyboard beneath her fingertips. Each letter of the user's keyboard, when pressed, produces a distinct sound score and an animation that can be displaced by the hand of the user working a mouse. Playing the "piano" of graphics and sound bites, the user can create an infinite number of verbal visual-aural collages, while hitting the space bar effaces all that has come before. The user can choose from a set of three sections to „write“ a story: "Sound System," Continuum," and "Pianoparole." Lamarque has programmed "pianographique" in such a way that the same constricted motions required to form a letter (curves and lines) are responsible, when digitally processed, for the letter's disfigurations. The swirling motions of the user's hand are mirrored on the screen only. These gestures render the letter illegible; its constituent marks are returned to protowriting, to the status of meaningless shapes and lines. Visually, "pianographique" becomes a work of post-concrete poetry accompanied by music. While the work is dadaistic and surrealistic, it also recalls dance and gestural movements or paintings by Cy Twombly and Robert Morris.

 (Source: "Digital Gestures" by Carrie Noland published in New Media Poetics.)

John Cayley, with Giles Perring and Douglas Cape.

overboard is an example of literal art in digital media that demonstrates an 'ambient' time-based poetics. There is a stable text underlying its continuously changing display and this text may occasionally rise to the surface of normal legibility in its entirety. However, overboard is installed as a dynamic linguistic 'wall-hanging,' an ever-moving 'language painting.' As time passes, the text drifts continually in and out of familiar legibility - sinking, rising, and sometimes in part, 'going under' or drowning, then rising to the surface once again. It does this by running a program of simple but carefully designed algorithms which allow letters to be replaced by other letters that are in some way similar to the those of the original text. Word shapes, for example, are largely preserved. In fact, except when 'drowning,' the text is always legible to a reader who is prepared to take time and recover its principles. A willing reader is able to preserve or 'save' the text's legibility.

Giles Perring has developed generative music for the piece that follows similar procedures, and, in a future version, Douglas Cape will create a more elaborate parallel visual channel. overboard is still being developed. An installation version was shown at the p0es1s exhibition and colloquium in Berlin during February and March 2004. There is also a web-based version (see below). A brief article describing the inner workings of 'overboard' is published by 'dictung-digital' - 'Overboard: An Example of Ambient Time-Based Poetics in Digital Art.' dictung-digital 32 (2004) http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/2-Cayley.htm.