Q&A with Brian Kim Stefans
00:02:29
[Jeremy] This is Brian Kim Stefans, who made the last couple of pieces we watched. So if I can ask you a couple of questions about the first piece, The Dreamlife of Letters, can you explain, what was the genesis of that piece, how did that piece come about?
00:02:41
[Brian] Well, I come from an experimental poetry background and so, when I discovered Flash in the 90s, I got very excited about what I could do with it, with text and so forth. And I was very involved with looking at concrete poetry and stuff like that, so I was part of this round table, that had to do with gender and sexuality and stuff like that, who .. and all this radical poets. And it started with this essay by a woman named [Doty Bellamy?] and it was all an internet thing.
00:03:15
And there would be spokes. So there was eight spokes by four poets and then the middle spoke would respond to Doty’s essay and send that response to the next poet. And then that person would respond and send it to the next poet. And so the poet that sent me the text, I totally didn’t understand the text.
00:03:32
It was totally full of, I don’t know, she did this weird process. So what I did was I alphabetized all of her words. And I went through the words and pulled out little clusters, that were suggestive. So the whole piece is in alphabetical order.
00:03:49
And then, I thought that was the poem. But then I was hunting around for a Flash project and I looked at that poem and I thought, ‘ah,’ I’ll use this. And I was just learning Flash when I made the piece, so essentially this is my first Flash piece. I didn’t know I had changed the frame rates so the whole thing is at 12 frames per second.
00:04:08
So that’s about it. So its all this really sexually-coded … I’m also really concerned with lesbian – the two people that were ahead of me were one was gay and one wasn’t. So anyway, that context gets into the piece.
00:04:27
[Jeremy] So were there any questions about that piece, or the other piece? [Audri] Is it important in the second piece [Scriptor v.0.2] that you know the content of the article? The political nature of it? [Stefans] Actually no. This is more like a proof of concept than a final art piece.
00:04:45
Because I was really wanting to do stuff with letters and doodles. Which is kind of why I wanted to show it because we started talking about doodles with Adam Beckett. But you know at one point it was, the text was about tennis. And for some reason it still ends up being kind of interesting. But now that I’ve – I just don’t want to play with it anymore.
00:05:09
I just put the music down today for this show, since I figured – usually it’s just a wall projection and it runs forever. But I think this content kind of works okay. [Audri] I was intrigued about how you throw political content, and and how much you intended the content, the words to matter or count. Sometimes I was really enjoying the fact that these kind of words were structures, that they kind of looked like little birds’ nests, and then they started looking like buildings. So that was, really building structures with words.
00:05:42
[Brian] Yeah those little bird nests where the words freeze, that was actually a bug, but then I really got into it, I liked seeing the letters kind of freeze, so, Which is kind of one of the advantages of doing your own programming. Because you know, you can take advantage of the mistakes.
00:05:58
[Jeremy] So were there any questions about that piece? [Casady] Yeah I was sort of curious about the construction of it, It’s programmed? It’s coded? You’re using – [Brian] Yeah, its Flash but I’m- there’s no action script, there’s nothing on the timeline.
00:06:14
And actually I’ve redone the entire project in Processing. But I just haven’t brought it up to an actual presentable piece yet. Because when you’re moving into a different language you just want to add new things, so, I could always take color things but I always want to take it in a different direction.
00:06:30
[Brian] But yeah, there’s nothing on the timeline. [Casady] Nothing on the timeline. So it’s action scripts, and the action scripts are running through a series of commands that’s referencing a text in an article about Afghanistan, and pulling words randomly?
00:06:45
[Brian] Well this is what’s happening. Well, first of all the letter forms are created in Flash, and I save them as text files. So I actually wrote an application that allows me to doodle. So to go back to what you were talking about, I really wanted to create a low-end, doodling, thing.
00:06:58
So it would sort of get me in that mindset. So I would create letter forms, and then save them. It’s just a bunch of numbers plotted on a graph. So there’s a whole set of letters, like fonts, like my own font. And then the program – then there’s the text file which has the newspaper article in it, and the program parses the text file, and so it finds the nouns and the proper names, it tries to understand some of the grammar. [Casady] Really? So there’s some intelligence as far as the words it’s picking out?
00:07:31
[Casady] But something about the program recognizes nouns separate from verbs? [Brian] Oh yeah. I mean there were a lot of people I was thinking of when I did this, but you probably know Ed Ruscha’s paintings? which often just have one word. And I really wanted to have moments where just, one word really occupies the screen space.
00:07:51
I decided to make it nouns so I wouldn’t have too many ‘the’s and ‘of’s and things that were.. But it still has verbs and things. I forget exactly how it’s doing it.
00:08:04
[Audri] So in that earlier piece, who was it that had the words ‘I Am’ typed out? And that piece was such a nice commentary because that kind of set you off, the just ‘I Am.’ And then where they took ‘I Am’ to, was kind of really fun. I was just thinking of that context of yours and what words you might mean and what words you might want us to take off from.
