The emphasis of the software is on the process of writing / typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. It reveals additional information on digital poetry, because the speed of typing and reading it, are visualised. E-mail, blogs, all kinds of digital media can be given a “human touch” by TBT. The software has been kept as basic as possible, is free to use and users are encouraged to add functionalities. The special TBT website offers space for TBT-created messages, haiku’s and poetry, so that visitors can admire each other work.

TBT was made by Jaromil and conceived by Jaromil and JoDi. Following is a short interview with Jaromil about this new tool.

Annet Dekker: TBT was born as an idea formulated by you and JoDi. An interesting relation, a computer programmer/artist and an artist couple who like nothing more than to deconstruct soft -and hardwares. Could you describe your relation and your shared interest?

Jaromil: It is definitely a result and very much inspired by JoDi. What brought us together, besides the curiosity we nurtured about each other, was this commission for “Net art is dead” by Impakt. So we spent two weekends together. JoDi initially thought of taking the dyne:bolic operating system and subverting its functionalities, but the perspective of working further to subvert something I already invested a lot of effort on building was really discouraging for me.

So I opposed their intention and argued that, if we have something in common, surely it is a minimalist aesthetic and a passion for text and inner processes. At that point JoDi mentioned their interest in building a “key logger” that would record keys typed in any program running, in particular word processors. I insisted in focusing on the aspect of literary production, stripping down the approach to a reference implementation of a time-based text protocol for recording time-based literature - I was extremely excited about developing a software tool for literature. We all realized we like literary experiments in automatic writing and we would be interested in a tool to publish online time-based poetry as well to be used in email communication, where hesitations in writing can be a vehicle for sentiments?

AD: One of the important changes in the way of thinking about language, typography and poetry came from Italy, Marinetti said “my revolution is directed against the so-called typographical harmony of the page, instead I want to grasp words brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.” is this something you can relate to? Does your own background, also coming from Italy has been of influence in your work?

J: Yes, I was born in Italy, but I’m part of a generation that starts, for necessity and virtue, to think about a common European heritage rather than a restricted (and in case of Italy over-celebrated) national identity. I guess this opens even more ways to play with language than Italians used to do in Italy anyway. My education was as classical as it can get in the south of Italy, mostly focusing on literature and philosophy, in particular ancient Latin and Greek; such traditions of written poetry respect metrical schemes and sometimes adopts a richer punctuation than the modern one we are used to. This is certainly a point of contact with the concept of Time Based Text, but by now I’d say my frequentation of digital haiku circles as the ‘five7five’ mailing list played a more important role in this project.

I find it very difficult to relate to Futurism, which I consider a decadent re-use of Symbolism. While it might be considered true that Marinetti’s furor has contributed to syntactical innovation and modern design, I do believe that was too functional to the mission of the industry to be considered art. Furthermore I fear the aggressive attitude of futurists, but that has more to do with personal taste I guess? My inspiration is coming from writers as James Joyce, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, to name just a few that challenged in various ways the performative act of what used to be called “automatic writing”.

AD: As the title indicates an important aspect of TBT is that it is time based, something that seems almost paradoxical when linked with a computer. How do you see this relation?

J: TBT is about the dimension of time in literature. The act of writing a flow of consciousness discards information. Such information is very abstract when compared to words and concepts, it can intimately describe the writer’s thoughts with all the hesitations occurring in the creative act. TBT offers also to preserve all the sentimental information that is related to the mediation of text in human communication. With TBT we preserve the emotional information produced when writing, at the same time opening the media art domain to the world of literature. The existence of a software as TBT draws complex relationships between code and language: it softly unveils the mutual influence between literary art and computer programming suggesting they can benefit from each other not just in terms of productivity.

AD: TBT reflects much the Japanese haiku’s or dada experiments. Most of these actions in poetry have a strong relation with the human, organic and emotions. Very little do they relate it seems with the ‘hard’ and ‘cold’ language and command lines of computers. How do you view this difference or better, change? Can we finally start to emotionally engage and understand our mechanics?

J: I guess the exploration of our mechanics (as opposed to the mechanics of machines) is always doomed to a sweet failure, the one that poetry celebrates with the best tears one can cry. The literary approach shifts the analysis to a produced fact, which reflects our inner sentiments: a production that is written out of our inner emotions but still sub-consciously shaped by them. Today the act of writing is arguably the most natural act of creation human kind engages on a regular basis, so there are chances to access a precedented undisclosed intimacy of thoughts there, in everyone who writes, between the lines.

AD: What do you think is more artistic the TBT software, as being software art, or the poetry that can be made by using it?

J: I think what is most artistic is the concept of TBT. The software itself and the poetry that can be made by using TBT are also a propagation of the artistic value of this exploration, but the artistic value is rather conceptual, probably definable media art. There is a formal approach in the realization that also can be argued as artistic: it is not by coincidence that both from a programmer’s and user’s point of view TBT will result minimalistic and, when adopted, extremely flexible. At least I refuse the usual rhetoric of presentation for “artistic software”, instead caring very much for functionality and a design that is faithful to text.

