Listing entries tagged with The Performing Book

the bible on dvd: another weird embodiment of the book on screen   02.19.2006, 5:50 PM

The bible has long been a driver of innovation in book design, and this latest is no exception: an ad I saw today on TV for the complete King James Bible on DVD. Not a film, mind you, but an interactive edition of the old and new testaments built around a graphical rendering of an old bible open on a lectern that the reader, uh viewer, uh... reader controls. Each page is synched up to a full-text narration in the "crystal clear, mellow baritone" of Emmy-winning Bible reader Stephen Johnston, along with assorted other actors and dramatic sound effects bringing the stories to life.

There's the ad to the right (though when I saw it on BET the family was black). You can also download an actual demo (Real format) here. It's interesting to see the interactivity of the DVD used to mimic a physical book -- even the package is designed to suggest the embossed leather of an old bible, opening up to the incongruous sight of a pair of shiny CDs. More than a few analogies could be drawn to the British Library's manuscript-mimicking "Turning the Pages," which Sally profiled here last week, though here the pages replace each other with much less fidelity to the real.

There's no shortage of movie dramatizations aimed at making the bible more accessible to churchgoers and families in the age of TV and the net. What the makers of this DVD seem to have figured out is how to combine the couch potato ritual of television with the much older practice of group scriptural reading. Whether or not you'd prefer to read the bible in this way, with remote control in hand, you can't deny that it keeps the focus on the text.

Last week, Jesse argued that it's not technology that's causing a decline in book-reading, but rather a lack of new technologies that make books readable in the new communications environment. He was talking about books online, but the DVD bible serves just as well to illustrate how a text (a text that, to say the least, is still in high demand) might be repurposed in the context of newer media.

Another great driver of innovation in DVDs: pornography. No other genre has made more creative use of the multiple camera views options that can be offered simulataneously on a single film in the DVD format (I don't have to spell out what for). They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and what greater necessities than sex and god? You won't necessarily find the world's most elegant design, but it's good to keep track of these uniquely high-demand areas as they are consistently ahead of the curve.

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:50 PM | Comments (11)
tags: DVD , The Performing Book , bible , books , christianity , ebook , ebooks , god , interface , literacy , porn , pornography , reading , religion , scripture , television

elements of style   11.08.2005, 12:30 PM

On NPR's "Morning Edition" (11/2/2005) Lynn Neary reported on the multimedia new life that The Elements of Style by E.B. White and William Strunk Jr. has been going through. The classic manual on writing and usage in American English first published in 1919 has sold millions of copies, and has been the guide for practically all writers from the 1950's on. The authors advocated a simple and direct way of expressing ideas in a manual full of witty sentences that serve as examples on how to use those rules.

Maira Kalman, illustrator of children' books and "The New Yorker" found the book at a yard sale and immediately knew she wanted to illustrate it. She saw the visual potential not in the rules but in the examples the authors used to illustrate them. She saw humor, eccentricity and an interesting combination of beauty and truth in their sentences, and felt compelled to draw them. The result is an illustrated, humorous and eccentric manual of style.

After illustrating the book, Kailman decided to create an opera. She commissioned Nico Muhly to create operatic songs with lyrics from The Elements of Style. The music was recently played at the New York Public Library. The songs are beautiful and convey the book's sense of humor and eccentricity, at the same time they make it uncannily contemporary.

Examples of illustrations and songs are at NPR.

Posted by sol gaitan at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book , grammar , manual , multimedia , npr , opera , strunk , style , white , writing

convergence sighting: ipod phone   09.08.2005, 8:10 AM

The Motorola ROKR, a new iTunes-compatible cellphone developed for Apple, hits the stores today for Cingular subscribers. The phone will run for $249.99 and can load up to 100 songs from a computer through a USB wire. Sounds like a rip-off to me, but indicative of things to come. It also comes equipped with a camera. The cellphone is steadily swallowing up all personal media.

Apple also unveiled its newest iPod, the "nano," which uses solid flash memory (like in little USB memory sticks) rather than a hard drive with moving parts. It's roughly the size of a half dozen business cards stacked together, and can hold up to 1,000 songs.

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:10 AM | Comments (1)
tags: The Ideal Device? , The Performing Book , apple , cameraphone , cellphone , gadgets , ipod , itunes , media , mobile , motorola , music , nano , phone , podcast , rokr , technology

is the future of the book a video game?   08.12.2005, 2:30 PM

"What ultimately sets gaming apart from prefabricated media like television and books is that the consumer is in control of the action; the consumer is the protagonist of whatever story the game might tell."

