Next week I will be flying to Karlskrona, Sweden to perform Huckleberry Finnegans Wake along with fellow collaborators Talan Memmott, Eric Snodgrass, and Michael Maguire at The Mixing Realities Digital Performance Festival on May 24th. Here is a description of what we're doing:
Huckleberry Finnegans Wake is a combinatoric performance work bringing together Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With both texts based around river culture, folding one text into the other can form contextual imbrications and through this, combinatorial engines can be developed for the texts as well as implied visual and auditory material. Though both source texts are replete with exclusive language (regional dialects, neologisms, etc.) when brought together what emerges is a fantastical environment lacking specificity, but for the rivers (the Liffey and the Mississippi) that run through both. Imagine steamboats on River Liffey, the Pike County dialect being spoken in County Dublin, or Mutt and Huck on the banks of the Mississippi. The performance of Huckleberry Finnegans Wake utilizes a number of applications to generate a multi-modal interpretation of the combined text that includes visual material, audio, and live readings from various combinatorial engines.I'm pretty stoked, so if you're in the area, check it out!
- SRT
