Non linguistic concrete poem.
The Aleph is his initial project attempting to observe and understand the world through photographs on the Web. The Aleph system collects photographs tagged with certain words or phrases, extracts a given number of faces from them, and composes a collective face in realtime. "10000 Faces at Funeral, The Aleph" and "10000 Faces at Birthday Party, The Aleph" are companion pieces created by the system using 10,000 faces extracted from photos tagged 'funeral' and 'birthday party,' respectively.
This paper makes observations about digital poetry through thematic connections derived from a 1969 short story by Robert Coover (“The Elevator”) and a poetics statement written forty years later by critic Janez Strehovec (“The Poetics of Elevator Pitch”). Strehovec’s essay addresses poetry in the age of short attention spans, and in which compositional designs are mosaics, hybrid. Contemporary works are unstable, precarious, and relations between textual components have evolved. Digital poetry is a textual, meta-textual, linguistic, and sometimes non-linguistic practice requiring new forms of perception. Because our observational skills have changed, Strehovec proclaims the importance of first impressions, getting viewers excited and immediately involved with language. He promotes the notion of an “elevator pitch” as a temporal ideal for digital poetry—the idea that the poem, “can be delivered in the time of an elevator ride (e.g., thirty seconds or 100-150 words)”, “which hooks the reader/user within a very short temporal unit”—an idea perhaps more relevant to authors of projected works than those who invite their audience to participate. Coover’s story, written as a series of mosaic passages, also points to the potential for instability in any moment but acknowledges unexpected possibilities that happen over time. Coover’s elevator reflects the awkward occurrences that gradually occur in a single place, how a familiar vehicle can bring someone to unfamiliar places, and how sometimes people are forced to solve problems caused by someone else’s statements. Through actions, in space, over time, social and communicative interaction is altered. The unknown, unexpected, and fantasy celebrated by Coover are the “space, time, motion, magnitude, class” of a given place. Yet, in the manner the life of the story’s protagonist Martin is spared we might conclude that walking—rather that riding quickly—through difficulties is a viable way to proceed. As authors strive for novel, complex, and sophisticated procedures, is it fair to use the elevator pitch as a model for engagement? Can an audience ably make conclusions in such a short amount of time? What can (and does) happen in the first 30 seconds of a digital poem? Examining works as diverse as John Cayley’s wotclock, Mary Flanagan’s [theHouse], geniwaite’s Concatenation, and others, this paper look at the possibilities held, and techniques used, by expert practitioners in the opening moments of their works. While certain works resist being quickly judged, others strive to be immediate. Artists working in the field often make a lot happen quickly but have not rejected depth—even if that, in Strehovec’s view, might be seen as self-defeating. If Strehovec’s digital vision trumps Coover’s analog speculations, projective authors can practice (and fine-tune) spectacle forever, but how will authors of participatory works employ language to keep audience engaged?
This is a collaborative work commissoned by the New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for its Turbulence web site. The authors conducted an exhaustive empirical study, with the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.For example, certain numbers, such as 212, 486, 911, 1040, 1492, 1776, 68040, or 90210, occur more frequently than their neighbors because they are used to denominate the phone numbers, tax forms, computer chips, famous dates, or television programs that figure prominently in our culture. Regular periodicities in the data, located at multiples and powers of ten, mirror our cognitive preference for round numbers in our biologically-driven base-10 numbering system. Certain numbers, such as 12345 or 8888, appear to be more popular simply because they are easier to remember.Humanity's fascination with numbers is ancient and complex. Our present relationship with numbers reveals both a highly developed tool and a highly developed user, working together to measure, create, and predict both ourselves and the world around us. But like every symbiotic couple, the tool we would like to believe is separate from us (and thus objective) is actually an intricate reflection of our thoughts, interests, and capabilities. One intriguing result of this symbiosis is that the numeric system we use to describe patterns, is actually used in a patterned fashion to describe.We surmise that our dataset is a numeric snaphot of the collective consciousness. Herein we return our analyses to the public in the form of an interactive visualization, whose aim is to provoke awareness of one's own numeric manifestations.
Source: Turbulence
Installation at the Seattle Central Library, 6 LCD Screens on glass wall, 45" x 24' (2005-2014)“Making Visible the Invisible” is a commission for the Seattle Central Library, situated in the Mixing Chamber, a large open 19,500 sq ft space dedicated to information retrieval and public accessible computer research. The installation consists of 6 large LCD screens located on a glass wall horizontally behind the librarians’ main information desk. The screens feature real-time calculated animation visualizations generated by custom designed statistical and algorithmic software using data received each hour. This data consists of a list of checked-out items organized in chronological order. The item may be a book, a DVD, a CD, a VHS tape, etc. and from the list we can collect and aggregate titles, checkout time, catalog descriptors such as keywords, Dewey classification code if they are non-fiction items. There are approximately 22000 items circulating per day. Items with Dewey Decimal System labels provide for a way to get a perspective on what subject matters are of current interest at any given time as the Dewey system classifies all items according to 10 major categories: 000 Generalities; 100 Philosophy & Psychology; 200 Religion; 300 Social Science; 400 Language; 500 Natural Science & Mathematics; 600 Technology & Applied Sciences; 700 Arts; 800 Literature; 900 Geography & History. These are then subdivided into 100 segments. There are 4 visualizations at this time.The circulation of checked out books and media transforms the library into a data exchange center. This flow of information can be calculated mathematically, analyzed statistically and represented visually. From a cultural perspective, the result may be a good indicator of what the community of patrons considers interesting information at any specific time. Visualizing the statistical information of the titles and their categories therefore provides a real-time living picture of what the community is thinking.
Source: project website
This course enabled an online cooperation between teachers and students within a cooperative transatlantical teaching framework, it is based on a collaboration between the University of Siegen, Germany and Brown University, USA. Five student groups were assigned one topic and one work (plus relevant examples), as well as leading questions to discuss and close read the assigned work. Topics included: installations, textual instruments/instrumental texts, digital photography, and mapping art. Over the semester students discussed their assigned work via an online forum, while participating in face-to-face classes at their universities. For a final session both students and teachers met online for a video conference.
Deep Walls is a projected cabinet of cinematic memories. When a person walks into its projection beam, the interactive wall starts recording his shadow, and the shadows of those who follow. When the last person leaves the frame, the shadows replay within one of sixteen small rectangular cupboards, looping indefinitely. Like structuralist films, the collection of repetitive videos becomes an object unto-itself, rather than strictly representational “movie.”Deep Walls creates a complex temporal relationship between movie loops. Each small shadow-film has the precise duration of its recording: from a few seconds to several hours. The temporal relationship between the sixteen frames becomes complex—in a manner similar to Brian Eno’s tape loop experiments—looping individual recordings of different durations to create a composition that doesn’t repeat for days.
(Source: Artist's description)