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October 31, 2003

Jim Andrews, Morph and Metaphor

Jim Andrews posted this on Empyre a couple of weeks back, and I emailed him to ask his permission to reproduce it, which he kindly granted. Just particularly liked the relation of morph as metaphor, sort of "yeah, ok" but if you spend some time thinking about it properly, which I guess means seriously, then it is a powerful idea. I'm thinking of Ricoeur's work on metaphor in particular and how this might give a hook into a visual register.

Jim Andrews jim at vispo.com
Mon Oct 20 04:07:06 EST 2003
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morph as figure of code.morph as metaphor.i made a java applet in 96 to display morphs called 'Morph Tea' (anagram for'metaphor').morph as in transformation.most of the morphs currently on my homepage at http://vispo.com are of people. but also of the egg word of ur etc. language. transformation of the word.in the digital, word, image, and sound are transformed to information, pliable, binary, transformable, electric, discrete liquid.the morph is a kind of digital alternative to metaphor. related to metaphor. metaphor is this is that. is. morphing is also concerned with the transformation, with the coming to be, process.i once had the pleasure of hearing minsky the great artificial intelligencer lecture. he said he felt that the computer's big contribution to knowledge was in how it furthers our understanding of processes.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:14 PM

October 29, 2003

MPEG 2 and QuickTime

There's a MPEG-2 playback component that you can get that allows QuickTime to read MPEG 2. You have buy the thing, I think because of the licensing arrangements around MPEG 2.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:28 AM

More on QuickTime 6.4

Just found the real documentation for what is new in QuickTime 6.4 The list is detailed and orientated towards developers. I have noticed though that some of my recent vogs are now broken. Where I had a text track scrolling in and out and a script that allowed the font size to be altered, it now appears to just make the text track not visible. I've done some testing and by not having the text track scroll the problem goes away. But for the time being I have works that don't work!

Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:27 AM

October 28, 2003

Image and Narrative

Found the journal Image and Narrative via GrandTextAuto (thanks), it is dedicated to visual narrative, under the editorship of Jan Baetens. Seriously good and valuable work and very relevant to the research and fiddling I do these days.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2003

Paying for Kung Log

Have finally made a donation paypals payment for Kung Log, which really is a fantastic blog publishing tool. A lot of my peers are often surprised at how regularly I pay for share and donation ware. Seems to me to be pretty straight forward, someone worked to make the tool, if it is good enough for me to keep using, then it seems reasonable to pay a reasonable amount. I've been online for a fair number of years and very much have adopted the early net culture of co-operation and peer support, and well remember that virtually all the tools I first used, no, all the tools, were for free and developed by the university sector. I particularly like the shareware model for Kung Log since its model of trust includes identifying yourself as a student or unemployed (so the software is free) or what you can afford in terms of what you think it is worth.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:22 PM

The Violence of Text

This is a project I undertook with some colleagues and a group of honours students in 2002. Their work has been published in Kairos. Below is the editorial come introduction I wrote for it. The project contains work by Mark Amerika, Darren Tofts, Jenny Weight, Jeremy Yuille, myself, and Pia-Ednie Brown. I've also mirrored the work locally.

