Peter Rose VOX 13 Series (1982 – 2000) on UbuWeb

Peter Rose is an experimental media artist currently a professor of media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Recently I and my fellow students of media at the Evergreen State College had the good fortune of receiving a couple of great presentations about his work and philosophy and creative processes that he gave here.

The reason I am writing about him here, is to key anyone who might be interested in to the fact that a collection of his works regarding language, the VOX 13 series, are online in full quality full length form at UbuWeb.

Taken in the aggregate, Vox 13 offers a grand circumnavigation of the subject of language. By turns it is a reflexive riff on reading, a hyperdimensional performance piece about gesture, a horror story told by a computer, an opera about the voice, a documentary on the transience of language, a metanarrative about the elements of story, an Edenic parable, a kinetic koan, an arch ideological satire, a joke about semiotics, a materialist metaphor, and a performance piece about communication. The opus considers what it means to read, what it means to listen, when it is that we speak, how words acquire meaning, what it means to write, who we listen to, how we listen, what speaks, other ways we can speak, what the voice is, where language can be found, what words do to time, what holds stories together, and how light shapes language. There are reflections on time and language and there are explorations of the places where speech and power seem to intersect. I offer a nod to Tom Phillips’ “A Humument,”, the Firesign Theatre, the Four Horseman, Sid Caesar, early Woody Allen, Julian Jaynes, the Sackners, W. H. Hudson, sehtraB dnaloR, and Ludwig Wittgenstein who, in one of his more jovial moments, announced that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Much of this work is a voluble illustration of that dictum.

- Peter Rose

Here is one work of particular interest for me, The Darkening.