00:08:25
[Brian] It’s funny because when you first buy a typewriter you write ‘I Am’ and when you first make a program you say ‘Hello World’ to kind of grant cognizance to … whatever. There’s a poem in there somewhere.
00:08:40
[Casady] But I’m trying to figure out how much randomness is in there, a lot of randomness. [Brian] Yeah. There’s a number that determines the so-called ‘crazy level,’ which is [gestures] you know, so I want the letters to flip in and out of legibility. So actually sometimes the letters are actually quite legible and the numbers can make it.
00:08:59
Then there’s also an iteration, so sometimes the letter is being overdrawn like five times and sometimes its just a single process. [Casady] And then you get that multiple-line scratchy effect. [Brian] Right. And then when the iterations and the crazy level reach a certain level, then the letter will explode. [Casady] And that’s algorithmic also, the explosions? [Brian] Yeah.
00:09:20
[Casady] Now is that something you wrote or is that in the action script, that .. [Brian] Yeah. I mean its basically, its my rudimentary math skills. I started reading these books on how to make video games and just lifting algorithms out of that. So I was trying to get each of the lines that compose each stroke and letter to kind of .. You know imagine a curve like this and all of a sudden you let it loose, the curve will start going like that [gestures] Whereas like the letter I, when it exploded it mostly just falls. Because most of the lines are straight. So there’s not that kind of tension.
[begin second half of Stefans Q&A video/Part 4 of 4]
00:00:06
[Casady] So some of the algorithmic instruction is making the lines bend and straighten and curve, [Stefans] Oh absolutely, yeah.
00:00:13
[Casady] And another one is dispersing them … is that an algorithm that [Stefans] Yeah. [Casady] Its something you wrote, its not an action script – there’s not an explosion script in there? [Stefans] Well the letters go between the two states, so when the letter’s just in a regular state,
00:00:28
You know, everything stays together. But then it flips, and it says ‘explode,’ then all of a sudden all the lines become their own … you know they separate from the shape, [Casady] and are subject to new instructions. [Stefans] Yeah. So then all of a sudden every line becomes it’s own little object.
00:00:44
And eventually the level I want to take it is to have the lines actually regroup into something else, or, there’s all kinds of things.
00:00:52
[Casady] It seemed very different each time we saw it. And that’s how it’s always going to be. Right? Because of the nature of what its doing? [Stefans] Yeah.
00:01:00
That’s why it was so disturbing for me to watch it the first time because i’m watching [Casady] Its not like you saw it. Its never going to be like you’ve seen it before. It’s always..
00:01:09
[Stefans] Yeah. That’s why I think its interesting to have as a projection, because you don’t have to pay attention to it, say you’re having a conversation and say you look over and something really.. I mean, I almost wonder whether there could be iterations where you could take a text that’s not racist but all of a sudden something terribly racist comes out, these algorithms can happen.
00:01:31
[Casady] Yeah, these juxtapositions can happen. So, this is an amazing film because it’s unique every time it’s shown. That’s pretty remarkable. [Stefans] Well after spending six months doing Dreamlife of Letters, everyone thinks I should do another one.
00:01:43
Because that piece gets rented out a lot. You know I probably got this job at UCLA because of that [laughs]. Because Katherine Hayles really liked it. But I just never wanted to do..eventually I’ll do another one.
00:01:55
I thought it would just be neat to program something, to see if I could make it beautiful, always beautiful. [Casady] Very successful. [Stefans] Thanks.
00:02:06
[Student] What was the story I heard about the New York TImes getting upset about this article being [Stefans] Oh that’s a different piece, where I took New York Times articles and switched out the quotes to [inaudible], this radical French philosopher from the ’60’s.
00:02:22
And then I would repost, I would put these articles with the ads, the graphics, the whole thing you know, and then I would send them to my friends and they kept getting sent out. Some people actually thought that Tony Blair was really saying these things. I did that about five times, this was in the lead-up to the war, this most recent. Yeah.
00:02:42
And that’s why I got a cease and desist. [Casady] Oh really from the New York Times? [Stefans] Yeah. [Stefans] But of course I just put them up again afterward.
00:02:59
[Casady] If you get one of those it’s a mark of honor. [Stephanie] Exactly. [Jeremy] Any other questions about those films? [Stephanie] I was just going to ask what your research focus is, and what you teach here and how this works into it. [Stefans] Well, it’s a long story. I did go to graduate school for English literature in the late ’90s.
00:03:21
And then when the internet hit – I used to program as a kid when I was like 10 or 11. And I was doing poetry when I was 15. And I’ve always been a terrible visual artist but, anyway. So I dropped out of graduate school because I didn’t really, I couldn’t really focus on anything either, I kept taking too many things.
00:03:40
And I went out and taught myself C++ just because I was like, this is what I’m going to do. And then taught myself Flash and stuff like that. So you know, computers in the early 1980s didn’t really mean anything in terms of culture. I mean it didnt seem so. But at that point it really became great.
