Talking Cure and Screen: Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Title: Talking Cure
Documentation URL: http://www.noahwf.com/talkingcure/index.html
Title: Screen
Documentation URL: http://www.hyperfiction.org/screen/
Short Description:
Talking Cure is an installation that includes live video processing, speech recognition, and a dynamically composed sound environment. The authors are Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Camille Utterback, Clilly Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin. I propose to perform the text live, using only the video processing aspect of the installation technology (which will require control over the light in the room, a place to set the camera, and projection).
Screen was created in the "Cave," a room-sized virtual reality display. The authors are Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenlee, Andrew McClain, and Ben "Sascha" Shine. I propose to show video documentation that includes a complete performance/interaction (which will require a DVD player, projection, and sound).
More Information:
Talking Cure is about seeing, writing, and speaking - about word pictures, the gaze, and cure. It works with the story of Anna O, the patient of Joseph Breuer's who gave to him and Freud the concept of the "talking cure" as well as the word pictures to substantiate it. The reader enters a space with a projection surface at one end and a high-backed chair, facing it, at another. In front of the chair are a video camera and microphone. The video camera's image of the person in the chair is displayed, as text, on the screen. This "word picture" display is formed by reducing the live image to three colors, and then using these colors to determine the mixture between three color-coded layers of text. One of these layers is from Joseph Breuer's case study of Anna O. Another layer of text consists of the words "to torment" repeated - one of the few direct quotations attributed to Anna in the case study. The third layer of text, which becomes visible only when a person is in the chair, reworks Anna's snake hallucinations through the story of the Gorgon Medusa, reconfiguring the analytic gaze. Speaking into the microphone triggers a speech-to-text engine that replaces Anna's words with what it (mis)understands the participant to have said. What is said into the microphone is also recorded, and becomes part of a sound environment that includes recordings of Breuer's words, Anna's words, our words, and all that has been spoken over the length of the installation.
Screen begins as a reading and listening experience. Memory texts appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play - as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that doesn't settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster, struck words don't always return to where they came from, and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing "better" and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms. While the discussion of the relationship between games and literary forms is longstanding, Screen uses text as play material in a way that this discussion has not previously explored.