Philip Durham Bird Pyrotechnics and Polemics

April 23, 2010

Ethereal Manifestations: The Spoken Word Artist as Cybernaut

Presentation Speech Text: ***: Marks paragraphs I can cut for time >>>>: Marks video or interactive segments Media Prep: 1: Introversion.com: 04.26.2009 art walk ~ 1 min. 2: Ursonate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgNL8-FdG-k to 1:30. 3: Pitch Paint: http://www.tmema.org/messa/messa.html#videos -select Pitch Paint: ~1min, or until Blonk says SHHH! 4: AR Demonstration: ~1min 5: Shane Koyzcan: We are more - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWZwIpvGQXw - ~1:20 at cheering pause. Media Time: ~6min Talk Time: ~14min

Philip Durham Bird Pyrotechnics and Polemics

April 23, 2010

We live in exciting times, and this is no less true for Spoken Word. The Spoken Word artist has an unprecedented position afforded to it by the introduction of electronic media into the mainstream, and into the bloodstream of the body of modern poetry, which has been dominated in the public conscious as a mostly academic form. The Spoken Word artist, with a YouTube account and a copy of a video recording suddenly has a reach that expanded exponentially from the coffee shop poetry open mic or slam to anybody with internet. Established artists often have websites, or belong to consortiums that do. Experimentation with visual poetry and creative editing generate landscapes that collide visual and auditory sense apparati. At the 2003 Ars Electronica festival, the electronic media Oscars, Japp Blonks Ursonate performance blended oral, aural, and visual components. Blogs harness the power of Macromedia Flash to create visual text events that can trigger sound. Esquire Magazine uses Augmented Reality Software to integrate a mediated layer composed of video, sound, and text. ***Technologys explosive power like Nobels invention of dynamite is reshaping the environment in which Spoken Word is performed, as we speak. What I aim to explore are the forms that have manifested in this strange ether, to point towards possibilities and seek out the strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. Ahem. I mean to boldly go where no academic paper has gone before. Internet accessibility is the most simplistic yet significant theme to consider when engaging in a discussion about new media and spoken word performance. Anybody with an internet connection capable of streaming video and audio is capable of accessing the poetry which will be explored here. What this means is that poetry is not necessarily contained by physical limits such as the four walls of a coffee shop, or the embedded magnetic resonances of cassette tape. Accessibility means that the problem of audience shifts from three dimensional and temporal problems of distribution to that of simple exposure or mediation. Word of mouth, via link lists of videos, email and Facebook or Twitter these are the most direct way audiences are exposed to these works. The primary obstacle facing the more experimental poetries online is that they are developed within the context of the avant-garde end of the cultural field.

Philip Durham Bird Pyrotechnics and Polemics

April 23, 2010

So what we have are Blonk and other experimental artists positioned closer to Bordieus autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at - is other producers (as with Symbolist poetry) (Bordieu 39). The internet levels the playing field of cultural production, so many of Blonks works and those of his colleagues are online and thereby accessible. However they yet remain outside of the current cultural zeitgeist. Due to their positioning on the field, they have little exposure. But were getting ahead of ourselves. First, in order for the Spoken Word artist to fully don the suit of the cybernaut, to fully explore the vast dark depths of the space of cyber, they must acquire a set of technological competencies or techniques. The Spoken Word artist is often starting out from dominated position in the cultural field, in our culture, somewhere between used car salesmen and preacher, requiring the artist to evolutionarily adapt and, as Michel de Certeau has observed: TO always [be] on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on the wing [they] must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities. The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them, (xix). Thus, in order to navigate this ethereal realm, one must be reasonable familiar with technology geared towards producing the pieces the artist desires. Specific knowledge becomes advantageous: recording video and audio, interfacing with video hosting sites, creating, maintaining, and hosting a website, and/or twitter account. *** The barrier to exposure may again indeed be a technical competence and personal marketing and it may be this competence that will separate a new generation of both Spoken Word artists and poets from the last. Tech Columnist Anand Giridharadas explains that: every individual must run a kind of permanent marketing campaign to build an audience that follows their tweets and maintains an ambient Facebook level awareness of what theyre doing So, once the artist in the ether, the cybernaut manufactures their work along a spectrum between pure artificial bodies and texts in performance to pure embodied human performances. At the artificial pole we see the Spoken Word artist wholly divorced in terms of body from the production of the poetry or language acts the text is all that is left.

