recombinant

Distant Affinities is a work of recombinant cinema about machine intelligence attempting to process, narrate and mimic sentient being. Through subtitles, the omniscient AI narrator cycles through media that has been captured from the network and attempts a narrative interpretation of the patterns of human behavior. Disparate data points and discontinuous video loops resist being systematized or narrativized. The distances or gaps between the text and video fragments suggest what remains outside the domains of surveillance and narrative. An allegory of the vagaries of networked life existing within larger webs of living and non-living systems, the work shows a world coming apart, but also transforming into a more spacious mode of being made of errant language, creaturely life, isolated gestures and mutating interfaces.

Distant Affinities is programmed to oscillate between a probabilistic distribution of media elements and controlled narrative sequencing; between poetic montage and spatio-temporal continuity. Video, audio and text fragments appear on the screen in semi-indeterminate arrangements, depicting the chaotic flux of a technological world endlessly changing and repeating itself with each user click. Clicking on certain fragments “zooms in” voyeuristically on moments of individual lives, full of their own complex cycles of sensation, memory, thought, embodied and disembodied living. Loops, nested and at various scales, are employed to convey a fractal temporality. The intention of the work is to create an ambient and fluid experience, at times adrift in indeterminate structures and processes and at other times stimulating in the viewer a search for meaningful patterns.

Phantom Agents is an episodic fiction that programmatically weaves sequential narration with random selections of text and image. Li and Pym are partner agents inside a broken augmented reality game. They solve complex plot problems in a plot that is proliferating beyond all reason. They collect data at virtual parties and forget all about their first bodies. They observe and are observed observing. Agency, identity, point of view and reality are slippery as both the fictional characters and the reader/user navigate cine-poetic juxtapositions, make meaningful narrative connections and progress, episode by episode, towards an understanding of the network that includes them.
“Recombinant poetics”, a term coined by artist/scholar Bill Seaman, refers to a techopoetic practice in which the display and juxtaposition of semantic elements are generated by computer algorithms, rather than through an author’s predetermined composition. Although inspired by traditions of combinatorial literature and the use of constraints to generate narrative or poetic forms, recombinant works of art produce variable “fields of meaning” (Seaman/Ascott) for the user/reader/viewer. Recombinant authors program discrete semantic elements, media stored in arrays or databases, to display through random, semi-random or variable processes, often in conjunction with user-interaction. Examples of recombinant poetics in works ofdigital poetry and art are abundant. Digital narratives that foreground recombinant processes are less common, because they tend to dismantle or dissolve themselves as sequential narrative in favor of more non-linear, emergent meanings. However, narrative authors since Laurence Sterne have tried to harness life’s variability and randomness inside their fictions by embedding non-narrative representations of contingent experience within a narrative framework. Through digression, semantic shock, dream logic, parataxis, meta-narrative, stream of consciousness, authors disrupt narrative logic in order to produce affect in the reader/viewer, which in turn contributes to the realization of a fictional world.
Phantom Agents is a playground of familiar identification processes inside a near-future culture that is dominated by database logic. The work is narrative and poetic, deterministic and variable, book-like and cinematic in an effort to explore a networked version of what John Ashbery calls “the experience of experience.” In this work, I create a recombinant fiction that uses computational procedures (random selections of image and text) to produce the affect of variability and randomness alongside or as counterpoint to narrative sequencing.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Huckleberry Finnegans Wake is a combinatoric performance work bringing together Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With both texts based around river culture, contextual imbrications can be formed by folding one text into the other and through this combinatorial engines can be developed for the texts as well as implied visual and auditory material. Though both source texts are replete with exclusive language (regional dialects, neologisms, etc.) when brought together what emerges is a fantastical environment lacking specificity, but for the rivers (the Liffey and the Mississippi) that run through both. Imagine steamboats on River Liffey, the Pike County dialect being spoken in County Dublin, or Shem and Huck on the banks of the Mississippi.

The development method for Huckleberry Finnegans Wake rests somewhere between the creative and the critical. In one regard, by combining the two source texts a sort of comparative and deconstructive textual analysis can be performed on either text, or both texts in combination. On another level, the work is creative; in that it is generative, performative, and relies on combinatoric principles that lend themselves to emergence.

The performance utilizes a number of applications to generate a multi-modal interpretation of the combined text that includes visual material, audio, and live readings from various combinatorial engines. 

