[william’s blogging]
William Cole’s started blogging! I know William from Hypertext conferences, and it’s good to see he’s joined the blogosphere.
30/9/2003
[oops]
Yes, I’m blogging like crazy because I’ve cleared the whole day so I can concentrate on working on two pieces I’m writing and so I was just going to have a few minutes of surfing first… I’ll start concentrating on the essays now. Yup.
[newsgaming]
Gonzalo Frasca and friends have released Newsgaming, a site where political cartoons and games meet. The first game up is called September 12th, and is a simulation where killing terrorists spawns new terrorists. I like how after you fired a rocket you’re forced to wait for your rockets to reload, and during that wait you hear the wails of mourning women crying for the dead. The mourner stands up and hesitates, changing into a terrorist outfit, then back to her blue, civilian dress, and to and fro until always settling with the terrorist’s black and white. One of the FAQs is:
Are your games biased?
Of course they are. We do not believe in objective journalism. We prefer games that encourage critical thinking, even if the player disagrees with our game’s ideas.
Of course they are. We do not believe in objective journalism. We prefer games that encourage critical thinking, even if the player disagrees with our game’s ideas.
A chapter in my thesis is about political web games, and when a lot were being published, after September 11, I blogged a lot about it too. Gonzalo has always been at the forefront of political gaming, and anyone interested in it should look at his MA thesis and his other publications, which are listed in the sidebar of his blog, ludology.org.
Gamegirladvance also has a post on newsgaming, with a nice photo of Gonzalo showing the game.
[hijack]
You’ve noticed, perhaps, that Verisign have hijacked the net to show their website every time you mistype a .com or .net address so that your browser can’t find the server you’ve asked for? There’s some interesting, though complicated, discussion of this, monopoly and regulation of the internet in a Slashdot thread on this. And Verisign’s rewarded for it all by another big US government contract. (Boing Boing, via Andedammen)
[issn]
The national library in Norway refuses to give ISSNs to weblogs, although many weblogs clearly fit the definition of a periodical worthy of an ISSN: periodical, archived, dated, one title, some kind of serious (faglig) content, etc. Obviously the ISSN system, with its paultry 8 digits, was never intended for true mass publication of periodicals, and they’re worried blogs might flood the system. But as Jon writes, flatly refusing blogs entry confirms A. J. Liebling’s statement: “freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns one".
(more…)
29/9/2003
[relativity]
The theory of relativity explained in words of four letters or less. It reads a little like Cat in a Hat, only with fewer rhymes and less impressive rhythm: “I can hear you say, “No way. That can’t be!” But I tell you it is.” compares quite poorly to “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It is fun to have fun but you have to know how,” especially if you get into the beat when you read it. You need to draw your breath after the second “Look at me!” for maximum effect, and keep the pressure on the “me” of course, until you get to NOW! I suppose you already knew that, huh? “But I tell you it is” is good, you know, with the same insistence as “it is fun to have fun” but the phrases leading up to it don’t quite do it, do they?
Of course, Cat in a Hat, while metrically perfect, doesn’t explain the theory of relativity. (via Elouise)
[learning ABCs]
When we picked up Noah from the airport a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I brought along her ABC book so we could do her reading homework on the airport bus. On the way back from the airport, Aurora requested that Noah and I both type our complete names on the keyboard printed inside the front cover of the book. Actually, since she was two or three, Aurora’s been pretending she has her own powerbook. The shiny, silver, folding mirror I keep in my purse was a favourite when she was a toddler: nowadays a book gives more realism to her games.
Though I swear at my powerbook often enough for its geriatric slowness, I’m quite amused to see it replicated almost exactly in a seven-year-old’s first school reading book. It doesn’t actually say it’s a mac, in fact, the publishers have put their logo, a tree, where my powerbook says “Macintosh PowerBook G3″. I suppose they have copyright clearance.
Aurora blankly refuses to put her digital photos on the web, and has yet to try instant messaging, but she can pick out emails by herself even on my real powerbook, which has keys so worn you can only read half the letters. And it’s obvious, really, isn’t it, to put a keyboard in a book of ABCs?