Philip Durham Bird Pyrotechnics and Polemics

April 23, 2010

An example would be the micro-journal of Patrick Kalyanapu, of introversion.com. Kalyanapu pairs up script events on his journal, incorporating a level of interactivity with the journal viewer/audience/user. While his journal is not solely poetic, it has poetic moments, and could be considered a kind of text. >>> introversion.com example: 04.26.2009 art walk What is significant about the site is the way it pairs up audio and video elements which often loop, along with clickable text elements that change and add insight, thoughts remarkably resembling stanzaic structures. What is demonstrated here is possibility. Imagine a poem that is run by similar scripts. The user/audience could click their way through a poem; each nugget of language illustrated and encoded with triggered multimodal information packets streaming into your cortex. In the middle of the spectrum of artifice we have Japp Blonk pieces. Blonk used Karl Schwitter's Ursonate sound poem and integrated the technologies of speech to text (STT) or text to speech (TTS) recognition software. This software was paired with Open Source software to create a striking visual component to his performance. Thusly, he visually displayed to the audience the actual sound syllables of the poem. These syllables appear and create a sense of play as they move around the screen according to an onomatopoeiac aesthetic. Small rapid-fire sounds appear with small font and move about quickly, liquids are stretched out and curvy, etc. Blonk's technology allows him to create a unique performance for reading, as the animations are triggered by the word-syllables he speaks, if he changes the words, so to does the animations within certain boundaries. >>>> Demonstrate Ursonate Blonks work with Ursonate blends into the realm of augmented reality. Blonk further extrapolates his conceptual work with sound poetry with his project Messa di Voce, italian for placing the voice. Blonk and his co-performer, Joan La Barbara, use the software to cast their vocalizations onto the panel screens behind each of them. The software intelligently recognizes their physical positions with relation to each other and the projector, and thus tracks their bodies as part of the interaction. Their shouts, percussive vocal gesticulations, are augmented on the screen, as you will see. >>>> Demonstrate Pitch Paint Blonk effectively utilizes the tool of electronics to gesticulate and increase the

Philip Durham Bird Pyrotechnics and Polemics

April 23, 2010

range of vocal possibilities that would have been naturally limiting to him as a sound poet performer. His performances fully embrace technology, and are a marker of how an electronically mediated layer of content can be added to a physical space this is known as augmented reality or AR. Augmented Reality is a computer generated overlay, including graphics, sounds, or tactile feedback on an actual physical space, it can be viewable through an eyepiece or a webphone camera, such as an iPhone. Or, it could be used in a more textually based manner, like Esquire Magazines December 2009 issue, which I will demonstrate. >>>> Demonstrate As you can see the magazine has a temporal and positional awareness, triggering different events through different markers on different pages, the way the page is angled towards the camera. Imagine a book of poetry with AR enabled. Words would have tactile and auditory functions. The poet could play with the 3d positioning of stanzaic elements, verse, or even syllabic structuring. Position is suddenly important in AR. Suddenly poetry is inherently interactive and increasingly experiential. At the other end of the spectrum of artifice and body lie the comparatively simple recordings and postings of spoken word performances, which most of us are familiar with. A search term and a few key clicks will bring you to videos of slams, open mics, and web postings, or individual recordings on poetry websites. Thus, the function of YouTube for the Spoken Word artist is a place of both friction and traction. Online presence, and specifically here in the form of videos of performances or a pictorial slide show with an audio track, allow for the poet to gain traction, to gain notoriety in terms of view count, in terms of reach of audience. Buzz can be built, traction gained. For example, Shane Koyzcan gained a commission contract to write a poem, We Are More, for the BC Tourism board. One of the primary ways the poem was distributed was through YouTube. One could argue this exposure led to the performance Im about to show you. >>>> Show Opening Ceremony We Are More Yet the same traction can also lead to friction, to stalling of the Spoken Word endeavor. YouTube has a thousand other videos of performances, of other artists slamming, dubbing, rapping, etc, not to mention of a million different forms of music videos, personal rants and other media miscellanea. It is not easy to shine as a cyberstar when drowned in the coronal flood of media YouTube emits. At a basic level, all one needs a webcam and free recording software.

Philip Durham Bird Pyrotechnics and Polemics

April 23, 2010

Poetry of the future and poetry of the now is inevitably linked to cyberspace. The artist gains an exponential extension to reach his audience no longer the circle of his friends or the hot mic at the slam or reading. The artist now can reach millions. The artist will require some kind of technical instrumentation a technological artifice incorporated into his performance in order to do something new with words, give them a virtual or real physicality and tactility. ***Imagine an Augmented Reality tour of Tintern Abbey, with Wordsworths words and perhaps a recording floating about in your view-space and aural-space, as you scamper over green hills and ruins. Artifice and tech in Spoken Word will at some point include a measure of interactivity with the audience, greater than simple transmission and reception one can imagine a kind of programmed poetry, triggered by text events, interactions in a physical space, or even touch, eye contact, smells, vocalizations of the audience, generated through programming. The importance of visualization is paramount as the primary sensory device of reception by the user/viewer/audience, whether it is through seeing a performer speak, to seeing how sounds interact synesthaesically with visual objects, from the most simplistic artifice of subtitles, to more complex and generative interactions. Spoken Word is in an undiscovered country, and it is limited only by the imagination and competence of its performers.