documentating and discussing the problem making that is vogging with the tiresome quotidian of the desktop digital.
oh, i'm adrian miles, rmit melbourne and intermedia bergen.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
innland
- journals
- interactive cinema
- people
- networked worlds
- interactive media
- deleuze
- mac stuff
- film
- hypertext
- hyperlit
- quicktime
- education
- conferences
- an ostryalean in gnaway
- agent
- jill w
- mark b
- lisbeth k
- torill m
- anja r
- diane g
- jeremy y
- anders f
- noah w-f
- brandon b
- liz l
- collogatories
- matt k
- scott r
- drew d
akademic werds
akademic werdslinklists
utland
vogs
archives
written and published in Tinderbox 1.2.3
5.2002
ephemera is a web based journal that combines cultural studies with various other flavours.
ephemera
::31 May 2002 15:52::
andrew mactavish is a new media humanities computing sort of canadian. got drunk on his whiskey with him and his mates once at a conference. so a fine time had by all. probably helped that we were all foreigners in america at the time too. he has been instrumental in setting up a new media curriculum that combines theory and practice, and is currently examining some streaming media work.
andrew mactavish
::30 May 2002 14:26::
a cold still wednesday autumn afternoon with the kids. playing in a park and some of the gums are flowering so a small group of maybe 8 rainbow lorikeets and 4 or 5 musk lorikkets are feeding. sometimes being chased by little wattle birds. when i first came to melbourne, in 1979, the only lorikeets around were aviary escapees. but during the 70s (australia's cultural renaissance) native plants suddenly became acceptable and were used in gardens, parks, etc (prior to that we insisted on europeanising our parklands and gardens). the result is that these birds have now recolonised suburban spaces. this is exciting because as a child these birds were just exotic northern species that you wondered about and were the stuff of myth (queensland). now they hang round my neighbourhood being noisy and chatty.
wednesday afternoon
::29 May 2002 21:51::
jasper, my son, is 3. he likes working on the powerbook and playing games on the imac. this is his work:
::29 May 2002 18:23::
this is the work of garry sheppard, a melbourne person (and currently artist in residence at rmit's i cubed). it is a large site about the history and practice of the techno scene in melbourne. he has an enormous archive of material that's he's building into the site. he's also an animator and roboticist (is that what you call someone who makes robots?).
cyberfaeries
::29 May 2002 14:11::
well i've redesigned the vlog. i did have two columns of text, one for the blog on vogging, and one for the generic blog, but now i've rolled them into one. i've shaded the backgrounds differently for them (via css and an attribute in the prototypes in tinderbox that automatically provides the css class) but that isn't working real well since there's no indication of why or how or if the entries represent different sorts of things.
now i want to add a series of links to my published work. these days on the server most of the traffic is via here, and the vogs, not the home page for the site (which of course needs updating) and so i want to provide access to them from within the vlog. advertorial really isn't it?
on my desktop (literally) is a photo i took last northern autumn in bergen. snow on the mountains, the fjord stilly mirroring a bluegrey sky. these are the colours i want for the redesign. my bergen autumn palette.
autumn makeover
::29 May 2002 10:12::
wasn't that an awful experience. bad enough that i've got a cold and sore throat and that i'd been invited to be the talker at an 8am breakfast at open channel (where i chatted about blogs and interactive video over coffee and muffins), so i was tired, harried and couldn't concentrate. but the rudest mass of students (or the most bored group of students) i've ever met.
constant idle chatter, a minority but visible and annoying and just plain rude. or arrogant, or both. what i'm angry about is that i just let it roll, instead of pulling them up and either chucking them out or asking them to shut the fuck up. they're inevitably journalism students (the subject is compulsory for journalism, public relations, professional communication and media studies students), because journalism students seem to have a gene for arrogance which is a professional prerequisite. in classes this is usually expressed as an attibute where they believe that since you're not a journalist there isn't actually anything that you can teach them. how do i know they were journalists? because they have the daily papers open and they skim for their bylines. they used to do this when i was a student too.
post lecture
::28 May 2002 14:44::
theory.org's link directory. emphasis on queer theory and identity politics via cultural studies. (butler, foucault, et al.)
theory.org
::27 May 2002 17:29::
ironic, even perhaps easily misjudged as parodic. but this is very excellent advice in a page. oh, it's how to survive your fyd.
ideal
::27 May 2002 17:19::
i've been invited to give an introductory lecture to first year students here at rmit on new media. the course they're doing is 'mass media in australia'. these are the topic headings i've jotted down to cover today.
[clear throat, cough {got a bad cold}]
new media an introduction
[clear throat, cough {got a bad cold}/]
Terminology; new media, new media studies vs. digital media and media studies. For instance the new media studies web site maintained by David Gauntlett at http://www.newmediastudies.com/
A brief technological history: hypertext and hypermedia (Bush and the Memex, Nelson and Xanadu), CDROM and multimedia (Macromedia Director, Expanded Books), Web and writing (Apache, machttp), Web and ecommerce (shareware, Yahoo), Web multimedia (Macromedia Flash, Real, Windows Media, QuickTime), distributed performance (MAX, MAX/MSP, NATO, KeyStroke).