Seth Schiesel affirms this in an article on The Godfather video game coming out early next year ("How to Be Your Own Godfather," NY Times, July 10, 2005 - also audio slideshow narrated by Schiesel). Schiesel's article intrigued me from the view point of the movie junkie and the book lover. The Electronic Arts team that created this video game, used scenes and characters from the first Godfather to create a virtual universe where the players can manipulate the plot and create their own narrative. This player becomes the ideal reader that Flaubert and Borges dreamt about, and that the French literary theorists wrote about. Reading/playing becomes writing. The desire to directly involve the reader/audience in the creative act can be traced to the notion of catharsis in Greek tragedy, to Shakespeare's play inside a play, to the second part of Don Quijote and so on, but it is now, thanks to electronic media, that the concept becomes reality, a virtual reality with all its possibilities yet to be explored.

Much has been said about the difficulty to faithfully adapt books to film. García Márquez, whose first love is film, defends his refusal to sell the rights of One Hundred Years of Solitude to Hollywood, saying that the screen robs the viewer the freedom of completing the characters of the novel in his imagination. His readers can, for instance, identify José Arcadio Buendía with an uncle or a grandfather. But, he argues, if that character were to be played by Robert Redford, that freedom of association would be lost. It would also be quite difficult to re-create on film the complex time structure of García Márquez's novel, or to render credible the many instances of magical realism that, when reading, one doesn't doubt for a second. Could this be done using electronic media?

The executive producer of the Godfather video game, David DeMartini, talks about time linearity in film, usually limited to 80 -120 minutes, in which the director has to provide his narrative version of a book. What is interesting in the use of a movie, based on a novel, as a video game is that the player actually goes through the story living it. Here, he doesn't only complete the characters in his imagination; he is his own character. Time is not limited or externally imposed upon the player/viewer as in film, he actually has 20, 30, 40 hours to experience and deal with the many choices he has as a character of the narrative. What we have here is not only the ideal reader; it's the ideal fiction. Brando, who absolutely bought into this project, puts it clearly; "It's the audience, really, that's doing the acting." Incidentally, the BBC reports today that a similar video game franchise is to be made from the Jason Bourne novels of Robert Ludlum - or rather, from the popular films starring Matt Damon adapted from Ludlum's books.

Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, disapproves of the game as a typically violent kill and get killed video game. Seth Schiesel makes an important argument in favor of games bringing the Grand Theft Auto series as a parallel to the Godfather, by saying that there is something more than just violence in these kinds of video games.

What is exciting is the game's form. In G. T. A. the player has an entire city to explore. There are missions and a story available, and plenty of violence, but there is also the freedom one has to experience an open-ended virtual urban environment. I dare to add: what I see here is the book of the future.

Posted by sol gaitan at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Games , The Performing Book

get on your digital soapbox   06.27.2005, 12:37 PM

"What would you say, given one free minute of anonymous, uncensored speech?" the people at One Free Minute want to know. Their project gives you a chance to speak your mind loudly and anonymously in "America's demographically average city: Columbus, Ohio."

According to the site: One Free Minute began as a simple concept: what would happen if the remote speech were connected to public space? Since then it has branched out to be an examination of public speech, an exploration of how cellular technology affects human communication in both negative and positive ways, a hand-made fibreglass sculpture, a web site, a bunch of phone lines, a whole lot of server bandwidth... you get the idea.

The One Free Minute mobile sculpture has a cell phone inside connected to a 200 watt amplifier and speaker. Callers remain connected for exactly one minute and their calls are broadcast through the sculpture's red, Victrola-like speaker. These micro-speeches are either performed live, or broadcast from taped messages. Visit the site to hear examples and to find out how to participate.

Posted by Kim White at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book

The 2005 Computers and Writing Conference   06.22.2005, 12:36 PM

Stanford University hosted the 2005 Computers and Writing conference this past weekend. Each session was rife with "future of the book" food for thought. This is an informal summary, with apologies to all the fabulous presentations that I don't mention (sorry, being only one person, I could not attend them all). Some of the major themes (which dovetail nicely with issues we are exploring at the institute) included: Open Source, new interpretations of literacy and "writing," the changing role of the teacher/student, performance, multimodality, and networked community. It is important to note that these themes often blur together in a complicated interdependence. This thematic interplay was evident in the pre-conference workshops which included instruction in open source tools and applications like Drupal that allow for multimodality and the creation of communal authoring environments. Workshops in "Reading Images" and "Using Video to Teach Writing" addressed multiple modalities and new concepts of writing.

