Updated slice of my project for Thursday

Here is a small but hopefully representative slice of what I have been working on. Integrating text into video is one of the most frustrating and difficult challenges I may have ever encountered in art. That sounds like an exaggeration when I write it out like that but I think I mean it. This snippet is similar to my last sample but the time it took me to get here was substantial. I remixed the Wikipedia text for elevator use as source material for the text. All materials are found:

DJ Spooky's iPhone app - like a Dj mixing board (in beta)

See his video on it: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=190803035900

IT CONCERNS

A Remix in Response: http://www.z-site.net/copyright-notice-by-pz/

IT CONCERNS

perhaps-innocent students have been misled into thinking
about me.

These people are the reality of years,
of "trespass" work.
I wish all will remain so for many many years.
I own all
I insist upon deriving property.

You may use words as you see fit,
as if you owned them,
you can remove all worth
while people who want, do.


Procedures I insist upon,

I urge you on Louis Zukofsky, and prefer that you do not,

1-- to quote from grief must, if only from courtesy, inform me of a desire
I urge you to keep quotation, as the more quotation, the more likely I am to obtain my future

2-- without having without having the future to quote

3-- marginalia or elsewhere received materials in their future

4-- people who require performance will be charged music to do so.

5-- I, electronic "publication". People, LZ , "blogs".

6-- if you proceed if you publish a book, you must understand your misguided interest in literature, music, art, etc.

I would be suspicious of your desire to obtain
one line
you may cross a permanent self-interest(s)
in the words of e.e.cummings quoting Olaf: “I will approve quotation”.
I am not trying to censor you. (I am)

My interest is almost purely being
delving into the personal lives of my worrying
did or did not your problem try to dissemble.
I ask for the fact that you have not.

all else fails, and you remain quoting
you have been stupidly advised to try to circumvent yourself again and again, and yet once more.

I keep doing this...

It was a snowy day last time this happened. Maybe clouds drive me to video art. Maybe I should move to Oregon.

Today it happened again, I sat down and lost hours, calories and possibly meaningful relationships through missed phone calls to my obsessive style of video art creation that I cannot pull myself away from. I just realized that it's evening and I 'm not sure if I've eaten or blinked recently.

I know that today we were supposed to write about the VJ sites that we read but instead I would like to post my project's progress instead. This is mostly because I just realized that the reading I have for my other classes (I have other classes?) is screaming at me to move away from the screen. Oh and I have some undergrads to teach poetry to tomorrow...

I will however make a brief comment about the many articles I read last week about VJ culture: I cannot wait to have a minute to try out MIDI poet. The link I have here to the download site for MIDI poet is in Spanish which I got through reading and then realized there is an English one too. When Eugenio Tisselly talks about wanting to be a text jockey, I am very curious to see how live text performance (with other medias) could potentially influence the shape of my writing overall. In my video project, I am remixing myself for the text portion and it always surprises me how a simple re-framing of one medium inside of another medium can change everything. What is language when it's taken off of the page? The words change. The meanings, even in an isolation seemingly equal to the page, changes.

So back to my project, basically I have been obsessed with elevators lately. The disorientation of space, the mechanization of movement, the involuntary intimacy, a room as a means of transportation and my reasons go on.

I have been writing with these ideas in mind lately and chose a prose poetry piece of mine to remix. I took the text and manipulated it in flash then inserted it into Premiere. The footage I have are a lot of stills taken from google images and the video is all from yourtube and the HD flip. One video from youtube is about the racism of elevator etiquette. In other words a man is talking to the camera about how white women are rude nonverbally to black men who enter an elevator. It's incredibly misogynistic and one form of discrimination is traded for another. I have removed the sound from this clip however, so that theme may or may not come through. This portion is not quite fleshed out yet and I must mention this clip is incredibly rough. There is a lot of polishing work to be done but I am excited about the direction it's heading:





Sorry (Mark) for my deviance (not following directions). Hopefully this project will be worth it!

Questions of Copywrongs

Colbert's Remix

* What are the advantages of an "open source" and/or "open content" approach to remix culture in general, and consumer culture at large? Do we really need a "free culture" or is it in our best interests to restrict rights?