AD: In the past you have also talked about making the net more ‘organic’ by devising ‘new ways for information’, is TBT a step in the right direction?

J: Hopefully yes, at least it is an attempt. I hope that it can work in a natural and spontaneous way. That is why the work consists of a portable source code that works as a clean reference implementation and can be included in any other software (being open source and licensed GNU GPL), rather than building a TBT software that does it all for you, that would probably limit its usefulness on the long term. I also expect it to inspire people to think about less superficial ways of communication: right in a time in which our media-scape is getting polluted by opportunist automatas abusing our attention, the difference between us and them might be just…sentiments.

AD: How can you use TBT in your email program?

J: As an external editor: it can be called when the message needs to be written, once done will quit giving back the TBT message, which can be sent in an attachment. The reference implementation is working with the mail client Mutt, but hopefully some mail client will implement TBT natively in future.

AD: Could you tell me step-by-step what I should do to make TBT poetry?

J: once you have downloaded and compiled the source code (or you have booted a dyne:bolic liveCD or downloaded the OSX binary), just open a terminal and type ‘tbt -h’, you will get this help:

TBT - Time Based Text - v0.7 - tbt.dyne.org
Usage: tbt [options] [file]

-h print this help
-v version information
-D debug verbosity level - default 1
-c console interface mode (S-Lang)
-r record tbt - option alias: rectext
-p playback tbt - option alias: playtext -m mail composer - option alias: recmail -s save format in [ bin | ascii | html ] -x convert binary tbt to html or ascii

which suggests various possibilities to write your message, for example to simply write a message type:

tbt -c -r mymessage.tbt

and type your message, once done quit pressing ctrl+c

you can then play the message on the screen with:

tbt -c -p mymessage.tbt

in case you want to create a web TBT do

tbt -c -r -s html mymessage.html

then type and quit with ctrl+c

you can then upload mymessage.html to your website together with the tbt javascript code to be put in the same directory.

TBT currently also include a full website with “guestbook” functionality for others to upload their TBT, it is written in PHP and quite easy to setup on a normal web server.

Jaromil is a free software programmer, a media artist and activist. He has made significant contributions to the development of multimedia and streaming applications on the GNU/Linux platform (the free counterpart of commercial brands like Microsoft and Macintosh). He was born in Pescara, Italy, but now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is author of the dyne:bolic GNU/Linux liveCD, and of various free software projects, including MuSE (a streaming server) and FreeJ (a free VJ software to live mix and adjust images and sounds). As an artist, he has created performances and netart works as the :(){ :|:& };: forkbomb (when typed in the command line of a Unix system the computer crashes). He also founded dyne.org in 2000 under the flag of Freedom of Creation, playing hybrid between the fields of politics, art and technology.

Annet Dekker is program manager at Virtueel Platform and freelance curator and researcher based in Amsterdam.

Socrates: What a lucky morning this is turning out to be! I was looking for one virtue and have found a whole swarm of them. — Plato, Meno

In September 2007, the Australia Council for the Arts announced the recipients of its $20,000 artists residency in the 3-D online virtual world of Second Life. Dodds, Nash, and Clemens were awarded the grant to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork which explores the possibilities of literary, music / sound art and real-time 3-D arts practices within the virtual world. The artwork is a simultaneous installation in Second Life and in a real world gallery, where gallery visitors can be directly involved in its creation via a computer interface.

[Image: left to right: Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (aka Mashup Islander), and Justin Clemens (aka S1 Gausman)]

BabelSwarm, a metaphor for the Tower of Babel, uses voice recognition software that converts the spoken word of real and virtual world participants into 3-D letterform images in an evolving tower of words. The letterforms generate relationships with each other through a combination of visual and sonic manifestations, fragments of narrative, environmental / user awareness capabilities and through interaction with existing data generated within Second Life itself such as the virtual winds, sunrises and sunsets. According to Justin Clemens, Second Life is an already burgeoning platform for today’s art. ‘Every era has a form that exemplifies it: in Shakespeare’s time, it was the theatre; today, it’s Second Life. It’s a question of trying to meet the new challenges of a new time - and the new spaces that it generates, ”Second Life epitomises the innovations of contemporary technology and culture: an entirely virtual world that has entirely real effects,” Justin said.

According to artist Christopher Dodds, Second Life is a step in the right direction for Australia contemporary arts practice. “It is encouraging to see the Australia Council recognising virtual worlds as legitimate environments for artistic practice, and while we thought our idea was solid, we knew the grant would receive a lot of attention and some pretty spectacular applications,” Christopher said.

Read more here [PDF] and here.

To gain access to Babelswarm you need to register an avatar name, download the Second Life application software, and then log-in to see the virtual world. This can be done in three easy steps:
1. Go to http://secondlife.com/ and follow the “Get Started” link. This will allow you to register an avatar name, download the application and then log into Second Life.
2. New users go to an instructional island where they can learn to walk, fly talk etc.
3. When ready, click on (or paste into a web browser) the following link: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ACVA/119/180/295/ Follow the instructions and your avatar will arrive in the Babelswarm foyer.

Read Bettina Tizzy’s interview with Adam Nash here.