The website for the book is amazing too, full of the same gorgeous illustrations as in the book, and with games and puzzles and karaoke reading and voices reading and so on. Each page has hints for parents, with suggestions for what to do at home this week on the website. I like having a computer age schoolkid.
Actually, while keyboards in schoolbooks seem new to me, it could be seen as far more revolutionary, in Norway, that the letter O is represented by olives and oregano. A lot has happened in a generation. Thank goodness.
[grammar of categories]
Of course, putting the category at the bottom of each post leads to some funny sentences. I’ve not designed my categories for this grammar: “Posted by Jill to world at 8:59″ - well, yes, I suppose I am posting to the world. I could rename every category, organise all this by whom I’m addressing, or what emotions I’m expressing, rather than by what I think I’m talking about. “Posted by Jill to Apollo", for instance, for clear-headed posts, or I could post to Diana when I was feeling chaste and forestbound. Thor for thundering fury. Buddha when seeking inner calm. Dionysos, obviously, after a night’s carousing. Aphrodite when in love.
What kind of posts would I address to you, though?
[comment spam]
Extremely frequent visitors may have noticed that link-packed comments advertising various drugs keep popping up and disappearing here. They’re always comments to posts that have a lot of links pointing to them and thereby a high Google PageRank, which is obviously what the spammer wants to get in on - links from a site with high PageRank give the linked-to site some of that PageRank. I’ve been deleting them as fast as they arrive (or as fast as I see them) and banning the IP-numbers they were sent from but these - or this - spammer is annoyingly persistent, is obviously on dialup and so has zillions of IP numbers, and it’s really boring deleting spam all the time. Fortunately Liz links to a solution to all this that lets you blacklist certain URLs, which are then never displayed in comments, though other, benign, URLs are shown. Unfortunately this solution involves three plugins, tweaking, and slower rebuilds and comment processing. Maybe I’ll just keep deleting, for now.
If linklove describes linking to lovingly spread the goodness of one’s PageRank, and linkslutting is doing anything to get other people to link to you, what is this? Linkcoercion? Attempted linktheft? I’m not going to call it linkrape. It sure ain’t rape if you can delete it and its consequences completely.
27/9/2003
[newborn]
 |
He slept through my entire visit, so I didn’t get to hold him. But while his mother was unwrapping the soft cotton blanket I’d brought for him he opened his eyes a little, not quite awake, but looking steadfastly at me as I smiled to him, gazing into his deep, dark newborn eyes. He considered me, seriously, then slept again, without crying for the safety of his mother. I take this as a good sign. |
26/9/2003
[wireless abroad]
This morning I was writing when Mark pinged me in iChat:
There are definitely a few times I’ve been alone in foreign cities where I’d have liked to sit down, order a coffee, unfold a slim laptop and find a list of friends, online, and happy to chat.
[different stories]
Digitales2003 is calling for stories and texts about gender and technology. Different stories:
One often hears that girls are not interested in technical things because they are too cold and too systematic, but what about telling them that one of the pioneers of computing wanted to create a machine that would enable him to contact his lost loved one and that he died like Snow White after eating a poisoned apple : isn’t that a beautiful fairy tale?
That’s certainly a different way of telling Turing’s story. Do any of you know more about the lost loved one and how he hoped to contact him through his machines? (via Hilde)
[thinking a rhinoceros is a unicorn]
Reading an old copy of The Guardian’s Review section over breakfast, I found this that I want to remember:
When Marco Polo first saw a rhinoceros on Java, he recognised it as a unicorn. The creature had a single horn and the word for a one-horned animal was already in the language - in Europe a “rhinoceros” did not yet exist. (Hustvedt, Guardian Sept 6, 2003)
Siri Hustvedt (who’s practically Norwegian, we’re all quite proud of her) writes that she used this conundrum when teaching writing. It’d also be a good anecdote to explain why it’s necessary to consider and develop new vocabularies to describe new media. Otherwise we’ll end up thinking that rhinoceroses are unicorns.
Perhaps we already did.
