Brendan FitzPatrick
For me it’s a weird compulsion. I HAVE to change one thing into another thing for me to engage with it.
Like, maybe a dozen year ago, I wanted to make a printout of my voice on paper, then scan it back and hear how it sounds, after going through the process of changing form.
How much of the content remains?
Is it degraded or purified?
These are all continuous parts of my ongoing Shannon Information Theory Obsession.
And by working with it, like softening clay and painting, it becomes mine. This work becomes my creation. My contribution to a weird invisible animated, breathing “platonic realm” of creative ‘stuff’.
So like this work here. I had to read a text in Christianity on black woman’s liberation theology; womanism – jesus as a black woman.
But the professor’s scan of a 1990 book was tiny on my screen, hard to read, annoying to work with like this.
So what I did was I scanned it. Converted it to text. Got rid of the two-across format so that it was a single long text file.
Then did a “Print to com port” to a fake text-only printer, which my own computer received in an Ubuntu linux dumb terminal
and the words now appeared at 300 baud or approx 450 wpm scrolling at about 400 words per minute, which is doable as I made it big so that there was only maybe 7-8 words per line.
And within 10 minutes or so, staying entirely focused, I read the whole thing. Assignment done and it was interesting.
[responsivevoice_button voice="US English Male"]