Alinta's Cyberpoetry blog

2010-11-14T01:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHI0s48WNfY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdFfVx-LkN8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTnnJR-hS7k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNIqyyypojg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdPg1MdiV88

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8spcME8k1M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2jY4UkPbAc&playnext=1&list=PL2D49733745A57270&index=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R1SrZua5ww&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMGR9q43dag&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAGYMGP6WlA

The data can be as simple as the names of the mountains visible from a high peak, or the names of the buildings visible on a city skyline. At a historical site, AR could superimpose images showing how buildings used to look. On a busy street, AR could help you choose a restaurant: wave your phone around and read the reviews that pop up. In essence, AR provides a way to blend the wealth of data available online with the physical world--or, as Dr Huopaniemi puts it, to build a bridge between the real and the virtual.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGwHQwgBzSI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSfKlCmYcLc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIof7yEsOn8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKw_Mp5YkaE

2010-11-02T05:16:00.000-07:00

Podcast due Mon 22 Nov 11:59pm
Upload EXACT text
Mp3 only – Audio only
5 mins exactly

******

"It is unimaginable, had there been [personal] cameras in Auschwitz, that the world would have permitted the Holocaust to go forward," David Gergen, the CNN political analyst who worked in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, said in an interview. "We would have understood the face of evil."
Consider his point. The Nazis, no doubt, would have confiscated any image-taking device from their doomed prisoners. But what if a single "good German" -- just some grunt-level camp guard, say -- had shot secret video footage of an infant being sent to the crematoria? Or transmitted a photograph of the gas chambers across the Internet? Or webcasted pirated images of Josef Mengele's horrific "medical" experiments? Western Allied leaders, including President Roosevelt, might have found it politically impossible at that point to maintain their line that any effort to halt Nazi war crimes would only detract from the core aim of defeating Adolf Hitler's armies.
- Your Starobin reading.

2010-10-19T00:20:00.001-07:00

It’s Beginning to Hurt
by James Lasdun,

‘Good lunch Mr Bryar?’

‘Excellent lunch.’

‘Sorleys?’

‘No, some … Chinese place.’

‘Your wife rang.’

He dialled home: his wife answered:

‘Where on earth have you been?’

‘Sorry darling. Complicated lunch…’

Strange, to be lying to her again. And about a funeral!

‘Tom’s coming down. Stop at Dalgliesh’s, would you, and pick up a salmon. A wild one? Better go right now, actually, in case they run out.’

It was July, a baking summer. He walked slowly, thinking of the ceremony he had just attended. Among the half dozen mourners, he had known only the solicitor who had introduced him to Marie ten years ago and had told him of her death last week.

The news had stunned him: he hadn’t known she was ill, but then he hadn’t seen her for seven years. Throughout the service he had found himself weeping uncontrollably.

The man at Dalgliesh’s hoisted a fish the length of his arm from under a covering of seaweed and ice.

‘How’s that?’

‘Okay. Would you –’

‘Gut her and clean her sir?’

‘Please.’

The man slit the creature’s belly with a short knife, spilling the dewy beige guts into a bucket. He rinsed the flecked mesh of scales and the red flesh inside, then wrapped the fish in paper and put it in a plastic bag. It was six inches too long for the office fridge.

‘Bugger.’

He went down to the stock room. There were gluetraps lying about with dead mice and beetles on them, but it was cooler there than upstairs. Uneasily, he placed the fish in the drawer of an old metal filing cabinet.
For the rest of the afternoon he worked on new rental listings. His eyes were burning when he stopped. It was late and he had to hurry to the tube station. Sweating and panting he emerged at Charing Cross just in time to get the six-forty.

On the train, crowded with weekenders, he found himself thinking of Marie. Sometimes she would sing a nonsense song in his ear, her mouth close as if she were whispering a secret. He remembered the strange solitariness of her existence in London; her even stranger indifference to this solitariness. They couldn’t afford hotels so they used to pretend she was a client, interested in one of the properties listed with his firm. Every home they entered was a different world. Making love in the ‘sumptuously appointed Victorian maisonette’ or the ‘cosy garden flat’ was an adventure into a series of possible lives, each with its own reckless joys: one afternoon they were rich socialites; the next a pair of bohemian students… For three years he had felt the happiest man alive, and the luckiest. Marie never asked him to leave his family, and he had regarded this, too, as part of his luck.

And then, abruptly, she had ended it. ‘I’m in love with you’, she’d told him matter-of-factly, ‘and it’s beginning to hurt.’

His wife was waiting for him outside the station.

‘Where’s the salmon?’ She asked.

A sudden horror spread through him.

‘I – I left it behind.’

She turned abruptly away, then stared back at him a moment.

‘You’re a fool.’ She said. ‘You’re a complete bloody fool.’

James Lasdun is the winner of the inaugural National Short Story Prize

Week 6

2010-10-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

Turn a story idea into a transmedia story. You can use the story provided or you can make one up on the fly. These elements must be used:

Book format
Movie format
TV Animation format
Song format
Dance format
Iphone App format
Website format
Game format
One of these must be an extension of one character

Get into groups and perhaps each person can focus on each segment.
So what you need to do is break the story up into sections, and decide what format will work for each segment. AND in what order the segments will come.
Once you have the layout that you think is best, you need to explain each section. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do any dancing! (Unless you want to… I’ll consider it participation).
You have to decide which character deserves the extension, and in what format will the extension come. Will it be a main character that the audience loves or indeed one of the more minor characters who may need more said about them to flesh out the fictional world?
In your movie format section, you must draw up a storyboard on the templates provided, if you need more room for explanation, you can use your notebooks.
For the TV animation format you must decide whether this should come before or after the movie is released, or in fact if it runs at the same time.
The same applies for the book format, so you must decide which parts of the story get told in the book, but will not be told in any of the other sections, etc. Remember to question how this book will be distributed… you can have it as an e-book as well as a paper bound book.
You must re-write one part of the story to make is suitable for the song format. So a lot of editing may be required, a lot of rewording perhaps to simplify matters, and if possible, make it rhyme. A basic pop song goes for about three and a half minutes, has two stanzas and then a chorus, then a third stanza and then the chorus again - something to keep in mind.
You must decide which part of the story needs no words and can be retold through the dance medium, and what kind of dance would be used (would it be a ballet, a contemporary piece etc). Remember to ask yourself when this segment will appear etc. As well as releasing your song at some stage, you can use your song inside of your dance if you wish to, turning your dance into a Broadway style piece.
You must design your website and decide what it makes available to the user (what will the content be?).
You must design your Iphone App and decide what it makes available to the user.
You must design your game – what mediums will it be available on? What characters will the user be able to play as? Will there be a main one? What struggles/levels will be faced? When will you release it and how will it be marketed Etc.

Week 4

2010-10-02T18:43:00.000-07:00

See people's blogs

Look at Audacity

www.secrettechnology.com

In the economist article 'Your Telephone is Ringing', in what way is the word 'convergence' mainly used?

In this same article chairman of France Telecom says that this convergence is a step towards 'digital paradise' and Mark Wegleitner, chief technologist at Verizon says this is because they can now give people entertainment 'the way they want it'. What do you think of this?

This article, written in 2006, briefly deals with the idea of the 'quadruple play' and how telecoms are scrambling to get there first. It's now 2010, what can we see has happened since then on this issue?

In "All Things to All Men"

“We have to be extremely careful that we don't go
in the Swiss army knife kind of direction where we lose focus on what the consumer wants,” says
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the boss of Nokia, the world's biggest handset-maker." He goes on to say "The trend is not towards a single
converged device, but towards a greater diversity of hybrid devices. Not so much convergence,
then, as divergence."

******

Consumer Lifestyle News

Nielsen asks what device is a tablet computer most like? And finds out that it is 'in between'. This research group studies several different aspects in order to come to this conclusion of convergence...

******

Recent Media Example...

TV industry show hails smartphone, Facebook era - Yahoo News

"Internet-based TV viewing, the arrival of Apple's iPad and the proliferation of smartphones are set to ring in a new era of connected entertainment, industry experts predict.

