an online memory of online meandering

Sunday, January 28, 2007

SELF
Innovative 1994 R&D GUI programming environment that attempted to emulate physical systems, emphasizing: directness, uniformity and modelessness.

PDF: "Self: The Power of Simplicity" David Ungar and Randall B. Smith, 1994

Self: The Movie
Tracing the Dynabook
"Desktop computing and multimedia were not first conceived as tools for office workers or media professionals— they were prototyped as “personal dynamic media” for children. Alan Kay, then at Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center, saw in the emerging digital world the possibility of a communications revolution and argued that this revolution should be in the hands of children. Focusing on the development of the “Dynabook,” Kay’s research group established a wide-ranging conception of personal and educational computing, based on the ideal of a new systems literacy, of which computing is an integral part."
Writing the Digital Life
"WDL is a collaborative transdisciplinary blog about the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience. We talk about writing and reading in the context of 'new and old' media, transliteracy, craft, art, process and practice, social networks, cooperation and collaboration, narrative and memory, human computer interaction, imagination, nature, mind, body, and spirit."
"Books were still governed by the old rule,

Born of a belief that visible beauty

Is a little mirror for the beauty of being."



Czeslaw Milosz, A Treatise on Poetry

Saturday, January 27, 2007





Theories of Media Change: Understanding New Media - Garnet Hertz

"Towards the end of his life, McLuhan and his son Eric embarked on a project to update the 1964 Understanding Media in response to his critics' requests to provide a solid basis for his drastic and metaphoric claims; the result was Laws of Media: The New Science , published by his son eight years after Marshall's death. Laws of Media defines a general theory of media change, constructing a tetrad model with four characteristics of media-in-transition: extension, obsolescence, reversal and retrieval."



10:02am January 27th, 2007,
I listened to the following two generative audio sites at the same time:

The Mockingbird Project
&
Variations VII: FishNet by Mobius

Friday, January 26, 2007

Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu interview by Chic Thompson
"Genius lies in developing complete and perfect freedom within a human being. Only then can a person come up with the best ideas."

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Tuesday, January 23, 2007



Alexis O'Hara

"Writings of many sizes and varieties.

Fresh product according to availability.

No-carb enterbrainment.

Suitable for all all levels.

Satisfaction is your choice."
Guillaume Apollinaire, La colombe poignardée, 1918




E.A.T. 1966 2002

"Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), founded in New York in 1967 by artists Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg and engineers Billy Kluver and Fred Waldhauer, was the premier art-and-science organization of its time."




William Poundstone

"...the nautilus emblem may suggest the Web itself, with its labyrinthine architecture and spiraling growth."




U B U W E B :: After Language Poetry -- Christian Bök: The Square Root of -1
"...the web page may provide the first, truly synaesthetic composition by field, in which the page no longer offers a passive terrain for the exploration of a lyrical thought because now the page itself can interact both dynamically and sensorially with the poet, engaging every sense at once in an immersive experience beyond the limited purview of the word."




U B U W E B :: After Language Poetry -- Brian Kim Stefans

"Cyberpoetry does not exist, and it is time that this preposterous fiction followed the trace, the spectacle, the rhizome, the libidinal economy, the paradigm, the sememe, phoneme, grapheme, little Miss Prision and the eighty-thousand North American progressive dadaists into oblivion. Why not?"

Brian Kim Stefans' Kluge




"But why write poems

If not because grief or joy

Has seized you. Why read

Them if you don't want

To make us weep or shout aloud?"



David Orr,

Concerning the Book That is the Body of the Beloved,

Copper Canyon Press, 2005




Poetry Magazine

"Academic poetry is intelligent but dull; non-academic poetry is dopey but exciting. Fair or not, that's been the rule of thumb for at least half a century, and generally speaking it's suited everyone just fine."




Richard Kostelanetz | Examples | Three Visual Litterateurs

"We are coming to recognize visual literature as a distinct genre whose measure is simply the visual enhancement of language. Once the concept of a distinct genre is in mind, we can acknowledge that visual literature can appear in many media, only one of which is books...."





Paul Laffoley, The Phenomenology of Revelation (1989)



NOTATION AND THE ART OF READING, Karl Young
"The idea of notation implies, if not demands, performance. Virtually any form of writing is a kind of notation and any form of reading is a type of performance. Poetry is an intensely physical art, one that activates several senses at once. In aural societies poetry has traditionally been accompanied by facial movement, gesture, manipulation of symbolic objects, the drawing and painting of figures, the wearing of costumes, etc. -- all of which, in a tribal context, are read. Poetry still is a physical art using multiple senses: the body as a whole equals or sometimes replaces the voice in performance art, and even silent readers turn pages, move their heads, their eyes, the roots of their tongues if not their tongues and lips, and so forth."




slope 17: | Luiz Antonio | Digital Poetry
"...a non-exhaustive list of terms..."

