Instabilities 2

Instabilities 2 [...] subjects a discontinuous text to various kinds of processing. The screen is divided into three sections which counterpoint each other. The top section consists of a video made by Hazel Smith comprising twelve short texts. The middle section consists of the same material processed in the program Jitter by Roger Dean, and involves various forms of overlaying, erasing and stretching of the words. In a third section of the screen the same texts together with others which do not appear in the top movie are processed in real-time by Roger Dean by means of a Text Transformation Toolkit (TTT) written in Python. The processing substitutes words and letters so that new text emerges, together with a spoken realization of some parts of the text, new and old. The pre-written fragments circle around the idea of social, historical, and psychological instabilities, but during the processing new instabilities syntactical, semantic, and phonemic also arise.  Improvised and composed music is performed by Roger Dean, Greg White, Phil Slater and Sandy Evans. In addition, computer-synthesised voices add an aural dimension to textual change.