Completely Automated

Samantha Gorman
HASTAC Scholar/Ph.D. candidate from School of Cinematic Arts at USC

Biography
Samantha Gorman is a writer, scholar and media artist who composes for the intersection of text, performance and digital culture. She is concerned with issues surrounding contemporary reading and writing practices: particularly, what these practices mean for the future of our cultural heritage in an increasingly digital world. Her current work includes the hybrid iPad novella Penumbra: conceived as a re-imagining of the eBook. She holds an MFA and BA from Brown University in Literary Arts where she studied poetry and writing for digital media. After her MFA, she taught courses in performance studies, digital literature and English at the Rhode Island School of Design. In Fall 2012, Samantha relocated to LA and began her Ph.D. at the Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) program in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She was recently accepted as a 2013 HASTAC scholar.

Abstract
I have formally performed “Completely Automated” on stage at a few conferences/venues and I think it could be a good fit for HASTAC’s themes. I would be very excited to perform it as part of an evening of performances. Total run-time is a duration of 15 minutes and it occurs in three parts. In the first part, I do a performative reading of a “historical” document that I have forged. To create the language of the forgery, I programmed a computer program to run a text analysis on a group of historical law tracts. I then skimmed the results and authored my own version of an early law tract. Calling on theater training, I perform this poetic text. In the second stage, the live performance overlaps and blends in with a short video that tells the story of how this forged document is digitally archived on google books as an “authentic” text. This video is blended with voice over of poetic text taken from the document. In the last stage I give a final performative reading of the changes that were made to the document when a group of users prepared it for upload in the digital archives. I think this project is an ideal fit for a performance at HASTAC because it deals with issues central to the digital humanities: archiving, preservation, digital conversion, authenticity, etc. What is at stake when our cultural documents undergo digital conversion? What artifacts or changes might be introduced? Where is the line of document authenticity drawn, in print or digital format?