ABSTRACT

Sooth is a series of works about love. It is a meditation on the texture of falling in love and the nature of touch: touch as an interface that evokes language. By clicking (touching) anywhere on the video, users bring new phrases and new sounds flying out of the archives. In other words, the change of the phrases is controlled by the viewer. There is a maximum population of between or three to five active phrases; the birth of each phrase is the death of another. 

Sooth is not concerned with narrative but with sensation, with bodily memory and with immersion in soft nebulous internal states. It is a formal study of minimalist video landscapes as metaphors for emotions. Language flies over and lives within these emotional landscapes, as it does in human relationships. 

Phrase flocks swirl ceaselessly, adjusting their position and opacity in response to the agile motion of other phrases. In Sooth, the phrases are recombined in ways that constantly move; there is no order to the lines; the phrases were written to be read linearly and also to be read non-linearly. Verses assemble and dissemble themselves. Meanings emerge and dissipate. 

Sooth is bilingual: the set of poems is in both French and English; the user can switch between languages without losing context. 

The sounds are brief audio samples of ambient electronica and nature sounds manipulated in Audacity and remixed dynamically in Flash so as to provide textures that can be recombined and looped over each other without beat boundaries. Each phrase is associated with a sound; the volume of each sound is controlled by its phrase position.

BIO

David Jhave Johnston ( www.glia.ca ) is a digital poet and curatorial member of the net and in-situ art collective http://www.year01.com. 

Jhave has been involved in numerous collaborative and solo digital and in-situ art practises (working with or exhibiting at among others: Symbiosis, FILE, Champ Libre, Bioteknica, Turbulence, Drunken Boat, ContinentX, CIAC, Le Chambre Blanche, ActiveText, and The Capilano Literary Review.). His work has been exhibited at 2 new media Biennales: Montreal '03 & Toronto '04.  

He is currently completing (July 2007) a M.Sc at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) in Diane Gromala’s immersion and interactivity lab. His thesis work is concerned with emotion, computation, the future of the book, dynamic text and the creation of autonomous ‘epiphany machines’.