Early forms are primarily screen based and new media in the academy and institutionally still largely interested in screens though not exclusively (and sound work and improvisational practice offers a great deal). We now have hypertext, hypermedia, net.art, flash art, sound art, networked performance and blogging. (eg. Mark Bernstein, Jill Walker, Peter Merholz.).
Content is mixed media, mutable, plurivocal and transitory. These are terms that the medium privileges and institutions tend to work against this in various ways.
Databases and loops are major cultural forms (Lev Manovich, "The Language of New Media".) Collage and montage are major aesthetic tropes (Lev Manovich again, and George P. Landow. "Hypertext as Collage-Writing." The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Ed. Peter Lunenfeld. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 150-70. )
Contemporary forms emphasise the network. The network is understood to have implications for: democracy, freedom of speech, copyright, intellectual property, community, identity and to have emergent properties (the total is greater than the sum of its parts). Amazon dot com is a good example.
Institutional considerations; bandwidth, literacy, convergence. institutional discussions focus on bandwidth in, on paradigms of consumption. this is the major reason broadband has not been adopted.
Copyright and ip are major factors that are being used to constrain these practices institutionally. a great deal of this is centred in the United States with things like the digital millenium copyright act.
Games now a major element within new media (new media practice, new media studies, and the network, eg rpg's, mrpg's, and first person shooters). Check out http://www.gamestudies.org/ as a beginning.
Futures: Local Area Networks, Wide Area Networks, Internet and Intranets, Personal Area Networks. Ubiqitious computing, agents (semantic web).
http://www.newmediastudies.com/webbook1.htm
http://www.newmediastudies.com/
http://www.gamestudies.org
http://art.colorado.edu/home.htm
http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.blogger.com/
http://www.markbernstein.org/
http://www.rhizome.org/
new media
::27 May 2002 16:50::
in the second last lecture i asked people to write down the two most useful skills and the two most useful ideas that they were going to take out of the course. was an interesting list. i also asked them to frame a miracle question.
a miracle question is the question that has no strings attached. it's what you would like to be allowed or able to ask if there were no constraints of any kind and if it were able to be answered then everything would be solved. i guess they don't think about miracles much, the list was pretty tame :-) :
second last week of semester so the penultimate lecture. time to make some outcomes or problems explicit and concrete. this is in point form, you just had to be there :-)
- hypertext is multilinear (not nonlinear...)
- most hypertext theory only pays attention to the reader. this subject and my own theoretical agenda is more interested in hypertext as a writing practice.
- this is because if hypertext (including the web) is a paradigm shift in literacy and the media it is because it allows writing. (most of us want to learn how to write for the web, not read for the web, most of us want to know how to do it, not consume it. and the web reached critical mass because its a simple writing system. blogs bear this out.)
- hypertext writing foregrounds the issues of hypertext as an event, as open, as fluid. this is where, how, why links become visible as more than navigational markers. as having an excess. most theories of the link express an anxiety of the link.
- in academic practice there is only one form of writing that privileges closure, that's the essay. however essays go round in circles as much as hypertext, we just hide the fact (conclusions should always mirror introductions). there are numerous other forms of writing that don't work like this, for instance print journalism. there are numerous other media forms that rely on repetition (music, poetry, television spring to mind).
- hypertext requires a different reading practice only if we equate 'reading' with literature, and then with a particular and restricted economy of reading and literacy. a good read is an open read.
- links are writing. not to happen after we have written, not things that lie only between what we have written. they are writing and happen in, with, and as a part of writing.
though that last one is problematic since it suggests hypertext writing as a form or process of improvisation - a view i think that has considerable merit - but obviously once we're working with or in guard fields this changes. or does it? certainly the way i write guard fields is improvisational (some would call it hit and miss), its testing structures and rules, see if they work, then modifying. it certainly isn't building the model in advance then writing it. the problem with all this is that i tend to hypostatise my own learning and writing processes. not a good thing.
penultimate
::27 May 2002 11:01::
another beta version of tinderbox for osx out and the brilliant just got brighter. loads files faster, saves faster, you can now control agent updates, and for me, the current crowning glory:
tinderbosx2
::24 May 2002 11:43::
after a frustrating class with my hypertext students tuesday i realise i need to make explicit what's been implicit all semester. first of all the frustration. we had been talking about how to write an academic hypertext, and what sorts of problems might arise and as the common list of issues developed i more or less berated the group for the list. why? well it contained all the issues/problems and questions we'd been talking around all semester and i was frustrated that they were still on the table.
that's when it is time to stop.
one reason for turning the space into a de facto lecture (this is this is this) is the intimidation of wondering and worrying that perhaps your students haven't learnt a thing in 12 weeks, which is my fault not theirs - the spectre of bad teaching. another is the frustration of having a subject that requires practice (what students say they want) where they learn by doing but since they don't or haven't done much doing these problems have not been foregrounded for them. again, that requires a revisiting of the curriculum so that they do need to do more writing in the medium so that these things are foregrounded.
