“A Word Heap” by Sean Capone
Title:
- A Word Heap
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Creation Year:
- 2015
Medium:
- Single-channel video
Duration:
- 10:30
Artist Statement:
A Word Heap is a single channel experimental video animation produced using facial recognition and motion capture software, motion graphic effects, algorithmic 3D renderings, and collaged audio design. In this work, the artist adopts various avatar personas (rendered as floating, talking heads) to conduct performative readings of various texts, exploring the notion of ‘avatar poetics’ within the mutable, special-effects driven environments of the screen. “A Word Heap” compiles texts from various online sources, most notably anonymous ‘troll’ commenters and from auto-generated word streams inserted into the body of spam emails (presumably in an attempt to flummox the recipient’s spam filters). These ‘word heaps’ randomized fragments of content culled from news, literature, online media and other far-reaching sources, often scrambled and illegible are deliberate introductions of pseudo-authentic ‘noise’ into a communications medium… a kind of Turing Test that seeks to outwit the A.I. of the user’s inbox, rather than the user.
These texts are edited with the intent of presenting them as succes- sors to the tradition of Surrealist automatic-writing poetry, or the free-association experiments of postmodern fiction. They are thus re-framed and performed with the added lyricism of an avant-garde poetry slam (or the most perplexing virtual reality karaoke ever). The performing characters themselves seem like simulated figures from a retro era cyberpunk floating heads statuesque, xeroxed and painted over older forms attempting to convince each other of their autonomy, their authenticity.