So, I wondered, what would happen if a small group of honour year students had the opportunity to collaborate, really collaborate, on an electronic academic publishing project? What if the project invited them to reconsider what constituted academic content by producing a publication based on a formal symposium on digital multiliteracy using video, audio, image, and text? Where three students from communication design joined three students from media studies to design, edit, and build an electronic academic publication, responding to an invitation to rethink what academic literacy and the expression of academic knowledge might be if digital literacy, rather than print literacy, were its basis. I wanted a group of digitally savvy students, with little necessary investment in academic prestige, to have the candour and sanctuary to experiment. What and how would the SMS generation (SMS is Short Message Service, aka 'texting', one of the major social uses of mobile telephony by youth and business in Europe and Australasia) want to design, express and articulate knowledge in their screen dominated cultures?
During the symposium the team of students recorded video and audio, photographed, and wrote notes. They interviewed participants and the audience. They received the hard copy text of what each speaker had written, or worked from. With this material they resampled and remixed in a way that responded to, and also interrogated, our assumptions about what an academic object might be. Violence of Text is the outcome of this wondering and collaboration.
The Violence of Text is an anthology of not-quite-essays where the designer editors identified a major theme or idea in each piece and used that as a primary filter to inform the design and reworking of that content. What needs to be recognised through the anthology is the insistent manner in which not only is there a major idea which has become the design trope for each author, but that the design in or of the article moves from a representation of this idea to producing or performing that idea in the academic work itself. In other words, what this academic anthology demonstrates with some alacrity is the manner in which digital literacy - as an engaged and informing praxis - inevitably creates, makes, and performs, even while it attempts to represent. It ought to be hardly surprising that the materiality of the digital is so manifestly available given the specific content available, but it is surprising to find so many nascent possibilities realised so easily by these knowledge designers.
By way of introduction I have provided a brief map of what has happened to each academic's work in the Violence of Text, helping to contextualise the work. This appears to me necessary for two reasons. The first is simply that many humanities academics have a limited set of literacies or competencies when it comes to reading or accommodating new media objects, largely because the majority of academic content in these new environments mirrors and privileges traditional paradigms - for instance there are very few genuinely multilinear essays published in electronic peer reviewed journals. The other is that without an introductory road map the work that has been achieved here risks being misunderstood as net art rather than the tentative experiment towards novel forms of academic writing that it is. In a screen literate world where print and the page are no longer exemplars for the expression of knowledge we remain hesitantly standing at the cusp of new academic genres. Hence, to use these works you need to be an active reader, at times you must do things with the text or digital artefacts for anything to happen, yet at other times the work will insistently run of its own accord. They are always variable, and readerly activity, as Espen Aarseth has taught us, is never trivial in cybertext.
Darren Tofts' "Discrete Fertility: Making a Particle Theory of Hypertext" discusses the infinity of the epigram as a form of the open text, and he uses this to speculate on possible new media works. His work, as it appears in the anthology, begins with an epigram from Jorge Luis Borges, then the active reader is taken to a text window containing what appears to be the content of Tofts' essay. However, as you reach the bottom of the window in your reading the scroll bar immediately leaps back to the top of the text window, and the attentive reader will have noticed that the amount of text has declined. Reading to the bottom of this window sees this repeated until eventually the text has 'shrunk' until only a final epigram remains, and a polite link to the full text in pdf is available. In other words Tofts' work has become an essay that only ever begins, and in its beginning it continually retreats into its own beginning, performing what it says.
Mark Amerika's "OzBlog" is an extract from an ongoing nomadic writing project. Here Amerika's blog has been collectively annotated, via Blogger (a popular blog writing tool), linking in and out of his entries with a series of commentaries, observations, asides and textual riffs that foreground questions of textual primacy and authority. In addition, the list of neologisms provided all perform eponymous Google searches maintaining an openness and future to the work where possible link destinations change in time.