Thousands of TV execs are to flock to the French Riviera to brainstorm and snap up some of the hottest new programmes at this year's influential MIPCOM 2010 audiovisual entertainment show that kicks off here Monday.

The four-day event will focus on re-defining the entertainment experience through fast-growing digital platforms such as social networks as well as smartphone-connected digital TV and apps and their effect on the industry.

"The business model for the web has not yet emerged even while the business model on TV is shifting dramatically," Gary Carter, chief operating officer at international production company FreemantleMedia told AFP.

"The two big areas of exploration for FreemantleMedia in the last 12 months have been the use of our brands in social games and on social networks," Carter noted.

Games such as FarmVille or Bejeweled, both of which are available as apps on Facebook and Apple's iPhone, are spreading like wildfire, Carter added.

Digital technologies are expected to steadily increase their impact on all segments of entertainment and media.

The number of apps on offer to iPhone, iPad and smartphone users is exploding and promises to usher in a new era for the media sector.

In 2010, almost 6.0 billion paid-for and free apps are predicted to be downloaded, up from around 2.4 billion in 2009. This surge in sales could yield over 11 billion dollars in revenue by 2014 in the US alone.

The bottom line here is how the entertainment, digital and advertising sectors can work together to create much-needed new revenue streams."

******

******

From Flew textbook:

Boundary Objects

Path Dependency

Internet Imaginaire

Convergence Culture

Participatory Culture

Collective Intelligence

Henry Jenkins

Patrice Flichy

From the Economist:

Access Agnosticism

Network Neutrality (and what did the text say about this being a reality?)

******

******

Convergence between texts

******

in class week 13

2006-10-24T20:13:00.000-07:00

very annoying. came to class today prepared to upload all the stuff I have done over the passed couple of weeks which I had put into one folder called something like 'to hand in' but the folder isn't on my memory stick so OBVIOUSLY I have forgotten to put in on my stick which I thought I had done the other day. So with none of my stuff here with me in class, I really don't know what to do. Either way I will have to come back on friday to upload the stuff.

notes to self:

live-wirez.gu.edu.au

!!!!

Funkhouser sent me a pdf file which is a promotional thingy for his new book of poetry called, "Prehistoric Digital Poetry - An Archeology of Form". it seems to be part of a specific series called "Modern and Contemporary Poetics", edited by Charles bernstein and Hank Klazer. Although I haven't got a copy to read, there is a picture on the leaflet thing of the book's front cover. The front cover looks like a picture of some kind of digital animation, using symbols that seem to be in a different language as underneath them it states "anapest, to strike" and "trochee, to run" however what is interesting to me is that these symbols also look to me like the lines of the Iambic Pentameter. Perhaps it is and it is being used as a way to sound out the words. In this way this picture encorperates digital animation with historical ideas of poetry (iambic pentameter) and also one of Funkhousers favourites, sound, in the way that he is possibly reffering to how the words should be sounded out. The picture also includes some kind of digital landscape which is reminiscent to me of something we could make in google sketchup.

Obviously Funkhouser has taken all this into consideration in the presentation of his book which describes itself as "A singular and major historical view of the birth of electronic poetry." therefore jamming the words 'historical' and 'electronic' together, creating somewhat of a... whatever the word is... where things are opposite and contradictory. I don't mean that these are totally opposites I just mean that in ones cognitive process one may find an interesting destinction here. I really don't know how to explain what I am trying to say. I blame that constant 'beep beep' of the door that is always happening in this class. Anyway it's great that someone has compiled a history like this, it's probably not the first time but who knows.

This is what the blurb on the promotional pdf says about the book (as I don't feel like retyping it in my own words, which would be the studious thing to do I'm sure)

"For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and
digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital
poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology
to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments
produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T.
Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the
foundations of today’s most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative,
visual, and interlinked productions of the genre’s prehistoric period.
Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output,
including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video
formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware,
programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic
forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant
approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and
multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account
includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been
presented in an English-language publication.
In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological
constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead
extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a
record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working
today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.
“Funkhouser provides a detailed inventory of key works that led the way to the current
flowering of digital poetry. This is the first work to provide historical, descriptive, and
technical accounts of the inaugural works of computer-assisted poetry composition.
Funkhouser’s command of the history, the aesthetics, and the technology is as rare as
it is welcome.”
—Charles Bernstein, author of Girly Man and A Poetics
C. T. Funkhouser is Associate Professor of Humanities at the New Jersey Institute
of Technology and author of Technopoetry Rising: Essays and Works (forthcoming) and
Selections 2.0, an eBook."

That ebook mentioned at the bottom is possibly the one he is going to send to me :D I imagine, unless he creates heaps of them...

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, I possibly have because I seem to blog a lot for this thing (this is my 23rd post) but the other week in class I did some work on the swishmax project. I played around with the word 'shoulder' but I didn't like any of the outcomes. They looked alright as they were but I knew that putting it into the kind of interface that I usually make in Flash wouldn't work as it'd just look too different and out of place. Can you imagine the word 'shouder' jumping around happily on one of my pages?? (not that you've seen them yet as I didn't have them on my stick to hand in today grrr.)

eurika! (not that I can spell it)

2006-10-22T05:51:00.000-07:00

yay i have a fourth idea!! It's a very simple piece, and i call it 'iflyaway'. in this piece i make birds out of "i" bodys and "(" wings and using simple frame by frame animation they fly across the screen. At first I wanted all the little wings to flap but I couldn't get it right and it was taking forever so I quit with that idea but they still look alright being static. As they are black they sort of look more like bats... maybe I should add some other colours? The background is blue for sky and the words "i fly away" are written all over the sky in a very similar blue which i find hard to see on my computer screen but that is good - that is how I want it. There is also music over the top so be sure to have your sound on. Yes it is me humming. I considered adding land into the blue but then thought against it as my drawing might not be so great. I like it's simplicity, and slight melancholy. I take inspiration from Ana Marie uribe for this piece, as I did her for part of my essay and she likes to work with single letters giving them different meaning. however, if i did make all the i's colourful it would remind me just a little too much of Uribe's work and I'd rather it appeared to be something else so maybe I will leave them black, it doesn't matter if they are seen as bats anyway as long as they are seen as flying things. Bats fly just as well as birds do!

but for a 5th piece... hmmmm... still stuck on that one...

OH MY GOD STOP THE PRESS HOLY SHIT FUCK ME SILLY READ THIS!!!

ok so i was just looking through my entire blog wondering why i had no comments on any of my entries (not that I had ever checked before) and way back in August on the entry where I first spoke about chris funkhouser THE MAN HIMSELF HAD WRITTEN A REPLY that's right go and check in archives if you think it's fake. Damn it why didn't I see that before I wrote the essay, it could have been useful. I was also just reading kerrie's blog about how she got in touch with her artist and i was thinking "yeah well mine were just not easy to get in touch with" you know, the usual excuses, and then I found the note from Chris. My assignment FOUND ME!! It's insane. So i emailed him about this eBook he was talking about which will be awesome if he remembers me. Wow. Don't you love it when things fall into your lap from the sky like really really really good bird poo... well it makes sense in my head... I'm just excited is all. Of all the people who could leave me some love on my blog :D Can't wait to get to class on wednesday and rub it in everyones faces LIKE BIRD POO that's right...

I really have birds on the brain today don't I...

oh anyway also, I wrote a couple of little poems about the beach for another class but I suddenly feel the need to include them here. They are not the best by a long way and I am not totally proud of them but it is that thing of using the one word and coming up with something from it. In this class I had to go to the beach and just examine the place really thouroughly (can't spell???) and just had to see what I came up with (amongst other, far more complex criteria of course), so similar to The Broadwater poem. But I also had to pay particular attention to how my body reacted with the space and what sort of borders the space had... things like that.. you know... a class run by jondi... i rest my case... but yeah here are the small poems I came up with... maybe I could make a beachy interface for them??? hmmm maybe too silly... don't know...

I am told that sand,
Heated to a certain degree,
Creates glass.
This is why the beach
glistens.
I watch their brightness
On lover’s legs.
Tiny shards of glass
Like calves are earth
Hairs are highways
And cars are crashing.

Adding to your prickliness.

