Jenny Holzer Twittering

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"Cantata Park" by Metamatic Collective

Second Life has been attracting a lot of attention as a platform for media artists... some of the work isn't all that interesting (especially if it mainly depends on the aging novelty of avatars virtual spaces)... but some of it is quite interesting such as Eteam's Second Life Dumpster (Marisa Olson describes it here);

Turbulence's Networked_Performance blog reported on another intriguing Second Life project:

Cantata Park 1 (2006) [Teleport to Mashup Park, Marni (206, 35, 23)] — by Metamatic (Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash) — is an interactive, spatialised sound sculpture built in the virtual world Second Life. The sculpture is made from 256 individual nodes in a 16 x 16 grid. Each node is embedded with a single word, triggered by a participant’s movement through the work. Each participant creates a random narrative, assembled on-the-fly, and in real-time.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a “cut-up narrative”. By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. The cut-up technique was popularised by Beat poets in the 1950’s-70’s as a method to “break the linearity” of written language, with William S. Burroughs using it extensively in his works. Burroughs believed non-pictorial languages contained a virus. By using non-linear writing techniques he believed the true meaning of language could be exposed, and the spoken word used as a weapon.

Cantata Park uses a passage of 256 words from Burroughs’ The Electronic Revolution (1971) and transfers the cut-up technique into a real-time 3D environment.

The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life’s construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar.

Popcorn & parrot art

Here are two interesting works, both dealing with language.

Talking Popcorn by Nina Katchadourian interprets popcorn popping as Morse code. A text-to-speech program provides simultaneous translation. Since popcorn doesn't have short & long popping sounds, the duration of the silence between the pops create the short Morse code "dots" and long "dashes."

I can see how this could create a series of random letters, but I wonder how it is turned into coherent words. Perhaps it waits until a word appears in the gibberish? The problem with that is you might pop an entire batch of popcorn and only get a couple of words. Perhaps the gibberish is translated into the closest matching word (in the same way that spell-checkers work).

In addition to the popcorn machine, Katchadourian has a nice series of spin-off works including The Popcorn Journal which consists of bags of popcorn along side their text output and Talking Popcorn's First Words which are bronze popped corn from the first batch (which was translated as "we").



may-por-e' is a work by Rachel Berwick in which she attempts to teach them the Maypure language. The Maypure were a South American tribe that were wiped out by the Carib in 1799. Parrots were among the items that the Carib's looted after the attack. A few days later, the German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt acquired one of these parrots. Realizing it was the last speaker of the Maypure language, he phonetically recorded the parrot's language. Using that sole record of the language, Berwick teaches contemporary parrot the Maypure language.