Ecclesiastical Proust Archive

Proust-Interpreting Videos

I was originally going to post a handful of videos derived somehow from Proust’s work but ended up finding much more — and of better quality — than expected. For now, I’ll post a few musical interpretations. What’s interesting is that almost all of them involve a prominent visual component that constitutes its own narrative. Much of the video out there either parodies, idolizes, or has nothing to do with Proust.

Add comment August 31st, 2007

STS 2007, Part IV - New Digital Text Work and the Future of Reading

On Saturday March 17th I attended two afternoon panels, Text Work in the Digital Age, Part 2 and the Pedagogy and Textual Studies Round Table. In Text Work in the Digital Age, Part 2, Alice Gambrell, Sandy Baldwin, and Rita Raley all gave presentations that focused somewhat on the future of textual works. I was struck by the fact that most of these forward-looking textual projects were artistic in nature.

Alice Gambrell gave a fascinating presentation on the textuality of workplace media and its subversive uses by artists. A prominent example was David Byrne’s PowerPoint piece (2001-3). But she also referred to a collaborative project she had done a couple of years ago, the Stolen Time Archive, which shows that an archive is an argument that achieves certain effects. In that way, the role of the archivist is to use the archive as a tool for passing information along to others who will use it in unanticipated — and subversive — ways.

Sandy Baldwin had an interesting take on spam, noting that much of it tends toward the literary — an eliteness (i.e. 1337, or leet / “elite”) and a uniqueness that achieves its own erasure as spam. He was referring, as best I can remember, to the kinds of “nonsense” stories and poems that enter our inboxes randomly (or seemingly so) and the pleasure he derives from them. I was pleased to hear someone talking about this experience of textuality at such an important conference because some spam appeals to my sensibility as well as that of others. I think that particular experience of textuality — the randomness with which it goes to the reader (as opposed to vice versa), the mystery of its apparently automatic origin — in large part defines our time. One of the most beautiful haiku (sort of) that I’ve ever read came from a spammer who apparently put something through babelfish several times before disseminating it to probably thousands of individuals:

modern animal
walk appreciate key hoping article
myself black

Rita Raley brought to our attention several new media art projects that seek to improve online reading, develop new reading interfaces, experiment with translation (by machine), and can help us flesh out more fully the history of reading. Her assessment of the projects addressed the following elements.

• Textual visualization
• Codex / digital hybrids
• Alternative interfaces and screens (i.e. cell phones for reading novels)
• Immersive text environments (i.e. room installations, 3D simulations, the CAVE at Brown University, the allosphere for textual composition)
• 3D textual environments (projected)

I don’t seem to have notes on all the artists she discussed, so I’ll do my best to recount the more interesting ones.

William Gillespie’s Word Museum is a 3D environment and interface for creating word objects and sculptures. It’s about the transition between legibility and illegibility, looking at text as a sculptural object and reading it — or processing it — from all sides and angles.

jodi.org — a site (reminds me of absurd.org) that subversively expresses the hidden structures of a text. In commandeering the physical behavior of the browser, the site calls attention to the binaries of code/surface, source/interface, and depth/surface. The reader is made aware that code is a deep structure that substantiates a surface. Rita also remarked that works which include code with human language in the same space isolate the screen as a surface.

Ted Warnell’s code poem Lascaux.Symbol.ic similarly lays bare the conditions of textual production. The background horse from Lascaux (circa 15,000 BCE) calls our attention to the “writing on the wall” and the communicative, expressive, semiotic systems that reside in art. The hand evokes tactility, the interface, and presence/absence. It also looks mounted, meaning the cave wall is not the mounting of the painting/poem, as traditionally, but the background of the picture — thereby destabilizing the notions of foreground/background (reminds me of Cubism).

She also discussed several pieces by John Cayley, a London-based poet, translator, and book dealer who also works at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and has directed research at Brown University and UC San Diego.

• “Overboard” - an animated display of a stable text dissembled by algorithms over time. The effect of this contemporary writing experiment is to create a continually moving “language painting” in which the base text occasionally comes into full legibility. Since aspects like word shape are largely preserved as the text changes, the word becomes a lens, a visual threshold.
• “Translation” - a selection of passages from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past — both the original French and the English translation by Moncrieff and Kilmartin — that rotate in 3D movements. This piece, like many others described above, is about the rising and sinking of the surface, though here it is viewed through the lens of Proust and memory. It’s basically a narrated video in non-Euclidean geometry and a virtual 3D space.
• “Imposition” - was a collaborative, networked, textual/multimedia performance. The room featured a main screen with a primary movie. Twelve laptops were distributed to visitors, who were invited to to interact with text. The ensemble then moves to multiple screens to become a networked performance. The driving question of the project is to see how text competes with other types of media in a multimedia ecology.

