John Cayley, imposition
John Cayley, to whom I attribute a great deal of inspiration with regard to digital poetics, features in the Anthology in the first section of PART 2. imposition was performed at an Openned night which I regrettably had to miss. This is a shame, as it’s a piece of work which I find conceptually very interesting, and was keen to see how the concept was realised in a live setting. The Anthology coverage forms a link to the main Openned site (in the real internets) which opens up a Quicktime panorama of the Foundry setting, with the audio of the performance over the top. The inclusion of the panorama certainly is not an arbitrary aesthetic decision; part of the brief for the audience was to arrive with any laptops handy, and with the software installed and ready to go. The result is that the audience form much of the performance – an achievement strikingly visual as around 1/3 of the audience sit with their laptops all working in tandem.
The notes on imposition state that the project is “the networked performance of an evolving collaborative work engaged with ambient, time-based poetics and harmonically organized, language-driven sound.”1 As loaded as this statement may seem, it makes more sense given its origins in overboard (footnoted in imposition’s notes), a ‘textual painting’ in which, as far as I can tell, noise and a stable text interact, one emerging through the other.
Such a setup seems relevant for the performative setting of imposition, since it foregrounds a reciprocal creative process between human beings and their language, all in terms of a wider reflexive participation with the media of flesh and machine. Random generation within algorithmic constraints produce textual variations, and it would appear that the same algorithmic system has been remapped onto the compositional strategies of Giles Perring.
I hope I can participate in one of these performances soon.
Fiona Templeton, imagining being at the republican convention
Before picking up Mum in Airdrie (available here) I was really only familiar with Templeton’s work YOU–The City. Like Mum, this excerpt utilises mainly extremely short lines of text which, as I noted in Robert Hampson’s work, seem to blur the starting and finishing points of phrases. This is helped by the occasional neologism (or perhaps partial erasure), as in the following:
bang
off the realm of
eager range
sun pists down
hold you on hold
like fire spreadinga scale of dampnation
and this is where I really
oozes itself
disturb
lack of
kid knownly2
This extract scans fairly easily but turns away from comfotable closure at every turn. “pist” here could be a partially erased “piste” turned into a verb. It also phonetically demands a reading as “kissed” as in sun kissed (or even Sunkist) or (the way I like to read it) “pissed” turned into a kind of past-participle present hybrid verb. I like this reading better, as it complements the neologism “dampnation” later in the extract, a word which seems to imply wet damnation as well as simply an adjective and noun fused. “kid knownly” might go unnoticed as “knowingly” at first glance, only to refuse that reading alone. Interestingly for me, the persistent grammatical disagreements produce a plateau through which such tensions come through with exciting energy. Such has been the joy of reading Templeton’s page-based work for me.
This post has taken longer than I’d expected! I’ll carry on in my next Anthology roundup with Steve Willey’s excerpts from his extended project (to be presented as part of his MA disertation) writing through Walter Benjamin. His relationship with this project, I assume, will eventually drive him mad.
As an aside, it would be interesting if anyone has anything to add / disagree regarding my comments on these works so far. No pressure, but feel free.
- Cayley, notes on imposition, http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/impose/impnotes.html. Accessed 5th August 2007. See also the PDF download of the same notes. [↩]
- Anthology p. 52 [↩]
I’m enjoying your anthology reviews very much, it is nice to see the project through someones elses eyes and words. In regards to John Cayley’s work imposition, the panarama, as you call it, is actually navigable as it was made using Quick Time VR, something which i remember having to find out after believing for a good few minuites that John Cayley was actually capeable of magic. The fact that it is possible to actually rotate the camera angle through 360 degrees in all directions and then zoom into different parts of the Foundry provides excellent documentation for his work, as well as for the Openned night. The other thing that strikes my mind in remembering the performance of ‘imposition’ is how the reverb of the room influenced the acoustic element of the performance as well as the sounds of the road which runs overhead. The interjection of a police siren seemed to meld into the sung vowel sounds which echoed discordantly from varous places in the room. There was some discussion on the night as to the benefit of this interference from the surrounding area. Perhaps, unsurprisingly I saw this as a good thing and a ncessary element of digital work in performance. I think, regarding code/internet based work, there is a tendency to respond to the digital realm as a clean space. Having to perform digital poetics in a live and physical setting often raises questions of the work which are sometimes left unasked within the on-line space.
Hey Steve!
Yeah, I actually stumbled upon the rotationability of Cayley’s wizardry quite by accident. First time I accessed the piece I was in the back of beyond and my connection cut out, so I was faced with an eery 3D grid room much like the Star Trek Next Generation hologram rooms before they’ve loaded anything. I knew there were people waiting to load, and eventually I saw and heard them.
Perhaps due to the fact that I’ve never actually BEEN in the performance space of imposition, I’d not really considered the external sounds seeping in. I kind of hope most people considered the ‘extraneous’ noise beneficial, as I think that, as you have said, anything involving a live performance (particularly one in which the Brechtian audience / performance blur occurs) should take into account its setting. I’m with Cage on this one, I think. I believe he thought that noise was the radness.
Viva la transistance
J