other tangents

kant and cog-sci

2007-07-22T18:59:00.000-07:00

is out there?
in here?
or at the interface?

where do the laws of things begin?
where does the wild joy live?
where does self begin?

in between becomings
truth is breathing
experiences

tickling transcendence
from within time
mind makes concepts

empirical meals served raw
dissolve into absolute
nourishment

another wasted day of code tinkering

2007-07-09T22:08:00.001-07:00

I feel like a gerbil on a wheel
reproducing technological font effects that have been thororughly masticated by previous generations.

Here's why: demo
Based on the superior: andre michelle flag
and very old news compared to 1998's It's Alive

Thinking about Thinking -- Epistemological Topologies and other Recursive Quanderies

2007-06-11T22:07:00.000-07:00

While searching for antecedents for the use of the term "topological epistemology" (which is a phrase I utilize in my thesis to refer loosely to how ideas are dynamic shared species/ecosystems that evolve around and within us...) I encountered Aaron Sloman's Logical Geography and Topography. He uses the term "logical topography" in a much more rigorous and insightful manner to elucidate (if i understand it correctly) the set of potential state space of concepts. In the process of his essay he also offers a very powerful definition and model of science and attempts to extend this definition into the study of epistemology:

"Doing deep science, e.g. newtonian mechanics, electromagnetic theory, quantum physics, molecular biology, theoretical linguistics (as opposed to the kind of shallow science that merely collects data and looks for correlations), involves coming up with a theory that cannot be derived from the evidence, but can be tested against it, where the theory has a collection of core 'axioms' embedded in a system of logic or mathematics in which inferences can be made.

This could be done for a theory about the structure of a collection of concepts. Then demonstrating that such a theory (a) is internally consistent, and (b) has the right set of consequences to explain facts of usage about which there are (usually, though not always) no dispute, would be more like a mathematical and therefore non-empirical task than like the empirical task of collecting evidence about usage using surveys."

Sloman is advocating treating concepts with similar rigor to mathematics. Douglas Hofstadter in I Am a Strange Loop (2006) describes Godel's incompleteness theorem as a conversion of Whitehead and Russel's Principia Mathematica into numerical terms. All of this migrational throughput between disciplines suggests that envisioning epistemology as a topological dynamic landscape is both fruitful and accurate at the empirical level.

Sloman distinguishes in his essay between

"Logical Topography (the structure of the space within which the divisions can be made), and Logical Geography (a particular set of subdivisions that happens to be used in some culture)."

Sloman continues to refine this distinction :

"...logical topography involves: not just exploring the connections in existing usage, but exploring the variety of possible concepts that can be defined in connection with the subject matter that is being investigated, analysing the relative merits of different partitionings, and showing how actual concepts do or do not relate to those."

What I am suggesting with a usage of 'topological epistemology' differs slightly in emphasis from Sloman’s concept in that I am advancing a notion of the subject-terrain as a dynamic landscape, and drawing an analogy between truth-validity and species survival (which echoes Dawkins' memes). Laws are not static; even universal physical, conceptual, and metaphysical truths are simply structures in this philosophical system. Structures are subject to time, decomposition, maturation and all the other life-processes of birth, death, change.

Geometry is the study of static surfaces; topology (for me) is those same surfaces animated and evolving. Human ideas grow on convulsive substrates.

To cite my own thesis: 'I conceive of knowledge as a landscape and theories as neighbours. I do not believe in the necessity of defending ideas; and I believe that approaches to epistemology can have political implications. In this ontology, ideas are living; they may have differing validity dependent upon the viewpoint but that does not alter their status or right to exist. Evidently there are limits to this attitude; I am not advocating an empirical absolute relativity; and I do not accept as true everything that occurs within my own mind. '

Between Science and Literature

2007-06-05T00:14:00.000-07:00

I haven't been writing much. Thesis writing has taken precedence.

And a bit of recoding of Thoems.

I was returning home on the sky train tonite reading : Livingston, Ira. Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.) --quite exhausted, bit of a sore throat -- and Livingston's making a distinction play between withness and witness. Basically language is a living system, self-organizing and its this inseparability from life and the world (it's withness quality) that makes paradoxes about its capacity to witness certainty arise.

I agree with him on these points.
But of course that leads Ira into the entire materiality thing. In short, the referential quality of modernist language as an illusion, and how the motion of post-modernist poetry and literary is toward a concern with language as an entity. And its there that I disagree on the exclusive importance of investigating language as system: humans probably are incapable of really seeing things change at a temporal scale that makes the refractory nature of language become dominant. Language still works pretty well, as one tool among many (along with image, touch, smell, proprioception and sound) for us to explore the equally complex seething dynamic of emotion, or biology, or cultural theory for that matter.

Still it looks like a fascinating book and if (as I suspect) i am about to fall sick with a cold, it will prove a wonderful companion.

On a synchronistic note, I came home hit the stumbleupon button and found a joke (very typical so i extended it to include a cultural theorist and a poet)

::::::::::

An engineer, a scientist, a mathematician,a cultural theorist, and a poet were traveling together on the sky-train to SIAT. Just as they passed over the bridge, they saw a black barge on the river's far edge.

"Oh look," the engineer said. "All barges in Surrey are black."

"You cannot say that!" the scientist exclaimed. "You can only deduce that this particular barge is black."

"You cannot say that!" the mathematician shook his head sadly. "You can only deduce that this side of that particular barge is black."

"You are confused by referentiality!" the cultural theorist snorted. "Language refracts as it is contingently saying that this side of that particular barge is black."

"O!" sighed the poet. "Tiny specks and smudges arguing in the sun about scratches."

:::::::::::

Studying emotion has the disreputable pleasure of being considered contentious by both scientists and cultural scholars.

Which reminds me of a tangential bit of academic territorialism: I heard a more-than-fascinating virtuosic speech on critical geography by Jeffrey Derksen --- in relation to “space-agent wah” at SFU downtown Thursday, May 31, 2-5 pm 'Count Me In: Writing public selves' -- Derksen discussed spatial scales, space bending, and how to locate spaces of emancipatory possibility.... It all sounded a lot like Scott Kelso's open dynamic non-equilibrium systems with a socio-political twist, but when I mentioned this to Jeffrey afterwards, he cautioned that some folks in the cultural theory world might not appreciate the association.

Humans are strange creatures indeed.