The overarching theme of these experimental projects is legibility. They approach text as something to be contemplated rather than read. In that way, they’re more about processing text in non-traditional, unfamiliar ways.

This was a particularly stimulating panel that precipitated a lively Q&A session. The three presentations had in common a forward-looking attitude that implied — if it didn’t directly address — the future of reading and textual production. They all focused on issues pertinent to the projects and discussion that happen at the Institute for the Future of the Book, so I suggested that anyone who didn’t already know about it should check it out.

In the next post I will review the Pedagogy round table that also proved highly stimulating.

Add comment April 9th, 2007

Guest Spot on if:book –> Thoughts-Illustrated

The Institute for the Future of the Book was generous enough to let me write a post on their blog, which can be found here:

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/02/ecclesiastical_proust_archive.html

The post was picked up by RSS feeds all over the world. Thanks!

In addition, Dave Davison, who has a blog called Thoughts-Illustrated, posted a comment comparing this archive to his project of “editorially segmenting and tagging encapsulations of longer serial archives such as recorded speeches, audiovisual/video content, and finally ‘Networked Books’”. Admittedly, I haven’t had time yet to read his blog in depth, but what I’ve seen so far is a series of very interesting posts on annotating visual media for better reading and reducing Constant Partial Attention, a term he picks up from Linda Stone.

With the explosion of technologies like RSS and Web 2.0, it’s very important that educators help students think critically about managing information. That might include using technology to tag longer pieces used in courses — whatever media might be used — and evaluating research sources.

I’ve seen a demonstration of courseware that takes this into account at Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CNMTL). One of CNMTL’s applications, VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning), is an environment that allows students to play digitized movies and music, select segments, annotate those segments with as much text as they like, and file the segments with annotations for when they write their integrative multimedia essays — all in the courseware. Granted, this type of activity occurs in controlled learning environments where the media are pre-selected by the professor. I wonder if the courseware allows students to import, segment, and annotate media they’ve garnered through research — or even digitize it. Applications like VITAL (but with the ability to act upon any media the reader might import, including text) ought to be readily available to students as stand-alone tools, especially now that much of their research will involve multimedia.

I could see using such a technology to teach novels. It would enable students to archive, tag, and illustrate passages, connect them to articles and other sources they’ve researched and imported into the environment, and so on. This might spark a radical (and possibly unfortunate) change in the English major. One of the unquantifiable skills that the English major has been touted to impart is the ability to see the Big Picture in a complex, hazy jumble of information and ideas. At the center of that is a highly flexible memory that is both detail-oriented and conceptually driven.

It’s important, as technology is increasingly appropriated to our intellectual pursuits, not to become too dependent on it. But if it’s used in such a way that it enhances those personal skills, then so much the better.

Obviously, one task accomplished by the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is to serve as the memory for the vast amount of material I want to study but couldn’t physically remember in its entirety. Sure, my unaided memory will recall the most important material: the early descriptions of the Église St-Hilaire at Combray, of Marcel’s epiphany with the twin steeples of Martinville, and sundry short passages that made impressions on me while reading the Recherche. And I’ll remember where to find them when I need to write about them. The usefulness of this archive, however, is a virtue of its “narrow” focus that keeps the field of information from assimilating and ballooning endlessly, like The Blob. (I say narrow, but really — this archive comprises 336 passages, 184,181 words, over 700 associations, and roughly 500 images.) The focus on churches keeps the project thematically and conceptually unified.

I’m starting to think, as a result of writing this post, that opening this archive to the inclusion of passages and paratextual information not related to churches is probably not the way to go. (Read this post and this post for more on that topic.) There’s enough that could be done under the church rubric — say, a variorum of different translations and editions — to make it textually and scholarly interesting. The vast jumbled archive of editions, translations, articles, books, pamphlets, websites, films … … is already there. One could simply use a wiki, perhaps with customized search tools, to make sense of all of them, which would be great. But this archive is really a tool for narrative and textual analysis.

Add comment February 14th, 2007