The goal of this performance was to take on the role of a historian presenting the historical importance that was the prohibition of keyboards as a result of a culture heavily invested in the benefits of copy and paste as a method for creation. The presentation is given after prohibition has been lifted. However, much like the prohibition of alcohol, once the ban was lifted, regulatory measures were put in place to maintain a level of control.
This project is an exploration of digital text and how it can be utilized in the creation of a new way of reading. The text that the project explores is Labyrinth, a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges.
A quick note about “references,” as defined for this project:
A reference, as I will refer to it within this project write-up, is a word or phrase that, when understood in more detail, exposes a more rich narrative within the writing of Borges. The references have been curated subjectively and by hand as the result of several close readings of the original text.
The stories of Labyrinths are dense with these references. What is most compelling about these references is that some of them are factual, some are completely fictional, and at times they are untrue yet rooted in fact or history. Throughout a collection of his short stories, the use of these references weaves together the narrative fabric that is his own universe.
The reading system developed explores the relationship between the reader, the Borges universe, the outside world and where he blurs the line between the two.
The first story from Labyrinths that has been built out into a specifically relevant reading environment is Three Versions of Judas. [continued ...]
As the text is displayed, each segment is analyzed character by character (in real time) and handed over for use in the creation of the sound for the space based on the same timing as is defined in the Time Text XML file. This is an example of the sound created based on the first several segments of Three Versions of Judas
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All text from "Three Versions of Judas," broken by pauses, organized by length.
Beginning with the stories from Borges’ Labyrinths, I am going to investigate ways in which the digital version of the text can be represented in order to create new reads. In order to this, I am using a mark up structure that takes advantage of the Timed Text (TT) schema, which is used for adding closed captioning to digital video. The XML was generated as a valid “TT” using the punctuation as the divisor the text. This is a direct correlation to my interest in not only the content of the stories that Borges writes but also the structure he uses.
I automated the markup process by writing some code to look at the digital texts of the stories and generate marked-up versions as valid TT XML files. The code basically performs these steps in order to create a marked up version of the text that aligns with my interest in not only Borges writing structure, but also the vast references that he utilizes in order to develop seemingly endlessly deep narratives.
1) Split the entire text into chunks based on punctuation for pauses, stops and inserts: , ; . ( )
2) Compare text to the list of references (curated by me) and highlight the words/phrases identified in the look-up list
3) Assign each piece of text a start time and a duration (as required by the TT schema) based on the length of text in each segment
4) Save results as XML file for use in a Closed Captioning for Digital Video system.
Given a piece of writing rendered in scriptio continua, we were then asked to explore 2 different layouts. The first was to use punctuation to give structure to the reading. The second was to treat the text as a “bag of words” and interpret the text as a spacial arrangement of words, phrases, ideas, or whatever else we found to be of interest from the text.
My bag of words all cut up and ready for the glue stick
