• Literary text-generation via Markov chains & grammars
• Integration with WordNet via RiTa.WordNet [available here]
• Analysis of Syllables, Phonemes, Stress, Part-of-Speech, etc.
• Support for verb conjugation, pluralization, and stemming
• Support for statistical tagging, chunking, and parsing
• Text-to-speech, image, and audio support for applets
• Concordances and Key-Word-In-Context (KWIC) models
• A customized behavior model for events/animations etc.
• Optional client/server mode for object persistence
• Real-time unigram, bigram & weighted-bigram measures
• Web/text-mining capabilities & a user-customizable Lexicon
• 13 Varieties of ‘easing’ for animation & textual effects

Whip smart, blissfully dense and multipronged cinema and performance; conceptual poetics, direct address, participatory movie song. Jesse Malmed presents a fascinating and manifold mix of conceptually rich video L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics, process-intensive bi-fidelity abstractedelia and participatory installations such as the multiple iterations of CONVERSATIONAL KARAOKE!! (in which audience members perform dizzying, strange and incisive texts of the artist’s design).

Jesse Malmed: artist, curator; video, film, installation, performance + text; Santa Fe, Bard College, San Francisco, Portland (, Chicago); Deep Leap Microcinema, Cinema Project, Creative Music Guild, Lasercave; Body Electronic, This Is What, Conversational Karaoke; galleries, microcinemas, bars, barns, universities, underground, skybound. The sonic, visual and (extra-)communicative potentials of language, a keen eye toward the history of experimental media art and an interest in the transcendent power of pure cinema… equal parts conceptual and instinctual, the work bears a zany levity that helps to buoy sometimes-incomprehensible​ blissmash visuals and dense textwork.” (This show also marks the release of several new publications on paper and cassette and the premieres of three new moving image works.)
www.jessemalmed.net

Located on Skwxwú7mesh territory in the heart of the city, the digital signs, facing north and south, flash a static advertisement every ten seconds. Their scale, and their proximity to the bridge makes for an assertive relationship to the pedestrians, cyclists and motorists entering and departing downtown, and this occupation of visual space has been the subject of considerable controversy.

For Digital Natives — curated by Lorna Brown and Clint Burnham — the billboard becomes a space for exchange between native and non-native communities in an exploration of language in public space. Using the form of tweets, artists and writers from across North America have contributed text messages to be broadcast during the month of April, coinciding with the 125th Anniversary of the City of Vancouver. Interrupting the flow of advertisements, the brief messages respond to the location and history of the billboard; of digital language and translation, and of the city itself.

digitalnatives.co extends the conversation, featuring a blog that captures the exchange between contributors across the continent. The contested history of the site is chronicled in text and images, and a live Twitter feed tracks public responses to the project.

Digital Natives is public art that the public not only ‘receives’, but may also produce. Contributions from First Nations young people have been gathered through a series of workshops, and local and remote audiences are invited to tweet their messages to @ diginativ to be considered for broadcast.

Public Language Trouble

Sixty messages were composed for Digital Natives: two contributions, and one Skwxwú7mesh translation were omitted before broadcast by the corporation that is under contract to manage the billboard’s content, Astral Media Outdoor. We present them below in solidarity with these respected artists:

“IMPERIAL CANADA AWARDED SEX ABUSE TO NATIVE YOUTH BY THE BLACK ROBES NOW PROUDLY BESTOWS BRONZE SILVER GOLD MEDALS WITH INDIAN IMAGE”

Edgar Heap of Birds

“Your grandparents’ unacknowledged debts return to you as rage against the car in front”

Larissa Lai

Other Sights for Artists’ Projects is dismayed at the exclusion of their work.

Contributing Artists and Writers: Candice Hopkins, cheyanne turions, Chris Bose, Christian Bok, Daina Warren, Edgar Heap of Birds, Emily Fedoruk, Henry Tsang, Jeff Derksen, Larissa Lai, Lisa Robertson, Lori Emerson, Marianne Nicolson, Mercedes Eng, Michael Turner, Peter Morin, Phillip Djwa, Postcommodity, Rachel Zolf, Raymond Boisjoly, Rita Wong, Roger Farr, Sonny Assu, Tania Willard.

Digital Natives is commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program with the support of Vancouver 125 and the participation of the Government of Canada. We are grateful for the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Museum of Anthropology, at the University of British Columbia.