[update, 11:12 am: You must read Anders’s continuation of this thought: not only does he recognise the Marco Polo story as one of Umberto Eco’s favourites, he adds platypuses and whales to the mix and has a well thought out argument for the usefulness of calling a whale a fish - for many purposes. This, of course, all figures in the how-do-we-study-new-media and what-do-we-call-it debate. Lovely.]
25/9/2003
[rainy afternoon]
 |
It’s been raining for days and days and days and days. My camera is too slow to capture the splash of raindrops in puddles but heightens the blue monotony of the bridge across the inlet, viewed from beneath my umbrella. |
[frost]
My friend Lars lives far, far North, further North than I’ve ever been, and when he walks across his garden to check on his potatoes the earth crushes beneath his feet, like scorch marks, he writes. I remember frost, but it’s not here yet. We just have rain. For years I assumed Lars would move South again, back to the rain and the wind, but I think he’s happy where he is. “Ting ser annleis ut sett herifrå", he writes, “things look different from here.” One day I’ll visit him, and perhaps I’ll see things differently, too.
24/9/2003
[better than good]
They say here that if the sun shines on your birthday you’ve been good as gold all year. I’m taking today’s gentle drizzle as a sign that I’ve been exploring my more interesting sides of late. When you’re two to the power of five years old you get to leave good as gold behind.
[2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2]
I’m 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 years old today! That means I get to be a two-year-old to the fifth degree all day long! I want BALLOONS!
23/9/2003
[new-mediated]
My friend Charley is teaching contemporary British poetry this semester and sent me this link to a new mediated version of Paul Muldoon’s poem “A Collegelands Catechism”. What you get, if you get past the forced Flash intro from the Princeton courseware (and thank you, Princeton, for making this publically accessible, we do appreciate it), is Paul Muldoon reading his poem with a Flash animation showing the words of the poem. Afterwards, you get to see the text of the whole of the poem, with extra information and glosses. There’s something about seeing this that makes me want to think something I can’t quite get at. I mean, look at Thom Swiss and Skye Giordano’s Genius (sorry, won’t work with my Mac anymore, I think it’s the browser, but it works fine on most PCs I’ve tried). The author’s voice reads a poem, a Flash animation shows the words and there’s music and images and these elements all speak to each other, they mean more than their individual parts. So is the Princeton version of the Paul Muldoon poem a (fairly simple, but perhaps sufficient) adaptation of a traditional poem into a new media genre that’s becoming conventional? Conventional enough that Princeton Courseware adopts it? Does the Muldoon poem become electronic writing when animated? I’m sure there’s some point to be made here but I can’t quite make it.
[nightmare]
I think I’m glad I’ve not had any dreams about teaching yet, but I recognise some of the themes of Lisbeth’s nightmare…
[si je te disais que je t’aimerais]
Navire.net has some beautiful writing, though I repeatedly stumble over the French: Could lapin be a new word for laptop, I wondered, at first, because what would a rabbit have to do with this? It turns out that the narrator calls her boyfriend her lapin, her rabbit*, and when he’s not with her, she writes blog posts to him:
Je suis dans un café à Marseille qui a un accès Internet. Mon lapin, j’en profite pour te dire que je t’aime, et qu’il n’y a rien qui n’ait plus de valeur au monde. J’embarque demain matin à l’aube. Sache qu’il n’y aura pas un quart à bord sans que je pense à toi. **
Isn’t that sweet? Tomorrow she’ll travel into the dawn***, to Montreal, perhaps, to her lapin. Or perhaps not, it seems a sea voyage is involved, from Marseille and around Spain arriving in La Rochelle. I might find the answer if I read more of the blog, but I like this uncertainty. The possibilities and openness of the stories in an newly found blog are only heightened by my creative interpretations of the French.
What happens, in a blog, when a post is directed to you in the singular rather than to the plural you of all possible readers? You, my lover, this is for you, and I dare to speak my love in public, in front of all my readers, knowing that it may be commented, linked to and archived. In French the private “tu” replaces “vous", yet despite this public declaration of love, the use of “tu” keeps the identity of the lover private. A secret. The public secrets of blogs.
