repetition

Let’s Play is part of an ongoing series of games based on ancient Greek figuresand their punishments. Sisyphus, Prometheus, Tantalus, Danaids and Zeno, thephilosopher known for his paradoxes, are represented by the CPU player, thecomputer’s Central Processing Unit. In this CPU edition, the computer does it allby itself, both simulating and playing the game, cutting out the player entirely.Every time the reload button is activated, the game starts afresh. It may seemlike watching an animated GIF or a video file, but it’s the computer playing,pushing a rock or having its liver eaten. Again and again. Let’s Play presents aworld closed in on itself, behaving according to its own logic, its own code. Aworld stuck in a frustrating loop.

(source: Description from the schedule)

For me, it was the repetitions of the few words of which this poem consists, that stood out to me and I wanted to do something with that. Because the poem I chose consists of merely 13 words, chosen from a pre-existing text, I chose to give the user the possibility to generate these words in a random order, resulting in a new, each time unique poem.

(Source: Translation of the description in Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

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)

This is a remediation of a popular paper book about two friends whose names reflect their personalities. Jakob always says yes (ja) to everything, and Neikob always says no (nei). The interactivity that has been added to the app version works perfectly. Of course children love touching Jakob to make him say ja, and Neikob to make him say nei. The repetition of this interaction perfectly mirrors the repetition in the characters’ responses, which is the whole point of the narrative. Other features, like being able to turn lights on and off, also enhance the experience, which culminates in Jakob’s cunningly finding a way to make Neikob go along with his plans, allowing them to escape great danger involving a thief and a crocodile. (source: ELO conference catalog)

The Triolets is an Alamien combinatory program created by Paul Braffort. The program was presented at the Centre Pompidou in the “Les Immatériaux” exposition in 1985 before being presented on the Alamo website in the 1990s by Eric Joncquel. The program is based on the triolet; a poem with a fixed form of two stanzas in an a b a a a b a b rhyme structure that dates back to the Medieval ages. The fixed structure of the poem lies in the repetition of verses 1 and 2 in verses 4 and 7, and 8 respectively. In his program, Paul Braffort substitutes the verses of 6 original compatible triolets at random with the stylistic constraint that characterizes the poem to create 7,776 different poems. The random combination of the 6 original poems is exponential in nature (6^5). As a result, this program is similar to “Cent Mille Milliard de Poèmes” by Raymond Queneau, but with a smaller number of possible outcomes.
In the Triolets program, the user plays both an interpretative and an exploratory role. It is up to the user to interpret the poem that he or she comes across during the “exploration” of the scripton. Due to the fixed structure of repeating verses that limits the amount of poems that can be produced, it is not difficult for users to determine the theme of the work. In the possible poems, one can find themes such love and death, two rather traditional themes that complement the traditional structure of the poems themselves. This characteristic allows for a feeling of control in the program. Despite the high number of possibilities, the recycling of themes predisposes the user on what might be read, hence providing a feeling of control. Nonetheless, the poems succeed in stimulating the users emotionally due to the themes that are used. Thus, these poems can be characterized as baroque in literary nature due to the formality and the lyrical aspects, but also the variation.

(Source: Sergio Encinas)

Very little information about this work is available online. P. Sugarman writes that "Ambulance is about some Gen-Xers who run into a string of spectacularly bad luck involving a car accident and a serial killer disguised as an ambulance driver. One of the most effective elements here is the music sampling. The droning repetition of the musical phrases, over & over while you absorb slices of the story, gives the whole experience an obsessive, claustrophobic feeling." (http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/CyberCulture/ambulance.htm)