I was excited to see that the Computers and Writing community understands the potential of, and imperative for, Open Source. It's practical advantages (free and customizable) and it's philosophical advantages (community-based and built for sharing rather than for selling) make it ideally suited to the goals of the educational community. Open Source came up over and over during the presentations and was featured in the first town hall session "Open Source Opens Thinking." The session challenged the Computers and Writing community "to consider a position statement of collective principles and goals in relation to Open Source." Such a statement would be useful and productive; I'm hoping it will materialize.

The changing role of the teacher and student was evident in several presentations: most notably, the pilot program at Penn State (see my earlier post) in which students publish their "papers" on a wiki. The wiki format allows for intensive peer-review and encourages a culture of responsibility.

There was a lot of speculation about how writing will evolve and how other modalities might be incorporated into our notion of literacy. Andrea Lunsford's keynote speech addressed this issue, calling for a return to oral and embodied "performative literacies." She referred to Tara Shankar's MIT dissertation "Speaking on the Record," which confronts the way we privilege writing above other modalitites for knowledge and education. She says: "Reading and writing have become the predominant way of acquiring and expressing intellect in Western culture. Somewhere along the way, the ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge. One of the effects of graphocentrism is a conflation of concepts proper to knowledge in general with concepts specific to written expression."

Shankar calls for new practices that embrace oral communication. She introduces a new word: "to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: speak + write = sprite. Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking "on the record" that yields a technologically supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing such as permanence of record, possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning, but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself."

The need for a multimodal approach to writing was addressed in the second Town Hall meeting "Composition Beyond Words." Virginia Kuhn opened by calling for a reconsideration of "writing," and the goals of visual literacy. Bradley Dilger reminded us that literacy goes beyond "the letter;" we need multiple interfaces for the same data because not everyone looks at data the same way. Madeleine Sorapure pointed out that writing with computers is determined by underlying code structures which are, themselves, a form of writing. She quoted Loss Pequeno Glazier, "Code is the writing within the writing that makes the work happen." Gail Hawisher, talked about the 10 year process of incorporating multiple modalities into the first-composition courses at the University of Illinois. Cynthia Selfe addressed this struggle, saying: "colleges are not comfortable with multiple modalities." She advises the C&W community to "think about how to give professional development/support to resistant colleges in ways that are sustainable over time." Stuart Moulthrop also offered some cautionary words of advice. In addition to faculty and administration, Moultrop says students are resistant to multimodality. Code, for example, is fatally hard to teach non-programmers or visually oriented people. "There is a political problem," Moulthrop says, "we are living through a backlash moment. People are very angry about how fast the future has come down on them."

Some participants delivered "papers" that attempted to demonstrate these new multimodal imperatives. Most notably, Todd Taylor's presentation, "The End of Composition," which asked, "Can a paper be a film?" Todd argues "yes" with a cinematic montage of sampled and remixed clips along with original footage, which was enthusiastically received by the audience (alt. review in Machina Memorialis blog.) Morgan Gresham's Town Hall presentation was a student-produced video and a question to the audience; is this just a remake of a bad commercial, or is it a "paper"? Christine Alfano's presentation experimented with a hypertext, "Choose Your Own Adventure," style that allowed the audience to determine the trajectory of the talk. Once the selection was made, she dropped the other two papers/options to the floor. The choice, unfortunately for me, eliminated the material that I most wanted to hear about (Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl). Additionally, "virtual" presentations were delivered during an online companion conference called: Computers and Writing Online 2005 When Content Is No Longer King: Social Networking, Community, and Collaboration This interactive online conference served, "as an acknowledgment of the value of social networks in creating discourse of and about scholarly work." CWOnline 2005 made both the submission and presentation process open to public review via the Kairosnews weblog. Despite some flaws, I thought these experimental presentations pushed at the boundaries of academic discourse in a useful way. They reminded us how far we have to go and how difficult the project of putting ideas into practice really is.

