recombination

Cenzobot is a simple Twitter bot that tweets fragments from real historical censorship reviews of publications from the communist era, written by Polish censors between the 1940s and 1990s. Some of the censors were very skilled critics, often well educated, but other were people completely devoid of talent, especially the ones delegated to review books for children and young adults. Twitter, which today is one of the platforms most associated with digital censorship, was chosen as an appropriate tool to tweet censors’ voices. I came up with the idea to tweet fragments of censors’ reviews after the Twitter Bot Purge in February 2018. I expect that my cenzobot will also be purged by Twitter at some point. It is actually the goal of my work.

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)

Dada was a mental system cracker. Think about the poem-algorithm. dadaoverload adapts the mechanics and adds the destruction mode. Tweets are fighting for dominance in this society of the spectacle. enough dada! “zersetze dada!” The world is filled with a dada overload. Today’s source material for Dada are tweets and spam messages, ads and any kind of short messages. Dada (Tzara) used newspaper clippings, cut them down to words and randomly reassembled them. Dada was a creative process in 1916. Today, 100 years later, Dada is everywhere and nowhere. It is massive disintegration of language and communication. It is a process of decomposition as tweets retweet themselves to stay alive. Our Dada destroys tweets. It subverts, undermines, disintegrates and decomposes tweeted messages. You have a stream of live tweets from different sources. You choose a tweet and shoot individual letters out into the tweet universe. Each letter bullet hits a tweet and disintegrates all equivalent letters in this tweet. The tweet now reads different. This happens fast and to all tweets on screen. One of Saturday, July 22 • 579 the tweets becomes the main tweet in the center and shows the process in oversize. Once in a while, you get a full word as bullet. This starts a creative process. The full word shows up in orange and recompose the incomplete gappy tweets: Reality. Truth, Naivity. You also get the choice of intervening with your own inputs and see how you feel when your annotations get destroyed by the Dada Overload bullets. [There are some enhancements. Try them out. You can click together a longer text. You can pause the stream and read the output easier. You can put in your own text spam. You can take an instant picture. You can send a dadaoverload tweet and get an answer from the dadaoverload bot.]

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

The Gathering Cloud collates research into the history and language of meteorology with current thinking about data storage and climate change. Archival material from the Met Office Archive and Library in Exeter has been studied and sifted, along with classical, medieval, and Victorian sources, including, in particular, Luke Howard’s classic essay On the Modifications of Clouds, first published in 1803.

This research material is presented as a sequence of texts and images, acting both as a primer to the ideas behind the project and as a document of its movement between formats, from the data centre to the illuminated screen, from the live performance to the printed page. In his foreword media theorist Jussi Parikka describes the work as “a series of material transformations made visible through a media history executed as digital collage and print publication, hendecasyllabic verse, and critical essay”.

This work won the New Media Writing Prize 2016.

source: http://www.uniformbooks.co.uk/thegatheringcloud.php

Talk with Your Hands Like an Ellis Island Mutt is a recombinatory cinema project that utilizes video material from my digital lyric memoir DADDYLABYRINTH, which appeared in the ELO 2014 exhibition and later premiered at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore, to create an interactive, polylinear narrative cinema experience. From the video “selfies” of DADDYLABYRINTH I have culled individual hand gestures and, through image manipulation and repetition, created sixty-four separate videos eight to twelve seconds long that can be recombined using a variety of strategies, from the performative to the algorithmic. A three-minute video describing the project is at https://vimeo.com/113867362. The sixty-four building blocks that make up Hand/Mutt are compiled at https://vimeo.com/113860613 and the original source videos can be found at www.daddylabyrinth.com. This interactive cinema project uses associational thinking to reach beneath common storytelling tropes and into the proto-narrative subconscious, where story is born in the collision between one image and another. My approach is indebted to the contrapuntal editing of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories, and informed by two more contemporary theoretical approaches. Walter Fischer’s Narrative Paradigm posits that the human mind will create narrative from any stimuli that are offered to it; Eugene Dorfman’s concept of the narreme sees narrative as consisting of discrete, recombinable building blocks – just as linguistics sees language as a combination of morphemes. My approach to recombinatory cinema rests on the faith that what we call “film” can be a polylinear narrative environment in which narremes, brought together into a variety of lines by the interactive viewer, can generate story experiences unique to each individual and thus be bound, by the co-creative process of interactivity, to each viewer’s psyche. In time for the Bergen conference I will develop, from the visual elements of DADDYLABYRINTH, interactive recombinatory cinema experiences using (1) the touch-screen based interactive narrative platform Opertoon (http://opertoon.com) and (2) the database-driven VJ software program Isadora (http://troikatronix.com). Hand/Mutt is the prototype project for a database-driven interactive and performative cinema system, and I will use it to explore how databases and interactivity let us conceptualize new ways in which the fundamental building blocks of cinema are capable of colliding – and what stories our minds create when they do. THE PROJECT IN THE CONTEXT OF ELO 2015 As evidenced by the 2014 ELO exhibition, which featured several projects that were cinematic in nature, it is clear that a branch of electronic literature has been heading toward film – and thus that film is indeed one of its “ends.” A forthcoming panel I organized for the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, “The Experimental Cinema/Electronic Literature Frontier,” directly addresses this relationship. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) suggests a coming art in which “the computer becomes an indispensable component in the production of an art that would be impossible without it” and in which “the machine makes autonomous decisions on alternative possibilities that ultimately govern the outcome of the artwork.” What Youngblood presaged has been fulfilled in electronic literature, and it is this cusp that I would like to explore. (source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