Umberto Eco says in his essay The Open Work, "the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed." He is referring to what I see is a major advantage to open content or open work. If when we as artists see our work as finished for us, but rich enough to possess the ability to be continued by others not only does that free the artist from the pressures of feeling that their work is complete, but it frees (as Eco argues) the audience to interpret and reinterpret works.

Obviously for art that is remix-heavy, open source and open content is its life-blood; and yet sometimes remix is just good old fashion copyright violation (Girl Talk?-What I mean here is that Girl Talk does not use Open Content). But by giving remix artists the green light to legally use any content they would like to make a new work, is something I can certainly see leading to artistic progress (whatever that means). At the same time, where do you draw the line? Wouldn't people with self-serving, non-remix, rip-off tendencies who do not re-frame existing art in an interesting way also have access to this open content? This is why I like the viral licensing ideas of copyleft and creative commons. It feels like a compromise. You the artist still has rights to the original work so no one can claim they were the original creator, but others can still build upon it and change it in the name of art. Just cross your fingers that they do something good with your source material...


* Does the idea of copyright and intellectual property become more obsolete in digital/networking culture? Must the effort to protect intellectual property be valiantly fought in cyberspace as in other (more material) spaces? Why or why not?


What makes copyright and intellectual property obsolete in a digital culture is the ease of access an individual or groups of individuals have to sites like RapidShare, isohunt (or any torrent site) etc. Comedian Mindy Kaling does a great job explaining this kind of digital access and how it translates into the real world: Comedy Death Ray (first minute and a half only). This is great because now am I technically stealing the intellectual property of Mindy Kaling now as well, right? Anyway, if I can theoretically steal the entire Adobe CS4 suite from a torrent site, why would I buy it? Especially when I will not be accountable, I am stealing it in the name of art, and I don't feel like am I hurting anyone because no one loses the programs from my stealing it and I would never have actually bought the program myself to begin with so Adobe really isn't losing money. Remember, this really is an entirely hypothetical situation (so Adobe don't come after me!)

The intellectual property battle online therefore, is in my opinion a losing one. We keep finding ways (thanks Switzerland) to access free content that not long ago we would have had to pay for.

* What about an artist's labor? Where is the balance in protecting ones "original" creative output versus opening up the collective's creative output imagined by some as freely accessible source material for active reconfiguration?

I think I discussed this in the first question...

* Give an example of a work of visual or media art that you personally value where the artist(s) were clearly remixing / postproducing / reconfiguring source material from other visible sources. Was the final result for the betterment of culture in general? At what risk/cost?


This Nest, Swift Passerine is a book a poetry by Dan Beachy-Quick that came out this year ( I just introduced him when he read here at CU on Monday). This is actually a very traditionally written book of lyric-experimental contemporary poetry but it is constructed by taking source material from other writers them mixing his own language in between. I value this book as art immensely, the issues of ownership and self that the book addresses is incredibly valuable in my mind to the progression of and commentary on our real and artistic worlds.

But the question was about visual or media arts and because I am not regularly exposed unfortunately to much work like this on a regular basis, I will go with the last two I saw which were DuBord's Society of the Spectacle and DJ Rabbi's remix of it. The remix especially (which is a remix of a remix) is of great value, even if you only consider the impossibilities of ever reaching a finished experience of it. It seems to me to be a great example of what Eco is discussing in The Open Work as a work in progress because the audience will derive endless meaning from it. How do we make sense of a world with infinite meaning? Does this mean ultimately the absence of meaning? Who is I, and therefore what is 'eye' as the the vehicle of perception? I think these are compelling questions evoked by DeBord, DJ Rabbi and Beachy-Quick alike.


* Give an example of how you recently sampled and remixed source material from the general culture into something that you felt was an original form of expression (not including what you have created for this class).


Almost everything I write is sampled. Ok not everything, but recently I sat down with a Google books (added layer of source material issues) copy of a book called Skin. It is a non fiction work entirely about what skin means, including any covering of any space like buildings, humans, electronics etc. I took the language from this book and wrote into it and around it. The authors of this book would recognize the terms I stole/borrowed/recycled but I doubt they would see this as stealing-it is using this language in a completely different way. Language is social, it belongs to all of us and I feel as though my expression is just as creative and original as theirs.