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.

Twitter Fountain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF59hA8xIC4

Daden Limited is a Virtual Worlds agency based in the UK.

State of the Union provides searchable access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to the present. Using visualization software, the site allows a user to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context. State of the Union focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. From this information, users are invited to try and understand the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.

As we are in the midst of a presidential campaign, and the vagaries of political rhetoric flood the media, it is especially important this year to be able to analyze and understand how politicians use words to court us, to convince us, and ultimately to gain access to positions of power and control. Lamenting the triumph of iconicity over rhetoricity, Borevitz describes the gradual changes in political speech from argument to brand. The project asks us to consider if evidence for this assertion exists in the language of the State of the Union address which stands as a controlled sample of political speech over the course of U.S. history.

Brad Borevitz is an artist whose work focuses on language, politics and software. He has produced websites, videos, software applications, and robots, all of which have at their core a deep commitment to understanding the political and cultural implications of computer technology. He is a recent participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego.

Related: By ASCII BUSH Yoshi Sodeoka.

Engaging in conversation on the Internet by means of short text exchanges that usually consist of rapid-fire sequences of questions and answers has a long tradition. So-called IRC (Internet Relay Chat) servers with thousands of chat rooms (channels) have existed since the ’70s. Over the years, chatting has established itself as an integral communications standard on a variety of different software platforms, services and user devices. This highly reduced form of communication has a quality all its own and has brought forth a number of different innovations such as the emoticon :-). Nor has the online verbal communication that has since become very widespread completely eliminated chatting; rather, it has supplemented it. In 3D worlds, chatting as a form of communication was present at the very outset. In contrast to chat “rooms”—abstract, placeless places—conversation has been re-endowed with a spatial dimension here. Wrenched out of the context of text windows, the typed-in message appears in a dialogue balloon above the avatar’s head and follows the player’s proxy on its way through the virtual world. All other players within a certain range can read these messages and, in turn, answer with a communiqué in their own dialogue balloon.

Chat is an intervention that translates this form of conversation into the physical, public sphere. The written conversation becomes legible by the people in ones proximity. Each message remains visible in the dialogue balloon until a new message replaces it. What happens when a conversation between two people is made public in this way? What relationship exists between the written and spoken word? How does ongoing technological development influence our interpersonal communication?

Chat will be at:

Festival Club Transmediale, Berlin, DE
- Opening of Club Transmediale, Friday 25.01.08
- After the opening of Transmediale, Tuesday 25.01.08
- and on Friday 01.02.08

Inspired Lisbon Conference, Lisbon, PT
- Performance & Talk, Thursday 14.02.08

Try Again, Exhibition, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, ES
- Performance during the opening, Thursday 10.04.08

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfZraHuTe3c
Chat at Ars Electronica 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6CnaWPAHmo
Chat at 24c3

BIOGRAPHIES

Nathan Halverson works with found, sampled and original audio using various methods and processes to produce new sounds. His work combines elements of film, literature and popular culture which he uses to investigate the boundaries that divide and connect various media, their reception and our perception of them. A CD of his work, Nurse Shark, was released in September 2007 on the Peapod label.

G. Matthew Jenkins teaches poetry and writing at The University of Tulsa. His writing explores the visual form of language and the page as a unit of measure. He has worked with several visual artists, including painter Sheila Giolitti. Their collaborations appeared at the Old Dominion University Literary Festival and at the Hampton University Museum. Flash has become his latest poetic medium.

David Goldstein teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at York University. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Been Raw Diction (Dusie), and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Jubilat, Typo, Pinstripe Fedora, Alice Blue Review, and Epoch.

Mindy Stricke is a photographer, artist and entrepreneur whose photographs have been exhibited throughout the US and Canada, most recently at the Safe-T Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her portraits and other work have been featured in national and international publications including the New York Times, Time, Time Out New York, Newsweek, PDNedu and Voce. In 2008 her work will be seen in Click! Photography Changes Everything, an exhibit curated by the Smithsonian Photography Initiative.

For more Turbulence Spotlights, visit http://turbulence.org/spotlight

Urban Echo from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

In this talk Martin Mueller will present MONK (Metadata Create New Knowledge), a large-scale data mining and visualization project funded by the Mellon Foundation. Following on WordHoard, an application for the close reading and scholarly analysis of deeply tagged texts, MONK is a project to create something like a “cultural genome” of close to a billion words of written English from Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1474) to Virginia Woolf’s fixing of December 1910 as the beginning of the modern world. Text read and viewed at this scale reveals new kinds of patterns and demands new kinds of reading tools. As background for this next generation of digital humanities research, he will reflect on how to complement “close reading” with new forms of mapping and overviews that information technology enables.

Martin Mueller is Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University. In addition to many publications on ancient literature, its nachleben, focussing on its use in Shakespeare, he has also written on the place of literary studies in a professional and technological environment. He has taken a leading role in several large digital projects; he is the editor of the Chicago Homer, a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek, and the general editor of WordHoard , an application for the close reading and and scholarly analysis of deeply tagged texts, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Most recently, together with John Unsworth, he is the co-principal investigator of MONK.