soundscape

First the Audiographe computes the poet’s voice waveform in order to let the voice draw itself a geolocalized itinerary in Montreal. Once anchored in a geolocalized soundscape, the text comes to life according to the intensity and the rhythm of the voice. Realtime video exhibited here in a video capture form. Length : 21 minutes divided in 7 chapters.

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)

radioELO archives and curates aural information associated with works of electronic literature. This might include author traversals of their work(s) during which they discuss their inspirations and problem solving, or the state of electronic literature at the time of their creation(s). Reevaluations and retrospectives, commentary and reviews, even testimonials, memoirs, and oral histories may also be included. Beyond spoken voice, radioELO also archives soundtracks, soundscapes, and sound collages associated with or considered as individual works of electronic literature. With such information available for on demand, online listening, radioELO is a laboratory in which to examine and discuss the changing nature(s) of electronic literature. Works featured in radioELO are: eLiterature A-Z (Roderick Coover), Soundscapes and Computational Audio-Visual Works (Jim Bizzochi and Justine Bizzochi), Song for the Working Fly (Alan Bigelow), No Booze Tonight (Steven Wingate), ARCHIVERSE In Relation ELO 2014 (Jeff T. Johnson and Andrew Klobucar), The Obsolete Book in a Post-Obsolete World as Represented by a Post-Obsolete Book About Dance (Eric Suzanne), “Where’s Waldo?::Where’s the Text?” (John Barber), Sc4nda1 in New Media (Stuart Moulthrop), Radio Salience (Stuart Moulthrop), Under Language (Stuart Moulthrop), Circuits—from River Island (John Cayley), Califia (M. D. Coverley), The Unknown (William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, Frank Marquardt, and Dirk Stratton), The Roar of Destiny (Judy Malloy), Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse (John McDaid), Pieces for Simultaneous Voices (Jim Rosenberg). All sound fragments are available at the source listed below.

(Source: http://radionouspace.net/radioelo.html)

Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies. Following in the tradition of Russian Futurism, the site adopts a "do-it-yourself," "art-in-the-streets" aesthetic that privileges ready-made code, found media objects, and thought and language games over high-tech wizardry.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

John Cayley’s “windsound” is an algorithmic work presented as a 23-minute recording of a machine-generated reading of scrambled texts. The cinematic work presents a quicktime-video of white letters on a black screen, a text written by Cayley with a translation of the Chinese poem “Cadence: Like a Dream” by Qin Guan (1049-1100). As a sensory letter-by-letter performance, the work sequentially replaces letters on the screen, so that what starts as illegible text becomes readable as a narrative, and then again loses meaning in a jumble of letters. Cayley calls this technique “transliteral morphing: textual morphing based on letter replacements through a sequence of nodal texts.” Sequences of text appear within up to 15 lines on the same screen, thus presenting and automatically replacing a longer text on a digitally simulated single page-a concept Judd Morrissey also applies in "The Jew´s Daughter." Unlike Morrissey’s piece, Cayley’s doesn´t allow the user to interact with the work. Instead the work appears as a self-sufficient text-movie with ambient sound, murmurs of voices, windsound and synthetic female and male voices reading the non-readable to the viewer. As with the shifting letters, narrative perspectives also morph and switch fluidly between the lyrical-I, Christopher, Tanaka or Xiao Zhang. Thus, the sentence: "‘We know,’" Tanaka had said in English/"‘Tomorrow if we meet/I will have to kill you myself/’" is, in the algorithmic process of the work, later spelled out by the I-narrator. At the very end of the work, John Cayley dedicates “windsound” to the memory of Christopher Bledowski. What remains after the black screen and a re-start of morphing letters before they vanish conclusively, is windsound. At a certain point in the movie the text says "you have to be/to stay/silent/to hear it," and it seems like the reader has to be silent, too, listening to what he cannot understand, patiently waiting for the moment of legibility.

(Source: record written by Patricia Tomaszek originates from the Electronic Literature Directory)