Thanks to Ken for his notice of the ICA gig. Thank god we went first! For
those who sweated, silently fumed, and white-knuckled the backs of the
chair in front through part 2, there was, it turned out, a fairly
interesting postmortem discussion, interesting chiefly for discussion about
the work of Xu Bing (he was on the panel), the maker of 'Book from the
Sky,' which I'm now more than ever convinced is one of the truly important
art works of the century.
>to
>read, from their own computer monitors, a "cybertextual" version of poems
>>from the sequence selected, apparently in random order, by the computer:
Just for the record, the choices were quasi-aleatory. From each gobbet of
the poem Yang Lian had mapped ('authorized') four possible links (one of
which was always the a link to the 'next-in-sequence' as in the printed
text). So the machine just chose one of four links which the poet, as it
were, considered acceptable. (Surprising how complicated this
simple-to-describe form turns out in 'implimentation'.)
There is a WWW version of the piece at:
http://www.illumin.co.uk/ica/wsss/
Warning, if you are on a slow dial-up link, this may not work as well as it
should.
Something that emerged for this performance: We (YL and I) thought we had
pretty 'bad luck'. I'd run the piece many times in preparation and hadn't
encountered the repetition of certain long passages which disturbed us by
turning up 'too often' on the night. Also some short passages, which
'should' have been repeated quite frequently, hardly figured. This made us
anxious, and, in performance, I for one, tried to conceal this anxiety.
But later I thought, in forms of art with indeterminate sequences, that
anxiety in performer or audience, is worthy of expression, could become an
important part of the rhetoric of such practice.
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John Cayley / Wellsweep Press http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/
1 Grove End House 150 Highgate Road London NW5 1PD UK
Tel & Fax: (+44 171) 267 3525 Email: [log in to unmask]
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