slippingglimpse
In slippingglimpse, we model a ring in which the roles of initiator, responder, and mediator are taken by all elements in turn. Our mantra for this: water reads text, text reads technology, technology reads water, coming full circle. Reading then comes to mean something different at each stage of the poem, in all cases involving sampling. Ryan reads and captures the image of 'chreods' (dynamic attractors) in water. Strickland's poem text, by sampling, appropriating, and aggregating artists' descriptions of processes of capture, reads this process of capture. And the water reads, via Lawson Jaramillo's motion-capture coding, by imposing its own sampled pattern. A variety of reading experiences are enabled: reading images while watching text; reading in concert with non-human readers, computer and water; reading frame breaks (into scroll or background); or reading by intervening. For instance, reversibility and replay are available on the scroll, as are reading in the direction and speed you wish; while, in the water, regeneration of text is available, as are unpredictable jostling and overlays.
(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Videographer: Paul Ryan
A longer description, with reading options described: Human language struggles to credit the capability of the other-than-human. Even as praise and description flow freely, human speakers reserve agency and judgment to themselves. Writing that honors the agency of animals does so in terms that disallow machine or mineral intelligence. In attempting to know, humans slice arbitrarily through entangled wholes. slippingglimpse, by contrast, reconstitutes an entangled whole. slippingglimpse is a collaborative interactive piece made with Flash software incorporating ocean videos shot off the coast of Maine. In this poem, water waves “read” words of text, words of text “read” the state of technology, and video technology “reads” patterns in the waves, coming full cycle. slippingglimpse credits the ocean with language, “understood in the broadest sense as a semiotic system through which creatures ‘respond’ to each other,” in the words of Cary Wolfe. In the FULL-SCREEN opening mode, phrases of poem text are “read” by the water; that is, they are mapped to its patterns. These patterns are called chreods and are the words of the water’s language. (For more about words in a multi-dimensional environmental language, see René Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis.) Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo’s programming here adapts the text to the water rather than for human reading. In SCROLL TEXT mode, text appears at human scale; it “reads” technology by sampling and recombining words from four sources: 1) artists interviewed in two issues of YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology; 2) Hildegarde of Bingen; 3) a Silesian folktale, The Passion of the Flax, which explores ancient technologies of harvesting plants for food and flax for paper; and 4) Strickland’s own words. In HI-REZ VIDEO mode, the chreod patterns are most easily grasped, as captured and “read” both by the camera and by the videographer. Paul Ryan’s technical interventions are guided by long apprenticeships in ecology and topology. In SCROLL TEXT mode, readers coming to the piece may contribute their own readings by using the sliding pointer to control speed and direction of scrolling. They can choose to view images, read text within images, read text breaking across the frame of the video out into the blackness or down into a column of scrolling text, or they may read text of either column in any order they wish, pausing (freezing) or rewinding the scroll at will. They can read in concert with the water or read by intervening; they must continuously decide how to direct their attention. In all video modes, readers can click “regenerate” to swap new random selections of text from the scroll into the water. Questions asked implicitly here: Where does exploitation (of earth, of cosmic, resources) begin? How do humans “read” it, justify it, and to whom?
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