but it is also to realise that there is a great deal that is implicit in what we have done as a class that has not been made explicit for them. i take the knowledges we're exploring to be explicit, but for these students it remains nascent and implicit and about to made concrete as they struggle to write their essays. this could become another demonstration of why assessment practices that emphasise finished works at the end of the semester are not productive, since it is obviously in the process of writing an academic multilinear essay in storyspace that a great deal of what the semester's been about will be foregrounded.
so what i'm going to do in the penultimate lecture is just make a lot of stuff explicit. in very simple ways, to label and make very visible what they now know. i want to make explicit the implications of this. but i see this as the wrong way to go about it.
implicit vs explicit
::23 May 2002 14:22::
sitting in class with 18 or so students who have all been reading afternoon (we have a 10 user licence though i now want to do these readings in class, so i'll get another 10 licences - just because it's electronic and i can put it on the lan doesn't mean there's a licence for everyone to read the one copy). i insist that when they read they must read for a minimum of 20 minutes, then quit the reading, have a break and then start all over again for another 20 minutes.
so in class we talk about what it felt like after the first 20 minutes, and then after the second. after the first nearly every student is completely frustrated and annoyed with the work. this is where i usually do my object relations psychology and art gig and so discuss the importance in interpretive practice to wonder why the work wants to frustrate us, rather than punish it because it does. (this time i even snuck in some comments on parenting. go figure.)
for some students after their second reading some of the things i've talked about and suggested become more visible.
(i also tie in the simple guard field examples we've done, not so that they appreciate all the work in afternoon (that's just a monumental model of justification for a work's significance) but so they realise that in their own example it would be possible for a reader to not see most of their work, and because of how we did the guard fields no matter how long a reader spent they'd never see them - that the reader would have to stop and reread from the beginning for this other part of their work to have any possibility of being read.)
these are things like how hypertext is more like poetry, music, and cinema. that it has rhythms that you need to find and listen to. that some bits go slow, some fast, and that as you read and choose and click you are helping/sharing/making that rhythm. how you can think of afternoon as like sampling, there are all these nodes that are samples of a story (or stories?) and each reading is a remix. they are analogies that do have some merit theoretically, and they're also concrete enough for these students that what is implicit in the work starts to become explicit.
but what other questions and problems does the work pose for the students? what problems should i be posing for them to help them find pathways to understanding the work? or is it only a case of i find the work of merit and you ought to too?
reading afternoon
::23 May 2002 14:22::
this is a project that's been a while in the making. a new copyright licence that's being developed where you grant a right to allow your work to be more or less in the public domain.
creative commons
::22 May 2002 10:25::
stephen j gould has died. one of the great popularisers of science who made science intelligible to a lay public rather than making science conform to the prejudices of that public. a major advocate for scientific reasonableness, staunch adversary of creationism in education, and a major figure in evolutionary biology. his books are always a joy.
stephen j gould
::21 May 2002 18:57::
thanks to mark bernstein several of us (don't know who else, all a bit anonymous this beta testing business sometimes) have got early versions of tinderbox for osx. early impressions: none. only written two new nodes. :-) obviously needs work on some cosmetic issues, i think some things might be faster (screen redraws perhaps?), and unless i've been otherwise preoccupied it seems that the find dialgoue - one of my favourite tindertreats - has gotten smarter. now, lets just try out html export...
tinderbosx
::21 May 2002 13:24::
just to confirm the bleedingly obvious. while looking for something else i found this place that is a history of macs and i was reminded of all the brilliant pbooks i have owned. the first was a powerbook 100, the best i could afford. before this i had a sharp twin floppy laptop that i thought was pretty damn cool. macs were for wimps. though i was troubled that all the creative people i knew used macs and their essays always looked so much better than mine. (glitz and mirrors i thought, sydney versus melbourne, same old same old.) then i walked into a mac shop when it was time to upgrade, the salesman was busy so invited me to play with a powerbook (i'd never used a mac before) and in minutes i'd set the system time, made a new folder, renamed it, and launched word. on my pc i couldn't do any of that without reading most of the manual. that was that.
so, a powerbook 100. (when 16MhZ was not to be sneezed at, though 25 was top dog.) then at a sale i got a half price brand new duo 230, still one of my alltime favourite computers for its size and convenience. then there was the powerbook 1400 (notice how i could only afford the cheapies?) which was kept in its box for 2 weeks since i was only going to use it once i finished my ma thesis (carrot and stick), but i couldn't hack it so out it came. that one lasted for a few years and the duo was retired. though i did run a webserver on it for a bit (battery backup, no space). from there i hit the big league and rmit (god bless 'em) got me a g3 lombard. this was the first (and currently only) time when i owned the best current model. and it was just a brilliant computer. didn't have it long before i got the powerbook firewire which made the old one look positively antique. with firewire my video camera plugged right on in, i could capture video direct to a laptop and for someone working in hypertext and cinema this wasn't just heaven, it was valhalla to boot. finally that got bumped off by my current 'puter, the bottom of the range g4 titanium. lost sound in but it feels like half the size of the g3 and pretty much makes a pim redundant (why carry a silly little pim when i've got a g4 with 20gig with osx that is live as soon as i open the lid and is really not much bigger than a thick exercise book?). what these computers have allowed me to do, not just writing but in learning about what digital multiliteracy, the network, and creativity in digital domains is, really is extraordinary. after all that i think apple should give me a freebie :-) (hey apple, i run 3 apple servers too.)