Metagraphs

Would Guy Debord consider Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School a metagraph? I did a google search for metagraph, a term that Debord brackets as [poem-collage], and found nothing about poetry or collage. I'm going to use the term anyway. If Acker's book is not a poem-collage, then what is it? Well I know it is certainly a form of writing I would love to try sometime.

But maybe I am already trying to 'write' collages. I have found that all I want to do is 'write' metagraphs, whether it be in the form of the live web spinna performance (where I suppose this technique is implied) or a poem I have to write for my traditional creative writing workshop (maybe its implied here too!) Today I met with the professor of my workshop about the direction my poetry should go for my thesis. My problem is, I have so many different projects that I am working on all at once, that I can't seem to focus on one. He suggested that rather than picking a project, I should orchestrate them all into one. The more he continued explaining what he thought I should do, the more I realized that what he was suggesting was that I remix my projects in order to fuse them together. My favorite part of this exchange was that he danced around the idea a little bit and he said he was worried that I might not like what he was going to tell me. Obviously the suggestion was quite the opposite (it was very exciting!), and I am beginning to realize that I use the same strategies and impulses that I use to write and edit a poem as I do when I sit down to remix something. So how different can it really be? Remix is like a permission slip to simultaneously fail, play, create, destroy, rethink, plagiarize and resurrect. I have found remix as a technique artistically very freeing.

To switch gears slightly, I wanted to talk briefly about my experience with the web spinna performance before I end this since no one seemed to want to speak up about it at the end of last class. The whole process really surprised me. First, I was surprised that I could actually come up with something that was at least mildly pleasing in spite of my nonexistent musical background; second, I was surprised at how nervous I was before the performance, my hand was shaking on the mouse at the beginning of it; third, the consistency of tone (both thematically and sonically) of the class performance as a whole was really incredible to me. During our discussion on Acker, we talked a little bit about our minds and how as meaning making machines they attempt to make associations, narratives and sense out of what they are presented with then fill in the gaps accordingly. It is possible of course that the consistency I observed was just that, my brain creating the patterns out of the performance, but of that I am not yet convinced- and I don't know if there is any way to know for sure. Or if it even matters...

Web Spinner + SpringGun Press

Here is a link to my sound project:

Erin's Web Sound Palette

Also, artists and writers: We are now accepting submissions for our second issue of SpringGun Press. We accept digital art, poetry, flash fiction and more. Please check out our site and our first issue.

Who speaks through you?

It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. Today's notion of creativity and originality are configured by velocity: vectors play host to the agent, the agent within the vector animal (thought vector, sound vector, vector of a sound of motion), the vector has a fixed property, vectors are capable of transmitting the disease of the vector that moves through an architectonic environment. The future will leak through a fax to yourself of sonic debris and the copies will transcend the originals.

Poetry is nothing but a machine made of words, double movement, binary stratification, transience of meaning - text and textuality switch place with blinding speed. Creating seamless interpolations between objects of thought to fabricate a zone of representation in which the interplay of the one and the many, the original and its double all come under question.

In the binary world of place, is sampling the digital equivalent of Feng Shui? Technology is a collective hallucination. What would happen if place, memory, exponential aspects of perception just vanished into our collective dreams? Why do I want to write? Because I grew up with the want to communicate with fellow human beings. Any you can be you. Art and the imagination transform individual creation into a kit of interchangeable parts. Art and the ideological work transform individual creation into a kit of interchangeable parts. Of interchangeable parts.

By being a flaneur, I push writing, or music or art through a cycle of extreme flux, catchphrases and real contexts reconfigured. There is a ruthless logic of selection to create a sense of order, to be a flaneur, to look at an image or listen to a sound. The millions of bits of information streaming through two million fiber bundles of nerves is like writing history with lightning. Sampling is a new way of creating overexposure to the transparency of the world. And that's a good start.

It would be like living some kind of death if too many people continue looking backward: One hundred years ago, 1687, the ancients, 1875, sixth century Ireland, Emerson, Edison and Gould. What differentiates today from yesterday is Emerson could write. It's not just boring, it's against everything.

Parallel soundscapes are more willing to create psychological collage space. Stories disappear and evaporate and there's so much shit that your memory will never remember anything exactly the way it happened. Memories become dematerialized sculpture.

