By Jeff Morris
Camtasia Fantasy is a study on institutionalized tools for presenting information, featuring numerous forms of misreading and corruption native to those systems—including automated captioning and stabilization, noise removal, layers of lossy compression, and the broader assumption that a PowerPoint slide show can communicate any knowledge worth knowing—as well as the unintended poetics that emerge from such misreadings.
Created during a slow and dry workshop introducing a particular unnamed software tool, I aimed to discover what amusing or enlightening artifacts might emerge by maximizing the software’s features and faults and turning it on itself. Most relevant to this discussion, I used its automatic transcription feature to try to transcribe text from the voices and noises around me in the workshop. The number of simultaneous speakers and their distance from me ensured that the software would transcribe nothing correctly, but since it was a process that could only yield English words and perhaps segments of English syntax, it was forced to become a glitchy kind of found poetry generator. This process achieved “deeper” meaninglessness as I had the software process the sound in dramatic ways and attempt to transcribe it again, yielding two layers of captions, moving in and out of view thanks to the hopeless attempts of an automatic image stabilizing feature. Here, in a manner taking after John Cage in a way, any meaning that emerges, however poetic, absurdist, or abstract, can only come from within the reader’s mind, because the source was nothing.
