LPDT3_Ground Level: The Letter Avatars ~ LPDT2/3

LPDT2/3 is the metaverse incarnation of Roy Ascott’s groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte (“The Pleating of the Text”), created in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris during that same year.

Almost 30 years later, in 2010, LPDT2 was created by Max Moswitzer, Selavy Oh and Elif Ayiter in Second Life; and a new version of the project, renamed as LPDT3, was realized by the same team in the open metaverse, at the New Genres Grid in 2012.

The title of the project, “La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale,” alludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation “distributed authorship”, a term coined by Ascott has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2.

Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by a number of human storytellers positioned around the globe; in the three dimensionally embodied metaverse the storytellers show novel and unexpected attributes: An emergent textual architecture/geography, as well as a number of autonomous “bot” avatars which dwell inside this bizarre, literary landscape are pleating the text by acting as communication nodes between the narrators of this new version of the tale: The persistent distributed authorship is now accomplished by many writers throughout the ages:

A text generator telling a non-linear, multi-faceted, often times poetic, story harvested from the famous online Gutenberg Project is now distributing its output amongst architecture and its inhabitants, generating dialogues and iterations taking their trajectories from masterworks of classical literature, thus creating distributed authorship not only amongst individuals but also amongst textual output that originates from different epochs.

The pleating resembles musical sampling, the connection between the sentences fades, text becomes noise, from which the audience generates meaning.

Version one of LPDT2 has been projected into Real Life in Seoul, Korea during the INDAF new media art festival held at Tomorrow City, Songdo Incheon, throughout September 2010. The project was also open to visitors in Second Life during this month, starting from September 1st.

LPDT2 was also shown at the ISEA 2011 exhibition in Istanbul in the Fall of 2011.

LPDT3 will now be shown as part of the exhibition "Roy Ascott: Syncretic Cybernetics," within the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012, curated by Juliette Yuan, starting from October 1st.

Roy Ascott's project is being co-authored in the meatverse (Second Life, 2010; New Genres Grid, 2012) by Selavy Oh (concept, programming and architecture), Max Moswitzer (concept, architecture and terrain) and Elif Ayiter (concept, avatars and soundscape). Further associates are Heidi Dahlsveen (avatar animations); and for the Second Life version, LPDT2, also i-DAT from the University of Plymouth, UK (Real Life SMS input).

Special thanks go to the University of Applied Fine Arts, Vienna and Sabanci University, Istanbul who have made the project come to life through the provision of virtual land for the duration

of the work.