Studies in ReTelling, 2009
Custom software for screen or projection, dimensions variable



"ReTelling" explores computer driven automation in narrative construction inspired in part by the author Raymond Queneau's mutiple retelling of a simple story to demonstrate how style creates changes in meaning. This version of "Retelling" features two sets of images that continuously replace each other over time with placement and scale determined by the software so that through the continuously re-ordered combinations, the story's meaning is potentially altered.

The reconstruction of narratives based on the rearrangement of a story's basic elements have been a principal theme in 20th Century literature, cinema and art. Examples include the montage of Eisenstein, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's "Last Year in Marienbad", Chris Marker's "La Jetée" and others. In the visual arts, the Dadaists, Surrealists, the Beat Generation, Fluxus and conceptual artists such as John Baldessari have all explored the techniques in many ways. The Dadaist Tristan Tzaras creation of a poem by pulling words at random from a hat got him expelled from the Surrealist movement. The artist Brion Gysin and beat writer William Burroughs "cut-up" technique in the 1950s consisted of an aleatory process in which a text cut-up into smaller pieces were rearranged randomly to create a new text.

Time-based reconstruction is one of the fundamental principles of interactive art. Software artist/engineer Angus Forbes collaborated with the artist to finetune a mathematical model used in the study of probability and statistics applied to the problem of how to best organize a set of objects of various sizes into a finite physical space such as a container. The "ReTelling" project explores the potential of such an engineering study as a form for expression in storytelling.