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1. Talking Cure

   Talking Cure is an installation that includes live video processing, speech recognition, and a dynamically composed sound environment. It is about seeing, writing, and speaking — about word pictures, the gaze, and cure. It works with the story of Anna O, the patient of Joseph Breuer's who gave to him and Freud the concept of the "talking cure" as well as the word pictures to substantiate it. The reader enters a space with a projection surface at one end and a high-backed chair, facing it, at another. In front of the chair are a video camera and microphone. The video camera's image of the person in the chair is displayed, as text, on the screen. This "word picture" display is formed by reducing the live image to three colors, and then using these colors to determine the mixture between three color-coded layers of text. One of these layers is from Joseph Breuer's case study of Anna O. Another layer of text consists of the words "to torment" repeated — one of the few direct quotations attributed to Anna in the case study.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 10.03.2011 - 10:20

2. Angels, Avatars, and Virtual Ashes

   An audio piece about online memorials.  The voice on the recording is somewhat high-pitched and sped-up, like the exaggerated whine of a self-indulgent preteen girl. As we listen to the voice reading, we realize that it is reciting a list of comments attached to a YouTube video tribute to a young girl who has been murdered. The recording is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing, filled with talk of Angels and “virtual ashes spread across the Web.” Comments like “I miss her. She’s so beautiful in the pics. Who was she?” highlight the absurd and largely shallow nature of death as filtered by the Web, at the same time as the piece somewhat uncomfortably reminds us, even as we laugh at it, that we are part of the same circus too. Caught up in our everyday use of internet-­‐based communication technologies, we may tend to be blind to political and social ramifications that our uses of technology entail. A kind of flattening takes place when discourse transpires on the Web. Activities that we might under normal circumstances consider personal or private, such as mourning, become just another form of information.

   Scott Rettberg - 28.03.2012 - 12:09