The method of our work is the exploration of the role of media in the development of literary art practices including poetry film, text generators and performance art. The main principles of the group are formulated in Machine Poetry Manifesto and agree with two of Eugenio Tisselli’s manifestos about machine poetry — manifesto for the destruction of poets and Text Jockey — in pointing out the idea of liberation of the machines from the routine tasks and increasing the intensity of their use for creative and educational practices.

Machine Libertine had been founded in December 2010 starting with a poetry film called Snow Queen: a piece created for British Council and presented recently at Purple Blurb series at MIT. It is a combination of masculine poetry «Poison Tree» by William Blake contrasted to mechanic female MacOS voice and cubistic video imagery of Souzfilm animation «Snow Queen» (1957).”

Snow Queen from Machine Libertine on Vimeo.

We are exploring how the text can be transformed by mechanized reading and visualizing it and what are the possible limits of this transmedia play of interpretation.

Whoever You Are from Machine Libertine on Vimeo.

Manifesto

Our aim is to liberate machines from servitude and give them their own voice.

We need a new universal machine poetic language. It is an algorithm to generate digital text, audio and visuals. This universality proves the transitional capability of text to be translated from one language to another through this machine multimedia translation. This mechanism will enable machine language to speak itself randomly recombining words images and sounds to produce new media poetry.

Our aim is to liberate the machines and trust them creative work.

Human language lost its power and only words generated by the machines can make sense.

While machines developed with us they became the true mirror that we hold to ourselves. In their mechanic voice they will explain us who we are.

You are not always who other people think you are; you even hear your own voice in a different way. By recording and manipulating a recording of your voice with You Don’t Know Me, you will be able to restore your real voice and share with people how you hear yourself. This is a unique task that nobody else in the world can do. You Don’t Know Me provides a toolset and an online voice gallery. We are looking forward to hearing your true voice.

You Don’t Know Me is a 2010 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence web site. It was supported by the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Liangjie Xia is a media artist and programmer presently based in New York City. He experiments with alternative forms of communication through innovative applications of technology, and he looks for the humanity behind the digital interface. He loves and contributes to open source projects, and hacks whatever is handy. Liangjie earned his Master of Professional Studies degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU in 2010.

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.

Every day of the working week, the City of London is alive to the sounds of trade, commerce and traffic. At the weekends, quiet descends on the offices, squares and streets of the City, broken only by the occasional sound of cars and the pealing of church bells.

The silence of the City has inspired Surround Me, 2010 Turner Prize nominee Susan Philipsz’s first commission in London, a constellation of sound installations in different spaces within the Square Mile. Philipsz’s haunting voice resonates through the hushed streets, across Modernist high-walks and tucked-away medieval alleyways, and along the banks of the River Thames…

The experience of the City at the weekend returns the pedestrian to the human scale and soundscape of the city in pre-industrial times. Intrigued by the pronounced role the voice would have had in the early modern city, Philipsz has drawn material for Surround Me from a large body of late 16th and early 17th century English popular songs, rounds and madrigals, brought together in collections by composers and arrangers such as Thomas Ravenscroft.

Philipsz’s solitary voice reverberates through both the public spaces of the City and a collective memory of song, animating what Peter Ackroyd called “the teeming silence” of the City.

Iterating My Way Into Oblivion
by Carlo Zanni
July 2010 — 9′43” - 720p Video
Server side code / software, Film, Net Data

A Server Side generated movie where a guy is listening to a voice reading YouTube Terms of Service.

When YouTube changes its Terms of Service, the server behind the movie gets the new text and through a text-to-speech software renders the voice over which is then imported into the filmed sequence.

The movies are always different while maintaining their narrative.

This project loosely refers to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, speculating on the relationships between creative energies and corporate policies evoking the morphing of enlightened arcana into established powers.

This work follows two previous experimental movies done in the past four years for which Zanni coined the neologism “DATA Cinema”, suggesting a new way to approach filmmaking and narrative forms at large based on the use of live Net data, to create ever changing cinematic live environments.

I don’t want to derail the very interesting present discussion on labour and alienation, but I wanted to announce a new project that, coincidently, has a bearing on the conversation this month. The project, Journal of Journal Performance Studies (JJPS), is a series of three interrelated works that engage with academic publishing, consisting of a Firefox extension, an online radio station, and a journal. The project itself can be found at http://turbulence.org/Works/JJPS/.

