Ashley
During summer 2009, I was lucky enough to enjoy an EdLab Digital Art Residency at Teachers College. EdLab is way up on the top floor of the school's library, and is a very big room with a lot of tables all of which have some electronic gadget. It was great to be able to spend a couple months with the people there.
I worked on a project called Ashley, a talking computer (maybe related to the long ago digital poet project) that speaks knowledge from the library. The computer reads in the least popular popular searches from the online card catalog, and has a roughly OCRed fluency with some library books I found of interest. A chorus of computerized voices read this all out, speaking in a staggered overlapping rhythm. Colored rectangles and lines (looking a bit like the cover of a '70s educational text or old-fashioned digital bouncing balls) slide about the screen.
There's a fancy custom controller which consists of two buttons and a lever. This lets viewers/users choose what Ashley will say and how it'll say it.
Anyhow, that's what it's doing at the moment. There is, of course, more work to do. I'm particularly piqued by the amount of magenta in those colored rectangles, but that should be quick to fix. Now that the residency is over, I'm looking forward to some time to mull over the project.
Some sound from Ashley was in Seth Kelly's great Audio Show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery. A version of the project is installed this autumn (2009) at the Gottesman Libraries in Teachers College, in the big room up on the 2nd floor.
There's some raw documentation up at a Teachers College site. I'll be putting up more information about it here, with luck, as things develop and I get a bit organized.
The project is named after the composer Robert Ashley, whose operas and recordings of overlapping voices are just beautiful and amazing.
