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[Casady] So some of the algorithmic instruction is making the lines bend and straighten and curve, [Stefans] Oh absolutely, yeah.
[Casady] And another one is dispersing them ... is that an algorithm that [Stefans] Yeah.
[Casady] Its something you wrote, its not an action script - there's not an explosion script in there?
[Stefans] Well the letters go between the two states, so when the letter's just in a regular state,
You know, everything stays together. But then it flips, and it says 'explode,'
Then all of a sudden all the lines become their own ... you know they separate from the shape,
[Casady] and are subject to new instructions. [Stefans] Yeah. So then all of a sudden every line becomes it's own little object.
And eventually the level I want to take it is to have the lines actually regroup into something else,
or, there's all kinds of things. I have all
[Casady] It seemed very different each time we saw it. And that's how it's always going to be.
Right? Because of the nature of what its doing? [Stefans] Yeah.
That's why it was so disturbing for me to watch it the first time because i'm watching
[Casady] Its not like you saw it. Its never going to be like you've seen it before. It's always..
[Stefans] Yeah. That's why I think its interesting to have as a projection, because you don't have to pay attention to it,
say you're having a conversation and say you look over and something really.. I mean,
I almost wonder whether there could be iterations where you could take a text
that's not racist but all of a sudden something terribly racist comes out, these algorithms can happen.
[Casady] Yeah, these juxtapositions can happen. So, this is an amazing film because it's unique every time it's shown. That's pretty remarkable.
[Stefans] Well after spending six months doing Dreamlife of Letters, everyone thinks I should do another one.
Because that piece gets rented out a lot. You know I probably got this job at UCLA because of that [laughs].
Because Katherine Hayles really liked it. But I just never wanted to do..eventually I'll do another one.
I thought it would just be neat to program something, to see if I could make it beautiful, always beautiful.
[Casady] Very successful. [Stefans] Thanks.
[Student] What was the story I heard about the New York TImes getting upset about this article being
[Stefans] Oh that's a different piece, where I took New York Times articles and switched out the quotes to [inaudible]
this radical French philosopher from the '60's.
And then I would repost, I would put these articles with the ads, the graphics, the whole thing you know,
and then I would send them to my friends and they kept getting sent out. Some people actually thought
that Tony Blair was really saying these things. I did that about five times,
this was in the lead-up to the war, this most recent. Yeah.
And that's why I got a cease and desist.
[Casady] Oh really from the New York Times? [Stefans] Yeah.
[Stefans] But of course I just put them up again afterward.
[Casady] If you get one of those it's a mark of honor. [Stephanie] Exactly.
[Jeremy] Any other questions about those films? [Stephanie] I was just going to ask what your research focus is,
and what you teach here and how this works into it. [Stefans] Well,
it's a long story. I did go to graduate school for English literature in the late '90s.
And then when the internet hit - I used to program as a kid when I was like 10 or 11. And I was doing poetry when I was 15.
And I've always been a terrible visual artist but, anyway. So I dropped out of graduate school
because I didn't really, I couldn't really focus on anything either, I kept taking too many things.
And I went out and taught myself C++ just because I was like, this is what I'm going to do.
And then taught myself Flash and stuff like that.
So you know, computers in the early 1980s didn't really mean anything in terms of culture.
I mean it didnt seem so. But at that point it really became great.
So anyway, then I got a - I just kicked around in New York, did my poetry.
Then I got an MFA at Brown in Electronic Literature. So it was a new MFA program.
So all of a sudden I had this MFA and I was like, oh I can actually go find a job.
So I applied for about 20 creative writing positions and didn't get a single call back.
And someone vacated a job in New Jersey teaching Electronic LIterature and I got that.
and then this UCLA thing opened. So, here I'm doing all kinds of things. I'm teaching poetry classes but
I'm also teaching Electronic Literature classes. But I'm not an academic.
I mean I do want to write a book of some nature, but I'm really concerned more about the art more than the weird theory that people love to talk about.