geekdom
::21 May 2002 13:24::
while making the nordic sky vogs i found that the first text track to show, or the last one to be turned off, makes the text track stutter. once one text track was active then turning on others was perfect. turning off text tracks was also perfect, until it was the last one.
tried having a small text track that just ran constantly but that didn't seem to help, so i decided to live with it and just accept the stutter (though i expect there is probably something clever that could be done in the idletime handler or somesuch to help).
one of the rather good things that deleuze says about minor languages is that they make a major language stutter (this is also what he says of godard in relation to the cinema too). i rather like the thought that one of the effects of a vog is to make 'film' stutter. that isn't literal like the text track problem i describe here, but in a more general manner.
interestingly in the final of the nordic sky vogs where i've got the sprites over the video this problem does not seem to happen.
stutter
::21 May 2002 7:03::
after finishing the second nordic sky vog i realised that neither of the two were actually vogs. well i knew the first one wasn't, but the second one. good just be a flash movie because there is no interaction inside the space of the movie - it is only inside the space of the player. anyway it looked crappy.
so i added a sprite to every video track and just made it toggle a text track. much more elegant. and playful. when you play it you can try to get all text tracks off, once you've got them on, becomes a simple computer game :)
i thought about making the tracks time based, so for instance mousing in a video track between 0 and 30 seconds would toggle text track 1, but mousing in there between 30 seconds and 1 minute would toggle text track 5, for instance. but it just makes the experience very abstract and unintelligible for the reader.
ivenson 3
::21 May 2002 7:03::
greg ulmer, uni of florida, author or teletheory, applied grammatology and heuritics. major theorist. teletheory's a personal fave. though could do with less derrida.
greg ulmer
::20 May 2002 22:44::
the multimedia ethnography research lab. this is at the uni of british columbia and has some brilliant work. they have a hypercard based tool for analysing digital video and web content ethnographically. essays on analysing data without centres, etc. somewhere to return to.
multimedia ethnography
::20 May 2002 14:08::
jay ruby's home page. jay ruby is a cultural anthropologist who has been very influential in the field of visual anthropology. i've got him blogged in here because of his oak park project, a sort of applied web anthropology project.
jay ruby
::20 May 2002 14:02::
another one from craig. this is from the canadian heritage information network and this page provides info and resources about digitising collections.
digital heritage
::20 May 2002 14:00::
this is the work of craig bellamy, an rmit student who is doing an innovative phd that combines thesis and project. is sort of a bottom up rich media oral history project of fitzroy, a gentrified inner melbourne suburb.
craig bellamy
::20 May 2002 13:47::
craig sent me this one. a collection of resources (links, explanations, procedures) about oral history online.
oral history online
::20 May 2002 13:47::
went to the latest star wars instalment this morning. this one, and the previous, have been largely shot in australia - fox studios sydney [warning, it's a really crappy flash site]. so when i'm watching the film all these australian actors pop up in various parts. jack thompson gets to be anakin's step father, and anarkin's half brother turns out to be an actor from 'the secret life of us' a popular 20s something lifestyle soapcomedrama (think neighbours meets melrose place meets thirtysomething for twentysomethings and you're in the general terrain). let alone jango fett (boba fett's dad). this is a good example of the glocal. star wars is not only this diegetic monolith of another age in another galaxy etc, but, well, it's supposed to be all exotic and different and yeah, they're actors, but they're not supposed to be that guy from channel 10 on monday nights. it is an irruption of the local, the provincial (i don't care what anyone says about jack thompson, he does bank of melbourne ads for goodness sake) within the international. the local in and with the global. sorta fractures the auratic (always wanted to say auratic) qualities that star wars is supposed to have (though i'm not sure if it has this internally anymore anyway).
star wars - glocal
::19 May 2002 16:33::
april 25 is anzac day. this is a day when we remember australian's who died fighting in wars around the place. i remember as a child sitting in the quadrangle with the whole school while we listened to an uplifiting story of sacrifice, struggle, and death (always from world war 1) that would be broadcast over radio and then we'd sing the national anthem (back when 'god save the queen' got the gong instead of the more recent 'advance australia fair').
during the 70s and 80s this all got very problematic. there was a deep suspicion of anzac day as a celebration of that which ought not to be celebrated, and with the rise of identity politics various groups wanted representation in the anzac day march but the body which managed the march (the returned services league - think right wing, conservative, ex military men) wasn't that keen. then of course they're all getting old and our most recent generation of soldiers, who fought in vietnam, weren't too keen on the whole event.
i remember attending an anzac day march in the early or mid 80s. it was sort of sad. there were not many of us there to watch and it had all the feel of a country town with a few folk out for the parade. it was in decline and the general sentiment was that it would just fade away.
