ONDOLOOP - HELLO WORLD

"The computer has turned us all into typists - even the dancers."

Referenced artist: the Poet.
Referenced software: BASIC

"Hello World" is event number #001 in a projected series of six events ("interesting phenomena") in which dancers use digital technologies in order to simulate the creative work of six different artists - poet - musician - painter - photographer - video - internet.

{The computer as simulation machine.}

The six events together mimic the development of the computer as a creative tool during the course of the last twenty years or so. The "Hello World" event references the first popular text-based home computers and has, at the heart of it, a random poetry generator triggered by the dancers. The projected text is intended to emulate an early green-screen monitor. The texts and grammars for this generator having been selected/created by poet Bill Griffiths.

{The computer has a random function.}

In addition to these core ideas, in this performance we worked with the conceit/metaphor that the performance space was the inside of the poet's head and that the dancers were the little men performing the mental operations of the poet. (This idea is from a children's comic/magazine of seventies' childhood - The Numskulls.) This was probably not obvious to the audience, though was mentioned in press releases and was the only direction given to the dancers. From this, the space was divided into three performance areas:

1) the keyboard + screen -

2) here, the dancers are performing in the space behind the poet's eyes - two speakers were placed either side of the projection screen to suggest ears (there was no intent to make this representational, only suggestive.) And finally there was an analog corner -

3) the poet's subconscious, where the images from the sense organs are mimicked but in a different medium - here the medium was electric light bulbs and shadows playing on a wall. (Like the projections, black and white images with text overlaid.) Cave art with electricity.

{All video art prefers darkness.}

"Hello World (& other monospaced fonts)" - Real Player documentation. CLICK HERE for 10 minutes of raw footage.

As well as adding words to the text-screen in a random fashion, when the dancers stepped on the keyboard they also triggered individual looping voice samples which were assigned to individual keys and mixed through a Korg MS10 synthesizer - the letter they pressed appearing in a random place on top of the black and white "reality" images. When the dancers stepped off the keyboard, the last letter they pressed continued to be added to the image on-screen at different "blend" levels - the poet interprets his reality through the "net" of language. The black and white images on the double projection screen are short image loops (13 - 15 images in each loop) the loops being synchronised and run from timers (3 secs. per image. 6 mins per loop. 2 loops to each image.)

{The computer likes to loop.}