2.1 Major Analog Poetic ‘Schools’ or ‘Movements’

2007-05-13T00:02:00.000-07:00

“Experimentation in new forms of prose, collaboration, proceduralism, and collage have diminished the role of the lyric subject in favour of a relatively neutral voice (or multiple voices)…the instrumental function of language is diminished and the objective character of words foregrounded…language poetry has made its horizon the material form rationality takes.” (Michael Davidson on the LANGUAGE poets, as cited by Rothenberg. Joris. 1995. 663)

Poetry has a long history of vigorous experimentation. Because it exists at the periphery of society (and at the centre of language in its self-conception), poetry is free to explore formal terrain that is not permitted to prose. Innumerable analog (print) poetic movements have contributed or anticipated to varying degrees the emergence of theoretical concerns active in contemporary digital poetics. The Dadaists, Surrealists, Lettristes, Futurists, Concrete poets, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and OULIPO movements have each, in their own way, provoked radical recalibrations of the page, text and semantics. The Lettristes and Concrete poets created vivid visual knots of text, which are ancestors of the current developments in 3D text display and dynamic mobile text. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets posited engaged texts that dealt with the materiality of language as technology, anticipating the current dominant theoretical paradigm of digital poetics . Algorithmic poetry (on a computer) was anticipated by the OULIPO group whose systems of analog writing constraints constituted a sustained engagement with generative algorithmic literature.

My own practical inclinations are not theoretical. I find some degree of affinity with the views expressed by a marginal splinter group loosely grouped under the title of PostLanguage poets who advocate a poetry disengaged from formal theoretics, a poetry that is allowed to evolve according to the inclination and tendencies of the artist instead of a set of systematic ideological forms. In the digital poetic realm, the online works at BornMagazine reflect this aesthetic foregrounding. The following section will explore theorists and theories which have evolved around language in computational contexts; this literature review will hopefully form a foundation from which to situate digital poetic work that does not initiate from a theoretical foundation.

Many language poems are computationally tractable. The central features: disconnected sentences, intentionally deconstructed narrative focus, hybridized spatio-temporal locations, and mixed lingo from different domains. One exemplary current digital poetics practitioner perhaps inadvertently replicates the LANGUAGE style using feeds from Twitter rss streams (tiny text messages that are migrating like starlings in public space among the pdas of conference goers). The patterned ecosystem of live realtime txts is mixed with video footage from a railway station, the twitter user icons, and flickr feeds. The writer is essentially replaced by the internet who steps aside and becomes information architect to the evolving dynamic undulant topological skin of data that is being twittered around. The effect is sporadically, like the best of LANGUAGE poetry, absorbingly hypnotic; the style is the same (disconnected sentences, intentionally deconstructed narrative focus, hybridized spatio-temporal locations, and mixed lingo from different domains ) In the digital work, the live feed (the page) work never repeats. It’s written by no one and everyone. Repetition, accumulation, variation and redundancy ricochet through the network. Language constructs itself. The digital poet is a voyeur of perforated space, The Waiting, hovering zones where humans nourish their appetites for absorbing anonymous patterns (L'attente, the waiting / Flussgeist 1 (2007) Gregory Chatonsky )

Response to Glazier's Criteria for Innovative Digital Literature

2007-05-06T19:25:00.000-07:00

Glazier outlines 3 criteria for innovative digital poetic practices.

1. " Innovative work avoids the …’I’…..a sentimentalized 'I,' often concerned with its own mortality, can be considered as having passed away." (Glazier 2002. 174).

Response: Humans devote inordinate energy to their affective condition. Text materiality should be considered by any digital author; in fact from the practitioner’s viewpoint, the materiality is simply knowing one’s tools, the IDE’s.. The ‘I’, far from being ‘passed away’, seems to permeate reality. Have nation states dissolved? Has death stopped? Has anyone ‘reading’ this never fallen in love? known loneliness? felt wounded? What account of this world that strives for holistic comprehensive clarity can disregard the ‘I’? Fiction offers us meta-I views, glimpses into other subjective cages. Poetry offers glimpses to the core of ‘I’ where forms of shared intent emerge.

2. “…the innovative digital literary text employs an architecture that places textual structures within the contours and values unique to its medium, a practice of textual ecology.” (Glazier 2002. 174-5).

Response: Agreed. To be ecologically viable, digital poetry must be adaptive to (and capable of surviving in) new media habitats. Yet nature is rarely unique, and evolution demonstrates an enormous amount of repetitive use of forms and strategies. New media is not exempt from absorbing evolutionary materiality. Old ways will lose relevance, adapt or go extinct. Many traditional poetic techniques (repetition, motifs, aesthetics, proportion, form, grace) transplant well into digital media.

3. “Enabling of new tools of intelligence. This quality suggests avoiding the reinscription of authority, totalitizing positions, and commodifying of the artworks.” (Glazier 2002. 175).

Response: Yes. This world is venomous; taming the human cognitive system for compassionate uses is important. However, restricting poetry to a non-authoritarian, non-absolute and non-commodified position consigns all poets to a relativistic totalitarian poverty. It also throws out a massive part of poetic inheritance: Ezra Pound? William Blake? Perhaps some humans are innately authoritarian commodities? Culture is how they communicate.

Glazier also points out what for him are ‘traps’ : narrative, the link, and ‘author versus programmer’ ( Glazier 2002. 175-6).

Response: All stable systems are ‘traps’.

Medium: Flash Video Interactivity : The Illusion of Choice

2007-05-06T18:04:00.000-07:00

The fact remains, I build most of my digital poetics work in Flash. As of 2007, it remains the most viable choice for rapid prototyping web-based multimedia work. But there is something almost banal about declared allegiance to a software. It's a bit like confessing to a brainwash.

Consider carefully the metaphysical intent of the 3 finalists in the Video category for the Flash in The Can 2007 People’s Choice award (links at bottom). These are 3 extraordinarily slick big budget advertisements; if this is choice, then underwear is toilet paper. The motivation for these works is money.

The planet's economy demonstrates two major inefficient uses of its talents: building weapons and making advertisements. If an equivalent amount of money was spent on research into how to put people in need in contact with what they need as they need it, then the internet could eradicate advertisements.

Instead, plain and simple sell tactics predominate, competitively dressed up in immaculate streaming video. Intricate, absorbing, intoxicating and ultimately sterilizing, indoctrinating merchants of consumption and lifestyle flourish. Luminary philanthropists they are not; enormous money goes into advertisements. Very very little goes into digital poetry. The field is neglected because in general it emphasizes the non-transparency of information and language: it is hard to sell ambiguity. My Flash video work sells peace using aesthetics; seduces the autonomic into reveries with non-linear affect. I feel that epistemologies of peace and awareness and indeterminate knowledge must be absorptive by bodies.

