Mind Machine

In this performance, an intersemiotic translation occurs between the visual artist’s demoscene videos and the performer’s live text generation. The performance continues the tradition of looking at electronic literature as something that is also created in front of a live, physically present audience. It challenges the notion of digitally native writing in that, as long as the writing is being performed by a human and not by a machine, there is always an organic, bodily dimension to everything natively digital. How can human writing then be born digital, if we are to take the term literally? In this sense, the performance re-situates the human performer. In another version of the performance, shown earlier in 2017, a robot writes in parallel and on stage with the human performer. In Porto, though, we'll leave the robot at home or have it only telepresent to bring attention to the contrast of human and machine embodiment in electronic writing. The human does not embody a privileged author in any unproblematic way, as we know from poststructuralist theory and more recently from the deconstruction of the author performed by digital media, and yet the human writer-performer continues to act as a source or node that contributes to the textual transformations that happen in and through digital media. In addition to language and video, here the two main media are machine translation and speech recognition software. The performance does not invite its audience to participate, but it is as open and transparent in its structure and implementation as possible.

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)