inflorescence.city is an exploration of a shifting virtual city from multiple vantage points. The publication is generated live using a variety of different approaches. Each time you refresh your browser, the publication rewrites itself.
The different sections of the work each offer a unique window into the city. These sections take the form of paper ephemera, census documents, a virtual graveyard with generated tombstones, visits to city landmarks, and various other artifacts. It was important to us that we give each of these separate perspectives a unique sensibility and a voice of its own.
To that end, each of these sections is written by a different set of algorithms. When writing this piece, we treated these software processes as honored collaborators rather than as tools. Each has its own texture and tendencies. Getting to know each of these algorithms is an intricate back and forth process of listening and refining. The bodies of text they use as source material are carefully picked and hand-refined to match the tone of the algorithm.
As the document is written, sections of the document are passed to a program that is responsible for the illustrations. Here the words are translated into sets of drawing instructions. The illustrations are visual mirrors of the text.
inflorescence.city is created by Katie Rose Pipkin and Loren Schmidt in collaboration with various algorithms and code snippets. Special thanks to @thricedotted and @zonodonoceros
The work is viewable online at inflorescence.city

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

On the Web, Bernardo Schiavetta proposes Raphèl. Raphèl is a multilingual cento, a collage poem of quotations in various languages, which is to be read as the endless commentary of a sentence from the Divine Comedy, an asemantic sentence attributed by Dante to Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel. The basic form of Raphèl is a cyclic stanza of ten lines which can reproduce itself infinitely if the reader clicks on one of its ten linear links and/or ten interlinear links: A click on a line in the left column gives access to its source. A click (precise) on a line spacing gives access to the corresponding stanza at the next level.

Raphèl is thus a poetic hypertext whose very form relies on the hyperlink. As far as Raphèl develops a formal process of proliferation of lines based on the principle of the cento and the crown of sonnets, this "unlimited babelic hyperpoem" is structurally a never ending text.

(Source: Serge Bouchardon, "Digital Literature in France")

"Winterscape" is an Ambient Video meditation on the changing faces of the Canadian Rockies in winter. The piece is a visual essay that takes the viewer deep into the mountain environment, and in the process expands the limits of cinematic time and space in the context of the recombinant moving image. Ambient Video artworks are "video paintings" that hang on the walls of our homes and offices. They present a considerable aesthetic challenge for the artist. They must give visual pleasure in any given moment, but can not require our attention at any time. Since they live in our homes, they must also support repeated viewing, yet still offer fresh insights each time. Winterscape exemplifies the three techniques I rely on to meet these aesthetic challenges: striking visual composition, manipulation of cinematic time, and the use of visual layers and transitions. Because ambient video works must be slow-paced, the pressure on the original composition is considerable. This piece is based on strong subject imagery with an emphasis on visual impact, simplicity of composition, and the subtle play of light, color and motion. The cinematic time base has been manipulated extensively in these shots. Clouds are sped up to maximize visual interest but still retain an innate sense of grace. Water is slowed down to reveal the complex relationships of motion, time, momentum, and resistance as it plays within the constraints of landscape and gravity. Even more striking is the manipulation of visual layers and transitions. This piece is a radical departure from the more than one hundred years of cinematic tradition—there are no hard cuts in "Winterscape." Instead, it uses a series of multiple layers and complex transitions to support constant but subtle change from image to image. This is a major shift in the fundamentals of film and video construction, which almost exclusively relies on the use of the discrete shot as the basic building block of visual sequencing. In this work, each shot has been fragmented into visual zones, and the transition from one image to the next unfolds in stages determined by the graphic and motion components of each composition. The result is a constant state of transition, as pictorial components layer, wipe, and fade in an unending series of changes. At any given time, the image on the screen is a seamless shifting collage, consisting of parts of two or more camera shots. The effect is one of visual flow, metamorphosis, and an overall sense of recombinant "magic realism".  

"Lord's Prayer, The" (2007) takes the original English version of "The Lord's Prayer" (in this case, a variation of the King James Version) and, using the same words, creates an entirely new poem. 

(Source: Artist's description, 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

Sydney's Siberia is a zoomable poem.

It is not technology making our wires, nodes and swimming data streams, our ever growing networks, beautiful. Instead it is the stories/poetics, the forever coalescing narratives that form the inter/intranet into a vitally compelling mosaic To explore, simply mouse-over/navigate to an appealing square, click and click, read, contemplate connections and repeat. Sydney’s Siberia recreates how networks build exploratory story-scapes through an interactive zooming, clicking interface. Using 121 poetic/story image tiles, the artwork dynamically generates mosaics, infinitely recombining to build new connections/collections based on the users movements.