Red Dice/Des Chiffres

Red Dice
image/png
1498 × 1026

Red Dice
image/png
836 × 564

Red Dice/Des Chiffres
video/mp4
720 × 540
15:32

Red Dice/Des Chiffres
video/mp4
720 × 540
14:58

Red Dice / Des Chiffré (2000) was commissioned by the Canadian National Gallery and is now in their permanent collection. Seaman again worked with Chris Ziegler on the programming of the work. The work presents a text by the Poet Stéphane Mallarmé - Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance, and an interactive audio/visual meta-text by Seaman. Large scale projections of both the interface and the visual portion of Seaman's audio/visual work are presented. The piece enables the user to view and listen to Mallarmé's text through the use of a Pen/Wacom tablet interface. When the pen touches on words, they are subsequently spoken. Small video icons are called up that register the potential to trigger related segments of an audio/visual text by Seaman. The work also incorporates a "Recombinant" section enabling the user to re-order Seaman's video, generate a new soundtrack by choosing from 144 different musical sections - layering up to seven at a time, as well as recombine Seaman's texts via this pen interface. The work functions as a companion work to Passage Sets / One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue which was also influenced by the Mallarmé text.