[Stephanie] Well it's just interesting because iota is always talking about how we like interdisciplinary arts
and not just film, but how film intersects with the other arts. And this is the first time I've seen a really good synthesis
of literature and experimental, abstract visuals. So I think its just a really interesting meld of those two.
[Stefans] Well I've been, another thing I've been working on is this, Los Angeles poetry, researching the history of poetry in Los Angeles.
Which actually does go back. And I'm trying to construct a history that also looks at the text art.
Because Los Angeles is also one of the - you know you've got your Ed Ruscha and Douglas Huebler,
[Stephanie] John Baldessari. [Stefans] Sister Mary Corita, and a lot of my friends are actually CalArts teachers in the writing department.
They don't even really call themselves poets. So there does seem something peculiar about LA art and literature culture
that a lot of people don't really even know about. [Audri] I guess [inaudible] put out all those spoke word/poetry discs in the early '80s.
And even earlier, in the 70's too. [Stefans] Who was that? [Audri] [inaudible] put out a lot of .. by LA poets.
[Stefans] Yeah I do have one double album. [Audri] Yeah he put out a bunch of them, different poets.
He was really big on spoken word stuff.
[Stefans] But yeah I really take the word and image, like that one piece that just had text and music,
it just really looked like an illustrated poem. Like I really don't want to illustrate the words. So that's why
that's what I'm really pressing for. But for me a poem can be one word long, so
luckily I don't think that way. I think of Ed Ruscha's stuff as being a version of poetry.
[Casady] It was very similar to Kurt Schwitter's piece.
[Casady] Primiti Too Ta, with the typewriter stuff. The text came from Kurt Schwitter in the 30s or something.
[Stefans] Yeah except it wasn't Schwitter's reading it was the filmmaker. [Jeremy] Colin Morton's.
[Casady] But the original text was a conceptual piece by Kurt Schwitter.
[Jeremy] Its called Ursonate. Its a tonal poem I guess. [Stefans] Yeah.
and you know there's wonderful recordings of it. I think that was a weak, fairly weak, rendition.
It should be really German-sounding like 'rakete Beeeee bö!'
[Student] Did he do other poems like that? [Stefans] I don't think so, I think he just did the Ursonate.
which is the longest sound poem, its like 40 minutes long.
But you had people like Hugo Ball doing things
Dadaists doing stuff.
[Casady] Yeah there, he fits in with the time period with the Dadaists, who were very interested in language and in words.
and in the graphic aspect of words. They did a lot of random stuff, and magazines
The Dadaists might have been the first people to throw text and letters into their graphic art, it was very radical at the time.
They were fascinated with breaking up language, and using it only for the sounds or only for the graphic aspect.
and not for the meaning of the words. It was very subversive at the time.
[Stefans] I was thinking when looking at the Ursonate piece, this poem shows up in a lot of different contexts.
Brian Eno used parts of it in his 'Before and After Science' and stuff like that.
But a recent piece which is actually a text piece is a digital artist by the name of (if I remember this correctly) Golan Levin?
Ever heard his name? And he created a piece that could hear and recognize sounds and then animate the text as it's coming out.
So he would do pieces with a sound poet named [Jan Blanc?] who is famous for his rendition of the Ursonate.
And as [Jan Blanc] is performing it live, the piece is hearing his voice and the text is doing these various things.
and reacting in real time to the tenor of his voice.
So, the Ursonate, while the meaning of the words is - well there is no meaning - it ends up becoming this perfect thing for this intermediate stuff.
Even though it was never really meant to be that right? Except Schwitters himself did.
Yeah that's another aspect of my research is to collect all these pieces and really create a language for discussing them.
Because there's no obvious way to discuss some of this type of work.
And you know, I would like to teach a class here at UCLA here in the DesMa [Design | Media Arts]
which is why I had kind of hoped some of those students would show up. I was going to call it 'Processing for Poets.'
where I would just basically teach the text-reading algorithms on the one hand,
you know, just bascially teach the stuff that has to do with animating and thinking about text
and space, which I think would be fairly unique.