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Theoretical Internet Opera
- by Juliet O'Keefe, August 2001
- Eclogues
- http://www.sfu.ca/~okeefe/previousII.html
I may not get the names right here: bear with me. One great Russian writer
(who I remember as Dostoevsky once went running
through the streets of Moscow (or St. Petersburg) after reading
a newly published masterpiece (which I remember as Anna Karenina)
shouting that after reading the said masterpiece, everything
he had ever written felt like it had been done in mud with a
stick. This has been such a day.
Wonderful European
site for different genres of art, including an internet ballet at [via womanonfire, aka Auriea Harvey]. What I find really
compelling here is the Oppera
Teorettikka Internettikka, which was "created and performed by Igor
Stromajer on March 18th, 1999, in the Slovene national theatre
in Ljubljana." (You can download the 38 minute long performance). Here is a tiny part of the libretto:
function Minutes(data)
{
for(var i=0;i<data.length;i++)
if(data.substring(i,i+1)==":")
break;
return(data.substring(0,i));
}
function Seconds(data) {
for(var i=0;i<data.length;i++)
if(data.substring(i,i+1)==":")
break;
return(data.substring(i+1,data.length));
}
function Display(min,sec) {
var disp;
if(min<=9) disp=" 0";
else disp=" ";
disp+=min+":";
if(sec<=9) disp+="0"+sec;
else disp+=sec;
return(disp);
}
function Up() {
cmin1=0;
csec1=0;
min1=0+Minutes(document.sw.beg1.value);
sec1=0+Seconds(document.sw.beg1.value);
UpRepeat();
}
function UpRepeat() {
csec1++;
if(csec1==60) {
csec1=0; cmin1++;
}
document.sw.disp1.value=Display(cmin1,csec1);
if((cmin1==min1)&&(csec1==sec1))
alert("Stopwatch Stopped");
else up=setTimeout("UpRepeat()",1000);
This just kicks
ass is about five different ways. I have been wondering if I
would come across any aesthetic experiments using programming
languages as language--and perhaps I just wasn't paying
attention two years ago when this work was first performed--so
if anyone knows of any more musical or textual works using programming
languages, do please let me know. On the other hand, there is
a link at the site to a review in [Paris] Liberation ("le Slovène a imprimé
la page source de l'uvre qu'il présentait, en 1998, à
Skopje et s'est mis à chanter son code HTML") dated
February 2nd of this year, so perhaps the work can be considered
to be more recent. Stromayer is quoted in this article as saying
"La technologie, c'est pour Hollywood, pas pour les artistes"
and goes on to say that the Ballettikka
Internettikka will be performed in Moscow in 2002. I'm not sure of the disingenuousness
of his take on technology--I find that attitude a bit tiresome
when speaking of a piece which obviously celebrates technology--but
I'm excited about the direction of this work anyway.
Kenneth Rexroth
(in Classics Revisited) describes Dostoyevsky as
a man of many
messages, a man in whom the flesh was always troubled and sick
and whose head was full of dying ideologies--at last the sun
in the sky, the hot smell of a woman, the grass on the earth,
the human meat on the bone, the farce of death.
Limitations
of the cast-a-net-and-drag type of web search: while attempting
to find the publication date of Anna Karenina, to see if the
Russian writer anecdote was even plausible, I came across three
sites where I could download the text of the novel but not one
which could give me the information I came for without, I assume,
much digging about. Maybe I'm just too tired to remember some
obvious and easy url where I should be looking, but there's gotta
be a better way...
© http://www.sfu.ca/~okeefe/previousII.html
Igor Štromajer Intima Virtual Base Virtualna baza Intima Igor Stromajer www.intima.org Igor Štromajer
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