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Description: John Cayley’s “windsound” is an algorithmic work presented as a 23-minute recording of a machine-generated reading of scrambled texts. The cinematic work presents a quicktime-video of white letters on a black screen, a text written by Cayley with a translation of the chinese poem “Cadence: Like a Dream” by Qin Guan (1049-1100). As a sensory letter-by-letter performance, the work sequentially replaces letters on the screen, so that what starts as illegible text becomes readable as a narrative, and then again loses meaning in a jumble of letters. Cayley calls this technique “transliteral morphing: textual morphing based on letter replacements through a sequence of nodal texts.” Sequences of text appear within up to 15 lines on the same screen, thus presenting and automatically replacing a longer text on a digitally simulated single page-a concept Judd Morrissey also applied in "The Jew´s Daughter". Unlike Morrissey’s piece, Cayley’s doesn´t allow the user to interact with the work that appears as a text-movie with ambient sound, murmurs of voices, windsound and synthetic female and male voices reading the non-readable to the viewer. With the letters, narrative perspectives also morph and switch fluidly between the lyrical-I, Christopher, Tanaka or Xiao Zhang, who appear in the story. Thus, the sentence: "‘We know,’" Tanaka had said in English/"‘Tomorrow if we meet/I will have to kill you myself/’" is, in the algorithmic process of the work, later spelled out by the I-narrator. As stated at the very end of the work, John Cayley created “windsound” in memory to Christopher Bledowski. What remains after a blackened screen and a start-over of morphing letters before they vanish conclusively, is windsound. At a certain point in the movie the text says "you have to be/to stay/silent/to hear it" and it seems like the reader has to be silent, too, listening to what he cannot understand, patiently waiting for the moment of legibility. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: poetry, appropriated texts, ambient, non-interactive , synthetic voices, algorithmic, soundscape, transliteral morphing
Creator: John Cayley
Description: A poet's playful meditation on the nature and function of letterforms in kinetic two-dimensional space. Dreamlife is a Flash animation, based on a text by the feminist literary theorist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, which explores the ground between classic concrete poetry, avant-garde, feminist practice, and "ambient" poetics. Stefans responded DuPlessis by using words of her text: "all I did was alphabetize the words in it and then construct shorter poems from them." The short film runs about 11 minutes and shows letters that perform their "dreams" on the screen. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: flash, Animation/Kinetic, visual poetry, appropriated texts, ambient, non-interactive
Creator: Brian Kim Stefans
Language: Engish
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