All of my work reflects some aspect of the tension between the visual and the verbal; “The Babblefield” is the apotheosis of the verbal. It is both a specific thing — the web-based, interactive Babblefield on this website (more below) — and a lager entity comprised of many texts I have been writing and compiling for many years.
Below are brief synopses of 3 interactive, web-based series manifestations of “The Babblefield” seen on this website.
Babblefield
While “The Babblefield” is the larger set of texts that feed into all the various text-based works seen on this website, the interactive Babblefield on this site is a specific, nearly infinite series of works.
Every time you refresh the Babblefield page, a new work is created. I have coded the page to pull in texts from two of three sets of Babblefield texts I have written: the mixed-case top-panel text coming from a set of longer, more narrative texts; the uppercase bottom-panel text coming from a set of shorter texts that are more like titles or ambiguous fragments. A random color is generated each time for each text and for each text background, so the number of potential combinations between thousands of texts and millions of colors is, as I said above, nearly infinite.
Sometimes the color combinations may be harmonious, while at other times they may be quite jarring. And sometimes the color of a text will be so close to the color of its background that it will effectively vanish.
Sometimes even the most nonsensical texts will pair up to make a kind of sense, while at other times, even the most ordinary and sensible text may seem completely crazy in this context.
Kippleverse
In the Kippleverse series, each refresh of the page serves up a random pairing of text from The Babblefield with one of over a thousand “kipple” photographs I have taken over the past 20-plus years, also served up randomly.
The name “Kippleverse” is derived from “kipple,” a word coined by the great science fiction author Philip K. Dick in his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which the film Blade Runner was based. In the blog post, Kipple and the Kippleverse, I go into this word (and world) — and its relation to my work — in great detail.
Ciphers
Ciphers is the third interactive web-based series that, like the Kippleverse, pairs photographs with a text fragment at random. This time the photos are of people — either photos that I have taken or scanned from my large collection of found photographs. The header text is pulled from set number 3 mentioned above containing thousands of character names that I invented.
There are many meanings behind the name “Ciphers” for this series. On the one hand, a cipher is a message in code, or a method of transforming a text in order to conceal its meaning, which resonates with the language aspects of my work.
But a cipher is also a person that has no weight, worth, or influence — AKA a nonentity, which is an accurate description of these characters who, at least as characters, have no corporeal existence. Even those pictures of still-living people — such as myself — are nonentities in the sense that the person captured in the photo at a particular time no longer exists, because that moment in time no longer exists.
The nonentityness of the Ciphers is further reinforced by every image receiving a different character name at random each time the page is refreshed.