For better or worse, these facts and fancies for the curious: "eliot's magic lantern" is an installation in weird space. It is a work of ambient literature arranged in three pieces. "30 02 2003" is a field recording of the house as sounds filter down into the basement studio. "eliot's magic lantern" (images) includes a set of objects already arranged on top of a shelf in the study. I'd wanted books included in the image because I planned to use page-scans as the basis for a musical score. "eliot's magic lantern" (audio) contains melodic elements and beat structures drawn from De Quincey's "Opium Confessions" through a process of text-to-MIDI conversion. The resulting MIDI score was used to sequence software synthesizers and samplers. All MIDI controller information came from hourly data readings gathered over two recent weeks of radon testing. T.S. Eliot hovers somewhere in the decadent territory of Baudelaire, pictured in the still life, and late Byron. Literature evokes atmospheric "taints" or sonic tinctures that combine with the data of raw space to suggest hallucinatory mediascapes. All in all, I'm playing with the notion of the shelved book's physical objectivity as still-life in contrast to the "activate-able" interior of the book as imaginative agent.