A lot can be learned technically from advertisements; they are mastering direct embodied communication online. The intensity with which these sites play affect within the reader is profound. Their technical virtuosity is superlative. A parody of Allan Ginsberg's Howl in that the best young minds of our generation have become advertisers. The entwined juice of cognitive science, psychoanalytic insights, demographic studies, and extreme branding aesthetics (3D modelling, chroma-keyed and airbrushed sets, vector tweens joyously sprouting like candy-coloured orgasms) create evocative yet ultimately banal and manipulative excursions into the human body. The human autonomic nervous system is largely beyond the conscious control of any human. These ads leverage that truth and ad-ject new parameters of respect, desire and goals into those who watch them.

Propoganda, poetry and advertising share the same evolutionary roots: the insistent rhythm of reality exporting its resonant thoughts to others.

From the 3 ad-sites mentioned above, 3 basic design principles can be derived:
Load swiftly.
Auto-play.
Allow choice, but reward inertia.

The ad-sites following 3 basic metaphysical principles need to be refuted:
Lie. Profit. Kill.

What is art’s role?
Truth. Give. Love.

*********************************************************************

Their dishonesty extends even into their names:

Friends of Orbit Bright – a racistly-white parody site promoting chewing gum and chastity (which makes me think of sex! and you?). Painfully obvious perpetual brand placements. It's aimed at tweeners.

Outlook Theatre – a car made glamorous through association with video vignettes of a perfect family and immaculate romantic moments. Light fluffy and efficient consumers. It's aimed at the wife archetype.

UFC66 – an Ultra fighting championship labyrinth full of snarling warriors and big time money. It's aimed at soldiers, the dispossessed and anyone who needs to fight to survive.

Reader Response Theory and GUI Design

2007-05-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

Reading is to books/texts what using is to interfaces. Reading is often assumed to be passive: texts contain known meanings. But, as with food, text enters into different bodies. One person may be allergic to a particular food; another may love it. Positive and negative associations may influence the reading of the text. Literary criticism evolved in the mid twentieth century to incorporate the idea of the reader as an active participant in the construction of meaning. Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, and Susan Sontag were among those theorists who developed and came to accept the role of the reader as an interpretive agent to some degree. Fish in his 1980 "Is There a Text in This Class" argued that readers approached texts with interpretive bias that constructed their experience of it. For Fish, the sameness of how many texts are experienced is due to 'interpretive communities' who share and propagate meanings.

It is my feeling that interface design theorists will increasingly follow this same path. The user of an interface is not a generic entity. Experience, aptitude, age, gender, operating system, culture, sensibility, interests, moods...the list of potential factors which could influence or bias response to an interface are huge. To isolate any one variable in a quantifiable valid experimental protocol ultimately involves stripping an interface down to an extremely simplistic representation. This reduction risks eradicating the living quality of an artwork. The reader may be faced with a situation that is formally rigorous yet aesthetically sterile. For this reason, I have chosen to take the notion of 'art-research' literally: art-research provokes irreducible qualitative responses on an individual basis that have validity as research results even if not intended by the artist or explicitly elucidated in any theoretical framing text.

Digital poetry art-works themselves create complex responses that emerge from the confluence of many features. I am not suggesting that quantifiable analysis is impossible, merely that it risks eviscerating the subtle essence of aesthetic experience; it would necessitate protracted and careful work which is beyond my scope as a solitary practitioner.

Multiple complex reader-specific interpretive analysis opens pathways to understanding the idiosyncratic effect of digital poetics. In this analysis, the confluence of variables is too complex to reduce without harming or destroying the actuality of the work. This form of analysis is generalist and seeks to understand through practice and design iteration how art can be made that has an effect locally on me, the artist. It is assumed that work that resonates and 'works' intuitively and visually for one being will invariably have some sort of audience (how ever marginal that might be). In this way, I cannot argue for any generalizable conclusions, but the ability to deal with complex multimedia interfaces is left open.

digital literature

2007-05-05T21:43:00.000-07:00

"This irruption in temporality from within writing introduces characteristics of oral literature to a resolutely non-oral object. To borrow a term from Robert Escarpit, it transforms the written text from being a document to a semi-document (like a film). What's more, it imposes the irruption of an act within the space of linguistic signs, imposing a poetic function for action on the poetic function of language. Borrowing from Jakobson's famous formula, one could say that animated literature plots the constructed axis of sequential reading onto the plane of equivalence in written representation...

...Alire has, for the first time in France, proclaimed loud and clear that computerized literature is literary and not a linguistic tool, as suggested by the programming and software camps who dominate Europe at this time. The first task for Alire was to affirm that literature was not "assisted by" the computer, contrary to the ideas of A.L.A.M.O. (Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs, [Literature Workshop Assisted by Mathematics and Computers]), but that there exists a literature tied intimately to computer technology....

Alire fights vigorously against such finished text objects or closed, functional 'histories'. In so doing, the journal defines literature as a computer-based process and not as a creation or result."

Bootz, Philippe. “Alire: A Relentless Literary Investigation.” Digithum 4. 2002. http://www.uoc.edu/humfil/articles/eng/bootz0302/bootz0302.html.

expressivity quotations

2007-05-04T23:04:00.000-07:00

Forms of Future by Michael Joyce

"The web is a pretty difficult space in which to create an expressive surface for text. It seems to me that the web is all edges and without much depth and for a writer that is trouble. You want to induce depth, to have the surface give way to reverie and a sense of a shared shaping of the experience of reading and writing. .... language finally finds its natural element in motion, not in a window but as a window, not as a single surface but as the aural, visual, and proprioceptive experience of successive surfaces. "

Chang, B.-W. and Ungar, D. "Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface." in UIST'93: Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 1993. pp. 45-55.

"The experimental user interface for the programming language Self uses techniques drawn from cartoon animation to replace sudden changes with smooth transitions, offloading some of the cognitive burden of interpreting the change to the perceptual system. For example, a small object grows continuously to a large, expanded object. A menu transforms smoothly from the menu button that is clicked on to the full menu. Objects move solidly from one location to another, maintaining the illusion of solid movement even if they must cross great distances in a single frame. These and other, more subtle, applications of animation to the interface work together to make changes on the screen smooth and clear.
Bringing this kind of animation to the user interface has both cognitive and affective benefits. By offloading interpretation of changes to the perceptual system, animation allows the user to continue thinking about the task domain, with no need to shift contexts to the interface domain."

