en/traced is a composition of relationships between a highly trained human form, an enfleshed machine, and a real-time programmer. The three fractally realized parts form an extra-ordinary body whose organs are distributed between them.

In the en/traced trialogue, the machine watches the body, eliciting text with its motion; the programmer watches the screen, beckoning these characters with his keys; and each answers the other two in turn. The relationship between the three bodies is also a body itself – an/other form of consciousness.

This composition disrupts the usual relations of looking. Viewers are invited to see the spaces between and in ‘seeing,’ they are eliciting another new body between parts. This fractal composition begs questions of experience, relationships, consciousness and enfleshment.

Jeannette Ginslov: "…it is a heightened body awareness – proprioception. I improvise every turn, pause, hesitation, fall or stutter, ‘re-writing the body,’ articulating in an/other open & playful language."

deridda (the Macintosh Hard Drive): "…SelectChangepixels(trackobj,[[30,PaintRect]]); set thisresult = the result[1]; if objectP(elicitText)…"

Nathaniel Stern: "Listening, seeing, touching – my improvised text-work is guided by the other two bodies, and I completely fall into the trialogue."

diaLoGue tracks by: dB BOMB at AFDA

Jeannette Ginslov and Nathaniel Stern

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hektor is one of the main characters in the non-aggressive narrative. hektor.net is his navigable artsite of photography, spoken word and video poetry. While viewers surf the site, hektor attempts to re-member: embody a past in the present.. Floating memories, re-presented as art pieces, congeal in different patterns; from the "ruins of memory," viewers re-invent the past and its meaning, piecing together a story for themselves. However, similar to Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, where readers can tackle any chapter, in any order, to assemble a whole story, this narrative is built by the listener, according to which pieces they have seen, in what context, and in which order. Viewers continually bring new insights to possibility by juxtaposing visited and revisited pieces and ideas several times over. hektor.net was featured at The User Illusion show at New York University (May, 2000) and at the 12 Artists show at the Johnson Museum of Art (Winter, 2000), and is permanently exhibited on the Rhizome.org ArtBase.

http://hektor.net is currently online for fast connections. Netscape or Internet Explorer, JavaScript and the Flash and QuickTime 4 plug-ins are required. For showings, it can be run locally off of a CD-ROM or hard drive. Production Media: Flash, Premiere, FinalCut Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, ImageReady, SoundEdit 16, Dreamweaver (html & JavaScript), Digital Video & Pinhole Photography.

Nathaniel Stern

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hektor is one of the main characters in the non-aggressive narrative. The hektor self-portraits are a series of 11 one-of-a-kind, sepia-toned, pinhole photographs. The camera is a homemade contraption constructed out of an answering machine box ñ a substitute for communication when ìnobodyís home.î Some of the images are double or triple exposures, while others are washed-out shots of his face. There is a deep contrast in each image, and his eyes and face are never fully realized. The original images were digitally scanned and added to hektor.net.

The screen erases all traces of the primitive technology used to create the pinhole photographs. The texture and roughness of the originals are transformed into what seems like digitally manipulated images. Transformations and the impossibility of ìthe originalî are integral to hektor and the non-aggressive narrative. To recapitulate texture, the images were taken down from the web, abstracted using PhotoShop, printed, blown up, and interpreted into patterns.

Production Media: digital scanner, PhotoShop.

Construction: construction paper, oak tag

Nathaniel Stern

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[odys]elicit is a large scale, interactive installation where every movement of the viewer, small or sweeping, births stuttering text onscreen. The viewerís motion elicits, character by character, passages from odysí text. The piece responds to small movements, writing the text onscreen slowly for the viewer to read, or to rapid passersby, whose full bodies birth hundreds of flying characters, impossible to decode.

odys is one of the main characters in the non-aggressive narrative. In odysí work, viewers are forced to look at the spaces between language and meaning, the luxuries of stuttering and silence as communication, and the effects of accelerated and decelerated time. [odys]elicit, physically places viewers at the center of co-invented noise, forced to perform ñ willingly or not. odysí text has been reduced down to where it no longer has meaning and is re-birthed, with a possibility infinite meanings, or none at all. [odys]elicit has been installed at the 3^rd Annual Conference on World Wide Web Applications (South Africa, 2001), the Gencor Gallery, Rand Afrikaans University (sponsored by SANMAN ñ the Southern African New Media Art Network).

[odys]elicit requires a minimum of a G3 400MHz processor (Macintosh format only), 256MB of RAM, RCA input (PCI card may be provided with a video camera by the artist), and an external projector. For showings, installation dimensions are variable. Production Media: Director and Lingo, TrackThemColors Pro Video Xtra (with QuickTime), mini video camera.

Nathaniel Stern

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What I affectionately call the non-aggressive narrative (NAN) is, more precisely, a mode of Benjaminian storytelling. It proposes the ìcontinuation of a story which is just unfolding.î I use digital and traditional media to create encounters between an ambiguous 'I' and potential 'You.' By embracing memory as a ìcollage in motionî through multiple characters, the NAN implies an origin story that may or may not have occurred. You are invited to co-invent this unfolding 'past,' and its openness suggests possibility and multiplicity. In a 1965 interview with Michael Kirby, John Cage said that theatre is not done to its viewers; they do it to themselves. The NAN depends on that. As viewers re-member along with the narrative, they complete / become the work of art. Alongside the NAN, the self ('You' and 'I') is unfolding and in process.