The Elocuter: I Must Remind You We Live In Dada Times... is a direct
response to the absurdity of the global economic crisis triggered by the 2008
financial crash and its representation in online news media. Similar to Dada poems reflecting
the absurdity of world events in the 1910's, the Elocuter reads out news
headlines in a new, seemingly non-sensical language. It emphasizes the
failure of language to describe the falter of global capitalism and its
complex implications.
The Elocuter is a small device that attaches itself via suction cups to a
computer screen. It has a speaker with volume control, a light sensor and
a simple pushbutton for sensor calibration. It receives its power from the
computer's USB port. Technically, the Elocuter is harvesting news headlines
reflecting the economic crisis from online sources such as CNN, Bloomberg
and the New York Times. A custom program displays these headline as scrolling
text, similar to stock market quotes, in white letters on a plain black
background. The Elocuter reads the brightness value of each letter with a
photocell and pairs this value with an allophone.
In this process words are translated into impossible sequences of allophones
similar to a Dada poem. Inspired by Dadaism, but addressing our own digital
context, we are consciously creating a paradoxical situation: mixing the
extreme rationality of computers and the irrationality of dada language play.
The name of our project references the technique of elocution, taught as a
remedy for stuttering and autism and as an improvement of spoken language
skills enhanced by body gestures. We also reference news media as inspiration
for new poetic forms, such as French poet Tristan Tzara's Dadaist poetry
engine, introduced in 1920 as a set of instructions on how to turn newspaper
clippings into poetry. Finally, this project can be placed in the history of
combining human and machinic components into instruments for performance.
Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori created human, animal and machine sounds
mechanically whereas the experimental use of phonetics in Kurt Schwitters'
Ursonate evoked the sounds of machines using the human voice.
The Elocuter - I Must Remind You We Live in Dada Times...
McMullen_Winkler