then something happened. i'm not sure what. australian involvement in peace keeping forces, a new postnationalism which still has a jingoistic edge to it but perhaps a bit more tolerant of different histories and difference? (probably not.) regardless, over the last 15 years anzac day is back. big crowds, children wearing their grandparents medals and marching. perhaps it's as simple as needing a couple of generations after vietnam to see things differently.
where's this going? nowhere really, except in my daughter's primary school weekly newsletter i read grade 1 thoughts on anzac day:
got here via squish. this is interesting, particularly as i'm currently reading eric michaels at the moment. an excellent reflection on friction, digital, analogue and how here is also there.
mmm
::18 May 2002 16:57::
i've been working on a new vog which has become a series of 3. the material is again a series of digital stills that i've added film noise and dissolves to so that they are protocinematic.
(this is part of a recent interest which i've realised looks rather pointedly towards chris marker's la jetée - i'm interested in a problem about movement in cinema and movement as not reconstituted representation of physical movement but movement as qualitative change in a whole which is open.)
i've written 9 text tracks that layer over the 9 video tracks. while the 9 video tracks are collaged to form a more or less whole image, the text tracks cover all the video and if they're all present make a word 'storm' that i really like the look of.
so, i made one which is just the video + text tracks and it is just a movie, there is no possibility for the reader to do anything but watch and, hopefully, enjoy. of course this also means that the texts are rather difficult to read, and it also means it isn't really a vog, since it is just a movie.
which meant i made a second one. the problem i thought i had to deal with was how to let the reader/user know that they could make a text storm by by their actions, but also control the text tracks. i did this with two sprite tracks. the first one counts mouse entries and turns on each text track in turn, as well as enabling the second sprite. once the second sprite is visible you can use that to toggle text tracks on and off, or you can keep using the first sprite track.
sorta went overboard there. it looks messy and cheesy. was more interested in working out the sprite problems.
ivenson vog
::18 May 2002 13:05::
::notes from the new london group 1::
these are from The New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies Designing Social Futures." Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Eds. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. South Yarra: Macmillan, 2000. 9-37.
sounds like a 50s sci-fi horror really. mark b. has been playing around with some alife programming (i gather) and is modelling blog communities. this is his first experiment and it is fascinating.
if we take jill's point about links as the de facto object of economic exchange on the web then this experiment seems to bear this out. i don't mean that links = dollars but i do think i mean that it is the the link, its presence or absence, that needs to be distributed equitably for a free range blog community.
social democracy meets blogsteaders.
alife meets blog
::17 May 2002 18:20::
the australian centre for the moving image. yes it's over budget. yes it's behind schedule. yes, when it opens it will be for that window of time the best place in the world to look at, participate in, and wonder at, screen based media content. i just hope the web site gets better.
acmi
::17 May 2002 16:32::
this is a melbourne based media lab that are making a major installation/gamespace as a part of acmi. it's a great project, using a game engine to combine ideas/explorations of architectural space with the sort of stuff/access/interaction you get via gameplay. so underneath the 'real' acmi (which will be in the gameworld) there is a subterranean system that you can enter/use/explore.
the fact that acmi is commissioning work like this indicates how good acmi will be, for how long is the problem.
selectpark
::17 May 2002 16:31::
fan. i've been running macintosh servers since i think 1995, or 6. i never met to, i got funding for a server to develop the hypertext (html and storyspace) teaching i was doing and i was always going to get the department sys.admin to run it. so the plan was to get a pentium and run some flavour of unix on it. till my system guy's boss heard of our plan and pointed out it wasn't in the job description and he sure as hell wasn't going to run a server just for me.
so we went sideways and got an appleserver. i think the original one is still running, its a 7250 runs at 120mhz, has 256mb of ram and runs filemaker and webstar. currently serves 80,000+ raw hits per week and i reckon it's running at 5-10% capacity.
anyway, i've been running them ever since because as anyone in a big university will tell you, if you want to innovate around technology and teaching and learning then you're going to be doing a lot of the stuff yourself.
yes i am a
::15 May 2002 10:45::
glocal. that which combines and is at the same time global and local. blogs are glocal.
meme
::15 May 2002 9:56::
an artists site that runs/shows/exhibits/does fluxus inspired work. it is only recently that i've realised that a major aesthetic in the vogs is probably related to the stuff that fluxus is interested in.
(side note, perhaps this is also related to blogs? that blogging actually is a sort of fluxus event?)
they're brief events that are intended to be minor (in deleuze's sense of minor) interventions in the everyday.
fluxus
::15 May 2002 9:51::
::closure and french feminism::
this weeks lecture ranged from a discussion of closure through to roland barthes and the pleasures of the open text and what it might tell us about hypertext. i did a rather bold job of relating literary ideology to patriarchy and some notions of hypertextuality to that brand of french feminist theory that irigarary, cixous, et al practice and which has been explicitly theorised in hypertext by barbara page and wendy morgan.
this is the reference list i sent to the students:
Morgan, Wendy. "Heterotopics: Towards a Grammar of Hyperlinks." Messenger Morphs the Media 99, n.d. September 15 2000. http://www.wordcircuits.com/htww/morgan1.htm
closure:
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books - or Books without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. ""How Do I Stop This Thing?": Closure and Indeterminancy in Interactive Narratives." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994. 159-88.