Finally, the conference highlighted ways in which computers are being used to cultivate community across cultures and institutions; and between students, teachers, and scholars. Sharing Cultures, a joint project of Columbia College Chicago and Nelson Mandela University Metropolitan University, in South Africa "creates two interconnected, on-line writing and learning communities…the project purposely includes students who traditionally have not had access to, or have been actively marginalized from, both digital and international experiences." Virginia Kuhn approached computers and community at the local level, with a service learning class called, "Multicultural America," which asked students to write an ebook documenting local history. The finished work is part of an ongoing display at a Milwaukee community center. This project inspired an interesting reversal; community members who worked with students on the project are now (thanks to a generous grant) coming to the University of Milwaukee for supplemental study. Within the academy there are also exciting opportunities for computer-based community-building. In her Town Hall presentation, Gail Hawisher said that literacy on campus is, "usually taken care of by first year composition." If we are to incorporate visual literacy into our definition of literacy then, "Perhaps we should be looking to art and design for literacy instead of just the English dept." This is an incredibly smart idea because, short of requiring composition teachers to have degrees in art, film, AND writing, collaborative efforts with other departments seem to be the best way to ensure a deep and rigorous understanding of the material. I had an interesting conversation with Stuart Moulthrop about this. We imagined a massively-multi-player game environment that would allow scholars from around world to collaborate on curriculum across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Wouldn't it be great, we thought, if someone who wanted to teach an odd combination like, film/biology/physics, could put a course scenario into the game where it would be played out by biologists, film scholars, and physicists. In other words a kind of life-time learning environment for the experts, a laboratory for the exchange of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and place to weave together different strands of human insight in order to create a more complete "picture" of the universe.

Posted by Kim White at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , The Performing Book , conferences_and_excursions , the_networked_book

poetry off the page   05.30.2005, 2:00 PM

Poetry was originally intended as oral/aural medium. It was language as song, performed for an audience practiced in the art of listening. The way a poem looked on the page was relatively meaningless until the advent of print technologies. Now, as digital media makes it possible for poets to publish their work as audio tracks, we may see poetry begin a natural migration back to its traditional form–-performance art.

A good place to find some of these aural treats, try PennSound, an ongoing project at the University of Pennsylvania, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives of poets performing their work. According to the PENNsound Manifesto, every project on its database "must be free and downloadable." Sounds good to me, I visited the archive and downloaded Tracie Morris' From Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful, which was performed at the Whitney Museum's 2002 Biennial Exhibit.

Tracie's work is extremely hard to come by, so I was thrilled when I found this. I can’t think of a better artist to represent the off-the-page digital instinct. Tracie’s poem uses broken and remixed language--so ubiquitous in our media saturated atmosphere--to present a conflicted inner dialogue about racial identity and cultural conceptions (or misconceptions) of beauty.

Posted by Kim White at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book

what I learned from laurie anderson   04.27.2005, 4:13 PM

Answer every question with a story. Be wary of rectangles. Ignore genre. Do not be afraid of Melville's ghost.

I have been inspired and influenced by Laurie Anderson's work from the moment I discovered it twenty-something years ago. Laurie was one of the first artists to understand how technology and multimedia can be used by a skillful storyteller to deepen the listener's experience. Her work explores the mystery and the pathos of these mechanized forms of communication.

Laurie's song "Language is a Virus,"(dedicated to William Burroughs) had an immediate and permanent effect on me. It made me realize that scrutinizing a narrative is not a complete investigation, one should try to understand language itself; is it friend or foe? Is it an agent that infects us with ideas (both good and bad). Does language, as a virus that must be communicated, fill us with the need for more efficient tools--books, radio, television, telephone, internet, cell phone, satellite radio, pod casting, ebooks, etc. And, if it is a virus, does it destroy the host? Is language a dystopia-breeding agent? The apple in the garden?

Parrot (Your Fortune One $)(pictured above) is an installation that consists of a plaster parrot and a digital recording of the parrot's monologue. The piece raises some interesting questions about the role of technology in our society. It’s obvious that technology is important, but how important is it for technology to be “human?” The parrot's voice is computer-generated. When I heard it, I thought of JAWS a software program designed to read websites to those with vision impairment. When you hear that synthesized JAWS voice in the context of someone who is dependent on it for access, it’s poignant. The parrot also sounds a lot like Arnold Schwartznegger, a man known for his role as "the Terminator," a robot-human programmed to destroy. The parrot's voice comes across as both comic and melancholy, which suggests a simultaneous levity and sadness in our efforts to humanize technology and to make into our “pet.” Shifting the metaphor from wild and destructive (the terminator) to friendly and tame (the sidekick).

