Tag: digital

Vielstimmig, “Petals on a Wet Black Bough”

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Vielstimmig,
Myka. "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration,
and the New Essay.&quot Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st
Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. 89-114.

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Electracuse

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

Given that classes started today, I guess it is both appropriate and timely
to declare that
WRT302
is more or less together.  Along with tightening the schedule, I touched up
a few minor things this morning. I also drew up a questionnaire to gauge
familiarity and interest related to a series of twelve applications (not all
apps: HTML, image work, Flash, etc.).  For the first time ever (in a class, day one) I projected
a few slides onto the screen to frame our opening trajectories re digital
writing.  The plan–the course’s imagined topography–still feels pocketed
in a few places, but I’ll wait a week or two before deciding to shuffle anything
for that reason alone. Also, I haven’t come to terms with the role of
del.icio.us just yet, as its unkempt state suggests.

Katamari Walking

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Before Saturday night, I’d never played
Katamari Damacy.
In

Datacloud and again in
"Katamari
Interface," I read about the princely roller pushing the tacky (magnetic?)
ball through the game’s byways, gaining in things, some strategic, many
accidental. All of them counted, catalogued. They’re persistent in my own
Katamari-like memory, the projects I mention, their framing of Katamari Damacy
as an installment of the database logic implicit in much digital writing. Like
toaster ovens placed enigmatically in the middle of the street (what’s that
doing there?), Katamari logics have joined the clump that is my plan for
WRT302 this fall, too.

Speaking of stickiness (or glue), I’ve been walking
Y. most days
lately. Mornings. We’ve jogged, too, but whether or not I’m jogging,
he walks, mocking me and my slow, laborious pace. Puppies are voracious
collectors; Y., particularly so. He aggregates the street, its detritus,
its unseen flavors. Leeches miscellany: cig. butts, sticks, wilderberries,
leaves, wrappers, styrofoam bits, and so on. This gets at the deep tension in
our relationship (Dr. Phil, Y. takes into his mouth every tiny speck of crap and
debris in reach!). He’s learning "drop." It’s a sweeter
lesson since he’s come to understand that I’m not afraid to dig my fingers into
the dark depths of his kibble-pipe to retrieve the salivascraps rather than have
him ingest them for good. Back to the point of what I was getting at: Y.
is a collector.

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Adventures in Illegal Art

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

We caught up with a friend last night for dinner followed by Mark Hosler’s
presentation, "Adventures in Illegal Art: Creative Media Resistance and
Negativeland" in SU’s Shemin Auditorium. Hosler’s been involved with
Negativeland for 25 years. The group
self-identifies with media hoaxes; provocative audio-mixed new media films and
shorts; and radical fair use
politics (i.e., it’s all public domain). They’re well-known for
lifting material from U2, mixing
it into a two-sided vinyl single including profanity and stolen U2 cuts, then
repackaging the album in a jacket with U2 featured prominently so as to dupe
unsuspecting consumers. Lawsuits followed, as you might expect, and Hosler
alluded to a dicey four years, fraught with legal uncertainty. Here’s that album cover:

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Scent of Maps

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Again and again we’ve read articles by D.R. Fraser Taylor this semester on
the coming revolution of cybercartography (even if that rev. arrived a year ago
with Google Maps and its API). Taylor takes credit for coining "cybercartography"
in his 1997 keynote address, "Maps and Mapping in the Information Era" at the
ICC conference in Sweden. Conceptually, cybercartography relaxes
cartography from the constraints of paper; the map-maker and the map-user blend
together; their products–often dynamic and unconventional–play a range from
physical maps to imaginaries and abstraction (idio-data), often at the computer
interface. The "false objectivity" of physical maps is loosened to the
enigmas and wonder. Consequently we have a disturbance of traditional
cartography (i.e. the map-maker, his instruments, and ink).

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Phonographies

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

But that’s not what I went to the bookstore for. I stopped down there
to purchase a copy of Weheliye’s

Phonographies (a late arrival, absent from the shelves when the semester
started). It’s assigned for Afrofuturism in two weeks, and as I’ve
been trying to maximize break for getting a jump on the end-o-sem workpile, I
read through the library’s copy of the book, finishing it last night. But
it’s good enough to own. In fact, if the "DJing is writing, writing is
DJing" plug in Miller’s Rhythm Science resonated for you, Weheliye has an
entire chapter on the mix (c. 3). His opening chapters (the Intro and c.
1) also have a few good pieces on the record’s function as an inscribed sonic
medium. There’s much here to elaborate up the uncanny ties between writing
and phonography, to extend them, etc. The second chapter, "I am, I be,"
links sound to identity, working across issues of opacity and "sonic conjuring"
to categories and constellations of the subject (also echoes W.’s article on
black subjectivity, the optic/phonic and posthumanism in Social Text).
The third chapter: DuBois and the mix. c. 4: sound’s construction of space, read
through Ellison’s "Living with Music," and Darnell Martin’s I Like It Like
That. And c. 5 reads the circulation of the diasporic motif in songs
by The Fugees, Advanced Chemistry, and Tricky and Martina. The "Outro" has
a bit to say about about his methods and also, drawing on Massumi briefly, makes
a case for affirmative methods: "’techniques which embrace their own
inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so
meagerly) to reality’" (208). Chapters 4 and 5 stand out from the others
as places where Weheliye gives readings; his approach in those chapters
is somewhat less theoretical than in the others, aligning with more literary
studies or cultural studies re-presentations of sources. And yet, I expect
to return to c. 4 for his arguments about "sounding space/spacing sound" and the
issues of space remade by music, noise. For a more careful review, read

this.

The Cuttlefish and Its Ink

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

From Barthes’ RB:

I am writing this day after day; it takes, it sets: the
cuttlefish produces its ink: I tie up my image-system (in order to protest
myself and at the same time to offer myself).

How will I know that the book is finished? In other words,
as always, it is a matter of elaborating a language. Now, in every
language the signs return, and by dint of returning they end by saturating the
lexicon–the work. Having uttered the substance of these fragments for some
months, what happens to me subsequently is arranged quite spontaneously (without
forcing) under the utterances that have already been made: the structure is
gradually woven, and in creating itself, it increasingly magnetizes: thus it
constructs for itself, without any plan on my part, a repertoire which is both
finite and perpetual, like that of language. At a certain moment, no further
transformation is possible but the one which occurred to the
ship


Argo: I could keep the book a very long time, by gradually changing each
of its fragments. (163-4)

It didn’t spring to mind while I was resting face-up in the MRI
machine yesterday afternoon (tomorrow’s entry?), but I eventually settled on a
title for WRT302, as I noted
in the
comments following yesterday’s entry expressing my dilemma, a title brought
about by RB’s bit above. So it’ll be WRT302: The Digital and Its Links.
I thought about The Network and Its Links, but opted for the former.
Plus I had a thousand really good suggestions, all of which I’d have done well
to take up. The course proper is still six months out; I wanted something
splashy enough to attract enrollments and also something that makes theoretical
sense to me–something that would motivate me toward working carefully through
the many decisions between now and then. I really like the way RB gets at
the ratio between stabilization and drift, the inter-portions of anchor and
flotation, between a buried bow in the sand and a three-thousand year voyage.
The "image-system" generalizes to digital composition quite effectively, I’d
argue; arrangement and spontaneity, "structure is gradually woven." Could
be true of…. And so it will do. Not to mention, when I decided,
yes, this is it, I still had the metallic grind and industrial deep-buzz of
the body-part scanner lasting with me into the evening; all the more appeal for
the idea of composition as the increasing magnetization of ongoing attempts.