Jenny Weight's "Field Guide to Information: Taxonomy, Habitat, Plumage" has taken her consideration of the relation of data to knowledge literally, rendering her 'content' as html source code and also taking images, audio and video from this presentation and presenting it as 'just' code. Here the issue of the representation of knowledge, and the relation of information to knowledge, is foregrounded as the reader's movement through the menu from left to right moves through layers of abstract information to one particular textual representation of this.
With Adrian Miles' "Digital Multiliteracies" the readerly versus writerly text has been turned on its head into the composed versus performed text. Here image, text, and audio need to be dragged from their place holders in the clip selector onto their corresponding timeline. Once assembled the play button in the viewer window can be clicked and this will play what has been assembled by the reader as a 'roll your own' edit of the paper and presentation. This dramatically appropriates Miles' commentary on the significance of digital multiliteracy and interactive video as a writing practice where the 'what next' remains radically open. As Miles' text only ever happens through the intervention of a reader who appropriates its parts in building, it foregrounds the dissolved authority of reader and author.
"Speaking in Textures", Pia Ednie-Brown's elaboration on the dissolution of dichotomy and difference in an electronically mediated world, has been ironically dichotomised in its electronic publication. Ednie-Brown's presentation consisted of two distinct parts, the first a story about the manner in which she and her appliances collude in conversation, the second a theoretical commentary on digital tactility. Here the animated Pia, deliberately mimicking Microsoft Word's insistently helpful office assistant, is narrating the story while the text fragments are the theoretical commentary. The personal and theoretical are combined as Ednie-Brown becomes the mechanised animation that narrates the personal story, while it is the fragmented text that controls and provides the syntactic architecture.
Jeremy Yuille's hypertextual collage is presented as a text movie with soundtrack. Of course the soundtrack is, in the spirit of all the interpretive work undertaken by the researcher editors, offered as an independent track though it cannot be played independently of its text accompaniment. The sound track is derived from Yuille's presentation, where the text has been translated into electronic sound through several translation programs, and the use of the sound is informed by Yuille's comments about synaesthesia, electronic literacy, sound and the driven first person shooter mentality of search engines and instrumental, rather than playful, networks, and by Weight's comments about code and data. In other words Yuiile's writing has been rendered as data and that data then rendered as electronic sound (riffing nicely against Yuille's creative practice as an electronic sound artist).
This project poses numerous questions and problems, for instance its reliance on proprietary technologies (Macromedia Flash), the disruptive manner in which the source texts have been collaged and montaged, and the fragmented readings that inevitably result. However, these are also those very things that the project wished to foreground and explore as material aspects of an applied digital practice, and in retrospect it is hardly surprising that the SMS generation would so willingly translate more or less formal and proper academic papers into stuttering, minor (to use the Deleuze and Guattari of their small book on Kafka) multiple screen works. What is surprising, and to some extent shocking, is the ease with which these screen literate students felt competent and comfortable to appropriate and rework authoritative academic works into windows that glimpse other sorts of academic literacies, and certainly demonstrate that learning can be expressed outside of the essay.
These essays are the outcome of an academic symposium and six students learning and applying their research and design skills in collaboration. The success of this is evident in the quality of the work presented and the manner in which these researcher editors (constructor designers?) have developed a practice based methodology that, in their words, performs "interpretation through implementation." Whether Violence of Text is of value simply as an applied project for students and provided a novel manner for them to express what they have learnt, or if it indeed does suggest some future alternative academic genres, remains unclear and largely rests with what other readers determine. Like all academic activity and knowledge in the humanities, an informed, consensual, and engaged community is required and the Violence of Text is a contribution to the discourse that this community needs to have, is having, about electronic literacy and the expression of knowledge.
Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Deleuze, Gilles, and F�lix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2003