Posted by Kim White at 04:13 PM | Comments (1)
tags: The Performing Book

books lighter than air   04.12.2005, 10:38 AM

A new installation by J. Ignacio Diaz de Rabago in the atrium staircase of the Gardner stacks at Berkeley's Doe Library (photograph from UC Berkeley News). Other works by Diaz de Rabago can be viewed here, including his multi-part "Babel" series, to which his latest presumably belongs.

(via Conversational Reading)

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book

sony patents prophetic invention   04.08.2005, 8:32 AM

Sony has secured a patent for a theoretical device that creates "sensory experiences" in the brain by sending ultrasonic pulses directly to the neural cortex - a non-invasive (that is, non-surgical) procedure, with the potential to give sight to the blind, or sound to the deaf. Gives a glimpse at what these tech giants are imagining for human entertainment further down the road.

From New Scientist - "Sony patent takes first step towards real-life Matrix":

Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."

Link to patent.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:32 AM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book

genre-busting books   04.04.2005, 3:38 PM

Bob Stein's comment about Sekou Sundiata and his desire to have a DVD recording of Blessing the Boats in order to be able to savor it, "it wouldn't do just to have a text transcription since hearing the many voices is a crucial aspect of the piece. it really was a genre-busting performed essay," brings to mind the origin of poetry and its deep roots in the oral tradition. Rhymed stories that were to be sung, so people would still remember them generations later. This tradition is almost universally shared across cultures, and is still alive today. Think of hip-hop, epic poems, the Colombian vallenato, "Martn Fierro" that repository of everything Argentine, or the itinerant poets whom one can still hear in the markets of Central Asia and North Africa. It is precisely that centuries old internal rhythm which makes poetry practically untranslatable, but also gives us a tinge of shared pleasure when we hear poetry in a language we don't understand.

The "genre-busting" aspect has been there all along. It was concealed when poetry became so obscure in the baroque, that one had to possess all the codes in order to understand it. It became a mind game and reading it was easier than listening to it. Then, in the 19th century, poetry began to look inside itself becoming aware of its raison d'tre; to give shape to an ontological reality, a sort of miracle that, in Baudelaire's words, is flexible enough to adapt to the lyrical movements of the soul. So poetry was freed from form, inaugurating true genre-busting. The poem in prose was born. Musicians have set poems to music, or composed symphonic poems. Genre became blurry, because poetry was going back to what was meant to be.

All this brings us to the future of the book. I often think that today there is a sort of "presentism," of looking towards the future in the form of the last gadget on which we can read, listen, watch, play, in a word, communicate. But there is a lot to learn from the past, from the visionaries that have been advancing history all along. Think of Alfonso X, the Wise, the poet king in whose court flourished Arab, Jewish and Christian cultures. Thanks to his books of poetry, mostly zejels (Arab-style poetry set to music) it has been possible to study Romanesque, Gothic and Arab instruments. Why? Through the illuminations (in the most complete sense of the word) that adorned his "Cntigas de Loor." Those miniatures depicting Arab musicians playing the instruments upon which most of the modern orchestra originates. We now have in our hands the tools to advance this concept ad infinitum. And, what 's best, knowledge can be shared in a democratic way that resembles its origins.

So, we wish to be able to hear poetry. Reading alone doesn't do it any more. Sundiata belongs to an old, illustrious tradition, so do Bob Holman, Sarah Jones, Joan La Barbara, Pedro Pietri, Algarn, and the poets that in the 70's dared to bring poetry to the forefront. Jaap Blonk's poetry of sounds without words, "Messa di Voce," that was so beautifully illuminated by Golan Levin, is another example of the hybrid. Poets have become performers, claiming their old role. Genre has been definitely busted. Think of hip-hop without its sounds, or Pedro, or Bob, or Sekou without theirs. I continue to be obsessed with a multiple book, the book of the future, the only one that does justice to poetry, and to them.