(more…)
22/9/2003
[nighttime]
 |
It rained all day, but when I walked home from dinner this evening the sky was deep blue and the street lights lit up the baring branches, half full with yellow leaves. |
20/9/2003
[quartet in g minor]
They never played the string quartet in G Minor at the museum. It disturbed the tourists. The repeated anguish of the chords made busloads of Americans and Germans stay outside in the gardens, merrily walking down to see Grieg’s grave or to admire the flowers and the view rather than read of the grief in his life that flowed from the sounds of the quartet in G minor.
She first heard it on her second day as a museum guide. They told her to watch the short film of his life, screened every half hour, and she sat there with the tourists, feeling out of place in her national romantic guide’s costume. The filmmakers had permitted one of the less penetrating half minutes of the quartet to accompany the mandatory images of fjords and mountains. The tourists can take half a minute, with pretty pictures, just as they can take seeing the christening gown of Edvard and Nina’s baby daughter who died of menigitis on a visit home to Bergen. They wanted to show her to their families; she died. Music cut to half a minute, the christening gown of a child that died, safely inside a glass container: tourists can take that, contained grief, contained emotions.
She listens to the rest of it at home. The jagged chords of the first movement affect her the most. The second violin holds a single note, refusing to let go, while the first violin tries to escape in half tones and crooked angles to the frightened stability of the second violin. Impossible to sustain such tension, they fall into slow beauty that holds no less fear, then on to complex chords and harmonies, always spiralling through stages of grief, never letting go.
The biographies they gave her to study so she could explain his life to the tourists were circumspect and reserved. They all mentioned little Alexandra’s death, Edvard and Nina’s disappointment at never having other children and the death of Edvard’s parents. Some hinted at possible affairs, Nina’s probable miscarriages after losing her daughter, Edvard’s desertion of Nina, and the tormented months he spent at Lofthus writing the Quartet in G Minor, before their reconciliation. Mostly, the biographers kept a respectful distance.
There’s no distance in the Quartet in G Minor. When Grieg first played it for his publisher in Leipzig, tears ran down his face, washing the keys of his piano. She imagines sitting there, invisible beside the listening publisher, hearing and seeing grief so raw. Would she try to comfort him? Leave the room, as the busloads of American and German tourists do? Perhaps the only reason she can stand this emotion is that she plays the CD alone, in her room, lying flat on her bed, eyes closed, emotions in turmoil.
Once, at the end of the season, she was alone in the museum. There were no busloads of Americans and Germans, only a few lone tourists, and the other guides were outside or in the residence. Guiltily she turned off the easily accepted piano concerto that he wrote when he was happily living in Copenhagen with sweet-voiced Nina and little Alexandra, just a few months old and such a bouncing, healthy child. She slipped the almost unplayed CD of the string quartet in G minor into the CD-player. The music filled the museum with sounds infinitely richer than in her living room. As the chords escalate, tears run down her cheeks, washing the keys of the cash register as she longs for the calm moments of respite, mellow harmonies where violins, viola and cello speak languid legato, but they’re so brief, followed instantly by chopping chords and then finally, the restful but oh so melancholy end, no, it never ends, a pause, you think that the grief is over, but there’s more, fast, anxious tremolo, slowness, and no resolution at all in the end, just a harsh, sudden decision that this is enough. No more. It’s over.
(Biographical details are mostly from memory and might not be exact. And of course, there is more resolution in the second and third and fourth movements, for those who are ready to listen to them.)
19/9/2003
[follow]
Decluttering bookshelves has turned up many old scribblings. A notebook from 1998 is full of blog posts, though I hadn’t yet realised that blogging was the name of my native genre. Here’s a quotation from Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl that would have been an epigraph for my thesis if I’d remembered it:
If you think you’re going to follow me, you’ll have to learn to move the way I do, think the way I think; there’s just no way around it. And then you’ll have trouble telling me apart from yourself.
That’s what computers do. Technology. Pens, too, for that matter.
18/9/2003
[fur]
I know you’ve been longing for a furry laptop forever. Or would you prefer a pink apple on your white iBook, with matching accessories?