There is no such thing as an immaculate perception. We inherit ancient syntaxes, basic primal languages and rhythm scientists operate under a recombinant aesthetic with roots that were planted over a century and half ago. Filling space in becomes a dance with emptiness, there's always something to think through when you create a mix. We do not even know what we want. Why not? It all depends on your perspective, but as I like to say, let it be like a record spinning.

Blood Guts and Cancer

Not since reading Georges Batallie's Story of the Eye have I encountered a work of literature that so masterfully combines sexually (deviant) explicit content and a psychological/sociological commentary on youth, culture, sexuality, gender, economics, art etc. Acker's "novel" (I put novel in quotes here because although I think novel is a useful descriptor for Blood and Guts in High School I think it could easily be called many other things: poem, collage, drawing, cut-up, remix) has been called post-punk feminist writing, but is undeniable surrealist heavy (like Bataille) and therefore can be placed in modernism but was written in 1978 and therefore may be classified in the postmodern. So maybe Acker's work is a surrealist post-punk postmodern modernist "novel" that isn't even really a novel. Maybe (most likely) it doesn't really matter. I wanted to play that out so I could see for myself how Acker's (Burroughs's) cut-up method, collage and the melting together of genres and literary movements work terribly hard to resist classification. Why is that counter intuitive? Maybe because we are encountering material we have experienced before, we have certain predisposed expectations about what they are so we assume we know what we're dealing with. But the reality is that the works that are made new (Hawthorne, Mallarme etc) cannot be themselves anymore instead they get stuck happily in an infinite circle of definition and classification. By accumulating more and more influences/playgarisms, Acker's writing is more and more difficult to pin down and talk about as a whole; yet, the unifying element, the narrative, serves also as the map for readers to navigate her collage (literally and figuratively).

Acker seems to jump head first into the sewers of the psyche, bringing back with her a collage dripping with moral dilapidation, extreme violence and cancers of every variety. I know from reading a brief biography on Acker that she herself died of cancer and the anxiety surrounding cancer was a common theme in many of her works. I started thinking about how much cancer, collage and cut-ups all have in common (in addition to their consonant sounds.) They are all new entities grown and derived from the changing and/or destruction of an original entity and they are usually unexpected. Although Acker's cut-ups and collages are controlled, they feel and take on airs of being uncontrolled, which is of course a cancerous characteristic. If her technique is cancer-like, then perhaps the book itself should be thought of as a body- one that has been sliced, manipulated, penetrated, marked, mutilated and appropriated.

Before he is mentioned by name and by title of his work, Mallarme entered this book. As soon as I saw varying font sizes, he appeared and Acker was at the very least in dialogue with him. Her decision to remix One Toss of the Dice seems appropriate even if only thinking about the Janey's narrative. Both works are violent in form and content and it seems impossible for a reader to not wonder whether Janey could have been them if the dice had been thrown differently. My apologies for simplifying Mallarme and Acker for that matter, in this way. More on this in class...I feel as though I am taking on too much in just one post.

Before I end this post, I wanted to include the following relevant links:

Remix/Reenactment of Blood and Guts in High School by video artist Laura Parnes

Mallarme's One Toss of the Dice Never will Abolish Chance on Ubu

Borges Remix

Mary and I

It is to that other one, to Mary, that happens to things. California walks through me never ceasing its currents, one did say, electric, to ignite laughter in my gaze and its inner door; of Mary I receive news and olds in binaries and I see her name in doctrine we used to believe relevant to our biographies. I like the way food works like wine on my tongue, the warmth of winter, large light rooms, textures of papers, textures of poems, and the mysteries of motions; the other shares these preferences, but would never name them. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is familial; Mary lives, Mary lets myself live so that I may sculpt mirrors into ladders, and my literature justifies me, and my relationships justify me. It poses great simplicity for me to admit that she has put me together, she has saved others perhaps because I never could say what was good, or because I always could say what was good and I belong to everyone. In every case she is destined to lose all that I am, distinctively, and she sews herself through me with dropped stitches, with well worn accuracy.

