The cinematic work presents a quicktime-video of white letters on a black screen, a text written by Cayley with a translation of the chinese poem “Cadence: Like a Dream” by Qin Guan (1049-1100). John Cayley’s “windsound” is an algorithmic work presented as a 23-minute recording of a machine-generated reading of scrambled texts.
Bootz holds that "reading is a limited activity that is unable to give a complete knowing of the work." A translation from the French is given on a separate page, its content responds to what is seen and experienced by the reader. Bootz addresses the work both to a reader for the multimedia components and to a "meta-reader" whose reading accomplishment can be widened by exploring the code. This textual and visual flow is accompanied by sound that seems to go in synch with the entire composition but which is, in fact, also part of the programming. The textual elements appear as animated letters on the surface of a shockwave based picture, whose surface (like the superimposed letters) is also changing. Entry drafted by: Patricia TomaszekĪ poem with pictures and audio components whose words, composed and presented by Phillipe Bootz, are reworked by the computer freshly each time the piece is launched. In calling attention to gaps between "movement" and "meaning," between "reading" and "acting," Errand grounds its kinetic poetics in concerns of ethics and cultural politics. These visual-kinetic images heighten the tensions among the meaning-mobilizing acts of "seeing an image," "watching a movement," and "reading a word" and insofar as these works also employ cursor-activated elements, between "touching" and "reading." Errand reflects on the nature of language and of reading, and these self-reflexive elements are embedded in considerations of how protocols of reading shape our consciousness. frogs and butterflies) and the lexical and figural dynamics of the poem. In Errand, animation is used to establish links and disjunctions between images of moving objects in the natural world (e.g. In “beatitude,” Smylie quotes from Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “I saw the best minds of my generation,” while the soundtrack repeats “starving, hysterical, naked,” thus leaving the user to fill in the omitted portion of the line “destroyed by madness.” Entry drafted by: Crystal Alberts
The B-52s song "Meet the Flintstones" is the featured audio track on another page, "evolution," where the cartoon images of the Flintstones (1960-66) are superimposed on the cast photo of The Flintstones Movie (1994). For example, one page titled "the b52s" juxtaposes images of a B-52 strategic bomber with those of the New Wave band The B-52s. Burdick and Wheeler’s book was adapted for film in 1964 and for television in 2000.Ĭreated during the Y2K frenzy, “1969/99” offers a complex (and sometimes comic) cultural commentary and comparison between Cold War America and that of the Millennium. In particular, “1969/99” draws heavily on the themes and images of Fail Safe (1962) by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, in which machine malfunctions and humanity’s blind faith in the infallibility of technology accidentally cause a nuclear war. It is dominated by graphics and sound from popular culture of the 1960s and 1990s. When viewed in Internet Explorer, the user can reveal superimposed text by mousing over images. Barry Smylie’s “1969/99” features multiple hyperlinked web pages and flash animation.