Teleport : combinatorial photo-fiction

2007-05-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

Teleport was completed in 2006 while reviewing cognitive science research into affect and synaesthesia. It is an online prose-poem that incorporates terminology (and insights) from cog-sci research inside a short fiction of an alien intelligence that teleports its mind into a human body. The thematic is reflected at both the level of content and materiality. Inside a hijacked body, the alien (literature) struggles to maintain control and decipher perceptions in a new (online) body. Teleport is fiction in a medium alien to paper and books: networked, accessible, mutable, auto-playing, silent, non-interactive , it is like a literature sculpture, hovering awaiting the perfect reader .

Visually it extends my concern for affective pattern into a sustained study of inanimate matter and dead ‘things’. How do static tableaus get read? What emotions are projected onto small inert items? Teleport is a visual testimony of invisible communities: plastic stippled coves, garbage, glue, water, dead bugs, dust, hair, sponges. Teleport’s inert matter portraits constitute an imagistic argument for the immanence of affect in everything. The hypothesis is that livingness, character and truth are reflected in all phenomena; when inanimate small-scale phenomena are re-contextualized as art, affect will emerge as the human cognitive system reads the visual patterns for emotional meaning. In conventional narratives, privileging the human world leverages the corporal reflexes evolution has placed within each reader; Teleport attempts to trigger those reflexes with micro-landscapes that would normally be categorized as irrelevant. In this way, the mechanistic autonomic aspect of affect and its role as amplifier in the construction (projection) of meaning is considered.

Teleport is also an experiment in combinatorial text-image creation. The story loops but does not repeat the same text never occurs again with the same images. 123 images are used as the backdrops for 122 phrases (the story is split at every period) so the combinatorial conjunction of image and phrase is quite large ; in other words, it rarely repeats exactly; it proposes, as many of my works do, an arbitrary algorithmic element into the notion of digital poetic page design. The animation of the words is enclosed in code which follows a set pattern with mild perturbations. The titles of the pictures are also displayed, operating (hopefully) as enigmatic commentaries. The entire effect is intended to offer a collision of contexts and ideas, from that collision sparks of affect emerge as the viewer confronts their reflexive tendencies to interpret these small environments in light of the ongoing textual story as landscapes, sites, and spaces of both tragedy and comedy.

Figure : Teleport (2006). One of many image-text combinations.

[1]There is no interactivity because humans have no control over time, birth, death. The subject of the story is not in control of the body it has dropped into. Digital culture is vulnerable to the illusion that we are masters of time and destiny, renderers of fate. In reality, mind is often just a mute immobile witness to mechanistic waves; everything that seems more than just a wave to it is probably just patterned systems moving too fast for its comprehension. Immobility, ignorance, impotence: stroke, coma, death. Teleport is about death and how matter takes life. The origins of myth and radiant microcosmos of catatonia.

[2]My combinatorial math is quite weak. And the factorial of 123 +122 reads undefined in online calculators. Anyone?

Language quotations

2007-05-02T22:32:00.000-07:00

Human opinions are experienced as facts by those who hold them. Knowledge, or epistemology, is an ecosystem of phenotypic opinions.

Tomkins (vol iv, affect imagery consciousness, p.17): "Language is designed to be a transparent medium mechanism."

Walter Benjamin (One Way Street, p.112): "Language is thus the mental being of things."

If there is anything I learn its that each genius has a domain.

working thoughts while making meanderings mashup

2007-05-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

//since blogger limits its entries to 999 but stops its rss feed at 25
//i am faced with daunting and unpalatable task of building a custom html parser... yuck
//each entry is a wad of superfluous data....
//how best to extract it for redisplay in flash9 as3 (a language i am just learning)?

step 1:
tidy gui converts the messy blogger code to fairly minimal xml
without all the cruft
or so it seems on first glance
in fact cruft remains
its just replaced headers...
must fiddle with diverse and voluminous settings...

first attempt: export as ascii
(who said being an artist was any different than a relentless infinite bureaucracy? kafka would have reveled in it. eternal humiliation of configurations.)

tick tick tick
same same same
a half hour passes parsing and parsing, no results...

so on to next loading problem
and think of the metaphysical aspects of the design's intent:

//what device functionality will my mind need in a computational recursive memory tool?

easy sift, easy sort
like lifting handfulls of pollen
tossed into the air suspension
lingering over touch

//how will amplification (Tomkins 1997) --the emotion of it-- work?

sort by those lingered over most
find the root mean of longing

its too easy to do something cool
lets concentrate on the content
what relationships exist between all this stuff, this knowledge, this list?

GLOSSARY (in progress) -- v0.01

2007-05-01T17:58:00.000-07:00

Affect: basically synonymous with emotion in my usage. Affect is a term from psychology brought to general contemporary usage by many but prominently by Silvan Tomkins in the 1950s who asked the question: “Could one design a truly humanoid machine?” Tomkins understands the “affect mechanism as a separate but amplifying co-assembly” which means he sees its role as a booster, a wave augmenter-damper in the brain. Affect is seen as a necessary aspect of cognitive decision-making in lesion studies (Damasio 1998, 2000). In post-modern philosophy, affect refers generally to a wide range of embodied experiences from the primal to the sublime. My view is a hybrid of all the others, affect fuses with physical reality: it recursively sets the valence of each particle’s approach to phenomena. Crucial readings Affective Computation, Rosalind Picard; Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp; Antonio Damasio, Silvan Tomkins, and Gaston Bachelard (whose aesthetic sensitivities offsets other more scientific approaches).

ELO : Electronic Literature Organization

Particle systems: humans, neutrinos, bubbles, neuro-modulators, stock prices, planets, universes. Everything known (and even some of what is unknown) is a particle system. Particle systems are not simply computational animations developed by Karl Sims; nor are they a theory of systems; they are manifest systems: comprehensive holistic swarming interconnected idea-forms. Particle systems are systems in motion: sets of temporarily autonomous data traversing space-time.

Spandrel : “A spandrel is a term used in evolutionary biology describing a phenotypic characteristic that is considered to have developed during evolution as a side-effect of a true adaptation, specifically arising from a correlation of growth, rather than arising from natural selection. The term developed from an analogy of causal relationships between forms found in architecture and those found in biology.” ()

Materiality : study of the effects of the medium on communication.

CHAPTER 3:METHODOLOGY

2007-04-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

"A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system - but even that, in his case, is borrowing from a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition." ( Joseph Brodsky, 1987, Nobel Lecture. )

3.1 Methodology Problematic : Why it’s difficult.

Methodology is problematic for arts such as poetry. Spontaneous, intuitive, immediate, often un-anticipatable, and emotional, poetry does not seem a good candidate for enclosure within a rigid methodology. All systemic methods threaten to inhibit the fragile process of authentic inspiration, or to be built yet hold nothing: wind cages, light enclosures, wave locks.
Seeking consensus amongst diverse practitioners, distils method into aphorisms that guide approach to the work: listen to the inner voice, be true to your heart, speak honestly, strive for simplicity, express the inexpressible.

