(A) Generative Engine

(A) Generative Engine

Earlid | (A) Generative Engine, winter 2017

London sound artist Seth Guy has built a narrative engine out of the fiction he has read across five years. He gestures towards the reader’s ears. What is born is The LiteraryMix. Not narrative, rather its möbius text is composed of hundreds of excerpts, which are linked thematically by the sounds they describe. Like any digital text, it’s more jelly fish than vertebral; an invertebrate eludes our grasp. Begin at a beginning.

Intersecting Guy’s concepts is a late-1990s work of my own called Plausible Narration—a ‘book’ of pages offering sounds off the page and into the ears. A story begins, is interrupted. Voices proceed and then double-back on themselves.

Another intersection beckons towards the ideas of writer and vocal performer, Caroline Bergvall, who practices across artforms, media, languages and locations.

More conversation than interview, Seth Guy and I plied numerous themes in a multi-part dialogue spreading across the hammers of storytelling and the imagined loud loops, clanging and creaking and sparking in both our projects and artistic practices.

Also featured is an audio portrait I produced of Caroline Bergvall for Trickhouse in 2014. See Dialogues for more detail.