noth'rs
"noth'rs" is composed from transliteral morphs & based on: - Marcel Proust 'Du Coté de chez Swann' & the English translation by Montcrieff & Kilmartin - Jean Genet 'Miracle de la rose' & the English of Bernard Frechtman, - with additional texts from Virginia Woolf 'To the Lighthouse,' and Li Ruzhen 'Flowers in the Mirror' ('Jinghua Yuan' translated by Lin Tai-yi). - plus 'Sixteen Flowers' by Caroline Bergvall.
r e a d i n g n o t h ' r s
"noth'rs' is a navigable constellation of nodal texts (in both French and English) and transliteral morphs between those texts. The controls available are as follows:
- The 'Show Film' option takes about 12-14 minutes for a complete run though. You can interrupt it with 'Command + .'
- After choosing the 'Read' option, if you press and hold down the shiftkey you can skip the longish opening sequences.
- If you press and hold the Option (or Alt) key down while reading, a 'help' card is displayed outlining the various controls available.
- UP and DOWN move through one of many transliteral circuits, each with four natural-language nodes.
- LEFT either discovers a (Bergvall) graft or spins to a new circuit.
- RIGHT gives access to the corresponding language for a particular text at the neighbouring upwards node.
- HOME for a sequenced, clean exit (you can also just use Command+Q to quit at any time.
- The 16 one-line 'flower' texts composed by Caroline Bergvall, appear at quasi-indeterminate points when an 'left' key is pressed. Each of these are seen once and once only during any single session.
- (OTHERWISE UNDOCUMENTED) f you are at a nodal text, it is possible to click on key words (italic words are always 'key'; others must be found by guessing) in the nodal text (if they are active they will highlight once you click them). If you click on such a word, this will reconfigure the current constellation so that the forward (UP) key will take you to another node where the keyword is morphed and moved to a corresponding/related key word in a related node. If you hold down the shift key while clicking a key word (be patient) the text will morph automatically to such a related node.
- Please note: in this new version of "noth'rs" these 'key words' are like 'key points' in graphic morphing. They are picked out in the morphs by being in italic text and you can watch them both morphing and migrating to their destination positions.
- Please note also: while navigating between nodal texts, you should hear the attempts of the speech synthesizer to pronounce the transitional phases. These should be louder when the text is most chaotic and should fade away as a nodal text is approached and reached.
Severely cut-back and earlier versions of "noth'rs' appeared on the CD ROM which accompanies Performance Research 'On Line', Volume 4, Number 2 (Summer 1999), edited by Ric Allsopp & Scott deLahunta); and on the web at "Riding the Meridian" http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/cayley.html. An initial performance version was shown at Digital Arts and Culture 1999, Atlanta Georgia, 28-31 Oct, 1999.
(Source: Project site at shadoof.net)