[DIY net.art]
This week my Digital Media Aesthetics class is doing networked art (which is sometimes, but not always, the same as net.art) and today the students will be following Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin’s instructions on how to make DIY net.art. Their Introduction to net.art is even translated to Norwegian, which I suspect will be a relief to students forced to read almost all their curriculum in a second language. I love the idea of writing theory as a set of instructions, and I think trying to follow the instructions will be a much better learning experience than reading a dull description. I might bring dice so we don’t waste time on consensus decisions as to modes and genres but get straight to generating ideas.
After imagining new works of net.art we’ll try to classify them according to Espen Aarseth’s typology in Cybertext. If it works, great, if not, even better, we can discuss why.
17/9/2003
[stop laughing]
Norwegians can stop laughing at the US voting system. In Oslo the various parties on the left got 46 more votes than the parties on the right, but because the council stopped using the d’Hondts method of calculating representatives and have switched to the St Lagües modified method, which favourises smaller parties, the right have 30 representatives against 29 from the left.
I still believe in voting, but democracy is hardly an exact discipline.
[leaf in mud]
 |
On the other hand, all my errands today meant I got to walk for two hours, all told, in a beautiful city in just the right sort of rain, rain that moistens your hair without making an umbrella necessary. |
[grumpy]
Grumpy. Long line at immigration office. Complicated citizenship rules. Phone queues. Spam. Back when in better mood.
16/9/2003
[juggling]
Torill’s essay on digital juggling in the latest Tekka paints wonderful images of multitasking with technology. I find her description of how she didn’t used to do this particularly interesting, because this is how so many of my friends use their computers, and it’s why they don’t get my fascination with web, net, network:
For the first several years I used the computer the way I would use a typewriter, a mailbox or a game-board. When I wrote, I wrote; when I picked up mail, well, that’s what I did; and when I played games I focused on the game. I would occasionally switch between these modes, the way I would change between television programs. Being Norwegian and brought up with the Norwegian State Broadcasting (which has neither commercial breaks or competing channels), I didn’t even channel surf – I’d decide which programs to watch and which to skip, and once tuned in, I’d stay.
Perhaps in Norway we’re culturally aclimatised to monosurfing rather than juggling? Like Torill, when I juggle my windows and programs and worlds “I am happy, a smiling, relaxed but concentrated digital juggler.”
[they won]
Oh, and the coffee baron won the Bergen elections. Now they’ll turn Festplassen back into a carpark. Great.
[reality kabul]
Åsne Seierstad was one of Norway’s favourite war correspondents in both Kabul and Baghdad, and so when she wrote a book based on the half year she spent living with a bookseller’s family in Kabul it was an instant bestseller. Unfortunately Seierstad wrote in a genre closer to reality television than to a documentary or a novel, though she subtitled her book “a family drama". No surprise then, that now that the bookseller has finally been allowed to read the English translation he’s sued her. In the reality tradition, Seierstad has concentrated on sex, illicit affairs and internal family conflicts. She declares in her introduction that everything she writes is true, but that she’s made it “literary", and that she has anonymised the family. The anonymisation isn’t particulary convincing since there’s only one bookseller in Kabul who sells books to foreigners. She’s also used the transformation of actual experience into family drama to write herself out of the story. Once she’s established her presence in the preface, we hear nothing more of her.
Obviously the too personal stories of family members’ sexual fantasies and affairs and the descriptions of where they keep their money will be the most damaging to the family, but I found Seierstad’s respectless descriptions of their lives and possessions almost as annoying. Descriptions are Euro-centric and derogatory, as when the lace on a bridal veil is characterised as “synthetic lace like on Soviet curtains” (page 96 in Norwegian version, my translation).
Sidsel Natland recently wrote a good piece with more or less my point of view, though she doesn’t mention the Soviet lace. Apart from that, the media has been almost totally on Seierstad’s side.
Surprisingly, I can’t find anything online about the bookseller suing Seierstad in English, except a brief report from the English version of Aftenposten. Surely this is odd: the book was published in Britain in August, and has been published in 17 other langauges this year, yetreviews seem clueless as to its ethical problems. I suppose the book is less prominent in Britain than it is in little Norway where everyone loves Åsne Seierstad.