00:04:00
So anyway, then I got a – I just kicked around in New York, did my poetry. Then I got an MFA at Brown in Electronic Literature. So it was a new MFA program. Then I got an MFA at Brown in Electronic Literature. So it was a new MFA program.
00:04:12
So I applied for about 20 creative writing positions and didn’t get a single call back. And someone vacated a job in New Jersey teaching Electronic Literature and I got that, and then this UCLA thing opened. So, here I’m doing all kinds of things. I’m teaching poetry classes but I’m also teaching Electronic Literature classes. But I’m not an academic.
00:04:38
I mean I do want to write a book of some nature, but I’m really concerned more about the art more than the weird theory that people love to talk about. [Stephanie] Well it’s just interesting because iota is always talking about how we like interdisciplinary arts and not just film, but how film intersects with the other arts. And this is the first time I’ve seen a really good synthesis of literature and experimental, abstract visuals. So I think its just a really interesting meld of those two.
00:05:09
[Stefans] Well I’ve been, another thing I’ve been working on is this, Los Angeles poetry, researching the history of poetry in Los Angeles. Which actually does go back. And I’m trying to construct a history that also looks at the text art.
00:05:22
Because Los Angeles is also one of the – you know you’ve got your Ed Ruscha and Douglas Huebler, [Stephanie] John Baldessari. [Stefans] Sister Mary Corita, and a lot of my friends are actually CalArts teachers in the writing department.
00:05:34
They don’t even really call themselves poets. So there does seem something peculiar about LA art and literature culture that a lot of people don’t really even know about. [Audri] I guess [inaudible] put out all those spoke word/poetry discs in the early ’80s.
00:05:52
And even earlier, in the 70’s too. [Stefans] Who was that? [Audri] [inaudible] put out a lot of .. by LA poets. [Stefans] Yeah I do have one double album. [Audri] Yeah he put out a bunch of them, different poets.
00:06:03
He was really big on spoken word stuff. [Stefans] But yeah I really take the word and image, like that one piece that just had text and music, it just really looked like an illustrated poem. Like I really don’t want to illustrate the words. So that’s why that’s what I’m really pressing for. But for me a poem can be one word long, so luckily I don’t think that way. I think of Ed Ruscha’s stuff as being a version of poetry.
00:06:33
[Casady] It was very similar to Kurt Schwitter’s piece. [Casady] Primiti Too Ta, with the typewriter stuff. The text came from Kurt Schwitter in the 30s or something.
00:06:51
[Stefans] Yeah except it wasn’t Schwitter’s reading it was the filmmaker. [Jeremy] Colin Morton’s. [Casady] But the original text was a conceptual piece by Kurt Schwitter.
00:07:01
[Jeremy] Its called Ursonate. Its a tonal poem I guess. [Stefans] Yeah. And you know there’s wonderful recordings of it. I think that was a weak, fairly weak, rendition. It should be really German-sounding like ‘rakete Beeeee beh!’
00:07:17
[Student] Did he do other poems like that? [Stefans] I don’t think so, I think he just did the Ursonate. which is the longest sound poem, its like 40 minutes long. But you had people like Hugo Ball doing things “¦ Dadaists doing stuff.
00:07:32
[Casady] Yeah there, he fits in with the time period with the Dadaists, who were very interested in language and in words. And in the graphic aspect of words. They did a lot of random stuff, and magazines. The Dadaists might have been the first people to throw text and letters into their graphic art, it was very radical at the time.
00:07:58
They were fascinated with breaking up language, and using it only for the sounds or only for the graphic aspect. And not for the meaning of the words. It was very subversive at the time.
00:08:10
[Stefans] I was thinking when looking at the Ursonate piece, this poem shows up in a lot of different contexts. Brian Eno used parts of it in his ‘Before and After Science’ and stuff like that. But a recent piece which is actually a text piece is a digital artist by the name of (if I remember this correctly) Golan Levin? Ever heard his name? And he created a piece that could hear and recognize sounds and then animate the text as it’s coming out.
00:08:37
So he would do pieces with a sound poet named [Jan Blanc?] who is famous for his rendition of the Ursonate. And as [Jan Blanc] is performing it live, the piece is hearing his voice and the text is doing these various things, and reacting in real time to the tenor of his voice.
00:08:58
So, the Ursonate, while the meaning of the words is – well there is no meaning – it ends up becoming this perfect thing for this intermediate stuff. Even though it was never really meant to be that right? Except Schwitters himself did.
00:09:20
Yeah that’s another aspect of my research is to collect all these pieces and really create a language for discussing them. Because there’s no obvious way to discuss some of this type of work. And you know, I would like to teach a class here at UCLA here in the DesMa [Design | Media Arts] which is why I had kind of hoped some of those students would show up. I was going to call it ‘Processing for Poets.’
00:09:44
where I would just basically teach the text-reading algorithms on the one hand, you know, just bascially teach the stuff that has to do with animating and thinking about text and space, which I think would be fairly unique.
[END] |
