Late evening texts and sounds from Raquel Meyers and Goto80

Mind the Volcano is a text-based, TV-performance with a typewriter logic that remediates existing materials. All visuals by Raquel Meyers consist of text characters, based on words and images from books. The music by Goto80 is composed live in text-based software and shown as a part of the visual story. Words, images and music work together closely in this performance and bring you closer to text as a fundamental building block of digital culture.

Many animations are typed manually as a form of keyboard craft. The animation works symbol-by-symbol rather than frame-by-frame. As such, the stories happen between film and typewriter, like a flip book. This limbo is strengthened by Raquel Meyers’ eerie visual style.

Commodore 64 is the primary medium for the performance, but it also uses teletext. Teletext is the data sidekick to the TV signal, manifested as a transparent layer on top of the video. The graphics are made specifically for this performance, using custom hardware and software by Peter Kwan.

Mind the Volcano premiered at the literature festival Textival 2012 in Gothenburg, Sweden. This is the first time teletext is added, making it among the very few, live teletext performances.