The Iowa Guide

The Iowa Guide. This is a great site. It lists various media and communication publications and you can find out about publication requirements, acceptance rates and the like. Had no idea any one had collected this sort of information. Delivered out of FileMaker too.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)

Peer Review, Academic Labor, and Publishing

Picking up from many of the discussions about academic publishing that have occurred in the sciences, I recently made this suggestion on the (primarily) Australian Fibreculture email list:

Imagine a database which publishes peer reviewed work via http. The system is designed to offer structured feedback and mentoring not only of those receiving reviews, but also those doing the reviewing.

  1. I submit a paper and nominate the fields and/or discplines (from set choices) that I
  2. think it fits into
  3. as a possible author I agree to also be a reviewer (this is a requirement)
  4. where I also nominate a series of fields and/or disciplines that I have expertise in
  5. these fields which represent the disciplines would be derived from an existing metadata standard,
  6. and if one doesn't exist then the project would develop one
  7. the system automatically allocates 3 anonymous reviewers based on the preferences made by each contributor
  8. my paper is anonymously reviewed by 3 others
  9. these reviews are well structured (template and process driven)
  10. and the author gets access to these reviews and
  11. the author is able to rate these reviews (template and process driven)
  12. during this process, which would support resubmission, the paper must meet miminum requirements for publication
  13. this minimum number would be determined by averaging the reviews received, measured against the reviewers ranks as reviewers
  14. if accepted the paper is published and identified as peer reviewed
  15. probably only after you have completed your 3 reviews (quid pro quo)
  16. since reviewers are rated by authors and authors are rated by reviewers
  17. over time an expert peer driven system is built which can then weight participants so that
  18. reviewer A is known as high quality and receives a high review rank, while
  19. reviewer B who is not much chop receives a low review rank

The benefits of this are multiple.

First of all the academic labour that constitutes a great deal of scholarly publishing is made visible, not only in the requirements of becoming a reviewer to publish, but by the use of straight forward and standardised feedback protocols to structure feedback. This models good practice, so provides professional development for new academics, and may also improve the quality of feedback generally (which in the humanities can be abysmal).

Once established, there is virtually zero cost involved, apart from bandwidth (which could admittedly be considerable), as the system is more or less self organising and self sustaining.

The engine could be entirely scalable so that new discipline groups could be easily added.

It moves scholarly publication into a quite different temporal model because rather than being volume based articles would appear whenever sufficient reviews had been completed and appropriate 'criteria' met. This would mean that in some cases publication would in fact be issue based, though in the more usual sense of timely interest, as a spate of papers may appear dealing with a specific theme because of interest or debate.

Finally, the criteria used throughout this system would be explicit, and though qualitative would have some quantitative index (a rank) so not only the papers but the values that constitute 'good' work would also then be subject to peer review and discussion. In the same manner reviewing as a professional practice would be subject to review. Of course all indicators would be anonymous, so that my reviewer identity would be some sort of number, for instance, which only I would know.

This would, of course, be just the beginning. Complex visualisation strategies could be employed to represent content and the emergent clusters that developed through such a system, generating in itself a whole series of new research problems and programs. For example the system could easily build and represent citational frequency clusters, visualise link patterns, and so forth. It might even help some parts of the humanities catch up to the sciences in reimagining what constitutes knowledge production, expression, and dissemination.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:22 PM | Comments (1)

October 20, 2003

Text and Image

The result of a Google search for 'xml schema emotion'. I've no idea what it says but I enjoy the graphic commentary courtesy of the character.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 03:46 PM | Comments (0)

Affective Computing

Well, a busy day researching online and I find MIT's affective computing project. This is really intriguing stuff, particularly since I met someone called Floyd the other day, formerly at MIT, who has worked on video capture metadata systems that capture and record affect as metadata while the video is being shot. That suggests all sorts of very interesting projects and possible archival systems... Not to mention delivery engines (imagine setting a slider so you only viewed content that met specified emotional or affective criteria.)

Posted by Adrian Miles at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)

Thank You, Timo Arnall

While doing some research about XML, metadata and affect I found the elasticspace experience design reading page. A seriously good annotated book list about interaction design, info architecture et al.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 03:15 PM | Comments (1)

Blogging Futures

This article over at The Feature on blogging discusses moblogging, photoblogging, audioblogging and suggests that video blogging might have a future. The business model for Audblog is interesting, and could be useful for getting a vog application up and running. Of course it might not be that different to what Apple's originally free .Mac service offered in terms of ease of publishing of those iMovie hits, but with the provision of blog style tools there may be a market to develop this. From my point of view a business model makes getting funding much, much, easier.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2003

Dan Winckler

Dan has been doing a video blog since June 2003. His practice, to date, is very specific, with each work more or less of the same length and generally concentrating on a series of abstractions derived from footage shot and what I assume are postproduction effects. The work, according to the page, is inspired by the work of William Gibson, and I'm assuming his most recent book, Pattern Recognition.