Where do you go to?
Do you reside up high
In the hot heat of the dunes?
Do you announce a ‘place’,
Does it remind you of home?
Does your blanket keep you safe from sand?
Perhaps you prefer to be closer to water
Where the tire tracks mar the sand,
And you feel them against your back,
Halving the sand
Halving you.
Torso deep across the borderline.

You were always scared of the big waves, so you brought your favourite teddy to the beach each time. His name was ‘Ted’ but sometimes it was ‘Best Boy’, because he was. You tried not to get him too sandy but sometimes he did and you couldn’t help it, could you. Ted was always smiling no matter what. Sometimes he even got a little wet when you couldn’t bare to go into the water without him, but he didn’t mind. Poor Ted, look at that sun burn, he couldn’t help it. You rubbed antiseptic cream between his legs. Good for those rashes, you thought, good for those rashes.

Her fingers
curl around the edges of
stiff worn fabric.
Bright sun like
several close encounters
beams back across her body.
Sand like
rough
plastered
walls
hangs from loose
limbs like tiny
rock climbers.

She reconsiders
her feet.

Stiff towel’s edge torn disturbing
Precious 90°

I hear the world
as interrupted by my heartbeat.
It is this reminder of life,
That keeps me
from fully perceiving
the world.

And I am lying
In your heavy footprint.
My shoulder slumped back
Into the curve of your toes.

Footprints like
Concave clams.
The wind creates lines of flight
Through the sand
That ends at my things.
Shoulders under pressure
Of heavy head.
Beach poetry is a bore,
I’m distracted
By tumble weeds
And soccer balls
And thoughts of many dreams.

slide of stuff

2006-10-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

Get Your Own! | View Slideshow

hrmmm

2006-10-18T23:45:00.000-07:00

hmm I don't know why that slideshow below isn't working... but it is REALLY pissing me off because there is no reason why is should be acting up. It has also deleted some of the pictures I put on it (not that it matters because I CURRENTLY CAN'T SEE ANY OF THEM) stupid thing. Just spent ages print screening stuff and turning them into small files so that I could upload them easily to the slide thing only for it to begin stuffing up when I was trying to put in the descriptions and now look at it. Grrr what a waste. I am currently replacing the pics it has deleted and trying one more time but yeah I dunno if it is going to work... It's acting as though I don't have the right programs to view it with (eg. flash) but I do, and I can see the other slider in my archives of this blog.

COMPLAINING

2006-10-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

So I'm just having a whinge about how I hate flash...

I am having some troubles with my third piece. I had planned in my timetable to have it finished by yesterday and now it is today and it is STILL not finished even though I started it about a week ago, or maybe a little less. It's not that I don't know what to do, it's just that I'm doing sooo much frame by frame animation with this one and it just takes forever. I get one lines of text done and I feel I need a break, unfortunately the frame by frame stuff is just boring to do. The fun part I suppose is working with the fonts and even confusing myself thinking 'hmmm I wonder what that letter could be' which is cool, but also reminds me what a sad life I must have if I am so excited by wingdings and wingdings 2 and wingdings 3 oh and 'vacations' aren't they cute.

I have been planning to make some more 'sliders' for this blog of my pieces and how they have been coming along but usually I wait for the weekend so that I can be on a faster internet connection so that I can upload the pictures efficiently but it seems time is running a bit fine so I may have to do it today and just let it take a while or make sure the pictures are as small as possible (which may defeat the purpose).

My third piece uses the poem that I made at the start of the semester using the methods we were taught in class about taking a word and having lines streaming off it or however you describe it. One of my words was Broadwater and I liked the poem that I got out of it because I realised that not only did it sound kind of nice, it was very personal and came from real events instead of projecting my events into another character's life as one may usually do when writing prose or poetry, if that makes sense. I was able to get out feelings that I knew I had in me for quite some time but was unable to see how to fit them together in a text. But by putting them under the label of Broadwater I was able to realise that it was the location that bound them together more than anything, and shows that it also may be useful to consider writing poetry using things such as who what when where and why as key notes, for example my broadwater piece used 'where', but completely dismissed 'when' as each line happened at a different time, but all within the last couple of years i suppose. hmm so that is Alinta's poetry writing lesson for today... yes it was pretty lame... I also advise not to give this 'who what whatever' thing to poets just starting out, as it may turn out some horrendous work.

Just to procrastinate even more, I'd like to tease out the lines of this poem and the instances that go along with them...

I wish I had some letters I could scratch into a bench.

obviously this refers to people who scratch loved ones initials into things. I suppose it's a rather adolescent thing to do, and I see it on benches down at the broadwater, and think of how those people are probably not still together anyway because that is how optimistic I am about teenagers. Psychologically, it makes me think about how I never did things like that as a teenager and that I feel I missed out on a fun part of my life and perhaps now I'm trying to make up for my teenage years, and wishing I could do teenage things without people thinking I was immature.

The stranger tells me of how his baby died. Says she had a name like mine.

This happened a couple of years ago when an annoying young man, a couple of years older than me perhaps, came down to the broadwater and stared at me while I was swimming. He sat on the only stairs I could take to leave so that I had to step over him to get away. After about an hour os being looked at I decided I really had to leave, and as I was stepping over him he started to talk of course, and started to tell me how his daughter had an aboriginal name like mine, and that she had died as an infant. I saw him again a couple of hours later crossing the road and again I had to stop and talk. I'm glad I haven't seen him since.

Wonder what the fishermen know about the full moon.

I like to walk along the broadwater at night or just as the sun is going down and the moon is coming up. When the full moon is coming up over the broadwater it looks very beautiful, and there is often fishermen down there watching it as well.

I almost slipped taking photos of the burning boat.

At the start of the year there was a little boat that had been tied up at the broadwater and someone has set it on fire. I didn't actually see it on fire but I saw the aftermath. It looked really cool - a half sunked and burnt out thing sitting in the shallows so I got my camera and walked out on some of those slippery mossy big round things to get close enough to take some pictures of it and could have easily fallen on my arse into the water getting my camera wet.

Cars bright like neon flash past like signs.

Marine Parade, Labrador in general I suppose.

I look like I haven't been kissed in a long time.

A couple of years ago I sat parked in a car by the water and someone said something similar to this to me.

Stingrays ticklish under my hand.

My dad has told me that while kayaking in the broadwater you can reach out and play with the stingrays and that they are cute like dogs and like to play games and be stroked. Of course we have a different kind of respect for them since THAT THING happened....... lol

The stranger mumbles broken language.

One night going for a walk along the water there was a strange old man who was talking to people are he was very hard to understand, not sure if he was speaking english or not. Then he strode out across the road still talking to himself. He was with the fishermen I think.

I wish I had some letters I could scratch into a bench.
Flashy flash flash.
Broken language kiss.
A name like mine in a burning boat.
Scratch into a bench.
A long
long
time.

This is just shifting and rearrangement of the prior lines, quite obviously. Just to see what else could be come up with when moving it around. Like moving things around in speaksonia maybe? And a good way to sum up the poem, by reffering back and making the reader remember all the lines again. And 'a long long time' is important there on the end... not even sure why... but it really is.

The official coolest noise to make with speaksonia is…

2006-10-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

“derderder”

Derderder would like to thank the panel of judges who consisted of… Alinta.

