Penumbra is a hybrid art/literature application in development for the iPad. It expands “ebook” conventions by carefully integrating video, illustration and fiction. These media work equally together to inform the total reading. Tablets are a promising literary medium with the potential to redefine our reading practice beyond a simple emulation of print on screen. Increasingly, ebooks could represent a growing platform for the consumption and dissemination of media art: a platform that is inherently interactive and readily mobile.
Investment in actively reading the interface relies on our experience with interaction design; the goal is to implement touch-screen gestures in service of the story’s content. Touching and tilting the screen places the reader in the position of the main protagonist. The reader can use the interface to decide how long the protagonist focuses on his external vs. internal world. The duration of focus changes the parameters of the next available scenes. Scenes follow a modern retelling of “the Book of Judith” as told from Holofernes’s perspective. His perspective is represented in two worlds: the protagonist’s internal world of floating text, animations, video flashbacks and the external world of video detailing the protagonist's day-to-day experience. These two worlds become increasingly conflated as the story progresses and the reader depletes the protagonist's ability to view the external world. Allowing the reader to switch worlds at will permits them to engage in an exploratory reading, while still situating the story in an overarching narrative. Penumbra addresses an essential quality of media art: ephemerality. Within the tablet's screen, the story modifies itself even as it is encountered.
Completely Automated, is part scholarly paper and part semi-fictional exploration of how our written histories are forged through the interplay between human and machine editing. To elucidate the editing process, this project examines online archiving initiatives such as the reCAPTCHA project. The reCAPTCHA project harvests answers from reCAPTCHAs to preserve and archive old manuscripts via a recursive authoring between users and automated processes. Essentially, even a slight deviation from the original may escape the loop’s filters and be preserved digitally as a final authoritative text: our cultural heritage. Meanwhile, the original print is less conveniently accessible than the digital version and begins to lose authority within its physical library archive. Completely Automated contextualizes the role of the reCAPTCHA as guard field which grants a human user access to online content, while rejecting computer programs that attempt to gain access by simulating human responses. We are able to pass a reCAPTCHA test because it privileges types of language recognition that humans can complete better than machines—thus suggesting that these processes help define us as human and are what, currently, best distinguish human cognition from that of a machine’s.
When screened in May of 2010, this short film was put in context by two readings from the document's evolution (chronicled in the slide-show below). The author's original print document preceded the video. At the video's conclusion, the results of users' imprints on the document–after it was digitized by Optical Character Recognition–were uploaded to an online archiving site and publicly read. The following slide-show shows the first page at different stages of the project. Download the PDF for full documentation of the document's evolution. Ambient backtracks are "Sailor" and "Window" by The Album Leaf.
When this project was first conceptualized in late 2008, it was executed in the name of a forged foundation: The Lara Wes Foundation. The mission statement of the Lara Wes Foundation reads as follows:
The Lara Wes Foundation was established 2006 in the memory of Lara Wes, head archivist for the National Library Catalogue, by her husband Robin Day Wes and niece Alice June Wes. The Foundation aims to honor Lara’s commitment to the preservation and cataloguing of public domain manuscripts. Lara Wes dedicated her life to her belief that literature should be both accessible and maintained. New and improving technologies have permitted texts to become available to anyone over the Internet. New technologies have also afforded the opportunity to quickly and accurately recover aged manuscripts for preservation purposes. By supporting a community centered upon fixing and archiving out of print manuscripts, we are at last able to preserve their true intent, so that anyone may benefit from their content.
To expose the irony behind the Foundation, an application was counterfeited to appear as though it might have been released by Lara Wes.
Lingua Version 1 debuted at the 2009 Pixilerations festival in Providence, R.I. This iteration was a interactive installation in the form of a real-time SMS text visualizer. Users submitted texts from their cellphones composed from simple English words in the project’s symbol key. The symbol key acted as a lexicon that showed how English words mapped to symbol graphemes representing general human core-concepts. Through this process, gallery participants were able to leave messages in the symbol language Blissymbolics, which reduces language to core-concepts. Each text received by the Lingua system was posted to the conversation thread pictured above. Patterns of reoccurring core-concepts were then marked in black throughout the thread. Both the thread and Bliss/English symbol key were projected in a gallery space. The projection responded to the physical presence of a gallery viewer by activating the symbol key and prompting his participation. This incarnation is a precursor for a series of future projects the Lingua Ignota Team wishes to disseminate in the Philippines: where SMS is a primary mode of communication. The goal is to facilitate a cross cultural exchange of these core-concepts between English and Tagalog; thus, permitting a rural demographic to participate in digital art on a global scale.