Posted by sol gaitan at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book

blessing the boats — a performance essay   03.27.2005, 11:42 AM

Saw a remarkable piece last night — Blessing the Boats, written and performed by Sekou Sundiata, was billed as a Performance Essay. Sundiata is a fabulous poet with a stunning range of voices. This 90-minute work recounts Sundiata's life-saving kidney transplant with a torrent of beautiful words which affirm in surprising ways what it means to be alive. The reason i'm mentioning it here is that the work is so dense and rich that i really wanted to have a dvd recording so that i could savor it — it wouldn't do just to have a text transcription since hearing the many voices is a crucial aspect of the piece. it really was a genre-busting "performed essay." Terry Gross' interview with Sundiata on Fresh Air includes a brief excerpt from the piece.

Posted by bob stein at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book

the performing book   02.03.2005, 3:56 PM

We've been talking about reading modes, but let's imagine, for a moment, that the future book will change reading itself. Perhaps it will combine the performance aspects of television, film, animation, and theatre with the interactive aspects of the world wide web to forge a book that reads you as you read it.

Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson imagines such a book in his novel, The Diamond Age. The main character is a book—an illustrated primer that functions almost like an artificial intelligence. It bonds with its reader, notices things about her life, and uses those bits of information to create instructional narratives on the fly. These stories are performed by live "ractors" (human actors working in reactive/interactive scenarios) and broadcast on the pages of a book. The physical book is leather bound, with "smart" paper pages that support electronic text and animated images. The primer looks like an old-fashioned book, but acts (or reacts) like a book of the future. In Stephenson’s imagination, it's this element of interactivity and performance that distinguishes the future book from its predecessor.

But lest you worry that I'm basing my research on the imaginings of my favorite science fiction writer, I can assure you that the performing book is already here in its nascent incarnations. In the image of Stephenson’s primer, a company called Touchsmart is developing a book with "smart" paper that functions like a touch screen, allowing readers to find answers to their questions instantly, through a wireless connection to the internet and to other electronic devices that broadcast content.

Publisher, Peak Interactive Books, whose stated mission is to, look beyond the print book, beyond television, beyond the web page, to the interactive book of the future, is publishing interactive multimedia textbooks including: Cryosurgery for Prostate Cancer, and Using Interactive Media to Communicate.

The interactive CD Roms published by Voyager are an excellent touchstone in the history of performing books. TK3 software, which has been used to make everything from textbooks, to performing paintings, also draws on the performing book model. The institute is presently developing "Sophie," ebook authoring software that will allow most currently available media to be incorporated into an electronic book.

As for the book reading you. Ben's recent post "finally, I have a Memex!" describes how the semantic web will add a new dimension to the growing power of search engines. Their ability to collect personal information has already been incorporated into the recreational and academic reading experience. What we are waiting for is the book that builds its content out of the bits it gathers from our lives.

Posted by Kim White at 03:56 PM | Comments (2)
tags: The Performing Book

curling up with a good movie   01.24.2005, 8:53 AM

i spent the better part of the weekend in a marathon viewing of the first season of 24 — the thriller TV show which has 24 episodes, one for each hour of a specific day. the first season (season four is on the air now) takes place on "the day of the california presidential primary" and follows the brilliantly interwoven story of politics, espionage and family relations. a non-stop roller-coaster ride with deligtfully unexpected and usually believable plot twists.

i watched 24 on a set of DVDs; most of the time the screen was on my lap (via my apple notebook) or right in front of me on a table. the intimacy of watching in that way, plus the duration created an experience that was much more akin to reading a novel you can't put down than watching a movie or tv show.

it would have been even more interesting and more novel-like if all 24 episodes were available simultaneously with a complete index of scene content and dialog so that i could have gone back to review key scenes the way you can in a book.

not arguing here that there are no differences between novels and films, but that some of what makes a book a book — random access and intimacy — can be found in new media and you can see the seeds of new forms of expression. figure that people coming out of film school in the next ten years will find themselves going in one or two ways; either making giant spectacle films intended for 3D imax or making very dense, intimate novel-like "films" that are intended for an audience of one at a time.

Posted by bob stein at 08:53 AM | Comments (1)
tags: The Performing Book

the film as book   12.30.2004, 9:50 AM

One of the year's big stories in film was Jonathan Caouette's haunting autobiographical feature Tarnation (trailer), famous as much for its methodology and tiny budget as for its strength as cinema. Made entirely on Apple iMovie on a desktop computer, and costing a mere $218.32, Tarnation is a patchwork quilt of sound, image and testimony, chronicling the troubled life of its author and his relationship with his fractured mother.

