No longer is art and media solely a linear representation of ideas that progresses with cultural innovations, it is also rendered (in the public consciousness and internet) as an interconnected cartography of material and exists in syntagms of metonymic expressions and excavations. In harmony with Writing Machines (2002), âMateriality is content, content is materialityâ (Hayles qtd. Kaye 75), for this Cybernetic Fictions project, I began working with forms and methods that I had never tried before to see if I could create a text that responded to both my visual art practice and my academic thoughts on how hauntology, performance, and spatiality are expressed and received between writer, artist or performer, and viewer. This reflection will palpitate instances in how my TechnoText plays with intertextuality, a myriad of material forms, and translation of images from other projects and writings to form a network of experiences.
Inspired by the asides and stage craft of Middleton and Shakespeareâs plays in Renaissance theatre, the mythology of âthe crowdâ interested me by its performative/recipient role as well as how it acts as a space of judgment, laughter, madness, drunkenness, sobriety, memory, violence, and praise where the media product is at the mercy of the crowd. With these concepts in mind, I read the one-man plays of Samuel Beckett which inspired me to try an audio play myself. In his play, Krappâs Last Tape (1958), Krapp is the only character on stage, and he appears to relive past memories via his tape recorder and begins to engage with it in quasi-dialogue. I found the interplay between an apparatus such as tape, his memories, and his words in the present tense (on stage in front of an audience) to be a fantastic example of earlier electronic technology confronting traditional theatrics. The vastness and potentiality of Cybernetics is always at tension with literary forms (and language). Haylesâ definition of literature moving beyond its words struck me as relevant to this discussion:
Literature was never only words, never merely immaterial verbal constructions. Literary texts, like us, have bodies an actuality necessitating that their materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven into each other. (Hayles 107)
The audio play I wrote titled Mythos of a nonequilateral sound (2021), begins with an interaction between the main character, Roland, and a guitar. The guitar serves as a representation of an instrument but also as a medium to demonstrate the limited ability that our memories have in relation to analogue instruments, even if we remember scale shapes, chord forms, and note names on the fretboard, we can forget entire songs or even every song we ever learned. Roland then reaches for his phone to find a recording of himself playing guitar to prove to the audience (or himself) that he could actually play guitar. As he attempts to scroll to his recordings, he sees several depressing titles such as âDecember 10AM, lost the Oneâ etc. Suddenly, a voice message from what sounds like Microsoft Wordâs âVictoriaâ begins speaking. The eery robot recites bits from a past conversation that Roland had with his former lover about a breakup. The audience does not know whether the dialogue is recorded from conversations or if the phone was merely dictating text messages. Mythos of a non-equilateral sound is an audio play which comments on the idea of the absent loverâs departure from the person who is left alone (from the I perspective) as Barthes put it so well, the I becomes like âa package in some forgotten corner of a train stationâ (Barthes 13) where the absent lover is constantly receding away. The narrator (or the representation of both Roland Barthes and the I) is stuck in the Blackbox of the stage of his own mind.
Another aspect of my TechnoText is the menu page where there is a âJoin Usâ button as well as edited stock videos of a sunset with heart emojis and cooking channel clips. The videos looping on the homepage act as uninteresting, non-interactable windows of what is to come. The âJoin Usâ button does not appear to work at first and thus the user is forced to scroll down the page in search for another link, where they find only the word Lo. . . a reference to the first word sent as a message via the internet as well as Werner Herzogâs documentary about the history of the internet Lo and Behold (2016). That link takes the user to said audio play, which is in the form of a video box displaying a floating curtain. The text itself shown on the page is meant to reflect the chaotic nature of thoughts occurring simultaneously as Roland is ruminating on love. The user is invited to listen and read along, or forced rather, because the audio play is intentionally recorded at difficult to hear volumes and contains competing sounds which assemble what Hayles refers to as noise. It is almost certain the user will be annoyed by the quality of the audio play and just simply read the text (I also omitted the userâs ability to skip around on the audio file, start over, or fast-forward).
