Hemingway, Faulkner And Fitzgerald: The Remix

By Samantha Henig

You may have heard those lines this weekend at “Shuffle,” a performance at the New York Public Library that paired Elevator Repair Service, of “Gatz” fame, with Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, of Moveable Type (a.k.a. the cool display in the lobby of the New York Times building) fame—as exciting a collaboration for techy literary theatre geeks as the Traveling Wilburys were for cool dads. The basic gist of the show, performed in twenty-minute increments, is that the actors read from a script that is generated by interconnected software algorithms that draw on lines from the three books that E.R.S. has performed (either in adapted form or in full)—“The Great Gatsby,” “The Sun Also Rises,” and “The Sound and the Fury”—and delivered, in synch, to iPod touches tucked into paperback books with covers collaged from the three source works. It looked like this:

It would be tempting to say that the lines are pulled at random. But that’s not right at all. Hansen and Rubin’s method of arranging text is highly calculated and stylized. Their first project, Listening Post, drew from a database of chat-room conversations, bulletin boards, and other online public forums, and presented the words on a wall of small screens in a series of logical groupings. In the video below, for instance, all of the phrases begin with “I am.”

For this weekend’s performance, which was directed by E.R.S.’s John Collins, whom Rebecca Mead wrote about in the magazine, and commissioned by the library and FuturePerfect, the script looked something like this. (Sections of it were projected onto the walls, and audience members, who were encouraged to move around freely, could catch glimpses of it whirring by on the actors’ iPods.) The cavernous library room was divided into locations numbered zero through eight, and the script dictated when the actors should move where. In Location 4, they spoke from behind a library check-out counter, occasionally with champagne flutes in hand. In Location 0, they mingled with the audience.

Sometimes the program generated two-person chants that “we referred to as ‘little dead girls,’” Collins said, because the rhythm reminded them of “something out of ‘The Shining.’” For those bits, the actors would link arms and march, creepily, throughout the audience. Other times, the program would pull a series of lines that all began “he is” or “he was,” which the actors were encouraged to address to specific audience members. Vin Knight, one of the performers, had a monologue on Saturday of two hundred such sentences, which he delivered standing between two baby strollers, each holding a boy of about ten months. “He sat there between these two kids, going back and forth describing one kid to another kid,” Collins described. “He was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty,” he might tell one. “He’s a bootlegger.”

View the original article on The New Yorker.com here.