lexusnexus-blog

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Above: Powerpoint 4.0 installation process (source)

The tight interdependencies of information, technology, and speech become most apparent in moments of breakdown and failure. Meetings without properly formatted slides cannot take place. Computer failures prevent speakers from talking about what they want to talk about. Students refuse to recognize the legitimacy of lecture content unaccompanied by slides. Even within functioning presentations, subtle cues signal that visuals and speech are bound into a common rhetorical object. Sociologist Hubert Knoblauch has focused on gestural coordinating of verbal content with on-screen images. Whether by hand, mouse, or pointer, the indexical move signifies that pictures do not stand alone.33 The speaker, decentered by the screen, enacts a “multimodal discourse” characterized by “two paradoxical patterns in discourse structure, a linear pattern in time, a sequential rhythm to discourse, and a non-linear pattern in space, a constellation of signs and symbols in three-dimensional space.”34 Multimodal discourse requires choreography, compositionality, ways of deciding how meaning ought to emerge from different channels, how they stand in relation, how audiences experience gestalt. There is a tremendous dependence upon not just knowledge production but also knowledge performance, or virtuosity.

-Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson. (2016) “One Damn Slide After Another: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speach.” Computational Culture: A Journal for Software Studies. (link)

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“can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age? It is relevant to recall that the loop gave birth not only to cinema but also to computer programming... the loop and the sequential progression do not have to be considered mutually exclusive. A computer program progresses from start to end by executing a series of loops.”

-Lev Manovich (2001), The Language of New Media. MIT Press. (pdf via monoskop)

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Above: Glitched .gif from Ecco the Dolphin

NOTES ON ECCO THE DOLPHIN:

“No, I never took LSD, but did read a lot from John Lilly.” 

-Ecco the Dolphin creator Ed Annunziata, 2012 (link).

“In the 1960s a small selection of neuroscientists like John Lilly were licensed to research LSD by the American government, convinced that the drug had medicinal qualities that could be used to treat mental-health patients. As part of this research, the drug was sometimes injected into animals and Lilly had been using it on his dolphins since 1964, curious about the effect it would have on them.” 

-Christopher Riley, 2014 (link).

“As a federal researcher Lilly secured the product (which was a controlled substance) from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals under an NIMH contract, and was explicit about his intentions to give it to the dolphins. I am quite certain that no one evaluating the application would have batted an eyelash, since there were plenty of neuroscientists giving LSD-25 to captive animals in those days — including fish, dogs, and primates. It made perfect sense to try it on the animal that seemed to offer the greatest promise of cognitive sophistication.” 

-D. Graham Burnett, 2010 (link)

[    r e c u r r e n c e ~ L i f e s t y l e     ] エコー ザ ドルフィン Ride the C a t a c l y s m

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Rest in peace Brummbaer

“Once you have let your optical membranes caress Brummbaer’s electrifying, throbbing screens you understand that your brain is a soft, juicy, pulsing cyber-sea with 100 billion computers (called neurons) waiting to be strobed with intelligent, funny digitals... Brummbaer’s name will be honored in the cybernetic Hall of Fame because he was the one of the first hackers to convert the computer into a pulsating, vibrating instrument of pleasurable communication.” -Timothy Leary, 1990 (source)

Rest in peace to an under-appreciated innovator.

The groundbreaking computer animator and artist Brummbaer has left us today (1945–2016). His diverse practice started in the 1960s with pavement painting, psychedelic poster design, and light shows for Amon Düül II, Frank Zappa, Tangerine Dream, etc. By the 1970s, he was running an underground comix company and had translated/edited Robert Crumb’s first book into German.

With the 1980s, he discovered his most expressive medium—the computer. He was a prolific computer artist with innumerable animations as well as digital paintings (a master of Deluxe Paint). He also created SFX for Johnny Mnemonic and a CG history retrospective for SIGGRAPH ‘95. Several health battles came with the 2000s but he continued to create and publish two autobiographical books. In describing Brummbaer during a 1992 interview: 

Ever modest with regard to the magic that he spins, Brummbaer says that his philosophy of creativity stems from his notion that an artist is but a humble window washer. His computer screen, he claims, is simply a window that allows him to see through into other worlds, and all he does is polish the screen so that we can see through to the other side.

