Here's a new piece by Vancouver's Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett:
http://turbulence.org/works/dynamo .
Quick! The deity is only present for a moment!
The press release says:
""Grafik Dynamo" is a net art work that loads live images from blogs and
news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. The work is
currently using a feed from LiveJournal. The images are accompanied by
narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought
bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web
content opens up the genre in a new way: together, the images and narrative
serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the
reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly
in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental
approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of
data animating the work and the formal parameter that comprises its
structure. "Grafik Dynamo" is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing
Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site (New York). It was
made possible with funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts."
Kate says, in correspondence on rhizome:
Hi Jim & Pall
Thanks for the comments about Grafik Dynamo. Yes, I wrote the texts. They
are pulled from a flat file and randomly fed into the piece using
javascript. There are two documents, one for the thought and speech bubbles
(upper texts) and one for the expository notes (lower texts). So there is a
level of organization that governs the way the fragments are distributed.
Regarding the fragments themselves: I wanted to use some of the formal
structures you find in comics, such as "meanwhile...", lots of exclamation
points, and speech patterns like "ack!" etc. I was initially drawn to using
references to science fiction and 1940s spy fiction. I was loving the
brilliant innocence of both comics and that literature, where everything
happens in either London or Damascus, people carry around suitcases of gems,
and scientists become deranged by their magnificent powers. As I was working
with these themes I found myself adding references to things that seemed
more current, like evangelicals!
, lobbyists and apocalypse, and started to pull in other concerns, not
usually associated with comics or hard-boiled crime novels, such as
existential freedom & metaphysical structures like extra-temporal essence.
These things started to feed back on each other so that all of a sudden I
was discovering implications that philosophical states were being influenced
by these mysterious machines, or that powerful non-specific figures were
motivated by the desire to have outre religious experiences. So that's how
the material evolved in the beginning. When it started to run against the
influx of images I was happy to see that these associations became even more
complex.
Kate
ja
http://vispo.com
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