LPDT2: La Plissure Du Texte 2

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• La Plissure du Texte

• LPDT2: La Plissure Du Texte 2

• Elif Ayiter

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel:  La Plissure du Texte

  LPDT2 is the meta­verse in­car­na­tion of Roy As­cott’s ground­break­ing new media art work La Plis­sure du Texte (“The Pleat­ing of the Text”), cre­ated in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art mod­erne de la Ville de Paris dur­ing that same year. The title of the pro­ject, “La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy Tale,” al­ludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a fa­mous dis­course on au­thor­ship, se­man­tic lay­er­ing, and the cre­ative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first in­car­na­tion “dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship”, a term coined by As­cott has been the pri­mary sub­ject of in­ves­ti­ga­tion of LPDT2. Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by a num­ber of human sto­ry­tellers po­si­tioned around the globe; in the three di­men­sion­ally em­bod­ied meta­verse the sto­ry­tellers show novel and un­ex­pected at­trib­utes: An emer­gent tex­tual ar­chi­tec­ture/ge­og­ra­phy, as well as a pop­u­la­tion of au­tonomous “robot” avatars which dwell in­side this bizarre, lit­er­ary land­scape are pleat­ing the text by act­ing as com­mu­ni­ca­tion nodes be­tween the nar­ra­tors of this new ver­sion of the tale: The pri­mary per­sis­tent dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship is now ac­com­plished by many writ­ers through­out the ages:  A text gen­er­a­tor telling a non-lin­ear, multi-faceted, often times po­etic, story har­vested from the fa­mous on­line Guten­berg Pro­ject is now dis­trib­ut­ing its out­put amongst ar­chi­tec­ture and its in­hab­i­tants, gen­er­at­ing di­a­logues and it­er­a­tions tak­ing their tra­jec­to­ries from mas­ter­works of clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture.

  The pleat­ing re­sem­bles mu­si­cal sam­pling, the con­nec­tion be­tween the sen­tences fades, text be­comes noise, from which the au­di­ence gen­er­ates mean­ing.  The struc­ture on the sim­u­la­tor adds yet an­other layer of pleat­ing by vi­su­ally mix­ing the dif­fer­ent sources of text, while yet an­other layer of tex­tual input will be pro­vided through a con­tri­bu­tion by i-DAT.?org from the Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth, UK, by means of which Real Life vis­i­tors will be able to con­tact the LPDT2 by send­ing SMS mes­sages. Thus all pleated text – the gen­er­ated, the con­tributed, and the stored – is si­mul­ta­ne­ously vis­i­ble as a mas­sive, ever evolv­ing lit­er­ary con­glom­er­a­tion.

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Category:

• Panel