This would suggest that the individual video entries are part of a larger whole, and so it is definitely a serialised work in a way that most blogs, and video blogs, while assuming regularlity of publication, don't quite accept, as in the general blog aesthetic explicit serialisation is rare. It also indicates that the individual pieces are intentionally abstract, so that while they offer an exploration of a particular video aesthetic they are also as much about the series. It is unclear if the individual pieces do form a specific and 'closed' whole, if and when the series ends, though given the first works are specifically collage experiments some idea of an alternative collage practice is probably indicated.

The abstraction at work is quite specifically video, not only because of its use of digital effects but also in the regular fascination with phosphorescent light and its avatars. Video as an electronic image (as opposed to film's chemical and projected luminosity) is drawn to such light, the sort of electric click click of the contemporary street, and in Winckler's work this forms the primary subject matter. This is most obvious in "5” which is the most referential of these pieces. Here the camera finds a flickering pulsing fluorescent tube and moves towards it, eventually moving in to an almost extreme close up of a X marked on the tube (in tape?). There is a glimpse of the street behind but its stuttering glow is what draws us, much like moths, and gives this video a found object everyday sort of quality.

As far as vogs go, there is no interactivity at work in the video, it is pretty much click and play, but their abstraction and the consistency of the idea and material shifts this work into something that is not just a dull documenting, nor a use of video online that is struggling with its own material conditions. It knows what it is about, why it is online, and it is not pretending to be television - all major plusses. What it appears to be is an experiment in treating low bit rate video as an experimental creative practice which wants to build or develop depth through regularity and constancy of its serialised form, which means no individual work stands out, but neither ought individual works be ignored.

I think it is this quality that offers a lot for thinking about vogging, since I suspect succesful vogs, as a genre, will need to combine the acuity of a well observed or crafted observational event (narrative, fiction or nonfiction, or perhaps a more experimental practice) with consistency. This is what good blog writing already does, it is just easier to write to the moment than it might to be shoot and publish to the moment. For now, anyway.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

Language Games

From the Humanist email list comes this explanation for the acronym TWAIN, "Technology Without An Interesting Name." Elegant humour sits alongside elegant code.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:00 PM | Comments (1)

QuickTime 6.4

Apple have just released QuickTime 6.4. The details about what's been changed from 6.3 are available, and most of it seems to be performance tweaks for Windows and the new G5s, and some tighter intergration of 3 GGP and MPEG 4. It now supports Pixlet, which is going to do wonderful things for video online, but you need to wait for the release of 10.3 next week for that.

An amendment, more details about what has been added in 6.4 is available at the generic Apple QuickTime page.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2003

Excess and Stoopidity, aka how Shrubs produce Forests

Via Matt, this simple visualisation of quantity and excess. For the last image and text I would have liked an explanation of just how far US$3269.00 for every person in Iraq or Afghanistan would go (I'd expect a very long way).

Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2003

Singin' in the Streets

Last night I took my kids to the opening night of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (that we need 'international' in its title tells you alot about antipodean and Melbournian assumptions) which was held at Federation Square. I should have packed the video camera (I just don't treat the video camera quite as the quotidian capture tool that I ought) since it was a magic experience. A tap choreographer taught approximately 2000 people (us) how to do the eponymous tap sequence from "Singin' in the Rain". Largely because it has always rained for the opening of the festival, though of course not last night. Good natured laughter, fumbled steps, and just the pleasure of strangers all trying to do something odd together. For my part I was hopeless, but given how much I like the film, it was a hoot, and I'm a sucker for strangers being oddly altruistic like this. Next time I'll bring the camera.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2003

Vog Exhibition

Two of my vogs have been accepted for the forthcoming Slowtime...QuickTime as an artistic medium show. As an academic who apparently is developing some sort of artistic practice I find it odd to send my work to these sorts of exhibition and curatorial spaces and for it to be accepted. While I argue for the thinness of the distinction between theory and practice in my research and teaching, to actually try and locate some of the work that I do specifically as a creative practice just, well, sits oddly for me. I know how to be an academic. I don't know how to be an artist. The first sounds like something that is defined for you, the second is something you need to define yourself as.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)