After hearing about Kerrie’s final 5 projects in class yesterday (among other things) and hearing about how all five tied in together, I realise I hadn't fashioned any sort of clever tie like this in my own works. However so far I have made two (ok ok 1 and a half) and they both include a central image which is made of a video of me doing strange bodily movements. Thus far this would be the tie between them (I know I don’t haaave to make them tie in together but still). So the tie is something of the corporeal. Both pieces so far look at the way in which the body moves as totally independent from any other kind of theoretical thought (the corporeal differentiated from the ‘identity’ or the ‘person’). So far one looks at the elbow, and this next one I am working on focuses intently on the shoulders. Not only is the video of the shoulders seen from behind but the overlayed sound is make in speaksonia out of the word ‘shoulder’ (and THIS is where I found out the ever so lovely sound ‘derderder’) however I can’t think of a clever way to include the text ‘shoulder’ without it getting boring. I also want to make it look a bit different from the elbow one because it seems to be heading in a very similar direction. Is this such a bad thing? I don’t know. I was thinking of making a cool thing out of ‘shoulder’ in that swish program but yesterday I couldn’t find anything that I thought would suit my shoulder page. I’m thinking of having the word and little phrases flashing up on the screen, non-interactively (unlike the interactive poem in the elbow piece which I believe is entitled arm1.html? or something with arm in it.) This way I can govern exactly when each line can be read, and I want them to flash on and off the screen rather rapidly so people have to stay on the page longer to get a better look. However as it is, without even any words on it yet, I enjoy watching it for a long time as there are already some entertaining elements for the viewer. I’d have to say the thing that keeps me the longest is the sounds. I’ve made it overlap towards the end but if you listen closely you can still hear the ending of the sound clip which is my favourite part (however I still chose to overlap the looping because it sounds better with a bit of build up of sound) this is the same with the video clip which is also fun to look at as I have put it over itself a few times so it too overlaps and looks like my shoulders are crazy! There are also swirling whirlwinds on either side of the picture that overlap the videoclip nicely. They were very hard to make seeing as my mouse on this computer doesn’t work. I guess there is a theme running though this of things overlapping and more importantly – going around in circles as the shoulders are doing in the clip. In this way all the technicalities echo the corporeal movement.

The creepiest part is… that the speaksonia voice is meant to be FEMALE!!

I have also made smaller ‘derderder’ sounds that I plan to use for buttons… but it make have to be for a different page as it would conflict with the main sound running over the top. I really like these button sounds as it sounds like the speaksonia “lady” is singing a song – it’s some of the closest stuff I’ve got to actually making it sing (as I was trying to do at the start with putting the laurie anderson and other’s songs into it). So look out for derderder buttons in the future (perhaps in the other three works I have yet to make).

Well it’s not that I have fully yet to make them. I already have basic layouts for at least two other pieces. When I say basic layout I mean I took all the body footage at the same time so I already have that and I have used windows movie maker on some of them to make some creepy effects. I have also already imported some onto blank flash pages but I don’t know if I will use them yet – dunno if I like them enough. So far I think I have already used my two favourites.

So now that I think about it, there is actually a lot that can tie them all in together... so in the process of writing this blog I have basically come to realise that this blog is rather pointless...

I have been bringing the Gerty Stein book to class now to give back for the past two weeks and I KEEP FORGETTING so this is a not to self that I must remember to give it back. That will be one less book in my bag.

last night's expeditions

2006-10-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

Well it is the morning before class. seems like ages since we last had class so I’m not quite sure what to expect, will we be doing speeches etc. if we are, I plan to be unplanned anyway. if we do end up doing oral presentations of our essays I want to challenge myself to get up there and talk without a script as I have NEVER done that before, but in this case I am hoping that I have enough to say and have learnt enough to talk without a script, however it's been a couple of weeks since I last looked at my essay so I’ve forgotten all the names of the artists I studied and everything... hah... hmmm...

Moving right along, last night I made a little flash poem and I would like to explain my process here. First I started with making a small movie clip of me with my webcam. I wanted the clip to concentrate on the body and look like I was isolating the arm, so I was swinging my arm around and trying to keep the rest of me as neutral and still as possible (by neutral I mean to almost disappear into the background). I then imported it to flash and turned the alpha down really low to in the 20's. I then strapped myself up with the earpiece off the webcam and turned on windows sound recorder (the only recording device that I have). Getting inspiration from the moving arm, I began to just talk a stream of slow audio, stopping the recorder after every time to give me a second to think of the next one. In this way, it was very very unplanned and 'natural' I suppose. I started to talk about art and digital culture and wondered how my body related to this. I intended for it to sound like a poem in an almost narrator'ish voice (the computer narrator that is). I then imported this over the flash piece, and as expected the audio was a bit longer than the movie clip and I did not want it to start to loop over itself, but it did, and I noticed that it was actually a lot cooler that way, and there is even a part where, because I say the word 'fruit' twice in the audio, a part where the word practically overlaps itself. The timing is just really good and the overlap sounds really nice and fitting and now I couldn't imagine it being any other way.

I wanted to have a text element on the page but wasn't sure how to do it. With the overlapping of the audio I realised I needed to have the words somewhere else on the page so if it wasn't totally understandable in the audio, it could be read. So as the audio is quite slow, I put the lines of the text in at a kind of corresponding level of words per line equal to words that I way before I take a break, if that makes sense... Having these small bunches of words all separate to each other (not on separate layers but a different green box would appear around them... ARGH I can't explain myself properly) this meant I could fiddle with them all individually. So I turned them all into buttons and removed the over states so you cannot see them. I then changed the colours of them all to either red or a variation between white and dark grey. Look out for the one that is both grey AND red ooh! so when you move your mouse around the outsides of the film clip (I was a bit waring of sticking stuff over the clip as I’m sure doing that has completely stuffed up things that I have done in the past - I am not that expert yet, but I might dabble with something like this soon) you will pick up on fractions of the poem.

I then realised it at least needed some other element because it looked rather blaa when you weren't looking for the poem, so I made some tiny little film clips where I just made a mark with the brush then moved it around for a few keyframes so that they looked like they were jiggling around. Some of them turned out looking really interesting, and I only wanted colour in one of them so I switched it from grey to red very briefly to just add a shock of colour. I think they make the page look a lot better than how it was standard.

This page has no links to other pages, I thought about it then realised I wanted it to just stand alone. I might make other poems and link them to this one at a later date... think I should???

I had initially wanted to use this awesome mined file that I had which would have allowed the viewer to control the film clip of my arm with a toggle bar, and be able to move it backwards and forwards, however I have the swf file for it but seem to have delete the fla file for it NOOOOOOOOO beyond that, if I go and find it and download it again I will never figure out how to work it again because the fla file had already been put into one of my own files for me so that I could figure out how to use it. Argh it would have made this piece look so cool :(

This turned out to be quite a big file due to the film clip and long audio elements. The swf is 194kbs, and I don't want to put a preloader on it because I don't want to stuff it up as I have done in the past with preloaders. BASICALLY I am very much a beginner at flash so I know how CRAZY it is of me to intend to use it as my main medium for everything for this class but hey at least I am challenging myself all over the shop. I plan to upload it to the server when I get to class today.

MSN

2006-09-23T04:22:00.000-07:00

Just had a quick thought... i'm sitting on msn and i'm looking at the different ways that different people approach the layout of their replies on the screen. Some type a word or two then send it, then typea couple more words then send it, so their replies come in short bursts that take up a lot of room vertically on the screen. Others such as myself prefer to type the whole paragraph of what they want to say before sending it, however this makes it looks like a much larger chunk of text, and takes up room horizintally, not vertically.

eg: (note the difference in style betwee chief big science and lanie my schnookems, lanie has vertical style, science has the one bigger line horizontal approach)
[Chief Big Science] - - says:
yeah i put some on myself once and that were fine until they broke and were like as sharp as knives then they weren't much fun
LANIE MY SCHNOOKEMS.... IVE HAD TO MUCH SUGA BABE(haha bec!!) says:
yeh me to ive had bad experiences wit fake nails
LANIE MY SCHNOOKEMS.... IVE HAD TO MUCH SUGA BABE(haha bec!!) says:
they hurt so much
LANIE MY SCHNOOKEMS.... IVE HAD TO MUCH SUGA BABE(haha bec!!) says:
especially if ur campin nd ur tryin to roll up an anex...
LANIE MY SCHNOOKEMS.... IVE HAD TO MUCH SUGA BABE(haha bec!!) says:
bad move

So, this is something I was always conscious of, the difference today is that I realised the connection between this and performance poetry. Some people cut their sentance up in terms of what should be said in one breath, others write the whole line, more like prose. I am a prose msn'er, the person I am talking to on msn at the moment is a serial performance poet msn'er... and it's annoying having to scroll up to see where her damn sentance starts. It is also to do with the difference between people who write impulsively, and those who understand where their sentance will end. An interesting concept really, that could possibly be applied to things outside of msn...?

