RECTO-VERSO

RECTO-VERSO is a recent outcome from an ongoing and open-ended enquiry into the use of appropriated sources as ingredients for the formation of new-media works. Potentially producing unique sounds indefinitely, in this work text and images are constantly collected from frequently updated internet news pages through a series of automated processes, and projected as abstracted sonic languages through (potentially) any number of channels.

The work can be discussed in two parts: the first outlining the methodologies and processes behind the design and construction of the ‘template’ digital environment that produced this work (and several other similar outcomes), and the second looking at its specific applications in the making of RECTO-VERSO.

1. MACHINE (REAL TO DIGITAL)

The design of the environment, or 'machine', used in the formation of this body of work is a work-in-progress. By the nature of new media art and design and the tools being used, it will expand and develop over time as part of an open-ended discussion with, and use of, appropriated ‘information’ (texts (letters and numbers), and images (moving and still) as a kind of code or fuel to drive the creation of multimedia works.

The work poses the question: how can we engage or ‘plug into’ the real world and use it as a controlling factor in the digital world? It attempts to question the position of the designer / artist within new media works, moving towards a role of ‘designer as technician’ rather than creator, through the manufacturing of digital machines which produce the work within defined extents. In addition, it is an attempt to give a creative ‘voice’ to otherwise largely unused information, empowering it with an author’s role in the work, making decisions about how and what is created, displayed and communicated.

Perhaps more importantly, the work attempts to challenge our relationships with everyday information such as word and image on the internet, and how technology allows both a shift and convergence of roles and mediums, giving new levels of engagement and communication.

The attempt at producing an interface as opposed to the work itself is central to the investigation: similar to the properties of kinetic art (sculptures etc), there is no work without the influence of an external factor. In the case of kinetic art this may be wind or the movement of the viewer, but in the case of this body of work the external forces are the everyday life happenings around the world, being recorded and distributed in real-time by way of the internet through word and image. The work produced through this process is both interactive in the sense that it responds to an input, created by human hands (the information on the internet) and generative in that the outcome is largely uncontrollable by the designer, moreover the listener.

Using an open-source application (in this case the Pd interface, by Miller Puckette) to create this environment as custom-built software is central to the ideals behind the work, given that one of the key characteristics of open-source software: the reliance on a collaboration with an online community, also underpins what is being produced: work reliant on an interaction with internet-based information. So in this instance, the nature of the tools, their fragility and almost ‘user-unfriendly’ interfaces, are embraced within the work they produce.

2. RECTO-VERSO (HEARING ‘RE:’)

Recorded in response to a call for entries to a book arts exhibition (Northampton, May 2008), RECTO-VERSO attempts a representation of written and visual content in a 4-dimensional non-visual space: a gallery environment over a period of several weeks.

In this work, the theme and title of the exhibition, ‘Re:’, was used as a keyword to automatically and repeatedly search internet news sites for articles containing the word ‘re’ in its title. Following a series of automated algorithmic processes, the text and images returned by the searches became new abstracted sonic languages, projected through 2 channels - the RECTO (right channel: words) and the VERSO (left channel: images).

The sounds produced for RECTO draw on areas of past enquiries into the meeting point of typography and sound, the most significant being the design of a typeface - SOUND ALPHABET - through which letter forms were drawn and shaped with stereo sound waves, allowing words to be ‘written’ with sound. This typeface allowed further questions and exploration into the potential use of accurate and accountable sound-based methods (alphabetic sine waves) in communicating complex written information in new ways - in this case news articles as sound - and challenge the boundaries between visual and sonic methods of representing written information.