Star Wars with a French existentialist twist. Almost all the subtitles (except for little things like “Despair!” and “I die!” and a few others) are actually quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre. And obviously this will make no sense if you understand French. If you do know it, hit yourself in the head repeatedly before watching this. And then hit yourself repeatedly when you’re done watching.
This project uses water vapor to write out, letter by letter, the book The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Savaedra.
Each letter dissipates into the air as quickly as it emerges, rendering the text only scarcely legible. The piece addresses the futility of grasping at stable meanings and the beauty of the ineffectual gesture.
ON READING THE TEXT IN THE VIDEO:
Although illegibility is a key component of the piece, the video is still a bit more rewarding if you can read the letters as they come out. The subtitles are actually cued to the sculpture as it performs, so each letter appears in the subtitles just as the sculpture is attempting to form it. The letters scroll upwards, like a vertical LED ticker tape. So if the letter is an “O”, you’ll see a bar of clouds, followed by several puffs coming from opposite sides of the sculpture, followed by another bar of clouds.
In 1821, Charlotte’s mother died, leaving widower Patrick, a curate in rural West Yorkshire, to care for their six children. The two oldest died four years later of tuberculosis (which would eventually take them all before Patrick himself died). The four surviving children created what their father called “a little society among themselves.” Charlotte, age 10, and Branwell, 9, began a series of plays based on the adventures of their toy soldiers, set in their make-believe world of Glass Town and Angria in Africa. The youngest sisters, Emily and Anne, would follow along with stories, and the self-described “scribblemaniacs” kept at it into early adulthood.
About 20 of these texts took the form of handsewn miniature books two inches tall. Harvard’s Houghton Library has nine of them, given by the poet Amy Lowell.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/tiny-brontes#article-images
In neurofiction, the story’s effect on the reader’s brain – electrical activity of their neurons – is captured using an electroencephalography headset. Using an algorithm that learns what themes and elements engage each reader, our neurofiction engine turns this data into a unique path through the story. The reader can be guided to one of multiple possible endings or allowed to explore a new region of the story space.
Note that neurofiction is not interactive fiction: the reader experiences the story as linear, calm and immersive, as if reading a book. But by opening themselves to be read, neurofiction readers become subconscious collaborators in the creation of a new narrative. http://neurofiction.net/
The photographs in this series, Fictitious Dishes, enter the lives of five fictional characters and depict meals from the novels The Catcher in the Rye, Oliver Twist, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Moby Dick.
In a nod to Hunter S. Thompson Buck donated its time to create this psychedelic journey to promote Good Books, where proceeds from every purchase goes to Oxfam-partnered projects.
One day [Sherwood, the owner of the Baskets Bookstore/Paperback Palace] handed me a postcard sent between H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur H. Goodenough, an amateur press enthusiast living near Brattleboro. Goodenough isn’t talked about much today, but Brattleboro is still full of Goodenough — there’s a road named for the family (or was the family named for the road?), a trash removal firm, you name it.
Lovecraft was acquainted with Goodenough, and Lovecraft’s visits to Goodenough in Vermont in 1927 and 1928 are the basis of his wonderful novelette “The Whisperer in Darkness.” After the story was published in Weird Tales, Goodenough sent Lovecraft a congratulatory card, and also asked the author a couple of questions. Rather than responding with a card or letter of his own, Lovecraft wrote the answers in a tiny hand and then apparently gave the card to Vrest Orton — a bookman and eventual founder of The Vermont County Store — who returned the card to Goodenough personally during a trip to the Green Mountain State. Then Goodenough sent the card back to Lovecraft again, with follow-up questions written in a nearly microscopic hand. I suppose he knew the local postmaster, and was able to get the card back into the mail system without a problem. Amazingly, Lovecraft managed to fit the answers to the questions on the postcard in an even smaller hand. Sherwood told me that he’d guessed that Lovecraft used a magnifying glass and a sewing needle dipped in ink.
http://revelatormagazine.com/from-the-vaults/brattleboro-days-yuggoth-nights/