Douglas, Yellowlees, and Andrew Hargadon. "The Pleasure Principle: Immersion, Engagement, Flow." Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM on Hypertext and Hypermedia. San Antonio (TX): ACM, 2000. 153-60.
Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. "Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers (Don't) Do." Perforations 3 (n.d.): May 21, 1998.
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Trans. Stephen Heath. Image-Music-Text. London: Flamingo, 1977. 142-8.
Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." Trans. Stephen Heath. Image-Music-Text. London: Flamingo, 1977. 155-64.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
closure and french feminism
::14 May 2002 13:54::
nearing the end of semester, and as usual vast swarthes of the unread, undiscussed, unconsidered reveal themselves. that's me as teacher, not what my students may or may not have done. they're in general smart, and the biggest problem i have in my teaching methodology is finding and framing ways to let their smartness work for them.
anyway, not long to go now. this week i'm going to go over guard fields, we're going to do the 'can i swap essay question' haggle, and read afternoon twice. oh, and return assessed essays too.
nearing the end
::14 May 2002 13:50::
australian cultural studies sort who does a lot of work on political/cultural economy and new media. currently new york based.
ken wark
::13 May 2002 13:37::
The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual 1/4. McKenzie Wark [version 3.0] (posted on nettime-l@bbs.thing.net and posted at 10.34am, friday may 10 2002).
this is from ken wark, on nettime (and no doubt shortly on fibreculture, rhizome, triumph of content, etc)
::13 May 2002 13:33::
this is a screen shot (thumbnail only) of a student essay. this is the first essay this student has written in storyspace, and the topic is informal - it's autobiographical. it has109 links, 20 spaces. there are two nodes at either end, one is "a possible beginning" the other "a possible ending".
what's interesting is the density of linking in the work and how the student has visually represented the writing. this happens a lot when the students use storyspace, and though it is often commented in the literature it appears to not get a lot of attention. simply, is this writing? given that my students aren't designers, haven't been taught the first thing about design, and aren't going to be (the same applies to their relation to information architecture) how do i think about this? how do they think about this? it's obvious that they do.
it's an elegant response to the problem of structure: represent it visually but also have two nodes that are possible beginnings and endings have have them saturated with links to get to the entire work. this is a solution, but in some ways it's a false solution in that saturation replaces architecture. on the other hand the visual structure does represent the work very successfully. there is a tension between the realisation of the visual-as-architectural-representation versus the hypertextual-textual-architecture which is the link structure.
more style
::12 May 2002 12:31::
i'm correcting the first lot of hypertext essays in storyspace from my students. came across this within a node:
and 'a life filled' is linked but that last teasing sentence remains unlinked. now this could be the sort of link that is an unlink that (from memory) mark bernstein (though it is also the sort of thing that stuart moulthrop might have written) has discussed. where to expect a link but not to find one becomes a part of a link structure by virtue of its absence. but i think it is more that links aren't yet understood, so it is naive rather than ironic (you can't be ironic if you don't know the rules of the game).
this is common in film, well, reasonably common. i remember john flaus (actor, film theorist and all round wise figure in the australian film community) showing a class i was in john ford's "seargeant rutledge" and how, though made within a studio system, a good director could exercise great control over the editing (even though the editing might be performed by three staff editors who don't know your work) by what you didn't shoot. at one particular point while rutledge (the heroic woody strode) is in the witness box he glances at something he has been handed (an image, if i remember right) but we don't see what he holds until several cuts later. this is because ford did not shoot the point of view shot that the canonical conventions of american narrative cinema would require and expect at this point. (you can imagine the editors going spare as they hunt for the point of view shot and their frustration when they realised there wasn't one!)
and though the point of view shot wasn't there, a good film reader would realise, ought to realise, that the absence of the shot then makes the expected but not present edit/cut/new shot meaningful. just like the expected but not present link.
on style
::10 May 2002 20:55::
i always struggle when it comes to teaching storyspace guard fields. i think it's because i don't really use them - i've never written anything for publishing as a stand alone storyspace hypertext, and so haven't had to work in a really gritty way with the beasties.
i think it might also be because i'm not a programmer, and i certainly don't teach anything like that (yes yes, i know, storyspace guard fields are hardly programming). but i don't quite have the language to show how it works.
on the other hand my students tend to not get it. in 4 or 5 years of this i've only ever had one student who just got it and loved it, whereas i get plenty of students who 'get' hypertext in some way.
this year i got them writing a simple narrative that reused nodes (which only contained pictures) so that they could begin to see how content could be reused. i got them to write two stories and each story had to use the same 4 pictures. then i got them to join the two stories together so it formed a sort of figure of 8 in terms of link structure, and got them to write guard fields so that the reader was just kept in this figure of 8 loop. sorta got it, sorta didn't.
