"Dan's Toys"
program note


I have long been entranced by the ambiguous clarity and concise
structural complexity of the writings of neo-childist poets such as
Walt Disney and Theodore Geisel.  While recently perusing the 'objet'
archives in the Daniel Garton Toybox, I came across a multi-media
presentation of the following poem (I believe the title is "Utterances
from 'Toy Story'"):

	Howdy, pardner
	My name's Woody 
	You're my favorite deputy
	Yee-haw, cowboy
	There's a snake in my boot!

The poem was digitally recited by an elaborately-constructed 
facsimile of the main character in the famous "Toy Story" epic.

I was captivated by the elegant conflation of sound and image
in this presentation, and decided to write a piece based on my
experience of the poem.  I have attempted to meld the semantic
aspects with the syntactic and phonological details of the recitation,
using every known and possible signal-processing algorithm to realize
the final composition.

I was also fortunate enough to receive a generous grant from the
Jill Lipoti Foundation, and (after gaining appropriate permissions
from the curators of the Daniel Garton archives) I will be able to
display many of the original artifacts used to produce the source sounds
I used for this piece, including the rare "Woody" doll that served as my
inspiration.

The piece was created by exploiting known holes in the Unix, Macintosh
and Windows95/NT operating systems and stealing CPU cycles from all
computers currently connected to the internet.