Note: In W. Mark Sutherland’s Code X (2002), a born-digital sound poetry machine that allows users to create their own sound poetry performances, a line is drawn between the work and a history of sound poetry, performance art, and concrete poetics. Code X is a fairly simplistic digital game that marks a point of convergence between many art forms and asks how the digital medium allows for greater audience participation. As Paul Dutton writes of Code X in a brochure for Sutherland’s Scratch exhibit at the Koffler Gallery in 2002 (archived on Sutherland’s webpage), the work “fuses poetry, music, and visual art” to reveal the tenuous boundaries between these art forms. As a part of Scratch, the program was installed on a computer and projected onto a wall of the gallery. Viewers were encouraged to interact with the program by typing letters or writing words, causing each letter to appear seemingly at random. Typing a letter also started a ten second recording of Sutherland’s sound poetry which played on a loop as long as the letter continued to be pressed. In addition to this appearance, Code X was also produced as a CD-ROM by Coach House Press. Code X appeared at a time when Coach House was adapting its largely print-based catalogue to an increasingly digital audience. As the compact disc became an impractical, unreliable, and irregular way to disseminate digital works, Sutherland and Coach House made Code X available as an interactive website in 2009. Coach House’s archived access to the work online is now a dead link; to use Code X today, you must either download the program or play it through a browser on Sutherland’s webpage.
John Waters Critique, George Kuchar Tribute, Ryan Trecartin Parody
new Felix Bernstein video
Bard College © student Felix Bernstein stars as YouTube Professor Felix Bernstein. Followed by a Post Script, Branching off on the aforementioned Homosexual Artists: An Overly Generalized and Reductive Philisophical Theory about Everything. Ryan Trecartin Played By and Animated by Gabe Rubin. (Ben Coonley homage.)