next week i'll get them to do a simple conditional series which are instructions to the reader and if they reader doesn't do what they're told the reader is stuck in a loop until they do what they're supposed to do. and then we'll add a little copyright dedication screen too that can have a conditional link placed on it. that'll be enough because i then want and need them reading some fiction, probably afternoon.
guard fields
::10 May 2002 20:46::
the more abstract a sequence/shot/minimal signifying unit is then the more readily and available it is to multilinearity.
abstraction
::9 May 2002 13:23::
for next week's lecture in hypertext theory think about links: links as performative utterances, hypertext as lyric, links and excess, and to propose a way of thinking or working hypertextually that is about the openness that the link expresses and is. a way of making this concrete might to be think about hypertext as a postcinematic writing practice where each nodes is more like a film shot than a literary unit (so each node, no matter what it contains, is already a complex minimal unit) and so i'll get the students to think what sorts of things might they be able to make if in each node we had, for instance, video. what are the problems? how would you narrate?
Miles, Adrian. "Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext." Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13.2 July (1999): 217-26.
Tosca, Susana Pajares. "The Lyrical Quality of Links." Hypertext '99. Darmstadt: ACM, 1999. 217-8. available at Miles, Adrian. "Realism and a General Economy of the Link." Currents in Electronic Literacy Fall.5 (2001).
Miles, Adrian. "Hypertext Syntagmas: Cinematic Narration with Links." Journal of Digital Information 1.7 (2001).
all of the above are available via google.
Harpold, Terence. "The Misfortunes of Digital Text." The Emerging Cyberculture: Literacy, Paradigm, and Paradox. Eds. Stephanie Gibson, B and Ollie Oviedo, O. Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press, 2000. 129-49.
Landow, George P. "The Rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors." Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Eds. Paul Delany and George P. Landow. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. 81-103.
the vanity of citing the self.
an idea
::8 May 2002 13:14::
this is the general outline of an email i've sent to various people throughout the nordic region. if you know people who this might be relevent/good for then please let me know!
Proposal
To conduct a preliminary meeting hosted at InterMedia University of Bergen to discuss the establishment of a Nordic Interactive Cinema Network.
Proposed date
October 2002 (subject to funding)
Brief description
To discuss the need and relevance to research, the creative arts, and industry for a Nordic interactive cinema research network. Such a network would assist in the dissemination of existing and proposed research and collaboration, and would allow research and technology centres to co-ordinate and leverage existing skill sets and resources. This includes the development of technologies, theoretical and project based research, creative content, as well as the delivery of progressive forms of media rich entertainment, education and narrative.
Interactive cinema
At this point I want 'interactive cinema' to be a very generic term to include any graphic time based narrative environment. This could include Flash narrative, games engines and game worlds, networked/streamed video, DVD, dedicated capture/edit/projection installations, and performance work.
Partners
It is anticipated that participants will be drawn from the fields of film studies, media studies, art history, humanistic informatics, game studies, graphic design, human computer interaction, computer graphics, hypertext, narrative theory, performance studies, film production, sound production, multimedia development, television production and other cognate disciplines and skills that I haven't thought of.
Action
If you're interested in participating in this planning meeting please contact me via email at adrian.miles@uib.no. If you know of anyone else in the Nordic region who may be interested in participating please let me know. For the purposes of this proposed planning meeting numbers will be limited. It is anticipated that preliminary funding will cover the cost of participation in this planning meeting.
All those who express an interest shall be added to a mailing list created to facilitate discussion, organisation, and collaboration around the planning meeting.
nordic centre
::6 May 2002 18:30::
this has hypertext writing by 40 men. collected/edited by marjorie leusebrink and stephanie strickland. the previous year (i think) there was a collection of women's hypertext writing.
hypertext writing
::6 May 2002 14:10::
well, best laid plans. ended up spending today's lecture doing poststructuralism and quite a bit on derrida and différence. near the end their i bought it back to hypertext, crudely.
then i managed to launch in to problems of set theory and hypertextual incorporation and the rule of n-1 as how we ought to think of hypertext processes.
i think from here i need to do some slow and careful work for my students to recover out of where i've taken them too. so next week will be closure and hypertext pattern. this weeks lab (another 2 hour one) will be guard fields but i'll also try to raise a pile of stuff about the narratives they wrote last week and tie it into the lecture - how it's easy to think about multiple connections around images but that to do that with text nodes is much harder. that it's about open sets and so they need to try and think about what they're writing in terms of having many edges for facets where each facet is a face towards a link or node (god bless henri bergson).
i've realised that what i'm discussing, doing, and modelling with them is very abstract and complex theory but i'm not sure where or how it adheres, or even if it's able to.
lectures
::6 May 2002 13:28::
notes on rosenberg and douglas about hypertext reading.
Actemes are what we need to do to read the hypertext and are its smallest unit. Following a link for instance is an acteme. Following a link, going back, are actemes, and actemes combine into
Episodes. An episode is whatever group of actemes 'cohere' for the reader into a minimal meaningful group. This might be the result of exploratory reading, of foraging for meaning, but an episode is largely reader determined. Rosenberg argues that a lot of questions and problems in hypertext structure (designing and reading) relate to questions about episodes - about whether they are hierarchical, their 'integrity'.
