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’.
Labels: affect, criteria, intelligence, literature
[+/-] expressivity quotations 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."
Labels: affect, expressive
[+/-] GLOSSARY (in progress) -- v0.01 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.
Labels: affect, definition, glossary, progress
[+/-] 2046, 2057, and the presence of affect in fluids "Do you know what people did in the old days when they had secrets they didn't want to share? They'd climb a mountain ... find a tree .... carve a hole in it ... whisper the secret into the hole ... and cover it up with mud...." 2046, Wong Kar Wai
On the same evening as I watched Wong Kar Wai's epically beautiful 2046, I encountered an obese parapalegic woman in an electric wheelchair wearing a huge pink and orange poncho on the sky train. She foraged in a blue silk bag that had an ink stain; her feet were enclosed in maroon macrame.
Kar Wai's 2046 is populated by immaculately ravishing fantasia's of physicality. Love, loss, sex, and longing are exclusively practiced by this fortunate elite. But in reality, in life itself, every body type fucks, yearns, flirts, and falls in love sometimes with the wrong partners. The drama of romantic tragedy is opportunistic; it exists everywhere on the continuum of corporality.
In my neighbourhood of downtown Vancouver, there are over 1,000 homeless people. Many of them chronically addicted to street drugs, their faces ravished by scabs, their rivetingly thin limbs contorted by sustanied insomnia; they copulate briefly, harshly and tenderly in the alleys behind dumpsters stained in piss and inhabited by rats. The futuristic cyber-medicine realities portrayed in 2057 The body, an exceptionally beautiful documentary on the Utopian gleaming potentials of modern biotech obscures the dystopia margins which remain gleamingly hidden
beneath the 3D living tissue printers and nano-bot drug delivery. In our futuristic fantasia's both health and love are the domains of the physically wealthy.
Ecstasy, grief, desire, and passion, the full spectrum of affect, traverses all existent entities. Immersed as they are in the immense river of life, all beings experience these states. My goal with Thoems and Interstitial video projects was to offset some of the bias conventional narrative film has toward portraying the presence of affect in perfect beautiful people.
My logic for choosing to film fluids: If affect is pattern, and patterns are biochemical, and biochemicals are fluid dynamic systems, then fluid dynamic systems coalescing and dissipating can visually represent and convey affect. Potentially and speculatively, fluid dynamics constitute affect.
[+/-] reactive, deliberative, self-reflexive According to Rosalind Picard, in 1981 the philosopher Aaron Sloman was “one of the first to write to the computer science community about computers having emotions.”(p.211) Sloman hypothesized 3 architectural layers in the brain: reactive, deliberative, and self-monitoring. For the most part, my software interfaces for the net consist of algorithms that are predominantly reactive: simple reflex flocks jolted around. Deliberative activity is assigned to the user, who must as all users decide how to navigate, what to touch. Self-reflexive activity is contained in the writings which are emerging from states of self-reflexive where the activity of consciousness becomes transparent.
Inadvertently, Sloman's 3-tiered simplification maps onto the proposed sound architecture of the Thoems which is to use three simultaneous sound files coming from numerous different categories: 1111 ( a suite of hundreds of my own environmental audio samples of length 1 minute and 11 seconds), some online poetry radio samples and spoken word (some of my own, some inspired, some inept, none edited) creating a sort of psychic sandwich designed to randomly induce an archetypal electro-acoustic composition which bypasses mimesis and simply maps the users mind to an arbitrary amalgam of a net archive.
Moods: If the activity level of the user increases above an agitation threshold, the interface maps the users' mouse to an invisible audio head scrubber which shreds the dominant playing sounds; as the mood gets stronger, more of the sounds are shredded; velocity distorts the auditory environment.
Auditory archives exist as a shared cultural dna; the implementation technique is in the lineage of Stockhausen, Cage, and John Oswald's plunderphonics.
Picard, R.W. (1997). Affective computing.
Labels: 3, affect, model, sloman
[+/-] future online 'tv' shows
will adapt to previously generated models of the users' affective needs
(based on their online viewing habits)
art will feed viewers cognitively tailored content
here's an example schema:
violence appetite 0.8
psychological depth 7
philosophical mode 8
sex appeal 6
warp index 9
warp direction would be mapped to a 3D zone
must b shitloads of folks working on that little gold mine
