radio art

To trail DADA traces on the net is a possibility to look up loose text satellites on a short-term and to bring singular DADA groups and sources to level a structural gap. Here, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about DADA per se, as approaches to and updates of DADAism as a historical phenomenon are too diverse: for instance, virtual identities settle in – present (babel, hugo baron, frieder rusmann, dadasophin) and historical ones (duchamp, tzara, serner, ball, schwitters), bananas are traded (anna banana) and indexed, art’s and the artist’s death is given shape (kunsttot.de), virtual countries are built (bananaland, rongwrong puppet empire) and, sometimes, even the audience is happily dispensed with (neumerz, dadasophin).
DADA TO GO bundles these different traces in an audio text which lets the DADA groups act within an environment which refers to computer games and makes DADAism get a move on. For: Boredom was in the beginning of DADA …
(Source: kunstradio.at)

50 years ago a calculator generated a literary text for the first time ever. And this was in Stuttgart my hometown.
Theo Lutz wrote 1959 a program for Zuse Z22 to create stochastic texts. On the advice of the Stuttgardian philosopher Max Bense, he took sixteen nouns and adjectives out of Kafka’s “Schloss,” which the calculator then formed into sentences, following certain patterns. Thus every sentence began with “ein” or “jeder” (“one” or “each”) or the corresponding negative form “kein” or “nicht jeder” (“no” or “not every”). Then the noun, selected arbitrarily from the pool of sixteen, was linked through the verb “ist” (“is”) with the likewise arbitrarily chosen adjective. Then the whole assembly was linked up through “und,” “oder,” “so gilt” (“and,” “either,” “thus”) or given a full stop. Following these calculation instructions, by means of this algorithm, the machine was able to construct such sentences as:

EIN TAG IST TIEF UND JEDES HAUS IST FERN
(A day is deep and every house is distant)
JEDES DORF IST DUNKEL; SO GILT KEIN GAST IST GROSS
(Every village is dark, thus no guest is large)

For the performance of “free lutz!” I use a web conversion of Theo Lutz’s program which I wrote in PHP. The Web interface generates stochastic texts on the basis of Lutz’s algorithm but permit additional word input. The nouns and adjectives of the original vocabulary can be replaced by the audience at the performance through a terminal.
In 1959, computer texts were connotated as literary texts twice over, firstly through the “Kafka” vocabulary, and secondly through corrections carried out by Theo Lutz. In an edited print out of a selection of stochastic texts, Theo Lutz corrected minor grammar errors and punctuation omissions by hand, and thus, out of keeping with the programming, he acted as a “traditional” author. In the performance, reference is made to these literary features (or one could almost say “human failings”) of the first computer-generated texts in two ways. The first is through the co-authorship of the listeners, the second is the literary production of the computer texts by a professional speaker reading off the screen and performing them as they were generated.

eft channel: hyper reader and writer hei+co@hyperdis.de (aka heiko idensen) says "live" what comes to his head ... (= SPEAK)

right channel: cut-ups and collages of historical/hysterical hyper texts (= LISTEN)

the mix is the bottom line:
who's sitting at the mixing desk? when is something faded in resp. out? which parameters and effects are used?

a hyper-text audio-book should definitely have a record button!

whilst hyper-text theorists and prophets predicted an exponential, uncontrollable increase of the electronic text rotation, publishing houses respond to the growing breakdown of the book market with audio books as a remedy.

as a consequence, in dealing with literature a revolution comparable to that in the music industry of the 1980s triggered off with the introduction of the walkman is finally happening: a mobilization of the listening situation taking the urban environment into account; the possibility to mix the internal listening space with any desirable external sound environment or everyday sound-scape.

and just as the text-message effect is introducing the mutation of cell phones into text tools (and, at long last, we can't only listen to our own music selection everywhere, but can also write texts at any time and place) ...