An episode is a virtual document since it is realised by the actemes performed by the reader.
Episodes form a session and a session can end by accident or circumstance (crash, interruption), surrendering (the reader gives up), by a sense of episode saturation (which is not the same as closure), or the reader may assume they have reached or realised some form of 'closure'.
What is important in Rosenberg's paper (and it is perhaps one of the more significant works on hypertext reading that has been unduly ignored) is that the reader generally forms these structures but in relation to what the hypertext provides. And this becomes a way to deal with complex questions (for instance what should the back button do) since these relate directly to questions of episodic structure.
Jane Douglas, in discussing Afternoon, wrote:
It is foolish. She detests young men." [Joyce]
The second time you read this, however, you might be convinced that you had read a different passage, and, by the third or fourth time, you might find yourself trying desperately to locate these different spots that sound awfully similar but seem to mean entirely different things. In one narrative strand, this segment crops up amid Wert's clowning around over lunch, emphasizing his immaturity around women. In another, Wert poses the question to Peter playfully, to distract him from his concern over the whereabouts of his missing son and estranged wife, whom he believes may have been injured in a car accident earlier that day. Encountered in yet another context, the passage occurs in the context of Peter's fling with a fellow employee, Nausicaa, and Peter sees Wert's question as evicence of his boss's jealousy over their involvement. Later, the lunch date and conversation reappear after a narrative strand couched in Nausicaa's own perspective, which reveals that she is sleeping with both Wert and Peter, making Wert's query something of a game of cat's-paw. "I'm sleeping with your lover," Wert seems to be thinking, so he follows the line of thought to a position he perceives as more daring: "What if I were sleeping with your ex-wife?" But if you reach a segment called "white afternoon," having visited a fairly detailed series of places, you will discover that Wert and Peter's ex-wife, Lisa, have been seen together by Peter himself, although Peter cannot be certain that they are invovled with each other. When the lunch time conversation reappears, after this last revelation, Wert's query is a very real question indeed. [Douglas, p. 58.]
Clearly it is through repeated readings that this sort of poetic repetition becomes available to the reader, and in many ways it is the poetic evocations (hauntings, motifs, repetitions) that is the strength of Afternoon as a literary work.
douglas and rosenberg
::6 May 2002 11:06::
some lecture points on closure
narrative tends towards teleology
linearity helps perform teleology
closure is crucial for traditional notions of narrative pleasure
where is closure in hypertext?
references
Rosenberg, Jim. "The Structure of Hypertext Activity." Hypertext 96. Washington: ACM, 1996. 22-30.
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books Ñ or Books without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. ""How Do I Stop This Thing?": Closure and Indeterminancy in Interactive Narratives." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994. 159-88.
Bernstein, Mark. "Patterns of Hypertext." Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Hypertext Conference. Pittsburgh PA: ACM, 1998. 21-9.
closure
::6 May 2002 11:01::
just realised i can't do what i wanted with the final essay in hypertext theory and practice. partly because for it to work requires a standalone, guardfielded storyspace story, and they don't have time to do that and to do the research and critical writing.
though i guess i can offer as an option students could write their own small work and use that as the object of their theoretical writing. i'll offer that after this week's labs, where they're going to meet guard fields for the first time.
damn
::6 May 2002 10:59::
the final project for hypertext has evolved into a rather complex work, though i want it to be kept simple by the students. first of all they are going to form small groups to make a short hypertextual work. i've decided to do this rather than get them reading hypertext fiction because it is making their own stuff that i can make visible what the pleasures, poetries and problems are in hypertextual structure.
(and of course i want them working in small groups so that the work load is lessened individually, but also because this requires a more sophisticated use of the network, sharing, collaboration and the like which are key things to do with networked writing environments....)
once they've got their project ready they then have to answer a problem. they answer this in storyspace, hypertextually, and i will expect academic resources to be used and cited appropriately. this has the benefit of two groups of peers workign together. the first are those who co-wrote their creative piece together and so they'll all be hopefully using that in some way to think about what they're writing about. the other group will be those who are writing on the same problem, but probably using different focal texts.
i give them a hard time (the students i mean), don't i?
the project
::6 May 2002 9:49::
John Maeda. Design by Numbers. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. saw this sitting on jeremy's desk and i'll have to find a copy (his is borrowed). i'm just starting to read maeda@media which is looking very interesting...
maeda design by numbers
::3 May 2002 15:40::
i had one of those duh! homer simpson sort of moments the other day. it was when i was buying maeda @ media (thames and hudson) and i realised for the first time why blogs pretty much seem to have developed out of the design community. because designers all carry around way cool groovy sketch books which are their work books. they write notes, sketch, doodle, store numbers, do the full bit in there. it's an archive that is personal but for it to work must manage the return of rereading. of course the entries are variable, multiple, and refer outside, inside, beside. they're book blogs. with more drawings.
a duh thing
::1 May 2002 20:33::