9:52 Minutes, 16:9, Color, Stereo.
Three Rails Live (2013) is a combinatory narrative film designed for installation. The collaborative database driven video project concerns memory, mortality, alienation, and regret. The filmmaker and authors wrote recursively, exchanging texts in response to images and images in response to texts, evolving themes such as "Landscape and Fate", "Death by Snake", "Toxic", "Flight", and "Flood." Spoken word narrative and image are then assembled and juxtaposed by the system into segmented stories such as "Empty Glass," "Between Stations" and "Passing Cars". These reconfiguring fragments are interrupted by "perverbs", in which proverb fragments combine oddly familiar but corrupted phrases such as, "where there's smoke, there's mirrors" or "nothing ventured makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." Running continuously, the system never generates the same narrative in the same order twice, but nevertheless produces a coherent holistic story of a man's late search for meaning among the detritus of his life and environment.
Roderick Coover: Artistic design, video, photography.
Nick Montfort: Perverbs script, title generator, digital code and combinatory design.
Scott Rettberg: Voice, narrative script, digital code and combinatory design.
Additional Voices: Lynne Innerst.
Sound mastering by Joseph Kramer and Roderick Coover.