This is a romantic-spy story rendered into the genre of Recombinant Fiction. Four characters told a fiction using dialogues shown on several media channels. The cloned identity of a real spy was used to portray a story about the political and sentimental weakness of our era characterised by a dysfunctional sociality being created by social media communications. Actions in public environments completed the set of stages upon which the story was acted and audiences had an active role by unfolding and creating other pieces of fiction. The drama deconstructed language and symbolism of ideologies by remixing characters' lives and identities with real-world patterns.

The work has been exhibited as an installation and there is also a web version.

Re:Cycle is a generative ambient video art piece based on nature imagery captured in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.  Ambient video is designed to play in the background of our lives.  It is a moving image form that is consistent with the ubiquitous distribution of ever-larger video screens. The visual aesthetic supports a viewing stance alternative to mainstream media - one that is quieter and more contemplative - an aesthetic of calmness rather than enforced immersion.  An ambient video work is therefore difficult to create - it can never require our attention, but must always rewards viewer attention when offered.  A central aesthetic challenge for this form is that it must also support repeated viewing.  Re:Cycle relies on a generative recombinant strategy for ongoing variability, and therefore a higher measure of re-playability.  It does so through the use of two random-access databases: one database of video clips, and another of video transition effects.  The piece will run indefinitely, joining clips and transitions from the two databases in randomly varied combinations.

Creative input to the system derives in large part with the selection of shots that the artist uses.  I've been fortunate to collaborate with a brilliant cinematographer - Glen Crawford from Canmore, Alberta.  Re:Cycle's landscape images include a range of elements such as snow, trees, ice, clouds and water - reflecting a deep respect for the natural environment.  These images also produce the ‘ambient’ quality I am seeking.   They are engaging when viewed directly, but also move easily to the background when not.  Another artist might choose very different images, and the resulting work could be completely different.  While I enjoy the complete control offered with traditional linear video art, I am intrigued by the different set of artistic decisions this simple generative platform can support.

The current version of the generative engine for Re:Cycle also incorporates a deeper level of artistic intervention through the integration of metadata into the dynamics of the system.  Each video clip is given one or more metadata tags - reflecting the content of the individual shot. I have used the tags to nuance the random operation of the engine, and group and present images in sequences that share a common content element (such as "snow" or "water").  The resulting generative video work presents a stronger sense of visual flow, and the sequencing begins to exhibit a degree of semantic continuity.

The overall design of the piece incorporates a series of decisions (number of shots, quality of shots, transition selection, algorithmic process) that strike a balance between replayability/variation on the one hand, and aesthetic control on the other. 

This document is a DMO. It is born from the transformation of an existing document. Words were replaced within it with other words through the Find and Replace feature of Microsoft Word. Moreover the word file was transformed into a video: dmo.mov. Through these transformations the digital document has become a different document: a DMO. But this document is still readable and it contains within itself the definition of DMO, i. e. Digitally Modified Organism. The text of this document is a product of electronic literature. As video it is a hybrid work of literature that presents itself as an essay on a topic while also being the subject of an essay. A Digitally Modified Organism is a digital being that has a digital heritage, this heritage is a sequence of modifications using digital engineering techniques, which allow the addition, deletion or transformation of digital elements or their subparts. The definition of the Digitally Modified Organism includes all those objects whose parts of the immaginoma has been modified through the modern techniques of digital engineering. All those organisms whose digital heritage is changed as a result of spontaneous processes (changes due to the corruption of the digital matter or the corruption caused by internet transfers of digital matter), are not considered to be “digitally modified organisms”. They are “digitally modified organisms” those ones that are modified by us intentionally through techniques that are included in the digital technologies (for instance editing or video editing operations, - or as in this case using certain features of the Word program - desktop video capture programs, image processing and video editing programs). A DMO cannot be recognized as a transdigital organism: the two terms are not synonymous because the term “transdigitalization” refers to the insertion - into a given non-digital organism - of objects and/or files clearly digital derived (for example, this happens considering the most extensive meaning of hybrid literature, where from a traditional print text the reader is invited to continue the exploration of text through a different medium such as an internet connection that links to a video related to a printed text). We define as DMO those organisms that show modifications that provide for the incorporation of digital matter from “donors” of the same (digital) type through objects and/or files and/or infinitesimal parts such as pixels (for example, in the montage of images, in video editing, in the assembly of static images or text within video).

To read this work, the reader had to browse the internet through a proxy server which kept track of visited websites and launched small windows in the readers browser, while the reader was viewing other sites, telling fragments of a story throughout the week. As the week progressed, the story would replace parts of the original text and images with text and images from sites the reader had visited. The work is no longer accessible.