Tuesday, June 06, 2006
affectatiyuns can be dangertus
This past Friday I attended a performance by the computational artists Franziska Baumann and Matthew Ostrowski at the Slought gallery in Philadelphia. Baumann's solo performance was notably compelling. Using her voice and a complement of computational devices, she delivered a performance (with her co-star, the CyberGlove) that ranged from the haunting to the comic.
The glove (developed in collaboration with the technolgists at STEIM ) is a mechanism for holding a set of electronic sensors that allow Baumann to manipulate the sounds of her voice in a number of different ways. The glove itself is an above-the-elbow, sheer black evening accessory. Thin, segmented, metallic strips run from the glove's fingertips to its cuff, nearly to Baumann's shoulder. But these are cosmetic only--the "real" wires are openly visible, connecting the sensors in the glove's fingers to a junction box strapped to her waist. There are three main sets of sensors. Those in the fingers respond to flex and relaxation motions. Those in the wrist respond to rapid axial motions of the lower arm. A proximity sensor responds to changes in distance between the palm of her hand and another sensor, which at various times in the performance, she kept attached to her belt or held in her other hand. Finally, a set of three buttons on a small panel, which she held against her microphone, gave her additional control over the characteristics of the sounds all of this allowed her to generate.
Most interesting is that none of this equipment generates its own sounds. All of the sounds begin with her voice. The glove not only lets her mouthful the sounds of her voice, but to sustain it for extended periods. So she can strike a note and then elaborate that note electronically while strike new notes in an eerily effective duet with herself. In effect her voice was its own accompaniment.
All of this is interesting, but what made the evening so memorable was the quality of her performance. She began by striking a single very high note and holding for a very long time. She let the audience know at the outset that before she is anything else, she is a singer. During the course of her 45-minute set, she sang avocally, in German, and in English. She voiced clicks and gutturals and she puffed whispers, all the while recombining these various voicings into altogether new sounds.
There's a lesson here for us working in computational poetics. Baumann's success is possible only through her collaboration, as a accomplished musicl artist, with accomplished technologists. It takes the best efforts of both sides of the collaboration to make a piece of art that audiences will want more of.
Take Brian Kim Stefans's Kludge as an example. (BTW: The Kludge just linked is a first draft; Brian is working on a new version of Kludge as hinted here.) This is an altogether remarkable text. Never the same twice (a virtue computational writers, including me, often claim for their work), the text is nevertheless compelling. It's simply something one would want to read. (The easiest way to get a sense for the text is to keep the mouse away from the flash window when it appears, then move it around the text to the & icon. Then click. However the various texts come into being after these clicks, regardless of how they stutter and restart, they are unified with a serious singleness of purpose and a steadfast adherance to the influence of Gertrude Stein. Wonderful stuff!
But the technology is so 2005. Actually more like 1985. The work works because of the use of the fixed-width font, which essentially allows the text to be constructed within a fixed coordinate system. Letters can appear at discrete positions with easily computed x,y coordinates. The letter immediately beneath (10, 11) will be in position (10, 12). The one immediately preceding it will be at posistion (9, 11). This way letters never overlap. This would be much harder using proportional fonts. Kludge is effective because Brian is a gifted writer, a really gifted writer. The technology adds dimensions that will never be available to plain text and Brian is pretty good at that too, but he's not as good a technologist as he is a writer.
Compare Kludge with Aya Karpinska and Daniel Howe's Open-ended, a remarkable piece that they showed at E-fest 2006. This kind of programming demands a great deal from the programmer, from the complex math of the spinning cubes to getting the text to align with the moving sides to keeping the display from flickering. Very tough stuff.
When asked during their seminar presentation if they had considered expanding the program to allow other sorts of polyhedrons and more than two such shapes, their response was that to do so would require writing more texts and that the difficulty of producing quality texts was the biggest constraint working against such an elaboration. This in effect is the obverse of Kludge. Where Kludge is the work of a gifted writer with a flair for technology, we now have gifted programmers with a flair for writing.
And then there's Judd Morrissey's collaboration with Lutz Hamel. Their Error Engine would not be possible without the talents of the gifted writer paired with the gifted computer scientist. The Error Engine is text that one does want to read presented in ways impossible without AI emulation.
As computational poets seek to be heard and to bring into the world a new polemic, they would be well advised to learn from the examples of Franziska Baumann and Judd Morrissey and recognize that the very best work will have deep roots in both its disciplines.
# posted by Jim @ 7:23 PM 