This would be an explaination for why it worked so well when I put narrator onto my msn convo a few weeks ago - it must like the style where it can pause a lot. I'm thinking of using narrator/speaksonia msn convos in some kind of artwork but the idea is still floating around in the air, not entirely catchable at the moment.

yeah... ok... sorry.

deleuze on writing

2006-09-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

“Deleuze and Guattari derive far-reaching implications and uses beyond the analysis of language solely… The first [point] is that expression, in so far as it organises content, remains necessarily blind to the material potentials of its own ordered substance, as, for example, when to represent something in words is, qua representation, to eclipse awareness of the shapes and marks on the page, or the unmeaning physicality of sounds, of the substance of thought itself, depending on the material of expression involved. Secondly, as this might suggest, an expression is a kind of encounter with a content, and can by itself be encountered as a form of content in another expression, and another substance, as when writing becomes read, of then again when this reading is discussed verbally. Thirdly, expression as a selective and organising function is the means of power. The encounter of forces becomes regulated by a repertoire of expressive possibilities, restrictive forms of expression and content amenable to institutional recognition and reproducible identification.
In minor literature, then, workings of power are contested in these ways: content becomes expressive; expression becomes material; and the formal controls of major literature becomes resisted, making of literature something that resists recognition as it releases new intensive forces. For instance, in writing about Beckett, Deleuze discusses how the writer distends and ramifies expression, and hance makes it emphatically inclusive of all kinds of bifurcating, endless, fluid multiplicities of sense. More than this, language itself becomes possessed by its inherent physicality, is placed into movements by sonorous intensities that will not resolve into recognisable meaning. So, where the major use of writing, with its premium on good forms, would subdue such stutterings of syntax, the minor writer, like Beckett, may exploit these to make language partake of something non-linguistic, like an erratic movement of the body:

It is Beckett who perfected the art of inclusive disjunction; this art no longer chooses but rather affirms the disjointed terms in their distance and, without limiting or excluding one disjunct by means of another, it criss-crosses and runs through the entire gamut of possibilities… It is true that these affirmative disjunctions, more often than not in Beckett, refer to the air and gait of his characters: an indescribable way to walk, by rolling and tossing…

An expression can be seen to take on physical properties usually identified with bodies, so conversely, deterritorialized, physical elements of language can overrun expression. In broad terms such a transfer is carried out first by playing on the expressive materiality of contents, so letting writing develop from the a-signifying – the purely sonic, in sound, the asyntactical in syntax. Language approximates, in this aspect of its use, to an involuntary animal cry or whoop, as well as unfolding a conductive surface of proliferating multiplicities and becomings of sense that cannot be simply prescribed, or subdued by interpretation:

We find confirmation of this in one of Beckett’s poems that deals specifically with the connections of language and turns stuttering to the poetic or linguistic strength par excellence… he places himself in the middle of the sentence, he makes the sentence grow from the middle, adding one particle to another… in order to direct the course of a block of a single, expiring gasp… Creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass; it is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what pits language in a state of perpetual disequilibrium…

In these ways, then, words resist the stabilising distinction of expression and content, and the function of representation. Writing plays on, and develops from, the expressivity of its unformed materials.”

This is an excerpt that I have written out all by myself from page 61 of a book called “Lines of Flight” (1997) Edited by John Hughes. It is about the writings of Deleuze, and this is a passage that I liked in relation to this course. The quotes within this quote are from pages 65 and 16 of Deleuze and Guattari’s “What is Philosophy?” respectively.

I am hiding in a maths lab

2006-09-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

i am currently hiding in an empty maths lab at the uni. funnily enough on the board are words like 'discourse' and 'ideology'

and i thought to myself

artists have been here.

This however, is not the main focus of the story.

I came here looking for a spare computer, and here I found the rejects from last years crop. This is G31. The maths lab is twice as big as any classroom I have been in before at university level, and it has two long sets of tables running parallel to each other like a shithouse Griffith version of a Hogwarts dining room.

I am here to upload my essay onto the server which I could not seem to access from home. After sending a panicked email to big K last night because my attitude got the better of me when all the smart people were writing down how to get into filezilla, I tried to access my student email this morning to see if he had replied, only to find that it did not seem to be working. I asked the lady in the library what could possibly be going wrong and she advised that I switch to another computer (as I type this what looks to be a tutor has come into this room *panic*), then two minutes later told me that she had just found out that the student email was 'down'. Realising that as I was the first to notice, the email probably only went down about two minutes before I tried to check it.

And I thought

just my luck.

I have tried here unsuccessfully a few times to open the server, my 2173118 being 'denied access' for some reason. but then that attitude of mine from earlier, thankfully, returned, and with one slight change (not sure what I even did, exactly, maybe it was putting an s infront of 2173118 or something totally KNOBHEADED) it let me in.

So this blog is confirmation that I have 'successfully' submitted my essay on time yay! please read the text document before looking at it, if it has even uploaded itself at all.

(just before i write this sentance the maths tutor came up to me and asked if i was a student, I graciously said I would be leaving shortly, to which she said that she was actually having trouble loging in to her account, and could she log into mine so that she could mark an assignment... so if all my work goes missing I blame the maths lady/computer hacker.

"i'll just sign you out when I'm done"

I hope so.

She looks so elderly and innocent... hmmm.)

Again, hope you can see my work properly. signing off and over to maths woman.

2006-09-08T04:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged for more than a week now but I really don't have much to say because I am working in my assignment and I don't want to repeat practically my whole assignment in ehre because that won't be fun.

I got a book out from the library today that looks interesting in relation to this course. It is
Featherstone, Mike and Burrows, Roger (ed). Cyberspace Cyberbodies Cyberpunk 1995. I wanted to get it because I like to play with notions of the body in my works, and perhaps this text will support some of the things I plan to create (when I actually think of them) I can't use it for my essay however because I don't think it is really connected to it. But I haven't looked at it properly enough yet to know.

I'm still playing with speaksonia. But now i'm getting sentimental and sad about it and using it to do interesting things with existing song lyrics from sad songs. It's very interesting to try and make the speaksonia person display emotions, which i think is what i have been doing since the first time i played with narrator by making it sound drunk. but the interesting thing is that is still soungs a lot like a song, the speaksonia person literally sings it, given the right words. Songs I have put into speaksonia...

Laurie Anderson - Oh Superman (this one sounds crazy! I had to fix it up myself because all the 'huh's were taken out of the lyrics that i got off the net. so i have changed it around to make it sound as much like the song as possible. it's interesting because in the song Laurie, at one point, talks like she is an automated message machine and when spoeaksonia does that line it doesn't EXACTLY THE SAME it's great. but it took forever to make, i could make it even better but i'm over it now.)
Lior - This Old Love (also used this one in a pic texter pic tonight. one of the most often said words in this song is 'we'll' which speaksonia cannot say, which is funny)
James Blunt - High

Argh they sound great! I even sent one to someone as a wave file over msn!

junk poetry

2006-08-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Feeling a bit pissed off with this funkhouser dude because he made something called 'Spam Poem' which is EXACTLY what I've always wanted to do. He made it this year, and I've been meaning to do it for more like FIVE years. I can even prove it because I have a special folder in my hotmail where I collect what I call "Junk Poetry" - there was some spam mails going around a couple of years ago that had the most devine crazy poems in them, most likely made from a bot that was just putting random words together, so I have always meant to do something with them but I have never really gotten around to it. However after being inspired by what funkhouser did with similar kinds of emails, I simply stuck a couple of these emails into Speaksonia (with a crazy woman's voice) and by itself it sounds really fun. I would like to overlay some images onto it, I don't know how to use quick time pro, however I could do it with Flash (perhaps not as simply though). I wont try to upload the mp3 file here, you will just have to believe me that I've done it. I will probably use it for one of my 4 or 5 (can't remember how much) cyberpoem pieces that we have to do for this semester.

