User:Inge Hoonte/Rule-based improvisation

Sunday, Oct 30, thinking about collaborative, participatory practices, improvisation, open-ended outcomes departing from set guidelines, nonlinearity

I'm working on the invite text for the 11:11:11 project that I'm working on with Birgit. Was asked to fill out a questionnaire about my involvement in the project, questions on collaborative, online performance. We had our rehearsal on Friday, and once again, I remembered why I love improvisation within some outline or set structure. We knew how we wanted to structure the space, with the Proprietary/Free Software apartment in the back of the room, and the projection on the other side, so the actors can see themselves and interact with the avatars better. Overall, the platform hasn't been super easy to work with. The site is a bit clouded to navigate. We've had a hard time working with the webcam within the stage. Images don't always load which seems to be a server issue. The rehearsal went fine though. It was good for us to test out some ideas and get a better idea of what we want to do on the 11th. I like going with the flow and seeing where things land. The part where I, as an avatar, moved into the webcam screen, and moved my physical body also into the stream, was SUPER. My avatar hands became real hands, the story connected, what Birgit handed me analog/physically on screen could become digital again!

Today, while working through unread emails, I find myself thinking about collaborative, participatory practices, and researching some terms in the field of networked media that I should probably know, or have heard of but don't really know how to explain. Trying to get a better understanding of how what I do relates to being here, learning here, and developing myself the coming years.

The journey started with reading on common practice- a project to write collaboratively, a link that Aymeric sent me in relation to my research on nonlinear textuality. This led me to reading Aymeric's recent text on free software. (more on GNU's Not Unix here) Use of copy-left terminology in 1960s by mail-artist Ray Johnson. "(...) under the 1976 copyright act, the only recognised artistic collaborative work was the joint work, in which it is required that all the authors agree that all their contributions are meant to be merged into one, flattened down, work. This made perfect sense in the context of the print based copyright doctrine but was clearly not working for digital environments where the romantic vision of the author is dissolved in the complex network of branches, copies and processes inherent to networked collaboration." About process of developing work, not just final product.

Mentions Raymond Queneau, cofounder OuLiPo-- cent mille milliards de poèmes --- would be interesting "import random" type of python poetry generator. Bev Rowes' html generator of Queneau. Wikipedia: "When Queneau ran into trouble while writing the poem(s), he solicited the help of mathematician Francois Le Lionnais, and in the process they initiated Oulipo.[1]" [1]:

Graham Coulter Smith on nonlinearity "a mode of narrative less concerned with storytelling and more preoccupied with the process of establishing connections, associations and transformations." On Mallarmé: "abstract in the sense that it transcends commonsense".

"Perception involves massive computational processes that take place within the brain unconsciously.

Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice never will abolish chance). 1897 Via: artintelligence.net