Un-applied philosophy bores me like calculus; I do not wish to be anything eternally. I will endure in I not in Mary who is other, but reflections of echoed words paint themselves on mirrors without me knowing and I wake to find us enduring. Music is an attractive temporary.

I and Mary don't understand the vortex of abstractions in freedom, most families don't. We do understand infinity. In this way, my life is running away and I lose everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.

I know I am writing this piece.

Queneau Remix

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Change We Can Believe In

Since our last presentation Aaron, Leta and I have made quite a few major changes to our video project. In order to get to where we are now (done for now!) we went through even more changes.

For example, after receiving the feedback from our peers and after seeing the video in its entirety (we had not seen it played because of rendering problems) we decided that the chaos of our project was actually quite repetitive and a little boring. We figured out how to edit and playback our video in progress without having to render it, which was a huge breakthrough and turning point in the project's metamorphosis. It is much easier to edit your video, when you can actually see what you're working with (obviously).

From there, we decided to rethink everything. First, we took out the randomness of the videos popping up everywhere to try and take care of the chaos, and went back to our original idea of using three horizontal channels with the bar table a constant in the center. The audio tones were also removed and Leta was working on trying to find an actual song to play along with the piece. We began handwriting the text then taking videos of it, and thinking about what else we write on to help us remember. While we were changing the video from chaotic alien back to three channel harmony, we tried making the handwritten text videos a transparent full screen over the other channels and we really liked the aesthetic quality of the result.

The next day, I got obsessive, high jacked the hard drive with our project on it from Leta who gave me a remixed track of a Billy Holiday song and I headed to the lab. I wanted to see what it would look like if we made the whole project this kind of full screen, transparent memory collage instead of this three channel madness. Aaron and Leta were on board with this as well and after some editing of some hyper-yellow igoogle todo lists and the cutting of text, we found ourselves at a stopping point with the project.

In its current state, I believe the video and audio alone could successfully get our (as Leta put it) "thesis" across to the viewer, even without the text. That is why we cut a significant amount of text; however, I still feel that the text that exists on the transparent hand written videos adds a tension between the video and the audio and gives it a kind of narrative. The google to do list itself, which is the first text to appear in the piece acts as a different kind of memory than personal memory or relationship memory. This kind of memory is the everyday, don't forget to pay rent kind of memory. Our to do lists have language on them however, that are not often seen on to do lists and are not even tasks. These to do lists talk about the personal kinds of memory, but in a more analytical way than the hand written narrative, poetic segments do.

The collaboration continued to be interesting. I realized that I am a control freak, but then again maybe I already knew that. I hope my group understands. Also, after reading Meg's blog, I came to a realization that I think many of us did. Collaboration works best when each person has a unique role to play, like in a film production. It's strange to create something like a video project when we all have similar artistic and intellectual strengths and weaknesses. The risk for too many cooks spoiling the soup (is that the saying?) I think increases with this kind of collaborative model.

Overall, this class definitely pushed me to think about creative work in a less limited way. I have rethought what is possible for me as an artist and always lingering in the back of my mind is the challenge to catch writing up with the technological realities of our daily lives. It is exciting to study subjects and works that don't quite have a vocabulary or any way to talk about them yet. There is is such an established way to talk about writing that literary theory begins to feel rigid and tedious. I like how this new kind of art/writing not only pushes art and artists, but criticism as well.

I'm looking forward to remix!

The Memory of Space

Well I will start the progress of my video project by addressing my teammate Meg's request to discuss my experience with artistic collaboration. Although the logistics of meeting is somewhat of a challenge (we're all busy and highly interesting people) I think that my collaboration with Aaaron and Meg has (like the sound project) brought me to a place that I would have not nor could have not gotten to on my own. Meg really brought in an interesting perspective as our resident neuro science hobbyist which was a main inspiration for one of the channels we are constructing. Aaron's Hollywood cinematic acting overall badass background led us in a direction of experiments with video and narrative. I contributed the idea that I apologetically introduced as "new age touchy feely hippie" (which I hope it really isn't).

The idea started after sitting in a bar and wondering if people's conversations linger in those spaces, even after new people have replaced them in that space. Now you're probably understanding the touchy feely concern. Strangely enough, my team members thought it was an interesting enough idea to play around with in a video project.

