03 January 2007

Coaxing Performa[nce/tism] from a Machine



I had an interesting experience recently while working on a sculpture. The piece includes a reading of Raoul Eshelman's essay "Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism," (much discussed in this essay) done with Apple's built-in text-to-speech software. The program assigns certain values to the pause given for a period, a comma, or or a line break. Weird changes in pitch occur for double quotes and parenthesis. It also has a hard time with unusual words, proper names, and words ending in "ism" or "tion." To coax the performance I wanted from the program I had to rewrite the entire essay phrase by phrase, sometimes word by word, changing the spelling until the pronunciation approximated the real word as spoken. Here's an example from the original text, followed by the altered version. Those of you with Macs can have Bruce (System Preferences/Speech/System Voice/Bruce) read the two versions to get an idea what I was working from:

Representation therefore always gives rise to resentment, which continually threatens to expand into violence; only the renewed employment of the sign can once more defer this threat. Gans--quite consciously--ontologizes and sacralizes Derridian différance. Semiosis is ironic deferral, but this deferral serves not the play of traces and linguistic paradoxes, but rather a "holy" goal, namely the preservation of the subject in the semiotic collective. The ostensive sign always contains an element of paradox, since the sign pretends to be something that it cannot be (a usable thing).

Representation therefore always gives rise to resentment, which continually threatens to expand into violence; only-the renewed employment of the sign, can once more defer this threat. Gans--quite consciously—awntoluhzhize’s and sacruhlizes Derridian diffĂ©rawnce. Semeeosis is ironic deferral, but this defurral serves not the play of traces-and linguistic paradoxes, but rather a hholey goal, namely the preservation of the subject in the semiotic collective. The ostensive sign always contains an element of paradox, since the sign pretends-too-be something-that it cannot bee; (a usable-thing!).

The entire process of trying to persuade something closer to a human performance out of a piece of software was strange. Kind of a Turing test turned inside out, almost as though I were the CPU in a Chinese Room. It also took a long time. The playtime for the MP3 is about an hour, and the rewriting process often took five to twenty minutes per sentence.

The sculpture is called Performatist Piece with Embedded Text, and it consists of a plastic pot, speakers, an MP3 player, and raw cotton (in which the "text" is embedded). It's so light and insubstantial that it hardly feels like a sculpture, which I like. In fact, it only takes about two seconds to turn it into not-a-sculpture, i.e. dumping everything out of the pot.


4 comments:

  1. hee hee,
    nice one mate.
    i like the cotton embedding, you little literalist , you...
    maybe you could get a grant from Stephen Hawking to further develop a humanoid cadence from these types of software.
    cheers, bruce.
    having been in a Wilber hangover for the last year or so, i'm interested to go have a read at your essay there...i'm not sure if Wilber is the biggest hypocrite to ever grace the halls of academia, or if he's just more honest than the rest of us.

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  2. Did you know that "Literalism" was the original name for what we call Minimalism? In fact Michael Fried accused it of the nearly same sort of theatricality that Eshelman is advocating for. Hmmm, wish I'd thought of that earlier. I'll work it into the rewrite. Thanks.

    As for Wilber, I don't think he's all bad, I'm even a fan of James Fowler's Stages of Faith, which is related, somewhat, to Clare Graves's work. I'm just a little wary of some of the more cultish aspects of his followers, their intense need for a yogi (related to our English word yoke), which, if we take Wilber at his word, would imply their entrenchment in the blue meme. I'm also a little disturbed by his yellow/turquoise/coral meme trump card ("Okay, having gotten the humor out of the way—and separated green from yellow, because green simply will not forgive the “simply suck my dick” thing, so there you go—but for the rest of you:..."). He seems to be willing to pull it out to excuse himself of childish behavior, and also as a way to curry favor with his followers, by letting them know that if they're in on the joke, then they must be 2nd tier, too. I think it could be pretty dangerous to let people stuck in the "absolutistic"/fundamentalist stage imagine that they're enlightened. Just look at 1600 Penn. Ave. if you want to see how that turns out. Anyhow, sorry 'bout your hangover.

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  3. Hi Dane,

    I was amused (and more than a trifle flattered) that anyone could make an art work out of my turgid prose. Could you contact me please at the e-mail address given in the original article? I'd like to use your creation in an article I'm writing on performatist art.

    Greetings
    Raoul

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  4. Raoul-

    I am likewise flattered (and more than a trifle relieved) that you would notice my little sculpture (and not get after me for copyright violation). I'm having trouble loading the Anthropoetics website right now, but I'll get back to you as soon as I find that address.

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