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  • Mediating (Through) Imagination:Web-Based Sound Art
  • Trace Reddell

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Fig. 2.

Marlena Corcoran, The Gallbladder Sonata, performance, Mainz Intermediale, 2001. The Gallbladder Sonata premiered on the Internet show "Here's Pangloss!" (New York, 1998) and was performed for live audiences in Munich (2000) and Mainz (2001).

(Photo: © Marlena Corcoran)

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The article introduces two Web-based multimedia projects and a recent series of live laptop performances and webcasts. These works describe an intersection of electronic literature, digital sound art, DJ culture and networking technologies. At the center of this intersection, the author positions the Web browser as an imaginative cultural interface uniquely capable of confusing received distinctions between media and moments of content-gathering and sampling, composition, performance, publication, distribution, broadcast and reception. Here writing and reading become digital performance pieces, extending creative practice into the domains of information access, retrieval and reproduction. Ultimately, the works characterize the civic function of organized sound in terms of telephonic connectivity, pointing toward the promise of collaborative streams and multidirectional remixes taking place within mobile sites of improvised transmission.

The LITMIXER project appeared in the music/sound/noise issue of the Electronic Book Review in November 2001 (Fig. 3). The multimedia component is a literary sampler loaded with phrases read from Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy." The accompanying user's manual draws attention to itself as an experience of mixed quotations and remastered theories. The critical gloss function of traditional literary theory thus turns to digital signal-processing as a means of generating new interpretative possibilities, even as it distributes a performative platform as a model for publishing critical theory.

"Machinery for Dreaming" was created for The Palimpsest Project, an ongoing "remix" exhibit launched on 30 September 2002 on the Stasis_Space on-line gallery web site. The piece explores text-to-MIDI conversion, using text-derived data to create MIDI events. The finished work consists of cut-up text files taken from De Quincey's "Opium Eater"; multiple MIDI files generated from the text; and an audio work created from the MIDI sequences. The proliferation of file types expands opportunities for access and participation in the ongoing exhibit, which positions content delivery as a means for gallery visitors to become producers and distributors in their own right.

In recent performances at the Denver's Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of Denver and Ars Electronica 2003 (via webcast), the author worked with the browser as a tool for spontaneous composition. Internet search engines, multiple browser instances, embedded audio files, links for direct file download, and assemblages of plug-ins and playback devices are the key components of live aleatory compositions and DJ performances.

As an improvisational vehicle, the browser becomes a technological analogy of the imagination, particularly in its classic function of mixing sensory data into complex aggregates that are then mediated as living experience. The finished work or live set is generated by the real-time activity of composition in an ongoing exchange between the mind of the performer and shifting content on the screen. To the extent that they lay bare their own compositional processes as part of the act of creative communication, these pieces mix digital forms of composition and delivery while expressing imaginative experience in terms of receiving transmissions—of reading, listening to or interacting with literary sound art in shared cultural spaces. The goal is to provide the reader or listener not with an artifact of process but, rather, with a scenario in which that process plays out openly for the eyes, ears and hands of the audience-participant.


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Fig. 3.

Trace Reddell, LITMIXER, 2001. The literary groovebox component of the LIT-MIXER project transforms the browser into an instrument for performing critical theory.

(© Trace Reddell)

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Trace Reddell
Digital Media Studies, 2490 South Gaylord Street, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208, U.S.A. E-mail: <treddell@du.edu>. Web site: <www.du.edu/~treddell>
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