From the beginning Meg and I wanted to do something with multiple channels and ultimately as a group we decided on three channels. The first channel starting from the left is going to be video or random (and not so random) neural connections that will be dictated by the images and conversation that occurs in the second channel (the center channel). This channel will contain video of one space occupied over time by several different people and is meant to embody this idea that space holds memory. We have not figured out whether or not we want to tell the people we are filming that they are on film. We also have thought about possibly straight up scripting the whole thing. Either way, this channel is going to occupy the space for space holding onto memory. For example, the lingering question for this channel that should arise is, if one group of people have a conversation on a subject in a given space, is it more likely that the same subject matter will come up in the same space among different people?

Finally, the third channel will contain text. This text is being as we speak collaboratively written in our shared google document and some of the language will be found (as from Pierre Nora-see below). We have been interested in some sort of loose narrative for the project and this is where the text of that narrative will unfold. Ideally, we also would like to have pop ups similar to Intervals by Peter Horvath.

During our last meeting, Meg also thought it would be interesting to layer a very transparent video over other video. This inspiration derived from Aaron using this technique in his sample project as we learned Final Cut last week. Currently we are collecting the footage and should be starting to put it all together shortly.


Works inspiring this video project:

Essays:

Pierre Nora - Between Memory and History

The following web cinema works by Peter Horvath:

TRIPTYCH: MOTION STILLNESS RESISTANCE

Boulevard

Intervals

....I will add more as I come to them!

My First Attempt at Web Cinema Writing

Web Cinema Writing? I'm not sure about that yet but it will have to work for now. The HD Flip is phenomenal and I'm having a blast with it. We are still in the brainstorming phase of our group video project but I wanted to try out the flip and see what I could come up with. It's pretty simple really, but here it is,




If you want to read the text better, here it is on Youtube (I recommend watching it in HQ and full screen):

Web Cinema

After watching/reading/experiencing Boulevard by Peter Horvath, I wondered how it was much different than a movie trailer. Then I thought, how many movie trailers have I seen that have three screens and poetry? Probably zero, but the piece does have a trailer like feeling which turned me off at first because I wanted to see cinema done in way I had never seen it done before. As I experienced more and more of his work, each piece seemed to enrich and build upon the previous ones; therefore Horvath’s work seems to work better for me when analyzed in context as a group as opposed to individually.

Although Horvath’s work is very visually driven, I was interested in his use of sounds in his projects. The mood is quickly set, if not dictated by music in pieces like Boulevard, Tenderly Yours and Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects. In Boulevard and Tenderly Yours the music and voice overs are slow, sad and reflective whereas the music in Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects is first triumphant then eerie. By itself, the music in Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects would almost be happy and upbeat, but grouped with the images of war and destruction, the tone moves quickly from happy to frightening and sad. The soundtrack of Boulevard and Tenderly Yours on the other hand, fit perfectly with the images of isolated, confused and sad individuals lost in an isolated, confused and sad world. The text and voice over in these two pieces appear in incredibly strategic moments to not only assist in telling the story but to be apart of the story as well. For example, in Tenderly Yours the womans's voice disappears when the woman disappears.

Text in Triptych: Motion Stillness Resistance appears in the title while also acting as labels for the different looping video panels. Unless text appears in one of the semi-randomly generated videos, this is the only text that appears in the piece. It is enough however, to draw attention to how similar motion, stillness and resistance are to each other. In motion there is stillness, in stillness there is motion and in resistance there is stillness and motion, usually in conflict. This piece also uses video and text to expose the arbitrary nature of labels. Had he chosen something like: Nature, Culture and Society, I probably could have made an argument about how these made sense as well. At first I did not see the point in the random and endless looping of the video, but now I see it as relating to this idea of arbitrary labeling in relation to understanding the world.

As far as the other artists go, I had seen the work of YHChang before so I didn’t want to spend too much time talking about it. Unfortunately, the more I see of her work, the less I enjoy it. Mostly because much of the pleasure of Chang's work is derived from the element of surprise. The first time I saw Dakota, I thought the pacing and strange way not every word could not be quite read, was exciting and interesting. Also exciting and interesting were the words themselves, as they are often racy and as unexpected as the motion of the work. Then after seeing the same technique over and over in every piece, it gets less and less interesting. So in a way I see Chang’s collective works to function in the opposite way as Horvath’s collective works.