Such phrases are evidently contentious and problematic within the confines of academia. Their explanatory power is marginal. Too often they become the refuge of solipsistic refusals to listen to any criticism. Yet the history of art is based upon outsider exiles who voyage beyond received wisdom. Holderlin wandered in a schizophrenic daze over the alps muttering to himself, returning with fragments that continue to be analyzed and discussed today. This thesis is intended to navigate the delicately actuality of art-making and the demands of scholarship, providing an introduction to an artistic practise that straddles reason and irrationality, interface design and art, science and folklore, and heart, brain and body. It offers an epistemological challenge to the norms of how we consider knowledge to be generated and shared.

Proposed: Knowledge is the glistening atmospheres that envelops all matter. Language is demarcated at every interface. Recursive consciousness permeates all forms.

Video Making as Wonder Seeing

2007-04-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

Filming in tidal pools, rivers, jars, puddles and plastic bottles, I attempt to discover behavioristic analogs of psychological truths. In other words I look for things that look like us. Like cities seen from space: information visualizations of masses of people, commuters, data clouds. I investigate patterns of self-similarity in ordinary things. Crowds of scurrying beckoning specks self-absorbed in intricate activities: dust, pebbles, pollen, spores, shells. Laws of physical motion and form that somehow extend into consciousness. The interior of a puddle can be considered an ecosystem. Inside the puddle, a tiny shrimp exhibiting curiosity may experience an eternity in an afternoon.

I appreciate the sentiments offered by photographer Garry Winograd who says: “It’s a picture problem … I learned a long time age to trust my instincts … Hopefully you are risking failure every time you make a frame … There’s no real system … Light on surface. That’s all there is, is light on surface…It’s not just the act; it’s the subject…It should be an adventure in seeing…I can’t seem to do enough of it. It’s pleasure.”

“Reason is the outward bound circumference of energy” (William Blake)
What lies beyond it?

In the turbulent dissipative structure that I imagine is beyond reason (perpetually evolving on the edge of plausibility), imagination has its home. . Is reason truer? It’s not a relevant question since both reason and imagination arise from the same system of neurological energy within the same (evolving) set of physical constraints. For this reason, I do not make a value-based distinction between the entwined physical systems of reason and imagination. Dreams, hallucinations, fears, loves, and lusts derive in great measure from both systems; terror needs logic to invent fear; and desire utilizes dreams constructed along probability trajectories. Each form contributes to art- research. Long before Freud re-introduced occidental humans to their evolutionary inheritance, desire and fear were born in the body. The blood, feces, glia, snot, spit, striated tissue and semen of the body are reflected in my choice of subject matter: thick fluids, household soaps, turpentine, honey, maple syrup, soya sauce, acrylic paint. In these materials consciousness is implicated. This constitutes my approach to “materiality”; my idiosyncratic answer to Hayles’s appeal for materiality is to invstigate the materiality of content beyond the digital, to re-reference the world, to re-matter the world, and at the same time make it transparent, a screen through which we see ourselves.

TCR: Poets, Speech and non-conceptual Net-Art

2007-04-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

In his introductory essay to The Capilano Review special issue on digital writing, guest editor Andrew Klobucar writes provocatively: "The final severing of writing's long and historically problematic relationship with speech begins with the screen itself as a device of communication."(p.8) This statement while valid from one perspective is potentially invalidated by a model of digital culture (inspired by Ong) as 'tertiary orality'. Witness the resurgence of Def Jam spoken word videos on youtube; poetry slams; indigenous translations of Haida myths by Bringhurst etc...I feel somehow that instead of a severing, a suturing, a joining or union of the written and oral is precisely what digital multimedia offers: voice-overs of spoken text mixed with generative audio and streaming video constitute a merging of disciplines, a reintegration of the voice into the page, and an opening of the contextual field .

In tracing the history of computer-generated poetry, Klobucar identifies the agreed-upon earliest computer poetry as Theo Lutz's 1959 "Stochastiche Text"; the first machine-written book as William Chamberlain's 1984 "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed".

In the same issue of TCR, Jim Andrews in his essay "The Body of Net Art" writes "I do think that the edge of net art will continue to be strongly involved with trying to do funky shit with an internet connection. Why? That's a crucial distinguishing characteristic of net art versus other types of art..." (p.99)

Jim accurately describes this practice as the 'edge' of net-art. What of the other contours? It is my feeling that investigations of the medium dominate the early phase of art's relationship with a new technology. Since the web continues to change, these conceptual investigations of the media/technology itself continue to have relevance. But there is a significant portion of the technological infrastructure of the web (the basic network structure, URLs, html, Flash) which have matured and now offer what constitutes normative service. No one is amazed by their email anymore, or blogs, we read them for their content; and every other technological innovation will follow a similar path. A spike of interest in the device in-and-of-itself followed by a dissipation of that interest as interest in 'what it can do' and 'what it delivers' becomes ascendant. Eventually media become invisible, as the technology of language has for the most part become. Investigations of network media as media will still play a role in net-art. From Jodi to the Electronic literature Organization, engagement with networks as networks and code as material is a core aspect of the digital aspect of art practice. I feel however, it should not and is not exclusively the only path that interesting net-art will take. A substantial space exists for the exploration of lyric and mythological artistic practice in digital poetry. The metabolism of humanity, our neurological inheritance is tuned to feed on lyric and myth which transduce emotion and cosmological questioning into language. Incorporating these venerable traditions into contemporary net-art constitutes an enormous opportunity for a digital poetry.

Tertiary Orality and Digital Poetic Composition

2007-04-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

On the theme of "third orality" (which is how features of oral culture are reoccurring in digital culture), an insight into the creative process of composition of digital poetry arises when comparing oral composition to database composition.

In 1928, Milnam Parry radically restructured western critical understanding of how Homeric poetry is composed. Parry's proposed that oral poetry was a process of following metrical structures and drawing on a large repository of epithets or formulaic phrases to fill in the blanks. Instead of inspiration and memorization of words, oral poets follow metre, and then utilize an archive of phrases. (Drawn from Ong, Orality and Literacy, p.17-21)

In 2001, Lev Manovich, developed theories about database logic, repeatedly stressing how the ability to access lists of data and link to other data "contribute to the anti-narrative logic"(Language of New Media, p.221).