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Above: production notes included with Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“one general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer. Digital cinema technology is a case in point. The avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as the ‘cut and paste’ command, the most basic operation one can perform on digital data. The idea of painting on film became embedded in paint functions of film-editing software. The avant-garde move to combine animation, printed texts, and live-action footage is repeated in the convergence of animation, title generation, paint, compositing, and editing systems into all-in-one packages.” (p. xxxi)

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my YouTube channel is finally taking off

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Above: stills from “End Millennium” demo (Darin Acosta, 2015) [LINK]

"You and your sister break into Wal-Mart in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane with a stranger you met on Craigslist. As the evening descends into madness and hallucination, you must decide who you trust more: the stranger, or yourself?” (End Millenium, author’s description)

twine is opening the game/electronic literature interzone up to new audiences, topics, subject matter, etc. this project nicely demonstrates the engine’s potential for animation and sound in addition to non-linear text exploration.

NOTES ON TWINE:

“Twine’s reference materials (oriented not toward code and problem solving, but to affirmation of the individual experience as the basis of a game), user interface (analogous to common brainstorming/writing techniques), orientation toward vignette (with the genre's subversive potential) and open distribution model (free to download, free to share, and exported as HTML) make the platform a uniquely-accessible tool for creating highly personal games.”  (Friedhof, J. “Untangling Twine: A Platform Study”)

NOTES ON ELECTRONIC LITERATURE:

from Hayles, K. (2002). Writing machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

(full text pdf via monoskop)

“a rhetorical form [ie, ‘fiction’] mutates when it is instantiated in different media. The power of MSA [’media specific analysis’] comes from holding one term constant across media (in this case, technotexts) and varying the media to explore how medium-specific possibilities and constraints shape texts.” (Hayles 2002, p. 31)

“The writing machines that physically create functional subjects through inscriptions also connect us as readers to the interfaces, print and electronic, that transform us by reconfiguring our interactions with their own materialities” (p. 131)

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Above: image from Hertz, G., & Parikka, J. (2012). Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method. Leonardo, (5), 424.

“Reuse of consumer commodities emerged within various art methods of the early avant-garde in the early 20th century, from Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s work with found newspapers in 1912 to Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel of 1913 or his inverted Bedfordshire urinal Fountain of 1917

[....]

Instead of using electronics to explore or develop cutting-edge technologies, this approach uses ‘trailing edge’ everyday and obsolete technologies as its key resource.” (p. 426, emphasis added)

contemporary usage of discontinued midi audio gear such as the casio cz-101 and yamaha dx-7 keyboards (produced circa 1985) constitutes a vernacular form of historical research.

even more recent products still in use today, such as korg’s first-generation electribe sampler, demand that users familiarize themselves with discontinued storage media (in this case, toshiba’s SmartMedia flash memory cards).

other devices, like the alesis HR-16 drum machine, enjoy an extended shelf life because of their circuit-bending potential. in this case, historical inquiry regarding the product itself serves as the launchpad for new cottage industries to emerge.

obsolescence is obsolete. today, the presence or lack of ongoing maintenance determines the functional status of historical media devices.

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Notes on Digital Audio

(img src)

Video: “1999-2011 The History of Napster” (link)

“the story of Napster, told through homepage screen shots that were made via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine”

“Mp3s of songs do not sound the same as the CD recordings; a professional audio engineer could certainly tell the difference. But the amazing thing is that as we move from ideal listening environments into the situations in which people usually hear mp3s, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish. Mp3s are designed to be heard via headphones while outdoors, in a noisy dorm room, in an office with a loud computer fan, in the background as other activities are taking place and through low-fi or mid-fi computer speakers. They are meant for casual listening.” 

-Jonathan Sterne, “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,” New Media & Society vol. 8 no. 5, p. 835.

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Above: Autonomous Housing Project Køpi 137 in Berlin, Germany (blurred out of Google Street View)

Links:

“Germany’s Complicated Relationship With Google Street View,” By Claire Cain Miller and Kevin J. O'Brien for the New York Times, 2013.

“Köpi” entry on de.Wikipedia.

“How to Remove Your House from Google Street View,” by Alexis Kleinman for Gawker, 2014.