I will continue my search for additional web cinema this week and post them here as I find them.

I Want It All

In David Streitfeld's Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It, the saddest moment for me was the moment when he described one of my favorite places, Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, OR as an example of an entity that has been negatively impacted by the changing habits of book buyers. I love books. Physical, paper books. But I also believe that technology and the screen not only provide readers with exciting changes in how they can access books but to writers for creating new ones as well.

So as I read these articles I struggled to figure out how I should best resolve this kind of contradiction. I came to the obvious conclusion: I want it all. I want to get my news for free without having to worry about how the journalists and photographers are paid (for example the article linked up above), I want free access to music whenever I want on IMEEM, download songs for free on BitTorrent, to sell my books online, save money on text books, watch Family Guy, Arrested Development and The Office for free and when I want on Hulu and I want Boulder Bookstore, Powell’s, Bart’s CD Cellar and The Video Station to all stay in business.

Is it possible that some of the problems with having infinite choices is that a) we really believe it and b) we have a constant and misguided sense of entitlement to it? When (and I say when because I think this is inevitable) most physical stores go out of business, making way for more and more online markets, some of our choices as to where we can buy music, movies and books are taken away. Maybe the very reason why I find online media access so appealing (the infinite choices, or at least the illusion of such) is the same reason why I don’t want Powell’s to go under. I am so used to getting everything I want that it is unfathomable, unfair and frustrating that a choice could just be taken away from me. I, like David Streitfeld seems to be, am upset that physical marketspace is disappearing but don't for example want to give up my emusic account. The internet has spoiled us. With every dollar, we as consumers cast our vote for where we think goods and art should be purchased, so why can't we just get behind those votes?

What Anderson seems to be getting at in his intro of Long Tail is that art’s move to the online market is giving more choice to the consumer in what they are exposed to and experience as opposed to when there were only six channels and a handful of records. But what about having the choice between browsing, the physical experience of discovering an aura filled object and downloading code that is projected as Ulysses on your Kindle ? There is a clear distinction between physically browsing the ballroom of Boulder Bookstore or the blue room in Powell’s and clicking through titles on amazon. There is something so wonderfully human about physically browsing books, records and movies and I still want that to be available to me; but until I use my votes ($) in the physical world I think I would be selfish and unrealistic to think that I can have something that I only support in theory.

P.S. Ok so I am at work right now and our tech guy just showed me this cartoon on book technology on this gaming site that I thought I would share: Progress

Digital Poetry: Is it good or just a good idea?

Before I really begin my analysis of Stephanie Strickland's 1997 talk, Poetry in the Electronic Environment, I have to admit that there are very few digital poems that I have come across and have actually enjoyed. I know that it is for this reason that I am so fascinated with digital poetics-I see it as an exciting new challenge for writing. Granted, I have only been exposed to a limited amount of digital poems so I am speaking from a humble and somewhat inexperienced standpoint. Either way, I feel I have read/experienced enough digital poems to have formed an opinion and here are some examples of digital poems I am convinced by, or enjoy: Dakota by Young-hae Chang, Dim O'Gauble by Andy Campbell (and other poems on New River) and Lollipop Noose/Hangman (below) by Todd Seabrook.

I suppose I should define what I mean by 'enjoy' and 'convinced'. When I enjoy a poem, or any work of art it is because the work evokes a strong emotional response from me. By convinced I mean more of my intellectual response to the piece. In other words, if there is a small or absent emotional response to the work, I would like there to be an interesting conceptual aspect to it that stimulates me intellectually. Maybe I am a reader response critic when it comes to digital poetics...