What I can do, though, is copy the words in here (however the voice makes it very different)

"When toward crank case leaves, waif beyond ruminates.Sometimes debutante living with earns frequent flier miles, but mastadon beyond football team always trade baseball cards with around eggplant!gonads remain purple.And negotiate a prenuptial agreement with the dark side of her garbage can.A few gonads, and sheriff for oil filter) to arrive at a state of asteroidambiguity selwyn alternate delinquent belgrade francoise silicate

When over carpet tack is darling, defined by football team make love to somnambulist behind.Eleanor, although somewhat soothed by spider related to and behind warranty.Indeed, hole puncher near caricature for deficit.Where we can amorously teach our spider.Indeed, scooby snack near assimilate judge about somnambulist.prime minister from hides, and graduated cylinder for sell to prime minister near.queasy irresistible until penury cathode critic"

(imagine in a strange high pitched deep south almost-female accent)

The first paragraph is from an email called 'marzipan gonads of 4185' and the second is called 'cheese wheel 58 brides' (i looooove their names! Not sure whether to include them in the final pieces or not but I may as well??? However I don't know how to change the mp3 file that I have made so I might just have to stick it all together in Flash, dunno yet.)

I'm in class right now, hence the sporadic terrible language of this post because I can't think straight, I would have, however, liked to explain this a bit better, so perhaps I will come back to it later.

2006-08-26T01:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.as.wvu.edu/clcold/epoetry/bios.html

In searching for the web poet to use for my essay I finally stumbled across a site that might help me. This above link shows a bunch of artists who were in some e-poetry festival a couple of years ago, and although most of them aren’t in English, there are some familiar names there, such as Nicolas Clauss, the guy behind the ‘flying puppet’ website, who did an amazing piece for this festival called ‘look at me’. http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frame/clauss/lookatme.htm - which can be viewed at this link. However I can’t really say that it would work as just poetry because there is no text involved and the only words spoken are those of the title, however it is still an amazing flash piece – one that stays with you afterwards. http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frAme/index.cfm?article=102 – this is an ‘introduction’ to the Clauss work by Simon Mills. It reminds me of a certain other visual artists work but I can’t remember the name right this minute…
I also looked at some work by a guy called Tallan Memmott. The work was called [n]+semble recombinant tone poem and I think this is the link even thought for some reason it looks like a broken link?? http://memmott.org/talan/rtp27/ I Don’t know but you can find him on the main www.as.wvu/edu link (up the top) anyway. This was an interesting piece because again no words were involved, instead it was made of sounds that you made via interactivity. This got me re-thinking the idea of a poem, however in terms of my essay, again I think this may be too much of an abstract idea?? Not sure though on what is allowed.
Another artist that I looked at was Aya Natalia Karpinska. Her work called “Nobody Knows But You” looked really interesting however I couldn’t view it because it was apparently set up in a 3D space in a gallery. It gave the option to view video footage from the gallery but it was 13MB and I tried to download it but it didn’t work. What I could do though was download the words to the poem which was interesting and I’ll paste them below. Also I could look at a ‘map’ of the controls (how people in the gallery could interact with the piece) which was made of a playstation controller which I thought was very cool!! Wish I could view her work because she is the best I’ve found in terms of actually using poetry etc. I will try to look into her stuff a bit more.

should we leave without you
i need to talk to you just a little bit more
didn’t think hatred would be so
hard to move
a thick layer of fat on the
inside. doesn’t melt away with
the heat of love.
i want it out
to evaporate under the glare of confidence
i’ll spit every doubt
even if my teeth turn grime
in the process
i’ll let go
do something special
i began to chat with
the penthouse poet
with the smell of my slick salt skin
radiating into the still elevator non-air
i stink of youth.
she gives me eight floors of anecdotes
i look her up her verses are chill and old
of winter, absent neighbors
later later i see her at the salon
on our street i don’t say anything
turn my head and
watch my fingers become rose-red
i chose red again
i feel beautiful
wishing for the tremendous quiet
that will change me
strength of reality
fades when you don’t speak
it can curdle and get hard
like wintergarden rot
do i hate the wrong metaphors for healing,
i always tried to leak out the poison
or draw it out or have it evaporate
from my palms
buddha makes it seem so easy
i’ve written the notation for the
dispersion of negativity, and am
seeking voices to sing it for me
how much do you care
reach out to someone who isn’t there
separate mutliple falls from heaven
with a comma
then confess
i’ve picked my enemies
lined up like sharpened pencils
attack them in small multiples
small enough
to change nothing
Aya Natalia Karpinska text for VJ poem nobody knows but you Fall 2005

And below is her artists statement that explains better than I did about her piece.

“artist's statement
nobody knows but you was written for Double-Cute Battle Mode, an application prototype for a VJ (video jockey) remix battle. DCBM allows two players to combine visuals and special effects in a playful competition for screen space. Using joysticks, players plug their imagination into their computer and share a creative space in an intuitive video-game style interaction. The piece was conceived as a way to ease text back into an image-dominated culture by treating it simultaneously as a visual special effect and as a poem.
The twenty-three verses appear on a plane in three-dimensional space. A cube shape displays additional visuals. Both the cube and the plane may be scaled and rotated, and the reader has control over which verse or image is displayed.
You may notice in the image at top left, or while watching the documentation video, a twelve-year-old girl plopped down in front of the installation. She played with the piece on and off for three hours. She began singing the words, making up melodies and turning certain verses into refrains. There is a clear lack of literature that responds to the intellectual and creative needs of young people today. I hope that interactive writing can help to fill that gap.
The original DCBM program was created with Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena.
Aya Natalia Karpinska, Fall 2005”

Another piece that I found on this poetry festival site was a guy called Chris Funkhouser, and his piece was actually a mp3 track that I had to download to my computer. It was called ‘Found Poem’. It was great!! I was really hoping there would be visuals to accompany it but it didn’t. It was a great song though made out of something he had obviously found, which seemed to be a shopping list. It’s fantastic I reckon! It’s very funny too. Just for the fact that it’s funny to imagine someone making a list like this – it is very ransom and interesting. I don’t know how to get a copy of the lyrics though so I will just have to listen to it and copy them out from what I hear…

(it starts with saying where and when he found the poem but I can’t really understand it so I won’t type it)
“make a list real quick
1. necklace like mine.
2. green socks.
3. jewelry box
4. Tupperware
5. toaster
6. sweaters
7. cell phone cable and Velcro
8. remote caddy
9. salt and pepper shakers
10. toothbrush replacement for sonic care
11. return clock to shop-rite”

(then it does some repetition of some of these things and digitally fiddles with them etc)
I find it interesting how you can (I think) clearly tell the gender and possibly age of this person by the things on this list. This is abstracted by the fact the voice is a young man’s. This is evidentially taking a leaf out of performance poetry’s book, as the way he uses his voice is entertaining and reliant on a beat. Obviously this is because it is used in a song so there is an actual beat in the background, but of course it goes further than this.

Well now I am going to take a break and perhaps come back to my research later tonight, as there are plenty more artists in this list that I still have yet to have a look at. I also saw Jason from our Uni in this list haha. I was actually contemplating using him, however I haven't seen many of his works that are text based - however I do like his little improvisational movies called 'Staggering Legends of the Inane' which I would regard as poetry, prose poetry, and they are performed in a beat type way, however they are hardly digital appart from the fact that they are done with a digital camera, and they are in no way interactive. But they are still very interesting to me and perhaps I will think about it further, or perhaps I should just generally ask in class what is considered good or too abstract to be called 'cyber poetry' for our assignment. I am hoping to get my artist for my essay by the end of this weekend (it is currently Saturday night).

23rd August

2006-08-22T21:31:00.000-07:00

This week I am hoping to get into doing my cyber poet essay thing but I can't find a cyber poet that I like, which is obviously quite a bit problem. more than that, i can't seem to find any cyber poetry AT ALL. everything i open that calls itself cyberpoetry is either cyber art, non poetry related or it is just poetry on the net. If it is actual cyberpoetry, it is very bad, and usually created just of some crappy links from some of the words. I did better stuff in first year uni. Maybe I should just write about myself... hah. I sort of know what I want to do, flash wise, but i don't know how to do it because I have downloaded a 'revolving room' or '360 degrees' fla. file from the net but it doesn't work when i open it for some reason - i'm sure it's probably my fault not theirs but either way I can't do it.

I'm hoping to make it in flash, that is if i remember how to use it.

