Formally considered, Zoosemiotics is about juxtaposition and variability. Its music, its text, its sequence and its texture all rely either on algorithmic procedures or intuition to lend it its unique look, sound and operation. It's my hope that the user interacts with the piece much as one would interact with a game; that is, that each manifestation of Zoosemiotics is a wading out into the depths of chance and discovery.
The work is a collection of nine frames or performance spaces, cycled through in a random sequence. Some frames are interactive; some are cinematic. A good hint as to the interactivity of a given space is the visibility or invisibility of the mouse pointer; if you can see the mouse, the piece requires input. Some of the interactive spaces have explicit instructions; others invite you to explore, by clicking and moving your mouse.
The music for the work mixes itself at random at runtime. Some of the sources for sound loops are Bartok, Webern, Spiritualized, Charles Mingus, Joy Division, The Jesus and Mary Chain and John Coltrane, among others. All of these loops were heavily edited to yield new textures from at times canonical material.
The text, as well, is algorithmically selected. Substrings are snipped at random from a collection of ten paragraphs. These paragraphs also come from various sources: Ron Silliman's blog, Petronious' Satyricon, the Clonaid website, a post to the Buffalo Poetics list by Patrick Herron, some texts on genetic engineering, etc. These are the raw materials on which the algorithm works. The results at times can seem asemic, and the text shifts continually, but this is part of Zoosemiotics' overall thematic concern; the barrage of communication, both biological and textual, in the early twenty-first century.
The tools used to create this work varied: Macromedia Flash MX for the final file; Adobe Photoshop for image-editing and compositing; Adobe Premiere for video manipulation; Electric Rain Swift3D for 3D animation; Syntrillium Cool Edit and Sonic Foundry Acid Pro for sound.

Lewis LaCook
2003/01/28 08:23:56

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