4. Literaturforum Hannover
4th Literary Forum Hannover
10/21-10/30/1994
"Tuthtable" by Mari Soppela (Finnland/NL)
"wet nurse / Die Amme II" by Peter Dittmer (D)
Works in the new media that dealt explicitly with speech and literature in the context of electronic communications were shown in this exhibit. The oppurtunities for expression were completely wide open, with such diverse possibilities as pure wordplay, experiments with narrative elements or philosophically oriented picture and text generations, and installations that covered several of these levels.

Mari Soppela called her story-telling work 'truthtable'. On one table 6 cm x 8 cm panels were seen. Each panel consisted of a video projection. They displayed a picture from one of the video stories that were produced for this occasion. When the viewer touched one of the panels, probably picking the most exciting motif in it, one of the many picture stories began. Once all the panels had been tried out, a completely new version of the story from the panel and a personal video style were given.

Peter Dittmer: wet nurse II. In this work the audience had the chance to enter into a dialogue with the computer with the help of the keyboard. With "Hello" the computer monitor greeted the person at the keyboard. The word exchange between human and machine began. Whether a pleasant conversation or a bitter argument resulted could be anticipated from the reactions of the speech controlled mechanism. The machine was upset when the course of the talk did not correspond to the programmed routines. The less the computer understood, the more megalomaniac and rough it became, trying to preserve its control. The computer saw itself as the host receiving a visit from the person in front of the monitor. When the persistent viewer insisted on further attempts at communication, the situation became even more tense. A window in the computer menu showed the course of the dialogue as an anger or relaxation diagram. When the computer was 'pleased' with the dialogue, it displayed a glass of water. As if from the hand of a ghost, the glass would fill up for a temporary reconciliation through a hole in the bottom. If the conversation took a sudden turn for the worse, the computer ended the dialogue by dumping a glass of milk into the antagonist's lap.The tipping over of the glass of milk stood for the switching of the direction of the talk, the binary yes-no structure. In this way Dittmer exposed dialogue as a proceeding that is based on mechanical structures. The computer tried to maintain its dominant position by using crytic text particles to fake its linguistic competence.