highlike

THOMAS LEBRUN

Lied ballet

“Lied, a word of German origin and gender neutral, which represents classical music sung about strophic poem, and Ballet. Lieder’s romantic themes are transformed into movement, creating choreographic writing that begins with mime and ends with abstraction. In the end, everything comes together in a great chorus challenging genres and categories, fundamentally expressing the artist’s confidence in the dancing body”. Marcia Peltier

Leonhard Lass and Gregor Ladenhauf

DEPART
The Entropy Gardens
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The Entropy Gardens is an artistic VR experience that explores one of humanity’s most archetypical artforms – garden making. It challenges its myths, aesthetics and modes of perception. Like a garden, The Entropy Gardens attempts to become a spatiotemporal poem — a poetic organism. In the form of a sprawling journey it constructs a hermetic, virtual garden as a poetic ecosystem — a psychic landscape that is foremost a complex audiovisual experience. It admits the visitor into a place that is equally challenging and contemplative (and of course profoundly weird).

NAHO MATSUDA

Tout à chaque fois
La pièce présente un commentaire continu sur l’activité de la ville dans laquelle elle se situe. La «poésie», qui est créée par un algorithme qui sélectionne et réorganise au hasard les données collectées à partir d’un certain nombre de points spécifiques au site, et est publiée sur un site Web. Les Pis tirent la poésie du site Web sur 4G, puis transmettent les adresses de lettres via Ethernet aux arduinos, puis aux moteurs en utilisant le protocole réseau I2C. L’acte de ceci déclenche alors l’algorithme pour générer un nouveau poème.

Ai-Da

“Poem for an artificial intelligence”

the sun is a beautiful thing

in silence is drawn

between the trees

only the beginning of light

this realm of rain

grey sky and cloud

it’s quite and peaceful

safe allowed

And, arguably, worse:

I am a coal-truck

by a broken heart

I have no sound

the sound of my heart

I am not

Christopher Meerdo

Metadata
These videos are networked across multiple screens that have ben sculpturally shaped into a tall arch, asserting its physical presence like boding force. Embedded within one of the video sections is a poem the artist wrote about the ties the police have to slave catchers who then became police officers after abolition. The video also separately speaks to the artist’s own personal loss, affecting the video with an additional elegiac quality of the search for a missing friend.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG

장영혜중공업
Heavy Industries
dakota
I discuss how the poem controls the reader’s experience and how this control affects its possible interpretations. The control is mostly executed by limiting the reader’s freedom over reading. Reading time, direction and duration are determined by the poem. It is only possible to start the poem, but not rewind, stop or fast-forward it. Furthermore, the manipulation of speed affects reading in many ways. In the fast extreme the effect is illegibility, but more subtly used speed creates varieties of emphasis and de-emphasis. The effect of emphasis of this kind, I argue, creates different layers of readings and invites re-reading. These different readings require different cognitive modes, which mirror our contemporary reading habits. Not being in control of the reading process also leads to a scattered sense of unity, one of postmodernism’s essential traits. While reading the poem I also question why I read as I do, and by doing so I hope to present more general traits of how to approach digital literature.

Douglas Lee

Naiad
“Douglas Lee’s Naiad takes the audience on a fascinating journey to the depths of the ocean. Fragments of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem The Kraken, a mysterious Naiad and a swarm of undulating dancers evoke the depths of an element which has long captivated the human imagination.” Stuttgart Ballet

Philip Glass

Akhnaten
Portrait Trilogy:Einstein; Akhnaten; Gandhi
According to the composer, this work is the culmination of his two other biographical operas, Einstein on the Beach (about Albert Einstein) and Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi). These three people – Akhenaten, Einstein and Gandhi – were all driven by an inner vision which altered the age in which they lived, in particular Akhenaten in religion, Einstein in science, and Gandhi in politics.
The text, taken from original sources, is sung in the original languages, linked together with the commentary of a narrator in a modern language, such as English or German. Egyptian texts of the period are taken from a poem of Akhenaten himself, from the Book of the Dead, and from extracts of decrees and letters from the Amarna period, the seventeen-year period of Akhenaten’s rule. Other portions are in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew. Akhnaten’s Hymn to the Sun is sung in the language of the audience.
OPERA

Rob Seward

Death Death Death
File Festival
“Death Death Death” is book written by an algorithm. It utilizes a word association study conducted by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. It contains over 10,000 words and their associations to each other. “Death Death Death” traces a path from each word to the word death. The book starts off with the words most closely associated to death. The beginning reads like this: Life – Death Funeral – Death Coffin – Death. Later, it takes several associative leaps to get to death: Enthusiasm – Spirit – Soul – Death Folly – Funny – Sad – Death Bahamas – Paradise – Heaven – Death Waggle – Wiggle – Worm – Maggot – Death. Reading soon becomes humorous, as every line reads like a joke-death is always the punchline. “Death Death Death” is 405 pages, contains an index so you can find any word, and a detailed description of the algorithm. Death Death Death was nominated for the 2010 File Prix Lux in the Digital Languages category.
video

RAYMOND QUENEAU

雷蒙格诺
レイモン·クノー
רמונד קנה
Раймонд Кено
OULIPO
Cent mille Milliards de poèmes
Since its arrival (the Oulipo), the rules of the group were set out as follows: “We define potential literature as the search for new forms and structures that can be used by writers in the way they will most like.” “Potential” refers to something that exists in power in literature, that is, that is found within language and that has not necessarily been explored. The favorite tool for study and production is the contrainte, an arbitrary formal restriction that can create new procedures, new forms and literary structures that can generate poems, novels, texts. Over the years, dozens of different contraintes have been explored, from those somehow related to the riddle, such as the palindrome, the acrostic, the lipogram, of which the playful aspect has certainly not been underestimated, with forms more directly related to the codes of exact sciences, such as combinatorial calculus, set theory or graph theory. Among the numerous definitions of the Oulipo provided by the members themselves, one is very elegant and significant: “An Oulipiano is a mouse that builds the labyrinth from which it is proposed to come out later”. Queneau often explained that some of his works might seem simple pastimes, simple jeux d’esprit (mind games), but he remembered that topology or number theory also arose, at least in part, from what was once called “funny mathematics“.