Sound Seeker by David Jhave Johnston
One of the instances of Sound Seeker is "YHCHI Homage Automatum"
David Jhave Johnston is a poet-programmer who has produced a large body of intermedial Flash-based net art for many years at glia.ca. His most recent project is titled Sound Seeker. He says in the “About” section that Sound Seeker is “an online real-time beat-synchronized poem animator. Sound drives the rhythm of the words: their speed and style of display can be controlled.” What you see on the homepage of the project are twelve experimental videos produced by Jhave with Sound Seeker. You can access the underlying interactive Flash app itself in the “Method” section of the documentation. In the “Motivation” section, Jhave discusses remarks by Rudolph Arnheim concerning intermedia.
This is a fascinating project that also has terrific documentation. The Sound Seeker app has interesting features, ie, code ideas, the videos are compelling, the music is fascinating in relation to the text, and the writing is very strong. This is net art of the first order and one of the strongest works of digital writing in several years.
For more work on Sound Seeker, see Jhave’s site glia.ca.
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2 Responses to “Sound Seeker by David Jhave Johnston”.
Great stuff, Jim. I’d seen some of his work but not this group of stuff. Hope to spend more time with it!
I’ve published on vispo.com some of the Sound Seeker project at http://vispo.com/jhave but there is considerably more (and later) work at http://glia.ca .
Almost all the ‘videos’ he’s produced with Sound Seeker, in their own right, are very interesting works. Seeing them as part of the Sound Seeker project emphasizes the artistic range of the app he’s written.
And all that work for each of those videos. The music. The video. The writing. And putting it all together.
Additionally, all the documentation he’s done that’s available from the top menu at http://vispo.com/jhave . Documentation that really adds to the experience of the project.
The project is broad and deep. Each medium and each element of each medium is intelligently considered.
I’m very impressed with this project. It’s vast and imaginatively thrilling as well as technically intriguing, innovative, and supremely accomplished.
And the writing is excellent.
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