[net]textualities › a blog of sorts

Some texts and art works that highlight the obfuscation of transmission in a multi-cultural and new media world.

Gareth Long’s Don Quixote

A book generated by processing the Audiobook version of Don Quixote through speech recognition software. After training the speech recognition software to recognize the voice of George Guidall - the narrator of the audiobook, the recording was played to the computer. The resultant text was reformatted to once again be a book.

http://garethlong.net/donQuixote/donQuixote.html

See also his Platoon / Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada http://garethlong.net/platoon/platoon.html

An intervention into the English subtitles of Oliver Stone’s Platoon. The regular subtitles slowly are replaced with text from Mark Satin’s 1968 underground besteller Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada.

Erika Tan’s Pidgin

Read about her cross-cultural, anthropological, new media installation:
Translation, Transcodification, Transmission: Erika Tan’s Pidgin: Interrupted Transmission

Andy Deck’s decoderBling

A free interpretation of privatized data streams. Digital encryption and encoding mired in secrecy and exclusivity. A premonition of future histories lost in translation. Decode the present and future illegibility of state-of-the-art media.

http://artcontext.org/decoderBling/

response (0) | filed under: cultural diversity and otherness :: on transmission

For quite some time I had a catalogue from the IDFA documentary film festival before my eyes. On the cover it said that “now it’s time to watch with your brain again.” Is that what the documentary form is about? I doubt it, yet it set my mind thinking about the documentary form.

What if the IDFA slogan is right? What then is the purpose of the documentary? To avoid the affective phallacy and to enlighten probably, in other words, to talk to Reason that is the Truth. Doesn’t it sound very old-fashioned? And very Western male? And yet, it is interesting to see how these old dichotomies live on - documentary as truth and, obviously, fiction as fiction. But, we know these dichotomies to be fictions themselves. That every choice made during the journey of making a film is based on subjective experience, on what the filmmaker, from his/her point of view, decides to show or narrate. He or she writes a story that can be more or less true or fictional, just as fiction can be more or less fictional or true.

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response (0) | filed under: cultural diversity and otherness :: on transmission