Comparing these two theories it is possible to see how oral composition is interpretable as database narrative: the archive of epithets and formulaic phrases are retrieved from the cultural database and used to fill slots according to metrical criteria. Perhaps this compositional method offers a viable model for anticipating how larger scale narratives will emerge from databases in spite of the bias against narrative that Manovich has chronicled.

As an empirical case-study, I offer the methodology I used for creating Interstitial: mp3 titles became phrases which sorted into chapters were stored in an archive (although formally a database structure, they conceptually are comprehensible as a database). Phrases from the correct archive were retrieved stochastically; proto-narrative emerged at the confluence of database and choice.

Ong: technologizing of the word (updated for internet)

2007-04-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

"Orality-literacy dynamics enter integrally into the modern evolution of consciousness toward both greater interiorization and greater openness."
Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen, 1982). p.179.

Do networked computers constitute a new language dynamic?
If so, how are they influencing the evolution of consciousness?

Ong (p.130-2) lists the following as the effects of print:
1. removed rhetoric from center of academy
2. encouraged quantification of knowledge
3. eventually discouraged iconographic knowledge representations
4. produced exhaustive dictionaries and culture supportive of definitions
5. reinforced language as textual
6. major factor in development of notion of 'personal privacy'
7. created a new sense of private ownership
8. encouraged self-reflexive thought, awareness of thoughts as impersonal things
9. encouraged sense of finished text (final draft, completed work, no marginalia, no erasures)
10. text as subject of literary criticism,
11. text as derived from lived experience (as opposed to borrowed from ancient works in oral tradition)
12 gave rise to romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of textbook which proceeds from definition to definition
14. birth of fixed point of view and fixed tone (McLuhan,1962)

If digital media is accepted as being a dynamic shift in language use comparable to the transition from orality to print, then similar substantiative changes will occur in the evolution of consciousness as the mass of humanity adopts networked digital communication. Ong referred to TV and radio as 'secondary orality'. On that basis, the internet may be 'tertiary orality', but the term may not be apt. Networked computational communication superimposes and potentializes aspects of both orality and print/literacy cultures. Yet it also does more. As an emerging discipline with indeterminant conventions (margins? buttons? motion? links?), it is exhibiting experimental fluctuations. Online interface design is evolving, integrating off-line innovations and introducing new sets of possibilities that are outside the boundaries of oral or print cultures. Networked multimedia introduces unprecedented simultaneous and instantaneous vectors of communication which are altering our collective relations to knowledge: blog comments, social networks, discussion blogs, forums, helplines, chats, mmporg, second life, augmented reality, haptics, biometrics, brain machine interfaces, bots...

What changes will/are occurring?
What are the effects of the internet on conscious perceptions?

1. defocalizing primacy on written word: shift to multimedia
2. visualization of quantified knowledge and eventually emergence of tactile data will re-privilege qualitative and aesthetic aspects of knowledge research
3. rebirth of iconographic representations
4. birth of self-correcting, de-institutionalized, open-source knowledge repositories (wikipedia)
5. language as multi-modal (video,audio,text,interface)
6. major factor in resurgence of public space: social networks, shared bookmarks, shared citations, peer-to-peer networks
7. major factor in resurgence of public ownership : creative commons and open source
8. awareness of thoughts as shared, simultaneous abstract, lifeforms
9. encouraged sense of UNfinished text (blogs, incomplete posts, comments, correctable uploads, redesigns)
10. text as subject of communal criticism / praise : thumbs up or down inside stumbleupon networks
11. text borrowed and woven from other sources online
12 mashups on romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of educational-sites which proceed from link to link
14. birth of networked point of view and rebirth of turbulent collaged tone

Multimedia version to follow.

Digital Whims and The Emergence of Nu Baroque

2007-04-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

In The Iron Whim, Darren Werschler-Henry documents the the history of typewriting. It is in essence a study of a technological apparatus that has become antiquated, and as a history of technology provides intriguing insight into the cultural values that accumulate around tools as they are born, mature and dissipate into the back-order catalogs and junk shops. When initially introduced into society, typewriters were generally perceived as antithetical to the artistic imagination: mechanistic hindrances. Yet by the time of the demise of typewriters in industrialized society, they had assumed an aura associated with inspiration and a mystique of the author's potency as a channel for divine imagination (Weschler, p.6-7). So clearly, cultural attitudes toward writing technologies shift; our conceptions toward technology are contextual; the idea of technology mutates with attitudes.

As they mature, computational writing tools (both software and hardware) invariably will become the subject and sites of similar diffusive projections of opinions and mythological debates. Nowhere is this more clear than in the evolving theoretical debates over the materiality of the medium and code as poetry. [Example: Critical Code Studies, Mark C. Marino ] My feeling is that as valid as these theoretical dialogues are, any attempts to position a truth on the situation negates the actuality of the constantly changing reality: viewpoints aggregate together to inform our collective notion of every tool's identity. Putting fences into the ocean does not constrain water.

In looking at computation poetry as it is practiced by non-theorists, it is possible to find evidence of mutations and migrations away from the materiality debate. This motion is indicative of an evolutionary shift in the artists relationship to the tool. Work is emerging which revels in the potentiality of the computer as tool without investigating the implications of the tool as medium. As with advertising where (as I've stated elsewhere) theoretically disinterested participants advance the technological potential of the medium, a few digital poets practicing now are involved in aesthetic expressive explorations involving 3D and baroque sensibilities. The technology has now passed the point in its evolution where it is opaque and mysterious and the subject of discussion; its existence has been digested; computers are now a normative feature of the cultural landscape; a generation is emerging who have never been without them; as such they display a tendency to regard them as tools that simply assist the artist in communicating their vision. This I feel constitutes one of the evolutionary life points of a technology. This insight is corroborated by McLuhan who recognized that each technology has a life path.

Among the emerging generation will be digital poets whose dexterity with the tool renders the medium's materiality transparent and irrelevant. Emphasis will shift as it did in literary criticism onto the semantic and humanistic aspects of the work. Consider "Distant Air" by Myron Campbell. The website is a compendium of stylized highly accomplished visuals and brief poetic texts. It utilizes 3D figures in a way evocative of both crude dada collage, film noir and gaming. Yet the text, sparsely interspersed behind the visual facades, is personally evocative and poignant; the fonts, baroque and resonant of illuminated manuscripts. This highly idiosyncratic and effective weaving of aesthetic elements and merging of interface design with traditional subjective meditations on death constitutes one potential evolutionary path now available at this stage of its life for digital poetics.

