Text as loop: on visual and kinetic textuality

Afterimage, July-August, 2003 by Janez Strehovec

Since this essay deals with text as a loop, let us take, as an example, a look at the loops used by Brian Kim Stefans in The Dreamlife of Letters (http://www.ubu.com/contemp/stefans/dream/index.html). In the introduction, the reader is informed of the author's decision to make a piece that looks more like a short film than an interactive piece. At the end of the text, Stefans notes "thanks for watching" and not "thanks for reading," which illustrates the point that the author puts more emphasis on watching than reading as being the appropriate perception of the piece. Reading is nevertheless important. With its strong visual effects, the viewer is also confronted with the effects of meaning manipulation and sense construction. How exactly does the dream life of letters

work? A letter is in fact a material, atomistic unit of e-writing, and with every letter we get a story consisting of words starting with that letter. Words are not arranged according to clause or verse principles; the verse is gone. There are only letters, syllables, and words that are sometimes fragmented and sometimes functioning together. The meaning is thus created by quick transitions to anti-words, derivative words, and even non-words. Words (and letters) are moving in the background and the foreground of the screen. Letters can fall onto the screen from above or come from below. "L" rotates. "material" becomes "maternal." When "poison" and "special" spin, the screen reads "policy." The verb "read" is presented in the loop, which is symbolic, since in the environment of kinetic textuality reading itself is confined to the laws of the loop. The word "oedipolity" is designed in the same way. This e-poetry project displays no verse whatsoever; it has been substituted with a moveable loop of letters and words. The arrival of the loop onto the screen in Kim Stefans's piece is designed to maintain the reader/viewer's rapt attention and but also arouse great uncertainty. This happens because the viewer can never be sure whether or not he or she will be able to catch the text when it pops onto the screen, and furthermore, does not know on which part of the screen he or she is to wait for the next text unit.

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Jenny Holzer is one visual artist who has been dealing with moveable text in electronic format for some time with such LED display-based pieces as I Do Not Want To Be A Human (1987). Jeffrey Shaw was already active in the beginning of the 1990s designing text-based interactive installations (such as The Legible Cit and Virtual Museum). However, this type of textuality only reached its full prominence with the present day multimedia internet, and the shift to new visual, auditory, and even tactile web design. The Dazzle as a Question (http://www.studiocleo.com/projects/dazzle/index.html) by Claire Dinsmore is undoubtedly crucial for the understanding of text-film as such. The text in question is highly condensed and very short, designed to suit the sensibility of a music video audience. The text is made of short-cuts and uses space and time syntax. Visual effects also play an important role, especially the irruption of blinding light onto the screen which occurs after only two minutes and 40 seconds. The text is designed in the shape of moveable tapes entering the screen from left and right and disappearing at short intervals. In one case, a line makes way for another by skipping further up, and in this way an association of meanings/thoughts is established. Its original position is then replaced by a line of new text while the upper line is deleted. In this text, the loop is thematically linked to the creation of an atmosphere of uncertainty, dazzle, and playing with identities. The loop is also present in the way the text progresses on the screen, which is realized by deleting and concealing. A part of the text is always missing and the reader/viewer is faced with the difficult task of recreating the whole image. Just like a music video, The Dazzle has to be viewed several times. In addition, notes of the missing syntagms have to be made, and schemes of the structure and movement of the text have to be drawn, making the piece difficult to comprehend. The Dazzle is also connected with the trendy concepts of "uncertainty and vagueness." Everything is based on shifts and deterritorializations, and it is no wonder that the author uses "shift" as one keyword.