I was just going to take a few questions if you
wanted to direct them now.
I thought this may be more interactive this way.
We'll let this continue to run in the background.
It's kind of a wallpaper anyway.
But are there any questions?
One of the things that I was interested to hear
is when you read a book, you have sort
of control over the book space.
The book is sort of right in front of you.
It exists in what's called a peripersonal space,
and one controls that space.
It's sort of an extension of the body.
But the minute I put you in a room, turn off the lights,
stick you in a chair and set something in motion,
you don't really have control over the language anymore,
and you're also looking up.
So people who have studied neural zen meditation practices
sort of also understand that the minute you look up,
you're sort of in an other directed space,
and it's characterized by sort of neural processing
that takes place in the ventral area
as opposed to the dorsal areas of the brain.
And it's sort of bottoms up rather than top down.
So I was really interested in distracted modes
of reading or gathering information,
and that's why I was encouraging you to, yeah,
go ahead, look at yourself, get up, do other things,
read part of the thing, and then come back to it later.
Or there was one sort of thing that
had 17th century stuff on it.
It was like, that's the longest title of a 17th century
painting, but I ran it from the bottom up.
So you're getting the PowerPoint bullet points,
but they're working in reverse.
So then the question is, well, do you read top down or do
you wait till it's shown, and then read it in its complexity?
There are just so many different ways to read.
And I was thinking about when the first phones were
introduced.
People heard someone's voice on the phone
and they said, oh my god, that sounds terrible.
You sound so phony.
And I think now we're reaching a point where somebody could
turn to you and say, oh gosh, your poems, they're
so SMS-ey or so text-ey.
But these are really very much about integrating
communications mediums and texts, video game walkthroughs,
a lot of bibliographic citations.
There's a huge play with the couplet as a structuring device
and how to make it more fluid.
But I suppose the thing that PowerPoint presentations raise
in comparison with a book or a codex
is that when you read a book most of the time
the text isn't moving, it's static.
And a book works to codify texts.
It works to enter them into canons.
Books stabilize text, but with a PowerPoint presentation,
the text is moving too in addition
to your retinal processing of that moving text.
So there's a lot of freedom in my mind
to reconfigure the text on the fly.
But are there any questions?
There's a question.
Did you want a mic someone?
It's not important.
The miking?
Why did you end it at 45 minutes?
Well, it doesn't really have an end.
I just sort of ran out of time.
So it's really-- it should be like a 24-hour work.
I was really wondering what the ideal situation was.
Yeah, it would be interminable work that would sort of collect
data on its own.
And then you could just turn it on in your house
like a thermostat, and it would sort of
regulate your emotional states.
[LAUGHTER]
That would be an ideal poetic system for me.
And it would be relaxing because you
wouldn't be so pressured to read it
in a linear, straight-ahead way.
You can just live with it forever
and accomplish that reading over 20 or 30 years.
You could finally say, oh, yeah, I've sort of lived
with that piece and read it and dah, dah, dah, dah, da
And at the end of 30 years, you could
say, yeah, I really read that piece really poorly,
but in that way, very well.
Yeah?
At what point does our distraction away
from what the words are actually meaning
and in the speed that they're being brought to our attention
play in this kind of text, this kind of coupling
of interactions between people.
At what point does that really start
to take over the meaning of the whole presentation?
I think I can cause you to get up and leave at any moment.
So one of the things that any reading does,
and it's true with the book too, you're
always free to stop reading.
People pretend that putting down a book
or not reading a book as a non-viable alternative
to reading, but, in fact, it always
exists as the sort of obverse, the opposite coin.
Like, if a book is boring, what are you going to do?
You're going to put it down right away.
I don't know how many books I've started
and I've only read the first sentence, and I put it down.
So this only brings to the fore something
that you can accomplish with the codex
very easily, which is, oh, I'm tired of this book
or I'm not going to read it.
Or better yet, you're going to say,
like for my Columbia orals PhD I had 200 books on my reading
list, but I only read a 1/3 of them,
and I just lied, and I said, oh, I read all these other books.
That's the other thing you can do about reading.
You can just say, no, I didn't read it at all.
I lied.
I didn't read any of that stuff.
I didn't need to read it.
But in a way, I had read them all, all those books, anyway
by whatever, by understanding their contextual relationship
to why they're books.
Half of reading is about contextualizing or managing
the information that one takes in at any given moment so.
But yeah, distraction, I think the other thing
that it dramatizes is, how active are you
going to be in relationship to the text?
On the one hand, you could say, oh, this is too much for me
to organize and I can't control it.
I'm just going to phase out.
The other thing is you can be an extremely active reader
and read this closely.
You could read all of these pages from right
to left and from left to right and from top
to bottom and from bottom to top.
So you could read it really spatially.
If you could just jam all that reading
into a short enough time, that would
force you to be an extremely neurotic active reader,
and that does exist as a possibility,
but you might defer and prefer to say no, this
is really sickening.
It's making me sick.
It's giving me a kind of vertigo.
I'm going to stop reading right now.
I can't stand it anymore.
So I think that something like this
dramatizes those choices that one makes
all the time with reading.
Reading can be nauseating, but also, reading
can be very relaxing.
So I like it when that becomes apparent or dramatized.
Yeah, other questions?
There's one in the way back.
Hi.
There's one right here.
Oh, OK.
I just want to ask, so you mentioned
Bogost and the idea of speculative realism
that Bogost writes about where you speculate that things
speculate themselves, that they think,
and then you speculate about what those things think about.
