[-empyre-] Computational Poetics

[Kenneth Newby <knewby@sfu.ca>]

Happy New Year and hello to all at empyre, and thanks for this 
opportunity to engage in the community with our work coming out of the 
Computational Poetics research group.

Unfortunately our webspace was attacked by a spammer a couple of weeks 
ago so the core touch point for the Computational Poetics (CP) project 
is temporarily unavailable.  Hopefully we'll get that fixed in the next 
few days.  In the mean time there are a couple of links to point to as 
reference points.  My own contribution to this is my webspace at:  
www.eciad.ca/~knewby  There are a variety of links there providing some 
context to our current practice in digital media and papers presented 
and published coming out of CP projects.

In the meantime I'll step in with some personal reflections on the 
current work, its focus and rationales.

There are two main forms of media practice that the CP group have been 
pursuing: media installation and media performance.  These have 
provided the focus for a variety of other activities.  The main outcome 
of the installation focus is the One River (running...) installation 
that was exhibited at the Surrey Art Gallery this past autumn of 2005.  
It was composed of a multi-channel audiovisual work that endeavored to 
engage its community in the form of an expanded media space:  32 
screens for projected video and 13 channels of audio, all spatially 
coordinated to support the metaphor of the river that focussed the 
work.  A quicktime reduction of the work can be viewed at 
www.eciad.ca/~knewby/oneriverd.mov  The complete work is a variable 
cycle of approximately 17 minutes in length.  Sorry, it's a fairly 
large file.  We wanted to give some sense of the flow of time within 
the work and its narrative nature.

The second major thread of the CP braid, media performance, might be 
described as an attempt to re-introduce performance to the practice of 
cinema.  Our approach to this is to try to enable the performer to 
inscribe media objects during the performance, organize and articulate 
these as performative actions.  To this end we are developing and 
assembling performative tools for music, animation and video diffusion. 
 It's an interesting approach that has already begun to be explored by 
artists such as Living Cinema (Pierre Hebert and Bob Ostertag) and 
others, and puts us in an interesting way in a parallel situation with 
the birth of cinema in the 19th century when the shadow play inspired 
performative gestures such as Magic Lantern and other approaches using 
projected light and sound in performance.  Aleksandra will have much 
more to say about this as her current research is focussed there.

Another core concept that has been informing the work is that of a 
cinema of braided processes.  This is a concept that was initially 
inspired by Richard Schechner's reading of the differences in narrative 
presentation across cultures.  The idea is that of a narrative of 
relatively autonomous yet related media processes (visual, audible, 
textual, spatial, etc.) that interact on a phenomenological level to 
provide an open set of associations and therefore an open set of 
experiential and interpretive possibilities for the 
participant/audience/spectator experiencing the work.  My own initial 
inspiration for this focus came out of several experiences:  
participation in ensembles of freely improvising musicians as well as 
playing Karawitan in Java and Gender Wayang in Bali.  In all of these 
cases there is an interrelation of forces that maintain a dynamic 
relation between the individual autonomy of each player (a thread) and 
the overall ensemble (the braid).  This approach to organizing several 
strands of musical expression is known as heterophony, in which each 
player articulates a common musical goal in their own idiomatic 
fashion.  An image of freedom within community that allows a creative 
relationship with the whole.   Aleksandra and I have written on this a 
a potentially fruitful model of media practice: heteroform and the idea 
of the process braid.

The overall rationale for the work in media performance is to counter 
the tendency of much contemporary media practice to erase the body and 
its attendant skills.  The current move toward technopoly, to quote 
Postman, is a worrisome cultural vector and one that does not sit 
particularly well with anyone who has trained their body and 
sensibilities within an embodied practice.  My own experience within a 
university that increasingly emphasizes information technology to as 
the medium of instruction and learning has led me to consider the 
re-introduction of the body into contemporary media practice to be of 
paramount importance.  It seems, at times, that we risk throwing away 
something of intimate importance in our zeal to empower our machines.  
All too often the image of Procrustes and his terrible beds comes to 
mind.

Ciao,

Kenneth.


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Kenneth Newby — Computational Poetics
School for Interactive Arts & Technology
Simon Fraser University
Integrated Media - Emily Carr Institute
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