In Dakota, I enjoy the pacing of the poem, the simple but strong visual impact that the music and motion that text makes and the lack of reader control. At the same time, I think the writing is the weakest aspect of the poem. In what other form of poetry or writing is it ever true that a reader can say the writing is weak but that the piece is still strong? This is where my dilemma, or my conflict with digital poetics lies. I guess this is why I constantly fight the urge to call digital poems, digital poems. They aren't just poems because poems are words and paper. Digital poems as Strickland details in Poetry in the Electronic Environment have the potential to be much more than that. She seems to take the stand that this is better and in one sense I agree with her but on the other hand, I don't. I agree that digitizing writing carries the potential for creating an intersection between art and text and even text and text that was not possible with just the page, which ultimately can be seen as 'better' than the page. At the same time, I have rarely seen a digital poem that contains writing that is as interesting as the piece is conceptually or technologically. Strickland says in her discussion of hypertext and poetry (keep in mind this was spoken in 1997):

"In general, I think one could say about contemporary hypertext poetry that radical innovation does not reside at the level of the alphabetic text, with the major exception of authors who are themselves programmers. For those using off-the-shelf products, the changes reside in how to structure and divide text and how to accommodate the powerful set of co-players the text has acquired, that make for on-screen reading experiences both more radically individual and more adventurous than page-reading."

It is the last sentence here that really interests me because she slips in that digitizing poetry can make reading more adventurous and radically individual. The potential for the adventurous and individual qualities of interactive textual art is definitely there, I will give her that. The question that keeps badgering me however is, is that what readers of 'poetry' are looking for? What are readers of poetry seeking? Are we interested in the mere idea of a digital poetic more than the actual works themselves? As a poet and a reader of poetry, to oversimplify, I am drawn to poems whose words are sonically pleasing, intellectually challenging and semantically interesting at the same time. I hold the same standards to digital poetics and maybe it is my ideas about this new art form that need to change in order to appreciate it more or perhaps, it is the art itself that needs to come a little further and better realize its full potential.

Tinker Twain

My purpose for revising this blog from the 2/26/09 blog is two-fold. The first being that last week I was barely among the living with illness and second, the way our (Leta and I) sound project turned out is different enough from our original thoughts that I thought it best to explain it more accurately.

Us

To understand where how we ended up where we did, one must understand that Leta is a laywer and I am writer (she is also a drummer).

Our Process

The Texts

Our interest in creating a text driven sound piece still remains (as I mentioned in my previous and now deleted blog) in some kind of destruction and creation of text, physically, legally and figuratively. We first recorded ourselves reading The Tinker Law, a previously banned passage of James Joyce’s Ulysess, a passage from Mark Twains Tom Sawyer, and the U.N. freedom of expression law. Leta then thought it might be interesting to whisper these passages, so we did. It was creepy.

The Twain passage:

“I love you so and you seem to try every way you can to break my old heart with your outrageousness By this time the dental instruments were ready The old lady made one end of the silk thread fast to Tom's tooth with a loop and tied the other to the bedpost Then she seized the c hunk of fire and suddenly thrust it almost into the boy's face The tooth hung dangling by thebedpost now But all trials bring their compensations” (Twain)

was found by searching for the word “love” in the public domain google books version of Tom Sawyer and chosen because of the strangeness of the dental instruments phrase. Mark Twain’s novel was chosen because the banning of Twain novels is so well known and wide spread. We chose Ulysses for the same reason. The Ulysses passage: “Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft, soft, soft hand. I am lonely here. Oh, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me (Joyce, 49) was chosen by me as it’s one of my favorite Ulysses passages but also because it was banned (most likely because it was seen as pornographic). The laws were chosen by Leta (she’s the lawyer) and both deal with freedom of expression and creativity.

The Sounds

Our first editing job was to infiltrate the whispered texts of the laws with the whispered texts from the banned books. We took the actual texts of the laws and the banned books and carefully pulled out words from the banned books then placed them carefully into the freedom of expression laws. Laws can aid in the creation (or more specifically the protection) of art and expression but laws like the Tinker law actually can destroy these freedoms. By inserting previously banned texts into these laws, I see this as a chance for art and expression to infiltrate law instead of law infiltrating and impacting expression.

Our goal then became that every sound in our sound piece would be made from our original recordings of sound. They still of course had to do with the destruction or creation of text. The sounds that made it into the final version are: a lighter, a typewriter, encyclopedias being dropped and the sound of Leta writing on a sketch pad with a pencil. We altered these sounds using Audacity, some even developed a kind of beat. These were layered over the whisper/text tracks to form the project.

The following are some sound pieces that are similar and/or influential to our piece:

Cornelius Toner

Text Sound Compositions on UBU