So I was curious.
If you think of PowerPoint as thinking,
and we're talking about us reading the text,
but do you interact with this as the text reading us
and the text reading you too and how that plays out.
Yeah, well, I think you should answer that question.
I think that what you're suggesting
is that perhaps this, reading this, which is sort of
perfectly calculated in advance in terms
of all the timings in the settings,
whether that gives off an anthropomorphic ring.
And if that does happen, if this feels like a human reading
to you, and it may or may not, I don't really know,
then the question would be, well, why does it do that
and how does it manage to do that?
So maybe I could throw this question back at you.
Did you feel like this was anthropomorphic,
that the reading was in some ways human or alive?
It was a machine reading in some ways.
This is software that's performing a calculation.
Of course, I authored it in some way,
but I like to think here that PowerPoint in some ways
is an authoring function with a kind of life of its own,
but that may be overly speculative.
I thought that-- we were humans engaging with it,
but I was trying to imagine the text and the words
going on in the wall and while you were walking around,
your phone making noise as something else connecting
with us in a non-human way.
That's what I wanted to do with it.
Yeah, I'd like to hear what other people say about that.
I'm actually very interested in this question.
It's not settled in my mind exactly how the piece is
functioning and how people read it actually,
and that's why I think this question is so interesting.
I was actually more interested in some ways in Ian Bogost's
notion of a unit operation where you
have sort of individual discrete and modular units each
functioning.
And here, you get a sort of reenactment
of the unit operation, computational operation taking
place in a very sort of in a very discrete unit.
And then you wonder, well, how does one thing relate
to another thing?
What's going to sort of put the whole thing together?
So I was sort of interested in that too.
That's a different issue that you raised.
Yeah, does anybody else have thoughts
on the anthropomorphic or alienating effects of having
PowerPoint dictate tempo?
I was intrigued when after the movement and Gary's
preceding screens we just had the word lather in the center.
And to me that was kind of a creative moment
in the experience because I kind of welcomed it and immediately
began picturing lather.
And also, when the word Hawaiian punch came up,
connecting with that.
So--
I don't even remember the lather thing.
What was that again?
At different points in the experience,
there were a variety of number of words
on the screen at any given time, but my recollection
is that, maybe towards the end, I noticed dead center the word
lather, and I kind of welcomed it.
It was like this peaceful moment of just thinking about
L-A-T-H-E-R, the sound of the word,
and calling up a picture of lather, and I just liked it.
Maybe my brain was tired at that point
and I welcomed a single word.
I just did it in another sequence in here.
I don't know if you saw it.
I can't remember it.
It was bounce, bounce, snuggle, which,
of course, are the names of my favorite fabric softeners--
[LAUGHTER]
--on the theme of lather.
Yeah, any other questions?
And then we should move on.
I think otherwise we're not going to-- yeah?
I'm curious about that ideal reading
that you imagined living with a text for 30 years.
How are you--
I was kidding.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, but even within this 15 or 45 minute piece
or whatever the case may be, how are you
thinking about time and context?
So for example, in both the content
of the words that are in the technology
you're choosing to use.
So I can imagine a way that the text from the video game stuff
can be contextualized, people might have reference points
to it now in a way that they may not have 10 years from now.
And also, the choice to use PowerPoint
as a particular type of technology,
are you interested in how the content
of the stuff, the technology you're using,
is getting indexed by the time in which it's happening?
I know in one interview you talked
about how copyright might become more of a factor
in appropriating text and language as the technologies
in the corporate structures around digital communication
are changing around us.
I'm just wondering about how you situate your work in a moment
and how you're playing or not playing
with context and temporality.
Well, and I've said this before, I think generally,
the codex as a form in the book tends to repress two things.
One is when it's its own platform.
When you read a book, you're supposed forget.
The ideal reading is premised on, oh,
I've forgotten that I'm reading.
I've gotten lost in the book.
And the other thing that a book typically
represses, in addition to its platform, its medial platform,
is its temporal dimension.
So like when you read Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress,"
when you read line 1 at 3:17 and you read line 3 at 3:21
you're not really aware of that.
But I actually think it's more interesting
if literature is connecting to a rapidly ticking clock.
And so yes, I'm very, very interested
in, again, the sort of time-based
and media specific platforms.
And as you say, PowerPoint, it's a very specific platform.
And as I mentioned, it has certain affordances,
and it makes it a sort of ideal multimedia platform.
And in that sense, I think platform
is just indicative of how much text
we take in today on various mobile devices, on a computer.
Reading is extremely varied as a practice,
and, yes, it involves pictures, now it involves moving texts.
It involves areas.
It involves time-based communications.
Yes, eventually, we're going to have Twitter poems
and you know Tumblr poems and all that too.
So I think PowerPoint as a medium
is in some ways prescient.
And yes, will it become obsolescent?
Yes, perhaps in relationship to a lot of the platforms that I'm
referencing, but who knows?
Video game walkthroughs are comprised of at least 25%
of this work.
This is pretty arcane stuff that I sort of surfed.
Will it be forgotten, these games?
Yeah, those games are sort of already forgotten,
but people who are familiar with video games
are sort of aware that, oh, well, you're
navigating some sort of virtual space
and you're using language to do it.
So language is a sort of navigational tool.
And I didn't use any GPS stuff here,
although I could have done that, and mapping systems.
Those were eliminated from here.
But yeah, this work could go on for a long time
and include different kinds of language as a navigation or GPS
system so.