Philippe Bootz et al

Artist’s Statement:
The installation, “Elpénor,” is an interactive generated multimedia piece based on an electronic music by Xavier Hautbois. It treats of the confusion by generatively destructuring all media (the music, 3 texts, 1 visual) in order to produce a narrative depending on the activity of the reader. The reader must progressively dig with the mouse a visual composed with a layer of pictures from 2 different Spanish countries. The program recreates randomly these pictures and thwarts the reader’s activity. It results in an interactive generated visual that is the user interface of the piece. Each picture is associated with a concept and the others parts of Elpénor are text and music generators that react at each time to the proportion of each concept into the visual interface. These generators are very specific. The music generators deconstructs a previous work by Xavier Hautbois by moving into the score. It does not result to an “open work” in the classic sense because the music is generated and each sample depends on the current state of the generator that does not exist in an orchestra musical open work. The text generator is based on 2 narrative that treat on the same concepts. These narrative are first deconstructed and rearranged by concept. In a second setp each sentence is transformed into a combinatory generator expanded it to a new short text. The generator shows some textes resulting from this second step.

Each media is in its own space: the visual interface is on a computer screen and the generated text is projected on a wall behind it in front of the reader.

The program of the piece is a dialogue between 4 different programs: one (in Director) manages the narrative, the second (in Director) the pictures, the third (in pure data) the music and the fourth (in Iannix) is a dynamic score for the music. All programs run together into the same computer.

This piece deconstructs all components of itself: medias, programs but also reading. The reader can access to all multimedia properties of the piece, but not at the same time. This piece is a part of the ” small umconfortable reading poems”

Artist Bio:
Philippe Bootz, Doctor in Physique, Doctor in Sciences of Information and Communication, Senior Lecturer at the University Paris 8, is responsible of the team Digital Writing at the laboratory Paragraphe. He has organised several international exhibitions, conferences, and festivals on digital literature and published academic papers on digital literature and semiotic aspects of the digital in many reviews. He has programmed poetry since 1977 and was the publisher of the electronic review on digital poetry alive (1989-2009). His works focuses on new modalities of receptions and shows the limited power of reading. He developed an “aesthetic of frustration” in the 80’s, which goes on today in the “uncomfortable reading” concept. His works have been shown in many international events and are documented in international data bases.