The remarkable thing about Tarnation is that Caouette made it in much the same way he might have written a print autobiography - alone, at a computer, pouring over a lifetime's accumulation of notes, scraps and memories. Only, the notes and scraps are in the form of VHS and Super-8, photographs and answering machine tapes. Growing up in the Houston suburbs, Caouette became literate in a multitude of forms, weaving a rich web of fiction as a blanket between him and his often-grim reality. These fictions ranged from eerie staged "confessions" by an 11-year-old Caouette impersonating a battered woman, to glamorous lip-synch music videos, to high school slasher flics. Tarnation is as much the story of this self-education in alternate forms of writing as it is of Caouette's family and upbringing.

Watching Tarnation isn't quite like watching other films, and the fact that it was made by a single, solitary person has a lot to do with this. It has long been taken for granted that film is the product of collective labor, that behind each frame lurk dozens of invisible hands. But here, as with a book, there is a single author, and you sense palbably that you are witnessing the craft of a private forge, far from the world of studios and crews - far from our usual notion of "the production." And as with a book, our encounter is very personal and unmediated - we are brought directly into the dreams and psychedelia of the author's mind.

Caouette describes the experience on the film's website:

"TARNATION is designed to mimic my thought processes so the audience can also feel like they're in a living dream, which can be scary and intense, but also beautiful and glorious. TARNATION is a documentary in the sense that it's a true story but it’s also a happening, an encounter, and a way for you to meet me and for me to meet you."

Caouette's film demonstrates the possibility for lone artists to engage powerfully in media that were previously very difficult and expensive to access. Already, people are producing highly polished videos made with digital snapshot cameras. The modes of production - of writing - will continue to increase and expand.

Tarnation is also a clue to possible new directions for documentary and autobiography in the digital age, and hints at ways that films and books might begin to merge.

Gus Van Sant, who became one of the film's executive producers, told Wired in January: "People assumed that one day film would be as accessible and inexpensive as writing, and now it practically is. For the price of a typewriter, you can make films with sound and burn them on a DVD."

Posted by ben vershbow at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book

light reading   12.17.2004, 3:49 PM

"The Book as Object and Performance exhibition (through January 22 @ Gigantic Art Space in New York, curated by Sara Reisman) presents work by over 20 artists, each using the book as a point of departure to explore the physical, sensual or conceptual dimension of reading and the written word.

But despite lofty ambitions, the exhibit provides little more than light reading. Though several works are visually arresting, few do more than glide over the potentially bottomless themes at hand. Most stick to playful reorganization of materials: a pile of wooden hoops culling newspaper headlines from around the globe; a precarious tower of books with a gaping acid-chewed hole at the top; a doorway filled with crumpled sheets of paper; a dictionary with words dislocated from their definitions. A collection of small, easily forgotten pleasures.

An exception to this is a mysterious piece titled "Perseverance" by Jenny Perlin consisting of a small, worn book in a glass case, above which plays a strange film of man battling anxiety, chewing his nails to the quick. Also memorable was a one-night-only "reading" of the ten commandments by Polish-born artist Maciej Toporowicz, a piece first performed in communist Poland in 1980, and part of small program of live explorations last night, filling out the "performance" part of the equation. The gallery lights are extinguished and Toporowicz takes his place in front of an illuminated glass bowl of water, perched atop an open Bible. He places his face in the water, as though reading through the aqueous medium, and remains there long enough for the audience to start imagining.. what? That he is drowning in this sacred, much-abused text? That he is drawing impossible sustenance from its power? He begins to twitch and tremble. Finally his head rips up out of the water, gasping.

The photo above shows bottles containing philosophical texts that have been literally chewed up and spit out. Click below to see more pictures from the exhibition...

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
tags: The Performing Book , art , book , book_craft , books , conferences_and_excursions , exhibition , gallery , manhattan , new_york

the book as object and performance - exhibit in New york   12.15.2004, 5:59 PM

"The Book as Object and Performance is an exhibition of artworks that takes the format of the book as a point of departure to deconstruct that which is bound up in text, image and the physicality of books."

Through January 22 @ Gigantic Art Space

*Plus: tomorrow night, in conjunction with the exhibition!
Thursday, December 16, 6-8pm: an evening of performances by AUX (Reynard Loki and Christopher Shores), Joseph A. Fish, Jesal Kapadia, Pia Lindman, and Maciej Toporowicz..

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book , art , book , book_craft , conferences_and_excursions , exhibition , gallery , history_of_the_book , manhattan , new_york