The previous generation's theoretical foregrounding of materiality can be considered a corollary of the newness of the media; its alien-ness and foreignness evoked an almost obsessive scrutiny of its functionality. To draw a spurious although relevant analogy, it is as if digital technology in the 80s and 90s was a newborn baby; like incessant parents, theorists gathered to scrutinize its feces. Now the baby is a little beyond a toddler, less an object of fetishized adoration and more a potential nuisance. It begins to establish an identity. It becomes less an object which needs to be constantly fed and cared, but is developing into a subjective entity with a distinctive identity.

1. Darren S Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Toronto, Ont: McClelland & Stewart, 2005).

Naivety, Stupidity and Authenticity

2007-04-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

"Naive is the word for stupid in the academic lexicon; it names a quality fatal to the aspiring hermeneut."
"Poetry and 'Stupidity': Beats to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E." Kevin McGuirck. Open Letter 11.1 (Spring 2001): 96-112.

If the preceding statement is true, then I, the aspiring hermeneut, am already dead. The fatal infection of naivety is at the core of what I (perhaps foolishly) consider the roots of raw authentic inspiration. Introspection on my own practice-based art-research leads directly to an awareness of the role of naivety in creation; often it is only through a naive clarity, an innocent mood, uninhibited by critical compulsions that projects initiate themselves. Yet I am aware that to situate or affiliate oneself with naivety is contentious; it risks provoking questions which can puncture the validity of an argument. Let's examine potential objections that might arise.

If art is the conscious mastery of communication and tools, what role has naivety in art? Doesn't that suggest we should value the art of the insane or childish more than masters? Art Brut did just that (collecting the art of marginalized anomalistic personalities). Art Brut was a movement led and espoused by Jean Dubuffet; it is a vivid example of valuing naivety in art; it's philosophical embrace of naivety is almost total. In Art Brut, often practitioners are literally the victims of organic obsessive compulsive disorders; art brut hovers between aesthetics and a freak show, aesthetics emerges through anomalies; it attracts paradoxically through revulsion and simultaneous wonder. In Art Brut, the edges of sanity melt away. Words or activities are transfigured through relentless repetition into large-scale monuments to endurance. The Art Brut path is one aspect of naivety; it is not representative of what I intend by naivety. Also naive are the relentless hordes of innocent postcards and romance novels, the aphorisms and injunctions that knot sentimentality into cliché. This ubiquitous practice is also not at the core of my definition.

Instead, there exists among the diverse alternative modes of naivety that remain un-enumerated by the incomplete preceding catalogue, a path that incorporates naivety without surrendering intelligence. It is a pathway that adheres to the nature of thought as it is thought; that cherishes the instantaneous gesture without deifying instinct; in a sense this form of naivety can be considered a proposal for neurological egalitarianism. Given that a human is a complex apparatus of intersecting neurological and enteric modules, it proposes that artists are not emphatically ruled by the reentrant circuits of analytical logic. Conjunctions of patterns arising through internal interfaces all contribute to the nebulous swirling notion of our self; art that is honest must allow the voices interior to this cloud-self to speak. In other words, artistic creation can arise spontaneously from the raw datum of thought, independently of a conceptual precursor. As Joyce wrote: "I shall express myself as I am." (James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

Contemporary theoretical initiatives are emerging from credible research institutions which advocate a clear play of ideas, free from the formal censorship of conventional scholarship. Naivety is not any longer fatal; it may stigmatize, but as a methodology it has its advocates, notably Henry Jenkins from MIT:"Popular culture is defined in part by its immediacy and it is not clear that one can meaningfully understand how it works or what it does without stepping at least temporarily into the realm of the proximate and the passionate."
Henry Jenkins, April 16, 2007. http://www.henryjenkins.org/

By juxtaposing the immediacy of culture against the slow production values of classical scholarship, Jenkins advocates a 'temporary' leap into 'the proximate and the passionate'. His argument generalizes well into a model for artistic practice in the digital era. Naive uses of technology need to be reexamined, but first of all be allowed to happen. Poetry without play is not poetry.

As Kevin McGuirty says in his essay on poetry and stupidity: "poetry, I would argue, has engaged more variously and promisciously, sometimes covertly, sometimes brazenly, with the many forms of the stupid." (Open Letter, 11.1, p.99). McGuirty emphasizes how this courtship is paradoxical: stupidity is deviously intelligent innocence. A preeminent example of the lucid innocent wild child persona is Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). Patchen's highly idiosyncratic style and pleasure in severely raw innocent visual poetry have limited his audience. Critical receptivity to Patchen is rare; his works are too hallucinatory, and rabidly political to be subsumed by the academy. He represents a dangerous subject, America's own William Blake.

Kenneth Patchen

It is from this tradition that digital poetry emerges. And as with any child it can deny or refute the influence of its forebearers only at the risk of inducing a hypocritical schism in its nature.

A Gap in the current Theory

2007-04-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

Currently, there is a gap at a theoretical level in dealing with aesthetics, intuition and emotions in digital poetry. This gap exists due to several convergent factors. First, academies privilege that which can be discussed. Intuition, emotions and aesthetics are intimate, qualitative and complex; they do not render easily in the language of formal research. Second, Lev Manovich (builing on Innis and McLuhan) stresses how new media is radically distinct from previous media. This insight which has swiftly consolidated into axiom, encourages an exclusive critical focus on work which investigates the materiality of media. Digital poetic work that simply utilizes new media as expressive tool risks being stigmatized as naive.

I argue for an inclusion of naive, intuitive, emotional and aesthetic approaches, and a sustained engagement with the issues that arise from emotional and aesthetic complexity. New media is, apart from its distinctive features, an aspect of computational technology; and if technology's evolution is analyzed comparative with biological life, technology is interpretable as the 7th Kingdom of biological life (Kevin Kelly, 2005). Technology is therefore connected to a continuum of tools which have been utilized for millennium by humans to build expressive forms. The motivation for the creation of these art-forms arises from a collective existential ignorance about death and love. Myth was the classical tool humans used to consolidate memory. Our existential ignorance remains the same: both love and death are mysterious apparatuses. New media art which deals with these fundamental thematics is neither retro or obsolete.

Conception and concept share the same etymological root.

2007-04-13T01:54:00.000-07:00

Few of the works (software tools and art) discussed in my thesis emerged out of conscious forethought. They emerged not due to a plan, or a structured mode of approach, or even due to a methodology. They emerged at the confluence of chance, aptitude, necessity, skillset and sensitivity. Often, during the process of creating the works, I was not aware that I was actually creating something specific. Only as a project evolves does it like the fibroblast of differentiated cell tissue in the womb demarcate itself as something separate and distinct. Creation is feminine, analogous to pregnancy, or more appropriately midwifery since it is never from the singular body of identity that art emerges but from the collective consciousness that constitutes our biosphere in which we are immersed.

