Thank you very much for that intro.
I'm very happy to be here tonight.
I'm old, but I feel younger after arriving in Tucson.
It's so warm here.
I'm going to screen a few videos as well as indicated.
I'm not really a big fan of reading.
So but I'm going to do a little bit of both tonight.
So I'm going to read, but I'm going
to start off with two videos.
Both of these videos were done in PowerPoint.
And I was interested in PowerPoint
as a multimedia platform.
And I guess the issue for me was, well, if you write a poem
and you put it in PowerPoint, what would it look like?
And would you read it in the same way that you read a poem?
And what would be interesting or not interesting about it?
Now people think about PowerPoint
in terms of, I don't know, PowerPoint hell, boredom,
like you're going to be subjected to somebody forcing
you to read stuff at a steady pace for a long time, which
means it's going to be very boring.
But I want you to be bored tonight.
I really want you to be bored.
So the first movie that we're going to look at,
it's been converted to a movie.
It's called The Bibliographic Soundtrack.
And I was asked by Richard Burkett
who runs artist space to write a catalog
essay about two artists.
They were named DUOX, and they had a show
at the Bard Curatorial Center.
And it was a hot show.
But I didn't really know anything about the artist.
They were extremely young.
There was no secondary literature on them.
And I was like, oh, how am I going to write a catalog
essay on these people who are like 22 years old
and I don't know anything about them?
So I asked Richard and his assistant
to send me as much information that they
thought relevant to DUOX.
And I composed research notes, and so these research notes
went into the formulation of the Sound, which
is the second video you'll see.
But it also shows up a little bit
in Bibliographic Soundtrack.
Now, one of the things I was interested in doing this movie,
I've been reading a book by Ian Bogost.
He wrote a very interesting book called How
to Do Things with Video Games.
And Bogost divides video games into two general categories.
First is lean back games.
Now lean back games induce a relaxation, meditativeness.
You just sit back in your chair.
And then on the other hand, you have a lean forward video game,
which induces anxiety and twitchiness.
So I'm going to show you two videos tonight.
The first is meant to induce boredom.
Keep your cell phones on for the first one.
The second movie has a musical soundtrack.
It was done by DJ in Moscow.
So I hope somebody dances.
Is Gianna in the house?
Gianna's in the back there.
Gianna, you need to come up here and dance
a little bit for the Sound.
Gianna is the daughter of Susan and--
I'm sorry.
Farid.
Yeah, then I met them for lunch today
and we had a wonderful lunch.
But I said, oh, bring your daughter, she can dance.
Now the texts is, we're not going to be able to project.
This as large as I wanted.
So these are reading pieces.
And I was interested in PowerPoint
for a number of reasons.
The PowerPoint itself is three iterations.
It was initially-- in the first iteration,
it enabled you to produce overhead transparencies.
So this is useful for corporations
because they didn't have to outsource this labor,
and they could save money and time.
The second iteration of PowerPoint
involved incorporation of photographic imagery,
and we still refer to PowerPoint panes as slides
and sometimes as pages.
So there's a crossing between book pages
and a photographic image.
And the third iteration really of PowerPoint
is when they start to bring in swirling bullet
points and cinematic gestures.
So PowerPoint is very interesting
because you have overhead transparency,
you have a photographic slide, and you have filmic effects
that I associate with titling.
But then you also have two residual formats,
one would be the book and the second would be the lecture.
And of course, I saw many lectures mainly
in the social sciences when I was going to college.
And yeah, they were boring.
So we're going to do--
I'm going to just see, now the most of the material
that you'll see in Bibliographic Soundtrack,
and it's a 44-minute movie.
So as long and goes on a long time.
We're only going to play this for 15 minutes.
But most of the material was sourced from SMS.
There's a lot of IM messaging here.
I took a lot of material from video game walkthroughs.
There's a lot of stuff from RSS feeds.
I sample from my email things.
So there's a lot of that, what I would
call communications mediums.
And I was interested in when do communications mediums
become literary?
There's so much information out there and we manage it.
Now it's become an aesthetic pastime,
curating our own information or curating ourselves.
And increasingly, we see ourselves as data individuals.
I mean, I think in the 19th century,
maybe the body was conceived of as a thermodynamic engine that
burns like glucose, and sugar, and fat.
But now we see a body as a kind of information management
system.
So the PowerPoint references to those idea.
So without any further introduction,
I thought we could take questions after this
if you have queries, and then I'll
play the PhD Sounds after that.
The first one is silent.
So we're going to try to dim the lights completely.
This is the cinematic effect, and we'll talk a little bit
about controlled reading practices
in a cinematic setting maybe or maybe not.
OK, here we go.
It takes a while for the lights to-- can
we turn off everything?
Yes.
Let's get this going first.
OK.
And you should move up a little if you can.
We just couldn't get this big enough,
but it is meant to be read.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
That's actual reading time.
[LAUGHTER]