music

Short description

In this workshop, attendees will learn to create "story instruments," a genre of performative e-lit with a very simple interaction model. In a story instrument, the author decides *what* happens, and the user, through a one-button interface, determines *when* it happens. This form, with its inherent connections to music, video games, interactive comics, and slide presentations, has been used to collaboratively remix the works of noted California poets, sonify the history of Mars exploration, create multi-vocal lyric videos for Hamilton, and visualize samples of martial arts films in hip-hop tracks — to name just a few applications. The software attendees will use to create their story instruments is Stepworks 2, a new version of the web-based tool I first introduced in 2017. Stepworks (http://step.works) has been described as "an ideal platform for teaching e-literature through feminist critical making pedagogies" (Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, "Back in a Flash: Critical Making Pedagogies to Counter Technological Obsolescence" [The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, December 10, 2020]). It can be used to create interactive works, live-streamed presentations, or linear videos (one example being last year's popular ELO talk "Temporal Aesthetics in Digital Comics: An Introduction for Makers and Researchers"). Stepworks standardizes multimodal interactive media in a way that simplifies authoring, while collapsing the boundaries between text, visual, audio, and musical content. Instead of tracks or layers, Stepworks features "characters" who take actions in discrete steps. Each character appears as a rectangular panel that can be rendered anywhere on screen. When a character "speaks" a word, that word appears in its panel. When they "show" a video, that video fills the panel's area. Put another way, Stepworks takes the visual logic of Zoom we've been living with during the pandemic — in which each box equals a person — and allows authors to build on it in creative ways. Stepworks 2 introduces a web-based authoring environment to augment the Google Sheets model launched with Stepworks 1, making possible more sophisticated compositions (even including the user's webcam) while maintaining ease of use. Attendees will come away from the workshop with basic knowledge of the tool, and free accounts which they can continue to use afterward (while Stepworks will ultimately include a paid tier to support continued development, the essential set of authoring features will continue to be free, and its file format is open and JSON-based). The workshop will be held over Zoom, and participants (up to 15) will be required to use the Chrome web browser. Each attendee will use Stepworks to follow along with workshop activities, creating their own experiments using media they possess locally or find online. Attendees will be encouraged to show progress via screen sharing, and will save their work locally, while also learning how to publish projects online (a secondary account like a GitHub account may be required for this). Finally, participants will receive tips for using Stepworks to expose students to basic e-lit creation in a classroom setting.

Record Status
Description (in English)

'Een hele echte' is a story told through emails that readers receive in the course of 14 days. In the story, Helen is looking online for a new bass gitar. She stumbles upon Tarak, who is not a real person, but an artificial intelligence entity. Helen experiences the enormous influence of her live on the internet, which is completely taken over by Tarak. 

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Contributors note

Zo'n coole basgitaar als ze Kim Gordon van Sonic Youth zag bespelen in een oude videoclip, die wil Helen als ze eindelijk weer muziek gaat maken. Online loopt ze Tarak tegen het lijf die virtuoos kan zoeken en haar leidt naar de overtreffende trap van de BC Rich Mockingbird Bass, namelijk het exemplaar waarop Kim Gordon speelt in die clip. De Echte!Wie zich aanmeldt volgt veertien dagen het avontuur dat Helen meesleurt tot op louche nachtelijke parkeerplaatsen achter een winkelcentrum in Sydney Australië. Tarak blijkt geen mens maar een vorm van kunstmatige intelligentie. Dat is interessant en erg handig. Tot Helen ervaart hoe de enorme invloed van het internet op haar dagelijks leven in handen valt van een wezen dat zich aan geen enkele menselijke beperking of overweging houdt. Spookachtig en vervreemdend, is zacht uitgedrukt, wat er dan gebeurt. Vragen over wat een intentie, wat contact, begrip en menselijke authenticiteit zijn als we met AI omgaan dringen zich op. En wat bezielt Tarak?De basis van het vervolgverhaal is een tekst bestaande uit emails die Helen aan de lezer stuurt. Maar de omgeving waarin die tekst verschijnt is verrijkt met real-time berichten uit newsfeeds, weer-apps, en losse chatberichten van Tarak, die zich aanpassen bij de locatie en het tijdstip waarop Helen zich in het verhaal bevindt, en bij de locatie van de lezer. De digitale alledaagse werkelijkheid van Helen en lezer is het decor waarin het vervolgverhaal zich afspeelt.

