Overview
Three Rails Live is an experiment in combinatory poetics and generative cinema. The work produces short narrative videos that braid images, recorded spoken texts, generated titles, and short morals into changing configurations each time the system runs.
Running continuously, the system never generates the same narrative in the same order twice, yet it sustains a coherent story-world around one man’s search for meaning among the fragments of his life and environment.
System
Combinatory Method
Each chapter combines a generated title, two narrative fragments, image sequences, and a perverb: a proverb-like phrase made by remixing familiar sayings into something oddly recognizable and newly unstable.
The collaborators worked at a distance. Coover sent short video clips and images to Rettberg and Montfort. Rettberg sorted the materials into themes such as Landscape and Fate, Tourists, Death by Snake, Industrial Sites, Trains, Flood, Toxic, Flight, Stripped, and Third Rail, then wrote and recorded short narrative segments for each theme.
Montfort selected images, wrote perverbs for the texts paired with images, and built a title generator. The system selects image sets and narrative recordings from constrained random choices, assigns a perverb as the story’s moral, and begins again.
Script
Script by Scott Rettberg (narrative) and Nick Montfort (perverbs).
Video
Demo video by Scott Rettberg, uploaded to Vimeo in 2013. The demo describes the work as a browser-based installation composed from thirty spoken narrative segments, aleatory video selections, and perverbs.
Access
The CDN Collection hosts both the descriptive collection entry and the archived browser-based version of the work, including English and French language paths. ELMCIP also preserves bibliographic links to the original New River publication and the ELO 2012 Media Art Show entry.
Exhibitions
- Listed by Unknown Territories as exhibited at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bergen International Film Festival, and other international venues.
- Presented in the Electronic Literature Organization 2012 Media Art Show: Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints.
- Included in the BIFF Expanded Exhibition in Bergen in September 2016 alongside Hearts and Minds and Toxi•City.
- Presented as Trois rails sous tension, a French-language adaptation, during a 2016 screening in Montpellier at Université Paul-Valéry.
- Shown as part of the Piksel16 PikelSavers program in Bergen in November 2016.
Credits
- Roderick Coover: images, film materials, collaboration
- Scott Rettberg: narrative texts, voice recordings, collaboration
- Nick Montfort: perverbs, title generator, collaboration