Lingua Version 2 was based on project 1. Data was obtained online through three rounds of translation exercises completed over a month by diverse participants. A pdf with info graphics detailing the process can be found below as well as an example of one of the translation websites. The following is a poly-vocal performance of the project's arc and results.
Lingua Ignota, meaning “Unknown Language,” is a collaboratively authored transference of lexical meaning between language systems. Multi-tiered rounds of transcription exercises were relayed between translation communities. Lingua Ignota is concerned with the resulting evolution/slippage of language, especially at the sites of deviation and collision with the author's original text. Translation rounds yielded the project’s secondary motive: the literal unfolding of an author’s text as it is re-interpreted/curated by a communal readership. To what degree does our subjective reading form another’s interpretation; hence, to what degree does it influence a total communal interpretation? Within the communal process of forming a consensus, the author’s original intent is moderated piece-meal until its supremacy as the “authoritative” document is overhauled. The author may accept or reject this outcome; however, from the moment of the text’s public release, it is no longer bound to the author’s intention.
Blissymbolics was selected as a language system for its impact as a visual language and the ability to break it down into base-concepts and rebuild it into new semantic combinations. Grapheme characters function as base concepts that link with other bases in order to suggest more complex concepts. This segmented construction permits a specific type of parsing. Parsing in this way leaves more room to easily promote a slippage of meaning in how the text is defined, combined and interpreted.
Invisible Monuments pays homage to Providence's folklore and forgotten architecture by situating its popular stories and historical landmarks within a Phantasmagoric peep show: a ghostly spectacle projected through the lens of the Victorian Magic Lantern. The pre-cinema lantern, along with its cousins the diorama and the stereoscope, are poetically re-imagined and enhanced by contemporary projection, video, and animation techniques in order to reveal the phantoms of Providence's past.
The steamer trunk is a free-standing antique with a periscope slider at the front. Embedded electronics let the user push or pull the handle to control the timing of three elaborate dioramas crafted inside. These dioramas are a conflation of virtual and physical objects. The technique “Pepper's Ghost” is used to reflect holograms of projection mapped models of the city onto the physical diorama. In addition to the layers of projection mapped holograms and physical models, a computer monitor built into the back of the trunk serves as a video backdrop.
Providence's history, in particular the evolution of its culture and architecture, was the primary inspiration behind Invisible Monuments. In the poetry of how the diorama exists: as a facade, a storefront, we found parallels into how Providence itself developed. We aim to pay homage to the monuments that now only exist in the illusion of memory. Simply, way-stations of “what use to be there” that exist only as a landmark for giving directions to existing destinations. In describing Providence and its sensibilities we have found it appropriate to invoke our fascination with merging old and “new” technologies. This style not only mirrors the unique architecture of Providence, but it also reflects that, in the combination of digital and analog/antique and contemporary, we find a cycle of decay and re-development.
"Canticle" was written for Brown University's CAVE immersive virtual reality environment. Like a concerto, it was composed in three movements and arranged for collaborative performance between a solo user and programmed VR environment. In "Canticle", The CAVE system and its user operate in concert: rendering the world through cooperation and opposition.
The tone of "Canticle" plays upon the spectacle of VR by inducing an aesthetic environment that is overly saturated despite its basic composition of greyscale letterforms. Evocative text and audio were used to assist this effect: "The Song of Solomon" and Nico Muhly's MotherTongue. A study of "The Song" resonated with the project's themes: the seduction of spectacle and awareness of a physical body within immersive spaces of illusion. Movements were written in response to spectacles that are native to the CAVE. Description of each movement refers to the specific quality of spectacle it explores: periphery, reactivity, stereoscopy, interface, depth or immersion.
Along with the author’s original poetry about spectacle, the piece is also comprised of selections from the "Song of Solomon" processed by a computer program written by the author. Output from the program was then edited for form and content. The body of the text is available in the pdf below; however, because Cave Writing promotes spatial hypertext, the text is not likely to be encountered in the CAVE in the linear order presented.
In the video documentation of "Movement 1: When the Eye" Asmina Chremos dances the physical gesture of reading through the interface of the CAVE. Her exquisite movements focus on the discrepancy between what the person wearing the tracking glasses sees and what the audience reads. For example, midway through the performance, the text is programmed to evade the dancer as she tries to engage with it: the text is programmed to only be legible to the audience outside the CAVE.