About Other Sights

Other Sights for Artists’ Projects Association operates as a collective of Vancouver-based individuals with expertise in curation, project management, presentation, delivery, and promotion of temporary art projects in public spaces. Other Sights is dedicated to challenging perceptions, encouraging discourse and promoting individual perspectives about shared social spaces. We seek to create a presence for art in spaces and sites that are accessible to a broad public, such as the built environment, communications technologies, the media, and the street, supporting critically rigorous work for highly visible locations. We collaborate and share resources with organizations and individuals to present projects that consider the aesthetic, economic and regulatory conditions of public places and public life, creating new platforms for temporary artist projects in the public realm.

Follow us on Twitter @diginativ

Image above: Barbara Cole.

Extending from Afflator is a tube with an attached mask, worn by the gallery visitor to create a machinic assemblage of human and creature. Sounds from the visitor’s mouth stimulate Afflator’s activity; Afflator’s activity stimulate sounds from the visitor’s mouth. Engaged in the ecstasy of communication, human and Afflator in an assemblage work to deflate the present bubble of functional robotic design.

Afflator from Nick Knouf on Vimeo.

Afflator is in the Experimental Gallery in Olive Tjaden Hall on the Cornell University campus. For more information about its development until then, see the diary.

Scripting Writing and Reading in Jim Andrews’s Digital Poems by Manuel Portela (University of Coimbra, Portugal) :: Moderator: Noel Jackson (MIT) :: July 14, 2010.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the theoretical relevance of kinetic poetry for studying the interaction between language, digital media, and signifying processes. Several writers have been using digital poetry to investigate meaning production as a function of formal operations upon linguistic, computational, and other cultural codes. Interactive kinaesthesia, the main algorithmic trope examined here, enacts the temporality of writing and the temporality of reading in medium-specific forms and genres that call attention to the way their machine and human processing happens. The cinematic enactment of time in the combined motions of computer-executed code and human-activated display will be seen in digital poems by Jim Andrews. His scripts are analysed as models for specific semiotic and interpretive processes. Computer performance and reader performance become co-dependent and intertwined as an entangled field.

Les Belles Infidèles consists of a short story — written specifically for this project by Benjamin Rosenbaum — that has been translated and retranslated by more than 40 translators into 15 languages. The project is an exploration of the story’s compounding mutation as the translators attempt to make it work in different languages and cultures. The term “les belles infidèles” comes from a 17th century quip by Gilles Ménage in which he compared a set of translations to an acquaintance of his: beautiful but unfaithful. The phrase has come to express the tension between making a translation seem natural in the target language versus keeping it as close as possible to the original text.

The project’s source code is available under a GNU Affero General Public License and the original short story can be used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Les Belles Infidèles is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

BIOGRAPHY

The influence of Ethan Ham’s former career in game development can be seen in the art he makes. The artworks are often playful and demonstrate his continuing interest in the interaction between an artwork and its beholder. Ethan is a sculptor and installation artist who often explores themes of translation and mutation. His projects include literary/art hybrids, kinetic sculptures, and internet-based artworks. He has been commissioned by Turbulence.org (Tumbarumba and Self-Portrait), The Present Group (Anthroptic), and Rhizome.org (Email Erosion). Ethan is an Assistant Professor of New Media at The City College of New York.

PLEASE SUPPORT THE TURBULENCE COMMISSIONS PROGRAM. Go here for details.

The piece Osloo by Danish visual artist FOS is a floating social pavilion where 12 ’situation-compositions’ will take place over the course of 12 nights. Each event involves a mixture of genres that creates an alternate view on a chosen subject, in this case ‘Language’. The aim of Osloo’s events is to explore the way in which language functions as a social tool.

The pavilion is open every day from 4-12 pm and functions as a public space on the harbour. The platform consists of three “stages”: a Bar, a Stage, and the Internet radio station Grotta Nuova.

Osloo Events

Osloo is a continuation of FOS’ work with what he calls Social Design. In Osloo, FOS works with ’situation-compositions’ where different genres are combined to take on the notion of ‘language’. By mixing talks, readings, music and other forms of expression, the events draw different groups of spectators to the same evenings. In bringing together different social groups, a room for public interaction is created at the pavilion. In the same way as human language is made up of various sounds that create words and meanings when combined, the events are made up from a range of separate parts that create new meanings when put together.

FOS graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1999. Since then, he has worked with the changing conditions of the public sphere as the main direction in his artistic production.