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Notes on Recent Violence

“It is not the case that an already existing peaceful union has been savagely shattered. We have merely been reminded that unity has to be made; it is not simply observed. Far from being self evident, unity was never more solid than a future possibility to struggle for. Unity has to be the end result of a diplomatic effort; it can’t be its uncontroversial starting point.” 

-Bruno Latour, War of the Worlds: What About Peace? (full text link)

“Politicians call on us to take part in their political concerns, economists call on us to be responsible, to work more, to go shopping, to stimulate the market. Priests call on us to have faith. If you follow these inveiglements to participate, to be responsible -- you are trapped. Do not take part in the game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things, do not hope. Dystopian irony (dyst-irony) is the language of autonomy. Be skeptical: do not believe your own assumptions and predictions (or mine). And do not revoke revolution. Revolt against power is necessary even if we may not know how to win. Do not belong. Distinguish your destiny from the destiny of those who want to belong and to participate and to pay their debt. If they want war, be a deserter.”

-Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. (review link)

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Above: 

Fig. 1: 1877 patent for Thomas Edison’s electric pen (second revision),

Fig. 2: 1891 patent for Samuel O’Reilly’s electric tattoo machine.

Images from the Thomas Edison papers, digital edition (link)

Edison’s Electric Pen: Mediating Changes in Gendered Authorship

Presented at the annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), Montreal/Longueuile 2015

In 1876, Thomas Edison began marketing his “electric pen” to offices and white-collar businessmen. The pen was meant to enable easy reproduction of business documents. Users would apply the pen to a stiff sheet of paper, puncturing the surface with a moving needle tip. The needle would create a design in the surface, producing a stencil, which could then reproduce images when rolled over with ink.

The product was generally deemed a failure. Office-workers complained that the tool was noisy, difficult, and messy. Beginning in 1891, however, the electric pen was re-fashioned into an electric tattoo machine. 

In histories of writing that privilege formal education, commercial publishing, and literary texts, the electric pen appears as a mere footnote. Expanding from the history of authorship toward a more general history of inscription, however, this paper suggests that the electric pen was actually quite successful. 

“Success” is a socially constructed category. In the case of the electric pen, received historical notions of “success” are tied to gender, class, and race stratifications formalized in education systems, beginning at least as far back as medieval manuscript culture.

This project is a part of some ongoing research concerning the afterlives of failed technology. 

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Above: Topanga Canyon Mall, (source)

Retail Soundscapes and the Ambience of Commerce 

I made a podcast for Sounding Out! recently. Excerpt from description:

Equally reviled and revered, the programmed soundscapes of retail space combine wonderful serendipity with quotidian blandness. This podcast examines field recordings from luxury megastores, suburban fast food joints, and everything in between. As it turns out, the corporate ambience of chain-store retail isn’t so far away from the high-brow ambitions of ambient music. Ambience is whatever surrounds us, and it’s embroiled within the same kinds of aesthetic, political, and economic struggles that have been recognized in architecture for centuries.

link to full post

direct link to mp3

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ON THE INTERPRETATION OF SNEAKERS, SPRING/SUMMER 2015

a semiotic chart

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I presented some research on vaporware preservation yesterday at DiGRA. Huge thanks to everyone who came out, gave comments, asked questions, etc. Some great information on other related projects, too.

In the paper, I use a sociology of knowledge/Latourian approach, looking at users who collect/preserve unfinished software as “spokespeople” for the non-human objects that they represent. While a lot of folks responded positively to this framework, I did get one responder who was more critical. When you use Latour, he said, you get into an actor-network perspective that does not leave room for artifacts to have multiplicity, diversity, or emergent qualities.

I responded by saying that I use Latour for his insistence that nonhuman objects have agency, and that human users are forced to “negotiate” with them during mobilization. I never use the word “network,” because I agree that thinking in terms of a network topologies can lead quickly into determinism. I advocate Latour without networks, which I hope can avoid some of the divisive responses that his work usually elicits. 

Also: Very proud to say that my work has been labelled “hipster game studies.”

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from “Burning Man 2015,″ Facebook event.  

Burning Man has an image problem

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an event i’m helping to organize at rutgers next week. i’ll be speaking on pre-columbian gaming in north america along with current discourses of gambling, education, and chance; i’ll also be leading some dice games. more info at http://selectstart.rutgers.edu/