... hyper-listening is based on including tones, sound, the noise of different channels, the clacking of speaking tools and devices, the voice's scragginess ... in the electronic text rotation again:

classically, hyper-text has totally rid itself of the voice: as a topographical text, as a mapping of texts on books' pages (visual poetry) or monitors it rather performs a poetry of links and networking than of sound, of metrics, of the spoken word ... there is no story – not even to mention a narrator ... actually, hyper-texts are as unsuitable for speaking or reading aloud as source code ...

audio hyper-texts whispered into one's ear include dramatic scenes from hyper-text history; one can hear the clacking of the MEMEX's lever, and from far away foucault invokes the laughter of the chinese encyclopedia ...
...

it's not all about turning the audio-book into an mp3 audio-book, but to connect the production instruments and media of hyper-text (weblogs, text-message love stories, collective writing projects ...) with the worlds of sound and listening: web radios, experimental literature programmes, lectures, radio plays in and from the internet.

... to sing and orchestrate the old song time and again:

"to transform the broadcast from an apparatus of distribution into an apparatus of communication."
(bertolt brecht)

heiko idensen 2005

Since the founding manifesto of the French Oulipo Group in 1962, in which it proposed writing poetry in computer programming language, there have been forms of electronic literature that not only employ computers primarily as text generators or audiovisual media, but also use programming, command, markup, and protocol codes as their medium. Departing from popular forms of this literature in the computer hacker culture, network artists like jodi, antiorp, and mez have been developing new poetic and artistic languages since the mid-nineties, for which the artist and theorist Alan Sondheim has coined the name “Codework.” Codeworks are technically simple e-mails whose text, however, calls to mind associations of computer crashes and interferences, viruses and spam. Initially, they were sent via network art mailing lists as interferences; later entire forums dedicated to the genre, individual styles, and private languages by individual and often pseudonymous code artists began developing. This program attempts for the first time to transpose codeworks from the written source text to radiophony.

Participants:
Florian Cramer (editor), literary scholar, Berlin, Germany
Tsila Hassine, media-design student, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
Alejandra Perez Nuñez, media-design student, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
Sasson Kung, media-design student, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
Fabian Vögeli, media-art student, HGK, Zürich
Alan Sondheim, Nnetwork and codework artist, New York
noemata , pseudonymous code artist, Norway

Further authors:
mez (Mary Anne Breeze), network artist, Sidney, Australia
Inke Arns , curator and critic, Dortmund and Berlin, Germany

Crossing borders, experiments, the appropriation of reality instead of a depiction of the world, dialogic art, the play with associations: this is Reinhard Döhl's work. His probably most famous work is his concrete Apfelgedicht (Apple Poem) from 1965. 30 years later it bites its way through an apple in Johannes Auer's net poem "worm applepie for döhl". „appleinspace“: a multi-layer-hommage experimenting with internet, reality, textual reality as well as with the complete text assemblage of Reinhard Döhl which plays with the unconscious, simularity, and volatility. As an extension of „appleinspace“, Beat Suter und René Bauer plan a multi-layered human-search-machine-cooperation.

A project by Johannes Auer for the ORF Kunstradio, Vienna. With: Reinhard Doehl, Sylvia Egger, Oliver Gassner, Martina Kieninger, Beat Suter und René Bauer Performer: Christiane Maschajechi, Stuttgart Peter Gorges, Stuttgart6 net authors generate a text on the others' web projects. 2 narrators/announcers perform the texts in form of a collage, remix, dialogue and (white) noise. 6 net authors form a new netart projects using the texts of the others. The radio version of this net project consists of four parts which add up to a radio play that represents different grades of (human) control: Part 1 is a kind of hand-made collage of the complete written material and, thus, is controlled "by human". For Part 2, the text modules of this collage were re-assembled by the computer (randomly "generated") - human control was abandoned. In Part 3, the announcers comment on this computer-generated collage - bringing human control back in (but at the same time infiltrating the meaning of authorship). In Part 4, finally, the announcers themselves lose control due to t heir being under the influence of alcohol ...