Keynote Speaker: Jay David Bolter — Elite and Popular: Digital Art and Literature in an Era of Social and Locative Media: The relationship between digital literature and the literary mainstream has always been complicated. Despite a growing body of creative work, digital authors still have difficulty attracting the attention of traditional readers and critics. Digital (visual and performance) art has had a somewhat easier time winning recognition. Meanwhile, the future of literature and art (digital and otherwise) is itself uncertain, because the status of art has changed. The task of “saving” culture, once assigned to Art (with a capital A) seems no longer available in today’s artistic practice. Popular entertainment and the new social and locative media forms do not lay claim to the function once assigned Art; instead, they seem to deny the need for Art altogether. What roles, then, can digital literary artists and critics play in a today’s diverse and divergent media culture?

Roundtable Workshop: In order to develop language-driven technology mediated collaborative research practice, we propose a preliminary roundtable workshop involving scholars, writers, theoreticians and creative practitioners from Kingston University and other European Universities to discuss the relevance of new technologies in the creation of language mediated practice. We invite the participation of researchers, in particular, those who have just begun to consider the implications and possible use of new technologies in their research practice, as well as international researchers who have migrated from more traditional print-based research practices to multimedial and interdisciplinary research methods that make use of computers, networks, and mobile technologies.

We will also consider questions including:

• What new opportunities for expression and registers of meaning do new technology platforms bring to fiction, poetry, and art?

• To what extent are born-digital genres remediating print, and to what extent are they mixing modalities of practice between literary and artistic orientations?

• How does electronic literature change the relationships between the author, the reader, and the text?

• How do the aesthetics, conceptual ideas and theories of the avant- garde poetics become relevant in new media poetics?

• How does the individual’s creative process work in a collaborative networked environment?

• How can critics and audiences engage with digital artifacts and experiences that are interdisciplinary in nature?

• To what extent do style, visual design, and aesthetics impact our interpretation of language-based works in digital environments?

• What are the distinctions between the materiality of the page, the screen, projections, installations, and works made for immersive or mobile environments?

• What effect does technology have in the practice of writing?

• How can collaborative models of literary and artistic production in networked environments be considered in terms of authorship and literary production?

• How can we define knowledge and authorship in multimodal frameworks?

• What can traditional humanities researchers learn from the research methodologies of practicing electronic writers and digital artists about adapting their own research practice to contemporary network environments?

• Can traditional research methodologies from the humanities be used as creative practice-led research methods or do we need to establish new ways of questioning and making?

• What constitutes research in a creative work?

• How do new technologies influence our perception of orality and literacy?

• Is orality the new written form?

• How could the advent of touch devices change our way of creating and experiencing literature and language-based art?

• How can Web 2.0 platforms, social media tools and network environments enhance and implement collaborative literary and artistic projects?

In the afternoon, selected speakers from the roundtable will be presenting their practical work and there will be an opportunity for discussion.

Event convenor: Dr Maria Mencia

Imprint is a daring, site-specific work for dancers, large music ensemble and telepresence technology. It explores the resonance of cultural artifacts and stories as transmitted from place-to-place, time-to-time, and person-to-person. Music by Owen Underhill is paired with Henry Daniel’s spectacular combination of modern technology and movement.

The Imprint project began when Curator Jill Baird approached Henry Daniel to create a new work for the opening of the new Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC. Henry approached Owen Underhill who in turn brought in the Turning Point Ensemble, and a complex journey was begun. On January 23, 2010, the first project, Imprint I, was premiered at the MOA. Extensive assistance with this project was provided by Chief Robert Joseph and William Wasden, both of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation.

With this ongoing project, our intention was to explore the imprint of cultural artifacts and stories as transmitted from place to place, time-to-time, and person-to-person. As a result and given the site-specific nature of the piece and subject matter, the second version created for SFU Woodward’s and the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre is a profoundly transformed work from what was premiered in January.

This new work, Imprint II, has almost entirely new choreography, new music for the TPE and music that has been expanded from 7 to 16 instruments. New languagescapes have also been created based on interviews with participants in Imprint II, and many other original elements including the boxes designed by visual artist Alan Storey and an installation in the Woodward’s Audain gallery designed by Majid Bagheri that the dancers interact with during the performance.

6 Netartists will challenge one another into collective actions. What will happen when they will only use their mother tongue and code to communicate? — Annie Abrahams in Amsterdam (NIMk) will only speak Dutch :: Ruth Catlow in London will only speak English :: Paolo Cirio in London will only speak Italian :: Ursula Endlicher in New York will only speak German :: Nicolas Frespech in Montélimar will only speak French :: Igor Stromajer in Hamburg will only speak Slovenian.

Any malfunctioning will be part of the game and must be assumed, never panic. Nothing can go wrong, all is permitted, we can play but we don’t have to – silence is beautiful.

Internet streaming in the bram.org salon
Process Guardian : Estelle Senay

Special thanks to Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and the Région Languedoc Roussillon.