Friday, January 19, 2007





NT2 | Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualités.

"Quel est le statut du texte littéraire, de l’art, du cinéma sur Internet?"

Tuesday, January 16, 2007





: : whisper[s] research group : :



"...developing technology and communications metaphors that enable networked wearable devices to communicate affective states in a continuous manner."

"aRt+d."




Scientists Discover New Life Forms In The Arctic Ocean

"The researchers have discovered a new group of microscopic organisms, which they have baptized "picobiliphytes": pico because of their extremely small size, measured in millionths of a meter, bili because they contain biliproteins, highly fluorescent substances that transform light into biomass, and phyte meaning they are plants."



"It's a very exciting discovery," comments Dr. Lovejoy.





Perception abstract

"Oliver Sacks observed autistic twins who instantly guessed the exact number of matchsticks that had just fallen on the floor, saying in unison “111”. To test the suggestion that normal individuals have the capacity for savant numerosity, we temporarily simulated the savant condition in normal people by inhibiting the left anterior temporal lobe of twelve participants with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). This site has been implicated in the savant condition. Ten participants improved their ability to accurately guess the number of discrete items immediately following rTMS and, of these, eight became worse at guessing as the effects of the pulses receded. The probability of as many as eight out of twelve people doing best just after rTMS and not after sham stimulation by chance alone is less than one in one thousand."




Born Magazine: Art and Literature Collaboration

Born Magazine is an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media. Original projects are brought to life every three months through creative collaboration between writers and artists.


organic information design | ben fry

"Design techniques for static information are well understood, their descriptions and discourse thorough and well-evolved. But these techniques fail when dynamic information is considered. There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. To approach these problems, this thesis introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design. The resulting systems employ simulated organic properties in an interactive, visually refined environment to glean qualitative facts from large bodies of quantitative data generated by dynamic information sources."
HorizonZero Issue 01 : WRITE
Daniel Canty : "Horizon One: Write issue concentrates on adaptations of that most intense form of writing - literature - from paper-bound book to computer screen."

Monday, January 15, 2007





Perspective | Futility Closet







Earth seen from 4 billion miles away, photographed by Voyager 1 on June 6, 1990.





Of the "pale blue dot," astronomer Carl Sagan said, "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
N Katherine Hayles:
"...we are near the beginning of a theory of media-specific analysis in literary studies." ( p.102)

Writing Machines
:: web supplement
:: book


run wrake's rabbit

Saturday, January 13, 2007





Tortuga :: Chapter 2. Art and Consciousness

One of the outstanding features of civilization is the antagonism that develops between what comes to be called science and art. The former term literally means "knowledge"; the latter, "a way of doing things."

If wisdom is the union of these two, their separation implies a loss of meaning,
a fall into absurdity.


"Without contraries is no progression.

Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate,

are necessary to human existence."



- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,

"The Argument", 1790







"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged numerous senses could percieve." (Plate 11)



"For every thing that lives is Holy."

Friday, January 12, 2007

//////////fur////
Roots
A world with a fluid atmosphere in a glass tank. Dark crystals grow trying to make connections. Constellations develop. They generate sound. And after some time they dissolve into clouds...,
Dynamic Sculpture, 2005-2006

Robert Frost

"Adventurous is not experimental. Experimental belongs to the laboratory. Adventure to life. Much of recent art has been merely experimental. It tries poetry with first one element then another omitted. I leaves out the head. Then it is too emotional. It leaves out the heart. Then it is too intellectual. It leaves out the feet. Then it is free verse. Adventure ends in the poorhouse. Experiment ends in the madhouse. Water spout theory of learning from above down from below up till it meets."

SOURCE: Harpers, Readings. January 2007, p. 11. From The Notebooks of Robert Frost, Harvard University Press, 2006.

Thursday, January 11, 2007



Lawrence Fixel

The effort of the Intellect is to explain the Mystery.



The effort of the Imagination is to express the Mystery.
Brian Jones | If You See Kay | (2005)




QDB:

Damn... while coming home from the store, this drunk came up to me, and was like, "Hey, you big black nigger! Loose-lips McGee, why don't you go back to your monkey relatives? Bet you couldn't even add 1 + 1."