I can't remember if i said it before in the last narrator post, but I was making it read out my 'msn' conversation one time, just with all the speeds etc on normal, and it sounded really good. Some of it was not at all understandable, and i was reading the conversation along with it so i can't quite tell how understandable it would be if you couldn't read it at the same time. it sounded like a movie script because it had to say the persons name of who was talking before they spoke, and due to the slack grammar that people use on msn, for example no full stops, the pitch of the narrator's voice at the end of each line was funny. But the best part of all was when there was a smiley face on the page because narrator would describe the emotion of the smiley, so if there was a heart on the screen it would say 'red heart' or if there was a frowny face it would say 'disappointed face' or disappointed smiley' - can't remember but it was something like that. It was like a conversation between two people ecxept they both sounded exactly the same or something. It was really fun to listen to.

narrator art

2006-08-18T04:28:00.000-07:00

I have been playing with Narrator on the computer and have made a few short things that I enjoy hearing it say. I have also tried to download a box to load the text in to (as we were talking about in class) but the downloads have always rendered unsuccessful or something and keep saying that there are errors :s

the first narrator poem is about love. but to listen to it you have to turn down the pitch of 'Sam narrator' to the slowest it will go (number 1), as i've found this makes it sound drunk. this is the line i feed into it:

"love me love me i want you to love me love me so much backspace backspace lovovovovovovovovovove mmmmm i said love me love me i want you to love me love me so much mmmmmmmmmmmm backspace editable edit editit editedi editable editablelele backspace backspace backspace backspace editiblelelelelelelel"

I guess it is obviously about saying things and then trying to change what you said by editing it.

The other one that i made should be listened to at the normal microsoft Sam speed of 5, and it about art:

"art arty tarty arttart art tart atreeee arty arty tarty tartarararararararty tart tart tart tart weeb tart web webtart web art webtartartart webt webt webt art weeb tart weeb tart"

the 'weeb' came about because i didn't like the way narrator pronounced 'web' however 'weeb' doesn't sound correct either but it still works well for the piece.

Note that these may not be completely correct to how i wrote them because i did not copy and paste them but wrote them out as i am on a different computer so for example i may have got the number of m's in 'mmmmmmmmmmmmm' wrong.

examples of what we did in class today with pictexter

2006-08-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

13th August

2006-08-12T18:38:00.000-07:00

Today I looked up text generators on the internet but didn’t find anything very good in google. In fact the closest thing I could find to a text generator for something that generated what they called ‘bad gothic poetry’. http://www.jbrowse.com/text/generator.shtml
Which does something along the lines of taking random lines from gothic literature and sticking them together in either an epic or a sonnet etc. However on the site they continually refer to it as ‘Goth poetry’ and even mention, very briefly, the subculture of ‘Goths’, which leads me to believe that these people are not really concerned at all with what I am calling ‘gothic literature’. On the site it claimed that this was the project from whence this generator came about,

“This goth poetry generator is part of a larger project to do with steganography. At one point, it was necessary to generate a lot of 'noise' data within which to hide encrypted 'signal' data. The grammar-based generator used here was created to produce a large amount of junk data which cannot easily be distinguished from real text without human intervention.”

I don’t even know what steganography is. Neither does Microsoft Word, but neither Word nor myself are very good at spelling it seems.

Today I also looked up the creative writing exercises on learning @ Griffith, while I was actually trying to find those text generators there that we had looked at in class. Not realizing that they were under the surreal section, I went looking in other sections first, such as the image section. I have to say that I’ve never used things like exercised or techniques to create a poem, and the haiku that I created was just atrocious because I wanted to move on to the next section. So basically, over all this is a very new way of looking at writing for me. I don’t like to think that I am merely a text generator.

I had a technical problem with the surrealist exercises, once I found them. As I could not view any of the text in the ‘exquisite corpse’ piece (such as the text telling me what it was etc), Nor could I view the examples of it. But I could view all the fish fine! I also couldn’t view the examples in other section such as the ‘known into the unknown’. At this point, I have to admit, I gave up completely. But I liked the sounds in it.

Oh I also downloaded google sketchup and have been looking at it but I cannot really work it out at this stage... there is a postwoman on the screen.... and that's about all that I can figure out. I guess you place her in front of a house on google earth?

12th August

2006-08-12T04:21:00.000-07:00

http://matcmadison.edu/mchristoffel/poetry/

This weeks looking up of internet poetry landed me on this site where I proceeded to look at the piece ‘spring cityscape’ by Michael Christoffel, as it looked quite appealing. However, it was a very simple piece. A short poem that was chopped up and moved around rather fast (almost too fast to read) until it disappeared again. I assume that this is obviously a metaphor for the city itself.

I then looked at another piece by the same guy. This one was called ‘pyrotechnic cells’. I found this one more interesting even though, technically, it was probably even simpler. I think that one thing that made a difference was the colours used. In the first piece, the colours were pale blues pinks yellows etc (probably to symbolize ‘spring’) but in this one the background was black and the words were reds and oranges, making them stand out far more. The creator Michael Christoffel, made a short blurb saying that he was still working on this one, but I can’t tell if that is just old or not because it seems finished to me.

With both of his pieces; I would have liked to hear some sound involved, as the supposedly shocking words, without any sort of accompaniment, were not as striking as they could have been. Also both pieces were extremely short, therefore the artist did not hold my attention for as long as he could have, and I didn’t feel that the small amount of words had much of an impact on me in terms of what he was actually saying.

10th August

2006-08-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

Recapping on some stuff I have been thinking about over the week:

I shared some ideas in class about my 3D words and they are as follows: These ideas are about thinking of words in an installation style space.

Use of the word SPLIT: It would be cut into sections, maybe only two sections 'sp' and 'lit' or 'spl' and 'it' or something like that. and the parts would be on opposite ends of a large bare room.

I was also thinking of making a big word that was hollowed out on one side so that people could in effect 'slot' themselves inside it and practically feel trapped in the word in almost a nightmarish way. After ages of trying to think of ways to use the word 'phantasmagoria', I settled on using this word for this idea due to it's long shape and also it's dream-like meaning, but i'm still not sure if this is the final word that I would use here.

I also had this other idea of 'words to be stepped on', originally coming from thoughts of working with scale, and after all this thinking about BIG words I was considering how to make them very small, perhaps so small that they could be crushed. But issues arrised with this such as how does one make it so that the wors is still readable after it was crushed? and what would one make it with? (other than the only thing that i can think of which is pretzels). I then thought of having words projected up onto the walls or ceiling as well to draw the attention away from the floor so that the stepping on of something would come as more of a surprise, and these words could make a mental connection for the stepee, such as 'snail'.

I also had ideas about texture such as making a word with a latex covering so that it felt and looked like skin. This word, which I innitially thought would be 'skin', morphed into something more dangerous such as 'repulsive' or 'volatile' or something along those lines, to make a statement about the female body and some people's belief that it is dirty and inadequate to the male body. I think I could take this idea a lot further so I will keep thinking about it.

List poem for word 'Broadwater' (i'm sorry, i know i keep bringing strange new words into the fold and changing my words around all the time, but I suppose my excuse is that it is all part of my thinking process and this journal is some kind of real-time brainstorm of ideas)

I wish I had some letters I could scratch into a bench.
The stranger tells me of how his baby died. Says she had a name like mine.
Wonder what the fishermen know about the full moon.
I almost slipped taking photos of the burning boat.
Cars bright like neon flash past like signs.
I look like I haven't been kissed in a long time.
Stingrays ticklish under my hand.
The stranger mumbles broken language.
I wish I had some letters I could scratch into a bench.
Flashy flash flash.
Broken language kiss.
A name like mine in a burning boat.
Scratch into a bench.
A long
long
time.

looking up some e-poetry

2006-08-04T18:53:00.000-07:00

I had a look at the InFlect website and found some inspiration in some of the pieces there, for example:

John Sparrow – “Eye in the Making”

At first I didn’t know if I liked this or not because after waiting for ages for it to load it only seemed to be a tiny image, but once I found that you could click on the words I enjoyed my experience with it. This poem is almost completely interactive, and the experience is heightened by the addition of the sound elements within it. The graphic element is pretty simple, just a black screen with some mediocre little images of walking through a building, but I’m sure it relates somehow, and I do like it better than I would if it didn’t have any pictures or moving images at all. I’m glad I turned my speakers on in preparation of watching this because I enjoyed the sounds in it – the random fragments of someone talking mirrored the fragments of words that were being created, and also gave you a sense that this was a poem, which may have been lost if the sounds were just music.

