projection

A “book post” is placed in the UiB Humanities Library during March 2021, consisting of a table/desk with two stools by it, near a wall.

Four books are on the table/desk (left to right, in alphabetical order by title): Articulations (Allison Parrish), Golem (Nick Montfort), A Noise Such as a Man Might Make: A Novel (Milton Läufer), and Travesty Generator (Lillian-Yvonne Bertram). Each has a hole drilled through it in the upper left and is secured to the table with a cable, creating a chained library. The books represent the work of four participants in an SLSAeu panel about computer-generated literature.

A Kodak carousel slide projector is in the middle of the table/desk, projecting small, bright images and texts onto the wall. Slides presenting covers and contents of the five books are shown continually during the exhibition. The selections will be made in consultation with all author/programmers and with their approval.

The stools allow two readers to sit and peruse the books. The table is wide enough to allow readers to do so while socially distanced.

The presence of a functioning “obsolete” slide projector, and the establishment of an “obsolete” chained library within the Humanities library, suggests to visitors that the book is also obsolete — while it is, at the same time, a perfectly functional technology. The dissonance of presenting computer-generated text via film slides and analog projection resonates with the decision that this group of five author/programmers has made: to present our computational writing in codex form.

The chained library is both practical and symbolic. Given that this is a library exhibit, the cables prevent people from relocating the books as one typically does in a library. They also emphasize that while we value ubiquity and portability in the digital age, at the same time we want things tethered, grounded, and available at the expected location. This suggestion will be strengthened by the similarity between the way these books are tethered and the way computer equipment is secured to a desk.

The projection of course alerts visitors to the availability of the books. Even if visitors do not choose to sit and peruse these books, the projected texts allow them to see and read computer-generated writing from recent years. Those who only view the projections nevertheless get a sense of the wide variety of approaches and the many textures of language that are seen in this sort of experimental digital writing.

Death Of An Alchemist is a multimedia novel written by Big Data—a detective story generated in real-time from live online content. The installation consists of an 8m wall displaying 128 pages of projected text, symbols and charts. This content is generated by scraping Twitter, Google and social platforms for today’s headlines, social media conversations, memes and more. The text flickers and updates as new data is received, yet still creates a coherent narrative that can be read from beginning to end. This is thanks to a bespoke technique we have termed the “poetics of search”: using a combination of search operators and algorithms to mine data, then string manipulation to fit it cohesively into a new plot. In the story, readers investigate the death of 16th century alchemist Trithemius. He has left behind a supposedly magical book, Steganographia, said to reveal the “clavis magna”: the idea from which all knowledge flows. Readers must decode the book to find the clues to Trithemius’ murder. But this is no ordinary leather-bound volume… The work is an extended allegory for coercive uses of Big Data by technology companies such as Google and Facebook, which aim to create their own “clavis magna”. Death of an Alchemist is an official selection of the 2015 International Symposium on Electronic Art, to be held in Vancouver, Canada. It is also being made available as a free iOS/Android app. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Cityspeak is an audience participation system that allows people to share their thoughts and comments on a public display by sending a text message. Engage guests at your event and see what they have to say.

Traces is a collage of text, spoken word, sound, and digital projection. The text forms durational video and audio composed into 17 sections (excerpts included), which are triggered over the course of an hour in a continuous fashion. The video was designed to be incomplete and unfold over time--drawing attention to the chance encounter each person may have with it. It does not reveal the totality of its content, part of which falls outside of the frame. I worked with archival materials as I built this project (oral histories and personal collections). I was interested in these sorts of personal collections being displayed and open for perusal. As private spaces become redefined by digital possibilities, information is readily transferred from one form into another and meaning is subtracted and added along the way. Traces is my own collection. Photographs become data, which initiate recordings that are transcribed and then re-recorded. These then become projected text, and finally transform into granulated rhythmic pulsations and fragments of words, which becomes a vastly layered resonant soundscape felt as vibration through the body.

(Source: ELO Conference: First Encounters 2014)

A commissioned work for Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany, the Illuminated Manuscript explores the communicative possibilities of spatialized language in the electronic media. Combining physical interfaces with purely typographical information in a virtual environment, this piece explored new types of reading in tune with human perceptual abilities.

A handbound book is set in a spartan room. Projected typography is virtually printed into the blank pages with a video projector. Sensors embedded in the pages tell the computer as the pages are turned. In addition, sonar sensors allow visitors to run their hands over and to disrupt, combine and manipulate the text on each page. The book begins with an essay on the four freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Each page explores a different text on the topic of freedom.

(Source: Project description at Small Design)

This multiplatform digital work references an event connected with the history of Košice and its tobacco factory from 1851 which employed mostly women workers. Some decades later, when St. Elizabeth's Cathedral was being renovated, the women workers donated a candle chandelier. The chandelier itself was repurposed twice – from the original candles, to gas lighting and with the advent of electricity, was turned upside down. In the installation, images of the chandelier from the cathedral are randomly generated and projected onto a screen in a flux of forms. Simultaneously the words connected with this story appear projected on the walls of the room, and phonetic sounds from Slovakian, Hungarian and German are generatively mixed in to create the soundscape of languages that were once spoken in the very same place by women workers.

How do we perform ourselves in digital space? In Not Not 0.1, Catherine Siller uses her own custom software and a motion capture camera to generate projected text and images of herself. She immerses herself in these projections and dances between the virtual and the real in a duet with her digital double. The piece destabilizes language and gesture as it repeatedly redraws the boundary between the physical and the digital self.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

The Fetch is a double-reading. Projected digital texts are read by one performer while the second performer searches the net for double texts which use the same combination of four word groups to be found in the projected text. ‘Fetch’ has a double meaning here. In Gaelic folklore, it is the wraith or doppelganger which is seen as a premonition of someone’s death. Secondly, The fetch cycle is the basic operation by which a computer retrieves and executes a program instruction from its memory. Thus the reading performs the theme, « Chercher le texte ».

(Source: http://chercherletexte.org/fr/performance/the_fetch/)

Time Room is the poem about time and short unmeaning activities which actually fill up our everyday life was illustrated by short animated clips which were screened on the walls and the roof ot the special construction.
(Interview with Sergej Timofeev http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-40-sergej-timofejev/)

A six foot square garden sits in the middle of an otherwise ordinary computer lab. Water briskly flows down a series of cacsades into a glowing pool. Projected on the surface of the pool and flowing as if they were caught in the water's grasp are a tangle of words. You can reach out and touch the flow, blocking it or stirring up the words causing them to grow and divide, morphing into new words that are pulled into the drain and pumped back to the head of the stream to tumble down again.

(Source: artist website)