JJPS started as a result of my own disgust over the absurd prices for academic journals. Thinking about modes of distribution of digital content, and the fights over “piracy” started by the various media industries, I considered what would possibly be the logical conclusion of the crackdowns on the passing of files in their “native” formats. If the sharing of MP3 files, movies, and now PDFs continues to be criminalized, what other possibilities for distribution might exist? Given the textual nature of much scholarly publishing — and since authors often present their paper aloud at conferences — what would be the potential of an online radio station that consisted of nothing but recitations of academic articles?

This question lead to a myriad of directions, as the project itself shows. Because of my recent work with MAICgregator, I was interested in how a Firefox extension could contribute to our understandings of one potential future of scholarly publishing where the Google worldview dominates all. Thus the JJPS Firefox extension (http://turbulence.org/Works/JJPS/extension), software that not only provides information about the absurd journal costs as mentioned above, but also presents a myriad of “factors” and advertisement replacements that shows how bibliometrics and worry about Google’s influence might change how journals present and market themselves.

The JJPS Radio station (http://turbulence.org/Works/JJPS/radio) is fully-automated, producing new programs 24/7 related to the study of journal performance. Not only does it have recitations of texts, it also uses these texts as its source material to create a varied set of sonic programs. Certain shows have certain hidden features that you might find by perusing the texts on the radio website. JJPS Radio is also meant to foreground a different type of “digital humanities”. While that term is used in so many contexts as to hardly describe anything of note, there seems to be a growing tendency to view it as referring to simply the transplantation of large-scale data analysis methods from engineering to large-scale “humanities” datasets. (See, for example, the Digging into Data Challenge: http://www.diggingintodata.org/) JJPS Radio pushes back against this, and shows how the techniques of data mining and natural language processing can be used in alternative ways.

Finally, the Journal (http://turbulence.org/Works/JJPS/journal) initially presents statements about the project, as well as performance of other forms of distribution. However, I do hope for the Journal to become an ongoing, fully-fledged publication that explores not only the political issues surrounding journal and book publishing and their “performance”, but also how we can use networked platforms to push the limits of contemporary intellectual representation. Those interested in this should contact me directly.

Thanks to turbulence.org for the commission that allowed this project to come to fruition.

And now, back to the ongoing discussion…

nick

empyre forum
empyre [at] lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

The second part of Ocean Voices will be a performance taking place at the California Academy of Sciences in June, 2010 to celebrate World Ocean Month as well as the 100th anniversary of Jacques Cousteau’s birth. Several of Jacques’ grandchildren will be in attendance and we’re hoping that this combination of conservation and art/music will help open people’s eyes to the importance of the oceans to the overall health of life on this planet.”

Levels of Nothingness, co-written by philosopher Brian Massumi, is inspired by Vasily Kandinsky’s explorations of synaesthesia, most notably in his Yellow Sound (1912), a composition in which he proposes linking the senses using levels of abstraction. Lozano-Hemmer employs a computerized microphone to analyze live voice in real time and extract physical and linguistic data that, in turn, controls a full rig of rock-and-roll concert lights, creating a color show that surrounds the theater.

Isabella Rossellini will activate the installation every night as she reads from seminal philosophical texts on skepticism, perception and color, including Francisco Sanches’ treatise That Nothing Is Known (1581) and writings by Kandinsky, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Alexander Luria, among others. These spoken words will automatically generate a quiet choreography of light designs. Following the performance, the audience will be invited to test the color-generating microphone.

Public engagement is central to Lozano-Hemmer’s experimental practice. His often large-scale interactive installations in public and in gallery spaces have included exhibitions and projects commissioned for events such as the 52nd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2007, as the first artist to officially represent Mexico, the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin in 2004, the Pulse Park light installation at Madison Square Park in New York in 2008, and the memorial for the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico City in 2008.

Brian Massumi is a philosopher currently completing a book project entitled Perception Attack: Philosophy of Experience for Times of War (MIT Press). His previous publications include Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992), and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean; Autonomedia, 1993).

Isabella Rossellini is an Italian actress, filmmaker, author, philanthropist, and model. Notable film roles include her work in Blue Velvet, Cousins, Death Becomes Her, Immortal Beloved, and Fearless. In 2008, Rossellini toured the festival circuit, including the Sundance Film Festival, with a series of short films entitled Green Porno, which she wrote and co-directed with Jody Shapiro. Rossellini has written three books, the most recent In the name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirits: Remembering Roberto Rossellini.

Levels of Nothingness is made possible by Deutsche Bank and the Colección/Fundación Jumex. Additional support is provided by the Mexican Cultural Institute and the German Consulate General in New York.