And I calmly respond, "What's the derivative of cosecant(x)?"

he just replied, "fuck you" and left..

The Dead

Billy Collins reads his poem "The Dead"
with animation by Juan Delcan of Spontaneous.

bukowski



mo[ve.men]tion net(wurker) mez
"Mez's ID.xorcism, written in her by now famous "mezangelle" language shows us one more time the possibility to use the Net as a non-linear reading tool and that coding can be artistically and culturally oriented, through its creative re-interpretation."

Jacques Derrida - Fear of Writing

News at Seven

News at Seven automatically generates a virtual newscast pulled from stories, images, videos and blogs all linked by a common news topic.

Uri Geller

Experiments with Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institue (SRI) in California.

David Lynch: Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain

Cyberkinetics - Neurotechnology Systems, Inc.: BrainGate™ Neural Interface System
The BrainGate™ Neural Interface System is currently the subject of a pilot clinical trial being conducted under an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) from the FDA. The system is designed to restore functionality for a limited, immobile group of severely motor-impaired individuals.

Human Computation

Google TechTalks
July 26, 2006

Luis von Ahn

ABSTRACT... the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.

I describe other examples of "games with a purpose": Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge. I also explain a general approach for constructing games with a purpose.
Justice Vs. Power - Chomsky Vs. Foucault, Part 1
Globe4D - Time-Traveling with an Interactive Four-Dimensional Globe




The Prometheus Society Articles The Outsiders

"His name was William James Sidis, and his IQ was estimated at between
250 and 300 [8, p. 283]. At eighteen months he could read The
New York Times, at two he taught himself Latin, at three he learned
Greek. By the time he was an adult he could speak more than forty
languages and dialects. He gained entrance to Harvard at eleven,
and gave a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the Harvard Mathematical
Club his first year. He graduated cum laude at sixteen, and became
the youngest professor in history. He deduced the possibility
of black holes more than twenty years before Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
published An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure.....Of all the prodigies for which there are records, his was probably the most powerful intellect of all. And yet it all came to nothing. He soon gave up his position as a professor, and for the rest of his life wandered from one menial job to another. His experiences as a child prodigy had proven so painful that he decided for the rest of his life to shun public exposure at all costs."






"Our research orientation is that a detailed understanding of basic emotional systems at the neural level will highlight the basic sources of human values and the nature and genesis of emotional disorders..."



Jaak Panksepp -- Affective Neuroscience





Stephen Oppenheimer - Out of Africa human origins

"Who were our ancestors? From where did we originate? If we came out of Africa, what factors governed our routes? And when? Now finally this interactive map reveals an exciting journey of opportunity and survival, confirmed by genetic science and documented by ancient rock art."




A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being: A Challenge to Positive Psychology?



"....the basic needs of people, needs such as healthcare, education and housing, have strong effects on SWB [Subjective Well Being]."




Auditory Seismology

"A collection of audified seismograms can be heard via the web to give an audible impression of the earth's sound."

Asa-Chang and Hunray





Theodore Roethke


" When I go mad,
I call my friends by phone:
I am afraid they might think
they're alone. "




Chris Hamilton-Emery Offers Advice on How to Make Poetry Submissions

"Alas, sympathy does not sell books, it sells greeting cards...."







www.wendagu.com



wenda gu

"united nations: united 7561 kilometers

....5000 m human hair braid made of 7561000 m of human hair, rubber stamps of recreated 191 nations’ names of the world, a hair column
1 m human hair = 0.00529 g, a 50 m hair braid = 0.4 kg (400 g), 5000m human hair braid = 7561kilometers (4698 miles)..."


Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life




"We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the street, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one."

Tuesday, January 09, 2007



Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

"...if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do."

Sunday, January 07, 2007





Fragments from the Library


"As the circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications involve us in network processes - which of their nature plant us in a perpetual present - our perception of history will inevitably alter. .... we meet the past as much in the presentation of words in books of specific vintage as we do in any isolated fact or statistic. The database, useful as it is, expunges this context, this sense of chronology, and admits us to a weightless order in which all information is equally accessible." Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies:




MoMA.org | Exhibitions | 2007 |

Douglas Aitken | sleepwalkers



"...continuous sequences of film scenes will be projected onto eight facades...the artist will create a cinematic art experience that directly integrates with the architectural fabric of the city..."

Blog Archive