User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/WHAT
Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway
- What
'Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway' is an installation composed of four inkjet printers that perform the homonymous short story, each representing either one individual character or the narrator. The story is about a trip to a so-called „Indian Camp“ by a medical doctor, his son, and his uncle, in order to help an indigenous woman to give birth to her child. During the process - a Caesarian incision has to be made to save the mother and her child - the husband commits suicide. An important aspect is that apart from the narrator's voice, the whole story consists of dialogue between the father, uncle and son.
The installation uses the fictional time of the story as a timeline for the actual – 'real-time' – print performance. Dialogues and narrator breaks are thus printed out as if they would be performed by actors in a theatre play or movie, synchronized with each other and containing the time gaps of the original narrative. One complete print-out of the story is a five hour sequence of intense, concentrated printing sessions interspersed with long pauses. Nothing was added to or left out of the original text. As they are being printed, the sheets – usually not containing more than one sentence or a few words – fall on the floor, so people can pick them up to read and recompose the part of the story that has already been 'told'.
- How
I wrote a script that constantly checks the current time and matches it with a logfile that contains the information about which part of the story has to be sent to which printer on what time. Whenever there is a match between the real, current time and a time-stamp in the logfile, the script instantly sends the according piece of text to the according printer. The assignment of – real – time to the text was done through my own interpretation of how the - fictional - time evolved in the story. The physical installation was set up in such a way that the three printers representing the characters in the story were facing each other, the one representing the narrator stood a little apart. The computer that was running the script and controlling the printers was not visible.
- Why
The thematic project we had been following that trimester was about re-enactments. The footage that was shown as research material consisted mostly of documentation about re-enactments of big historical events, mostly driven by a desire to understand or experience what it would have been like. I wondered what it would be like to re-enact a piece of fictional prose by means of performance instead. The starting point was also my longing to understand a text I was not able to finish in the past: James Joyce's Ulysses. Since this turned out to be a little too ambitious, I started looking for texts with similar style, more specifically ones that consist mostly or solely of dialogue. Hemingway's Indian Camp not only matched this requirement, the story itself could also be read as a metaphor for the violent European invasion of the 'New World' in the fifteenth century, and perhaps even for Western imperialism as a whole, which fed back into the realm of the traditional historical re-enactments we had been looking at.
Folklore
- What
A set of two animated .gifs displaying rotating kebab meat on vertical spits. Lamb & chicken!
- How
The .gifs each comprise 20 frames that are displayed successively in a loop, resulting in an animation. The transition between the first and the last frame of the animation is seamless, thereby creating the impression of endless rotation. I drew each frame myself using image-editing software.
- Why
A thematic project involving a lot of 'nineties net-art sparked this idea. Since the work that was made during that trimester would be shown at an internet café in Rotterdam, I wanted to make something that would blend perfectly in the interior of the space and still keep a link with the internet services it offers. And just to have fun, really.
The Listener
- What
The Listener is an interactive installation that consists of two main parts. Firstly, it is an online multi-person chatbox that people can join by surfing to a certain web address. The chat is mediated by a computer script that alters the original messages by adding, deleting or replacing words. It operates in such a way that every participant sees his/her own unchanged messages, while the recipients are presented with a transformed variation. Secondly, a large pen plotter instantly prints out a complete transcript of the conversation, showing both the original and altered version of the messages. This way, the workings of the computer script are exposed – which is not the case in the interface of the chatbox itself – and a physical log of the conversation is made. The installation was presented at an internet cafe where people were invited to join the chatbox and could see their conversations being plotted at the same time.
- How
As soon as someone sends a message to the chatbox, a filtering process takes place that scans the message for certain (predefined) words or pieces of text, such as 'hello' or 'how are you'. If there is a match, a script replaces these sections with an (also predefined) alternative text before actually posting the message to the chatbox. A logfile of the conversation, which is kept on a webserver. In order to print it out on the plotter, another script checks the logfile every second and looks if there were any changes made since the last check. If so, the script will use the information that is embedded in the logfile to first print the original message in black and afterwards the 'corrections' made by the script in red, if there were any.
- Why
As a text is read, a certain meaning is derived from it. The installation tries to address this creation of meaning in an online context. It is an attempt to show the subtle inner workings of computer programs when mediating the information we consume online. The use of the plotter is meant to amplify this: as a counterweight to the sneakiness of the computer program, it tries to raise the awareness about this issue by literally putting it permanently on paper in a very loud and ostentatious way.