Conception and concept share the same etymological root. So it is that finished artworks that seem to be conceptual in form, may first make their existence known in the stomach. A twinge in the belly that signals proximal potentiality. This rupture in the continuum of normative consciousness is followed by an impulsion which the artist follows incessantly: the faint urges of an unknown interiority. Like any creature that is carrying a child, the artist must supply the virtual body of the gestating art-work with nutrients necessary for its survival. Necessary materials impel themselves into the path of the work.

“Through this creativeness the imagining consciousness proves to be, very simply but very purely, an origin. In a study of the imagination, a phenomenology of the poetic imagination must concentrate on bringing out this quality of origin in various poetic images.” (Bachelard 1969:xx).

Victim of the Brain (dir: Piet Hoenderdos, 1988)

2007-04-13T01:38:00.000-07:00

Victim of the Brain (dir: Piet Hoenderdos, 1988)
an astonishing document-art with Douglas Hofstadter, Dan Dennett and Marvin Minsky

In this film, Hofstadter refers to Caranium.
I transliterate this into Careenium.

Question: do the ricocheting magnetic marbles of knowledge representations live and die and express themselves? Does this differ from consciousness? Hofstadter sees no thought in neurons; that concepts change at varying scale. My feeling, an unprovable hypothesis, is that symbolic activity inside a neuron at some level of resolution has a thickness and intricacy of self-relating that corresponds to self-awareness and subjective expressivity.

Hofstadter sees mirroring and understanding in perception is best modeled by large coherent networks. I see those networks as civilizations undergoing the turbulent lifepath of civilizations. Internal systems of awareness as just morsels of clustered intercommunicative data somehow complex enough to occasionally curl around and recursively see themselves, and discuss their state with other beings like themselves. But in reality all humans are constrained to communication with other nets of humans. Indigineous cultures may have benefited from the nurturing of individuals with the innate capacity of immersivity into their universe; the immersity which allows specific humans to shift their modalities of time and enter into states of rich deep reverential connection with the other forms at other levels of spatial and temporal scale.

The Minsky Dennet parable of brain-in-vat at the centre of the movie is an exquisite rendition of the complex nuances and potential fallacies of the embodiment-disembodiment debate: are we just algorithms? Is identity patterned data? Predictive analytic machines, recursively entwined. Brains possessing bodies just demarcates diplomatic power relations between structures. It may be that bodies have their own brains.

Consciousness: Patterns of interchange which arbitrarily optimize their opportunity to organize or delineate the patterns of other material.

Hofstadter: “Interaction or pattern…the pattern itself could be implanted in any hardware….” Ants. Teams. Teams of Teams. Hypothetical units named symbols. Stimulus response mirroring interior-exterior interfaces. Knowledge changes at different levels of scale. Activity aggregates. Patterns and perception introduced into computers constitute consciousness. Hofstadter looks for enough levels to form any kind of pattern. I do not look for levels. Levels accumulate and dissipate. Awareness permeates.

Soul? Hofstadter: sees names associatively linked in a cascade: intentionality, self, I… at each level humans deny the possibility that they can be mechanistically modeled. If mechanism is “…synonymous with consciousness....Once you admit that machines can be a perceiving being that it would have some degree of consciousness and some degree of soul….”

For Hofstadter free will is unexplained desire; desires arise from predictable recursive interactions at subatomic scale. Awareness of how the brain operates has not been evolutionarily necessary for humans until now. Free will is an illusion useful for survival, helpful for describing behavior at a course grain.

Stanilaw Lem: the universe is a rendered illusion capable of being mathematically emulated. Emotions, social tides, lives: simple tiny formulas. No distinction between us and a model. Fractal self-similarity refracts joy and suffering throughout innumerable dimensions. Self-organized binary algorithms, “continual meandering of electrons”. The question of whether suffering is only here now at this level in this human body? If we accept a sensitive interconnected model of our own existence, when will art be alive?
“over perfected replica…the antithesis of a mechanism…”

“…the continual meandering of electrons…”

For Hofstadter, emotions and intelligence are inseparable; goals, drives and desires control the pathways of action; emotions arise in relation to tension between goals and actuality or perceived models of world.

Offloading our cognitive functions to machines: “maybe it would be better if the human instead of transmitting itself forward by biology, transmitted itself forward by means of artificial creation….I am not convinced that the human race is the most important thing in the world, and we can’t control what will happen in the future….”

The Newness of Digital Poetics: Loss Pequeo Glazier

2007-04-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

The academic journal Poetics returns no results for an online search of its database for the word "digital". The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terminology contains no reference to "digital", "computational" or any variant thereof. The Handbook does however deal with visual art and poetry, referring to it as a "composite art", as in the engravings of William Blake. The visual arts in this taxonomy are spatial; while poetry is temporal [1]. This formal distinction dissolves in new media that incorporates time-based art: video is a time-based art, evidently a visual art, yet also temporal. Poetry, after concrete poetry, displayed in spattered fonts or mobile text, is often both temporal and spatial. So the classic literary distinctions are not feasible in the new terrain of digital poetry, and it has not yet absorbed the critical theory which is beginning to emerge concerning this discipline.

In one of the first full-length academic treatments of digital poetry, Loss Pequeo Glazier's Digital Poetics, argues "electronic space as a space of poesis". Glazier investigates "not the idea of the digital work as an extension of the printed poem, but the idea of the digital poem as the process of thinking through this new medium, thinking through making. As the poet works, the work discovers."[2, Introduction]

The active vivid evolving process-oriented state of observational transformation that is at the core of traditional poetic work is enhanced through the digital-poet practitioners proximity to generative algorithms capable of mutating or modulating words and structures along trajectories that are stochastically or architecturally defined; the visual or kinetic result is unknowable in advance even by the author of the algorithm. Kinetic digital poetry that incorporates video is thus indeterminable on both the semantic and on the visual or design level. What it looks like and how it behaves may emerge from a set of code, or be invoked at the intersection of user response and predetermined reactivity.

Indeterminacy in the making leaks into the meaning. Across this ambiguous chasm, researchers in poetics investigate the unknown (result) with the unknown (self). Its not a conventional methodology, nor can it easily be constrained within research terminology. In the same way as choreographers feel their way toward correct or appropriate movement at an instantaneous level, poet-programmers often intuitively juggle analytical and emotive concerns.

1. The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1994). Pg. 332.
2. Loss Pequeo Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-poetries (Tuscaloosa, Ala: the University of Alabama Press, 2002).