Description (in English)

Meet Me At The Station is a surreal and lyrical 10 minute experience for for 360 cinemas, domes, virtual reality headsets. A scientist is trapped in the future due to a time-travel accident. His only hope is to travel through dreams, but dreams can also turn into nightmares.

 

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Description (in English)

Leveraging the Curveship-js system for automatic narrative variation (version 0.2) to regen~d~erate the lyrics of the second cut off The Velvet Underground’s debut album, after adjusting the street value of heroin on an annualized inflation rate, I then coded this updated and enumerated content into BBC BASIC II (1982) and emulated all that output as a series of twenty-something decidedly non-vector formats—subsequently renamed à la a Pixies tune 22 years removed from the late Lewis Allan Reed‘s original.

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Description (in English)

Camtasia Fantasy is a study on institutionalized tools for presenting information, featuring numerous forms of misreading and corruption native to those systems—including automated captioning and stabilization, noise removal, layers of lossy compression, and the broader assumption that a PowerPoint slide show can communicate any knowledge worth knowing—as well as the unintended poetics that emerge from such misreadings.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/camtasia-fantasy/)

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Description (in English)

The music/animation, “arlequi,” is a digital map, a metaphor connecting the sensory divide as image and audio derive from the same numeric source, creating a visual music in a synaesthetic counterpoint.

Description (in English)

Play the Chinese lottery and see what life was like as a Chinese immigrant to British Columbia.

High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese is an interactive poem, created through an interdisciplinary collaboration of 11 Canadian artists, programmers and community members. The project consists of an interactive website, 8 videos and an interactive gallery installation. 

High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese explores the theme of Chinese immigration to the west coast of Canada – both historical and contemporary – the tensions that exist in and between these narratives.

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Description (in English)

It Must Have Been Dark By Then' is a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recording to bring you stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara. Unlike many audio guides, there is no preset route, the software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. It is up to you to choose your own path through the city, connecting the remote to the immediate, the precious to the disappearing. 

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1465/It+M…

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Description (in English)

It Must Have Been Dark by Then is a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recording to bring you stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara. Unlike many audio guides, there is no preset route, the software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. It is up to you to choose your own path through the city, connecting the remote to the immediate, the precious to the disappearing.

In January and February 2017 Duncan Speakman travelled with collaborators across three countries on three continents, visiting environments that are experiencing rapid change from human and environmental factors. What he created on his return is somewhere between a travel journal and a poetic reflection on connection, progress and memory. The experience asks the listener to seek out types of locations in their own environment, and once there it offers sounds and stories from remote but related situations. At each location the listener/reader is invited to tie those memories to the place they are in, creating a map of both where they are right now and of places that may not exist in the future.

(source: https://ambientlit.com/index.php/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then/)

 

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Description (in English)

Penelope is a combinatory sonnet generator film based on the Odyssey, addressing themes of longing, mass extinction, and migration. Recombinations of lines of the poem, video clips, and musical arrangements produce a different version of the project on each run. Penelope was co-produced by Alejandro Albornoz (Sound), Roderick Coover (Video), and Scott Rettberg (Text and Code). Using a similar combinatory structure to that of Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, the computer-code-driven combinatory film can produce millions of variations of a sonnet that weaves and then unweaves itself. The program writes 13 lines of a sonnet and then reverses the rhyme scheme at the center couplet. Each 26 line poem is produced as an audiovisual composition, with lines spoken by voice actress Heather Morgan. The system determines their composition, produces and plays the video and musical composition, and then displays the text of the generated poem before composing a new sonnet pair. The videos by Roderick Coover and the sound compositions by Alejandro Albornoz also recombine in an algorithmic structure. Albornoz remixed oboe solos by Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra musician Marion Walker in developing the aleatory soundtrack. The video and the text were developed by Coover and Rettberg during 2017 residencies at the Ionian Center for Arts and Culture. Actors in non-speaking roles in the film include Kefalonian residents Helen Amourgi, Kostas Annikas Deftereos, and Sophia Kagadis.

(Description: Author's description)

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Technical notes

The main source code of Version 1 (exhibited at ELO 2018) with generative javascript is attached. Open in a text editor to read the javascript.