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poetry beat : nicolas collins & jonathan chen / judd morrissey & lori talley
Friday May 14 at 3030
A Discrete Series event
Nicolas Collins and Jonathan Chen begin the evening by doing a "talk poem" on the topic of Donald Rumsfeld's use of language
"Rumsfeld actually has changed language, hasn't he?"
They carry on in this vein for a while, analyzing Rumsfeld's public appearances, and politics in general, as "performance work"
"I think of [Rumsfeld] as a sound guy—I'm not impressed by the visual ... if you're successful in certain terms like body count you stop worrying about how you look on camera"
The dialogue occasionally seems to trigger a computer to play small clusters of piano notes. The notes seem not only triggered by the speech but also determined by it—some of the notes' characteristics (most notably pitch) match the characteristics of the dialogue. It seems as though the computer is algorithmically converting chunks of the "speech-matter" into short bursts of "piano-matter."
Accordingly, the speech, at times, touches directly on the topic of conversion processes—Collins discusses how, in reading to his young son, he noticed that "all that mattered" was the inflection of what he was reading, not so much the content
"I would take whatever I was reading and intonate it in the style of Dr. Seuss ... I pushed the Autobiography of Janis Joplin through the sieve ... it's like vocoding."
It seems very much like in this performance, the computer is, similarly, "sieving" music out of the dialogue
This process may be intended as the central focus of the performance, as the dialogue itself eventually begins a long slide into increasingly banal territory, to the point where it begins to attain the status of comedy (with Chen, who punctuates Collins' long flights of digression only with occasional brief responses, serving as the "straight man")
Eventually the conversation stops, but the piano continues to play "algorithmic jazz." Chen improvises along with it on the violin and Collins blows into a box that produces odd electronic sounds. The overall result is similar to a performance I saw a while back, where George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell improvised against a computer-controlled grand piano. There may be a thematic point here about the similarities between conversation and improvisation? But are the two phases of the performance akin to one another? The improvisational segment seems more collaborative than the dialogue (which was predominantly a punctuated monologue)
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Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley are presenting a piece of software they call the "Error Engine": "an attempt to write the book that writes itself"
"a tool for self-organizing language"
"a page rewriting and reconfiguring itself"
"we are developing our tool in the context of creative evolutionary systems"
This speech alternates between Morrisey's description of the program and Talley's more lyrical description of the demolition of a building (video of a demolition site is playing behind them). The hybrid nature of this dialogue is key, as the Error Engine is essentially a device which creates a hybrid text by connecting several "text nodes" appropriated from various sources
Morrissey begins to (verbally) bracket Talley's lyric phrases with markup code, indicating how an operator might mark up code in order for it to be manipulated by the Engine
"our current research is concerned with allowing the engine to acquire its own text" (via the Internet—shades of the Google poem here)
They collectively demonstrate the software: Morrissey reads through a block of text on the screen. Talley repeats a word and Morrissey clicks on that word, which splices in a new chunk of text somewhere nearby, whereupon Morrissey begins to read through the text again
There's a point about repetition and variation here although after a while Morrissey (having grown nervous about the high level of repetition?) switches to only reading the new chunks as they appear, which mildly erodes the point about the text as an object which gradually mutates itself—it begins to seem more like the point is just that each click serves up some fresh new text, which I don't think is the theoretical angle they're going for here
The various texts include a description of an AB85 Harrier jet, more narratives of demolition, first-person narratives about performing in the theatre
The key forerunner here seems to be Burroughs' cut-up machine, although the Engine seems to have a greater control over the lexical relationships here—it rarely, if ever, breaks a sentence in the middle—so there's less junk syntax in the "end result." A more orderly mosaic, overall. |
