From #Carnivast by Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell

#Carnivast is a new work of electronic literature by Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell which explores code poetry as a series of interactive 3D sculptures/landscapes.

Available for Android phones and tablets from the Google Play store
http://www.carnivast.com

And for Windows Desktop from Dreaming Methods
http://www.dreamingmethods-store.com

Dreaming Methods presents a new work – Zone – by Andy Campbell and Jhave.

http://labs.dreamingmethods.com/zone/

With both protagonists of the story dead, only 90 seconds of (un)consciousness remain. Dark, immersive and fleetingly short-lived, Zone is situated within the most vivid 3D world we’ve realised so far, lingering hauntingly between literature and game, and pushing visual language to the limits.

On this, the day that the Mayan calendar runs out of time, I am pleased to enter into the subtle and timeless acoustiplasm of Silence Radio with a new voice castaway, In The End.

Silence Radio is a project sponsored by l’Atelier de création sonore radiophonique , a Brussels-based independent public-funded organization founded in 1996. ACSR’s main purpose is to help beginning producers and artists with their first projects in the realms of creative radio and audio. ACSR is also responsible for a festival named Radiophonic, whose last edition was in 2007, yet with a welcome resurrection promised for November 2013.

SilenceRadio was initiated in 2005 by sound artist-engineer Irvic D’Olivier, in collaboration with (among others) Etienne Noiseau, who writes:

Karinne Keithley Syers

To the attention of Netarterians: the extraordinary work of Karinne Keithley Syers, an artist-philosopher in the very best of senses; that is, one who uses all her senses.

While doing a bit of ruminative slogging through the dense sediments of the web several years ago, during one of those many times when I had the impression that creative brain activity on the planet earth had ceased, I encountered Keithley Syer’s Basement Tapes of the Mole Cabal. After listening to the entire series I still wanted more, but the basement went dark.

Perhaps a wired bird reached her ear with my request, for it seems Ms. Keithley Syers has recently renewed her mole cabal excavations, available for a very modest fee:

For an illuminating interview with Ms. Keithley Syers, carry on to Desperado Philosophy for Severe Harmony.

Let me show you the ‘trailers’ to the two resulting videos. What I’d like to show you are slideshows made of screenshots from the two videos. The videos are made of dbCinemations/collages of 53 images of me from the day I was born to my current grizzled state at 53 years of age.  The Surrey show will run from September 15 (the opening is from 7:30-9:30pm), 2012 till December 16, 2012. The show was curated by Jordan Strom.

The first trailer is at http://vispo.com/dbcinema/selfportrait2/ index.htm?n=1 . The video of which these screenshots are composed used two dbCinema brushes. One of the brushes ‘paints’ a letter from my name each frame. The other brush paints a circle each frame. Each of the brushes (usually) paints a different photo. So we see two simultaneous photos of me being drawn. The man and the baby. Etc. A brush paints a given photo for several seconds and then paints a different photo. The slideshow is composed of 47 still images.

The second trailer is at http://vispo.com/dbcinema/selfportrait3/ index.htm?n=1 . The video used one dbCinema brush: a Flash brush. In other words, the brush was a SWF turned into a mask. The shape of the brush was a curving, undulating, rotating, translated line. Each frame of the video, dbCinema rendered one brush stroke, one rendering of the brush image; the curving line’s paint was sampled from photos of me. The brush would sample from a photo for several seconds before moving on to another photo. What we’re looking at here is not the video but 17 screenshots from the video.

In the main, the man does not cohere. No coherent person emerges from this process of forcibly joining / collaging / synthesizing / remixing these 53 photos of me. It doesn’t magically tell me who I have always been. Or does it? Or if not, what does it suggest? You could say “If you don’t know who you’ve always been, no piece of art is going to clue you in.” Well I do kinda know. On the other hand, I do seem to tell myself a lot of stories.

It seems what the self-portrait does for me mainly is to problematize the notion of the existence of a person whom I have always been. The images in the video are messy. Like birth mess. Perhaps that’s part of our discomfort in life. We’re always in the midst of our own birth mess. And death stink. As Bob Dylan once observed, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

In fruiting the fungus, all I knew from the outset was that I would aim for a duration of 33:33, and that I would use translated excerpts from the Turin newspaper La Stampa as source material – reviews regarding the 1959 appearance of a young American composer named John Cage on a very popular Italian television quiz show, Lascia o Raddoppia. I was careful not to practice or rehearse the texts in any way, but to confront them in a single take, with no way to correct mushroom pronunciation mistakes.

My most extended personal conversation with Cage transpired in 1989 at an unlikely location: Skywalker Ranch. I noticed that Cage was not eating the catered food; he had his own little dish of brown rice and mushrooms. This led to a fantastic comic conversation about mushrooms, and I have since come to believe that his foraging expertise and his fascination for these strange organisms offer fresh ways to understand Cage’s philosophy of composition.

The performance he gave at Skywalker (How to Get Started) used the decompositional process of voicing a passage, then playing a recording back into the room while voicing a second section, and so on, gradually creating a rich fungal compost of words, ideas, and decay. The Skywalker auditorium was thus gradually transformed into a mush-room. This would be my structure as well, though performed in private, only made public through the radio broadcast. Each little mention in La Stampa receives its own generation, regardless of length.

Additional tracks are improvisations played by me on bowed cigar box guitar, plucked psaltery and gently thrummed turntable. I kept post-performance shaping to a minimum, and let myself be guided if not by the I Ching than by the whispers of Hermes, and by the forager’s disposition, so present in the art of John Cage.

LEAVE IT OR DOUBLE IT

Dreaming Methods Labs http://labs.dreamingmethods.com/ features 6 leading-edge digital fiction works developed using a spectrum of technologies and in collaboration with some fantastic writers/artists including Kate Pullinger, Chris Joseph, Jim Andrews, Judi Alston, Martyn Bedford, Lynda Williams, Matt Wright, Jacob Welby and Mez Breeze. The site also offers completely free source code for developing your own digital fiction works and links to highly recommended resources across the web.

Dreaming Methods Labs presents ‘R’ – an experimental digital fiction project created using WebGL – an open source 3D technology.

‘R’ follows the story of a young man who has had the same recurring dream since childhood. The narrative alternates between glimpses of his current everyday life and short recollections of conversations and incidents from when he was a boy. A 2000-word short story accompanies the work, published on Figment.com.

The project was co-written by Jacob Welby and uses visuals from Jim Andrews’ Aleph Null. It’s currently best viewed in Google Chrome.

http://labs.dreamingmethods.com/r/

Alternative Flash version
http://labs.dreamingmethods.com/r/stage3d.html

Short story
http://figment.com/books/373685-R

Joe Keenan's MOMENT in Internet Explorer

I put together a twenty minute video talking about a fantastic piece of digital poetry by Joe Keenan from the late nineties called MOMENT. Check it out: http://vispo.com/keenan/4. MOMENT, written in JavaScript for browsers, is a work of visual interactive code poetry. It’s one of the great unacknowledged works for the net.

I used Camtasia 8 to create this video. I’ve used the voice-over capabilities of Camtasia before to create videos that talk about what’s on the screen, but this is the first time I’ve been able to use the webcam with it. Still a few bugs, though, it seems: at times the video is quite asynchronous between voice and video.

Still, you get the idea. I’m a big fan of Joe Keenan’s MOMENT and am glad I finally did a video on it.