Throughout the first few minutes of the narrative, a stand-up-comedian-like voice is asking cheesy rhetorical questions starting with the phrase âhave you ever thought to yourself. . .â as he goes into a musing on some mundane topicâmeanwhile, the stage is being set for Roland, who enters in front of an audience, in a Blackbox-Beckett-esque manière. Rolandâs first spoken line is âSo. . . annoying.â Is he referring to the audience or the voice in his head? The music element adds to the overall rhythm of the words and reacts in an orchestral sense at times when the action calls for a stop or for tension. At one point the stand-up comedian Roland comments on the music, âThis beat is pretty good, but it could be better. . .â alluding to the thoughts that arise when choosing a partner in a romantic relationship as well as the impossible nature of perfecting music or the written word. The music then transmorphs from real sounds, samples, keyboards, to a bizarre processed MIDI render, marking the ascension into the Green World, or a type of Fairy Land where, in Act II, Roland confronts an alter ego fairy who doubles as his inner writer persona and attempts to explain to Roland where he isâbut ends up getting frustrated and wanders offâonly to complain about needing a vacation (however, according to Barthes, writerâs cannot take vacations).
Between the two acts of the play are a series transitional spaces, like an intermission at the theater, except time gets extended and numerous bunny trails are offered in the form of visual candy. The page with the multi-colored GIF began when I was in the process of Photoshopping a round of paintings. As I played with the Color, Vibrance, and Warmth, I noticed how specific lines and shadings on the images reacted to the adjusting parameters. I thought it would be interesting to film the image as colors slowly alternated. The resulting short video was uploaded into a GIF generator online. I took that GIF and copied and pasted it into my WIX web builder to create a space which could act as a transition. The images âfly inâ from the margins (seemingly out of nowhere) as the user scrolls down. I used cheesy animated stock features from WIX to call attention to the template choice/materiality and juxtaposed that with the use of âout-of-the-box-curationâ. Once the user scrolls all the way down the page, an icon of an arrow pointing right appears. The user is invited to click on the icon which leads back to the homepage, only this time there is no Lo. . . link and the âJoin Usâ button works (this is a reference to the idea of occultism of Western love and Andy Warholâs exclusive club). Once the user clicks on the âJoin Usâ they are sent to yet another strange page with a kitchen scene copied over and over. This kitchen scene represents a time when the absent lover and the narrator were together, enjoying a cup of tea. The URL is /tea-time and at one point included a soundscape which I deleted (an experiment on my own self, I still hear the soundscape in my head as I scroll).
On the second transition page, there is a drawing of cell phone users on a train as a ticket checker walks by. This scene is in reference to Barthesâ comment on lovers and train stations, as well as a nod to how technology plays a role in the art of noticing and ruminating (the figures in the drawing are perhaps all the absent lover, leaving the narrator behind). Now the user is left with two options: click on the âenlarge iconâ, which takes to a music video, a track called âDada Gone Fauveâ from AR for the Ears, which is a narrative chapbook and EP, and explains more of the backstory between Roland and his absent lover (in this case, named Julie), or the user can click on the âTrashcan iconâ which leads to a list of poetry.
This âbad poetryâ can be seen as written from the perspective of Roland as he attempts to navigate a near future where AR exists everywhere around him and he can no longer tell what is real or a simulation: âI swear these insta-gen lyrics are getting so sad, Julie says, and then we both realize we have never actually met. The streetlights came on squeaking like a bike tire against a brake pad.â The list of poetry, as mentioned, are little fragments that often lead nowhere. The user is free to explore each link, until at the bottom there is Mythos 2, a link to the second act of the audio play. In Act 2 it becomes apparent (especially after watching the music video) that this is just another âsong mapâ programmed by codersâalgorithms based on the narratorâs preferences and memories. Â
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Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. New York, Hill & Wang, 1978. Print.
Hayles, N K. Writing Machines. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002. Print.
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