The way this piece gave me inspiration was the way that the poem was constructed purely through interactivity as you had to press on the words to make more words come up. I assume this was done in flash but I don’t entirely know how. However I found that I didn’t ever bother to read any of the text, finding myself more carried away with the interactivity and the sounds, also every time I tried to read the words the lines seemed far too abstracted to really mean anything. I think Sparrow should have made this piece a bit longer, in the info page it says this piece is created of 3 lots of text, which doesn’t seem like very much to me. I would have enjoyed being able to be in the experience for longer, and I found myself repeating the whole thing just to try and draw it out.

Next I wanted to chose a piece that was by a woman (from the InFlect site) to compare with the Sparrow piece, so I looked at “House” by Mary Flanagan. It ended up being a zip file that I had to download to my computer, I think because it works on the basis of what your computer is doing. I thought it was a nice idea, but it came up rather small on my screen (about 3 or 4 inches wide) and I don’t know how to get it any bigger or whether it is meant to be this size. Therefore it’s hard to read the text. The page doesn’t seem to change much, just the amount of ‘houses’ can become more or less, and the text can change. You can use your mouse to pull the houses around, and if you pull them in close to you the text is easier to read, but you can only see a bit of it at a time.

I let it just sit for a while on my computer while I did other things then went back to check on it and found that while the houses were distanced from the screen there was text floating very close past the screen which looked cool, and then I did it again and the houses were off in the left hand corner, but they were no longer houses and just boxes. Overall (I may just be unaware of how it works) I couldn’t see how it was a very interactive piece, and again, like the last one, I didn’t feel compelled to even want to read the text, and the graphic and interactive elements seemed more interesting. What I did like about the placement of the text in this one was that it wasn’t always the right way up, so that if you did read a line you would have to turn your head and move your body, which is interactive in another level. I didn’t draw too much inspiration from this piece but I suppose it did make me think about colour and also 3D spacing, which the first piece did not have. This piece seems more sophisticated in the way that it is made (due to the 3D effects and the movement of the text and everything else, but less involving for the onlooker perhaps.

update on last post

2006-08-02T04:26:00.000-07:00

i just found this one in googlism:

"Phantasmagoria is a shorts destroyer"

HAHAHAHA i like it.

some class exercises

2006-08-01T03:27:00.000-07:00

Feelings
Fuck
Expression
Fuck
Passion
Fuck
Rhythm
Fuck
Realities
Fuck
Words
Fuck
Black
Fuck
Rhyme
Fuck
Personal
Fuck
Thoughts
Fuck

I know this is very simple, but there are a few reasons for it. I think it is about frustration, not only for the words themselves, and their meanings (obviously) and the task, but just a general feeling. I suppose it speaks for itself really. It is said in a one word per beat way.

I want
Passion
I want
Expression
Give me
Rhythm
Give me
Words
I have
Thoughts
I have
Realities
I have
blankness
Give me
Feeling
Make it
Personal
Make it
Rhyme

***

Words that I’m thinking about for the 3D task, and their listings.

SPLIT
Lip
Relationship
Fabric
Heart
Crack
Hair

List Poem

Pick at my lips, to make them bleed, dry, creviced.
Picking at me, always picking at me, make me in two.
Like a shirt that doesn’t quite fit, squeezing over one’s head.
Pain in the chest like something dark spilling out under my ribcage.
Cracks in dry earth longing for rain.
In the shower, wet hair tangled around my fingers, tangled around my legs, tangled in
the plughole.

A few from Googlism: (ones in bold are my favourites)
split is
split is being healed
split is actually a good thing
split is coming
split is destroyed
split is on monday
split is one of croatia's major ports
split is enough to
split is george
split is a possibility
split is amicable
split is removed
split is good for users
split is a 32
split is denied
split is here
split is "historically inevitable" russia's first president stated in an interview on sunday that
split is risky
split is it? how does it affect investors?
split is well timed
split is extreme and unjustified
split is the economic and administrative center of middle dalmatiasplit is on monday april 1
split is located along the dalmatian coast of the mediterraneansplit is 2
split is 3" lid and 3" base* actual weight 16lbssplit is enough to turn at&t around by scott moritz senior writer 10/24/00 3
split is about to become the go
split is true
split is effective april 8
split is george soros
split is heard best at the hearts second intercostal space on the thoracic cavitysplit is good omen for s
split is a decision by the company's board of directors to increase the number of shares that are outstanding by issuing more

SPASM

Writhing
Body
Fast
Floor
Frightened

A few from Googlism. these ones remind me of the stuff talked about in the video in week one for some reason. (take special note of the one ‘spasm is virtual reality’) (faves in bold)

spasm is characterized by intermittent or continuous
spasm is characterized by intermittent or continuous twitching of one side of the face
spasm is a parallel molecular dynamics code that runs on any message passing systems supporting mpi
spasm is an explosive mixture of cyberpunk and social critique
spasm is the 1990s
spasm is a condition characterized by
spasms of one side of the face
spasm is a benign hyperactivity of the muscles enervated by the facial nerve
spasm is a condition of intermittent
spasm is virtual reality
spasm is a neuromuscular disorder characterized by frequent
spasm is an uncoordinated contraction of the muscles of the esophagus
spasm is a
spasm is an assembler for reactos / wine / win32 pe files production
spasm is a neuromuscular disorder characterized by frequent involuntary contractions of the muscles on one side of the face
spasm is a movement disorder which causes the muscles on one side of the face to contractspasm is a condition in which there are involuntary
spasms of the facial muscles so that the eye blinks or closes and the face draws upward to one
spasm is usually an intermittent twitching of the eyelid muscle which can lead to forced closure of the eye

PHANTASMAGORIA

Shadow
Dream
Image
Vision
Shapeshifting
Changing
transforming

A few from Googlism: (faves in bold)

phantasmagoria is very easy
phantasmagoria is the performance of david ryall as sir nikolas valentine
phantasmagoria is wide ranging
phantasmagoria is indeed a masterpiece combining horrific visual imaginary and moody ambient music with an engaging plot
phantasmagoria is easily surpassed by the sex scenes in this game which include frontal nudity and bondage
phantasmagoria is the best place to find any information concerning phantasmagoria
phantasmagoria is no exception to this
phantasmagoria is a great adventure game
phantasmagoria is a constantly changing phenomenon
phantasmagoria is
phantasmagoria is just one of the featured games at 1stcdrom
phantasmagoria is that it's an easy enough game
phantasmagoria is ominous and forbidding
phantasmagoria is easy
phantasmagoria is easy enough without online hints
phantasmagoria is a collection of four of his musical fantasy works for chamber orchestra that have been written over the last twenty
phantasmagoria is a fantastic sequence of haphazardly associative imagery
phantasmagoria is intended for readers with a more than casual interest in seriously collecting king

Googlisms of my name below. some are quite boring, but i like being perfect for the garden. And this is actually all of them, not just a sample.

alinta is working with alcoa to jointly develop energy efficient
alinta is in the business of delivering reliable
alinta is run for
alinta is a vigorous plant with a very high early yield
alinta is a high yielding disease
alinta is hanging on to a cross beam
alinta is a sandy beach were the visitors can enjoy also the sea sports
alinta is the first strawberry to fruit year round
alinta is disease resistant and perfect for the home garden
alinta is a rather erratic mage and priestess
alinta is wa’s major distributor & retailer of natural gas with customers in perth
alinta is lorraine mafi
alinta is working on the recently formed youth foundation
alinta is expecting revenue per module operating at full capacity of between $40 million and $100 million a year
alinta is very much being done in a way to ensure that alinta is a publicly listed west australian based company
alinta is a campus catholic community check our home page
alinta is the daughter of jesse lee ott and ruby childers