There are good sides to the book, if you look past its ethical bankrupcy. Though its quality is a very long way from Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel A Handmaid’s Tale, it portrays a society that is frighteningly similar. Without its claims of reality perhaps this would not have as strong an effect as it does.
15/9/2003
[election]
I asked my seven-year-old to document the election while I voted, and she selected these photos for the weblog. School was out today because they use the school for the election, and when we went shopping after voting green sheets covered the beer: “Alcohol may not be sold on election day.” I forget that every year. (Update, evening: The results are updated online as votes are counted. Only 57% of the population voted, only 53% in my suburb, though 60% in Bergen as a whole. How can people be so stupid as to not vote?)
[tegnemaskin 1-12]
Odin is not only king of the ancient norse gods, but also the main website for Norwegian goverment information (odin.dep.no), and, interestingly, the first public digital space in Norway and perhaps in Europe to include publically funded art. Marius Watz has written a program he calls Tegnemaskin 1-12, Drawing Machine 1-12, which runs on Odin’s server and generates images based on simple algorithms. A section of the day’s image is shown prominently on the front page of the site and other sections show up under the left column menu, throughout the site, so it’s quite thoroughly integrated into the site. I think, though I’m not sure, that the image generated might depend on traffic and document structures on the server. There are no project descriptions in English yet, though they’re supposed to be imminent. Does anyone know of other art installations in public digital spaces such as this?
14/9/2003
[form art]
Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art (1997) is a series of patterns and pictures made from buttons, forms and boxes, charmingly subverting their usefulness.
[vote]
Local elections tomorrow, the only elections I’m entitled to vote in, so I’m surfing, thinking about what I’ll vote. In Norway we have lots of parties represented locally and nationally, and they usually form coalitions. So in Bergen council there’s usually at least one communist representative (this period there have been four), several socialists, a handful of Christian Democrats, a few smallish central parties, the right wing “Progress Party” (growing yearly) and the large traditional Social Democrats and the Conservatives.
Ten years ago I would have voted for the communists every time, not because I agree with everything they want (the whole armed revolution thing made my youthful communist period even briefer than my conservative fling) but because I love the courage of their outspoken voices, and treasure a democracy that will listen to them although they have little voting power. This time I’m thinking much more tactically. The Conservatives, led by a seventh generation coffee baron from one of Bergen’s “oldest” and richest families, are looking like they might take over power from the current Social Democrat run council. So I think I’ll vote Social Democrat, though they’re less and less social, because the alternative to having them in power is far worse. I don’t think I’ve exactly gotten more conservative as I grow older, but I’m certainly getting more pragmatic.
[leaf with raindrops]
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I try to take pictures of grand scenes, of mountains, cityscapes and fjords, but the images I capture contradict my eyes, foregrounding insignificant objects that I look right past. So I return to small things where the camera’s eye chooses aspects that complement rather than contradict what I see. When I took this photo the sun was shining and the raindrops were sparkling prisms. The camera chose to portray a darker, more ominous picture. Or perhaps it was the leaf, refusing to be caught. |
12/9/2003
[community]
I went to the theatre this evening and saw a Canadian group try to create community, a space for people to connect and change the world. They cultivated an awkward, grungy, amateurish style telling embarrassed little stories and plucking at their guitars with some difficulty: “No, it’s a C now! And an F!” Then they repeated some formulas about global capitalism, sweatshops and George Bush and asked people to come to the microphone to tell their own stories. Amazingly enough, the third or fourth time they offered the audience the microphone, a few people did come up to speak. “They’re fakes, all of them", my friend whispered. “I’m sure I saw her talk with the actors before the show. And him.”
If I could speak a foreign language, a really foreign language, I would have walked confidently to the microphone and told a story of lovers, dreams and stars in Arabic or Mongolian or some Ethiopian dialect. They would have politely clapped, not knowing what I had said. But I can only speak English and Norwegian and French, I would be understood, and so I remained silent.
[tribute]
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A tribute, already, not from mainstream artists but on a wall of graffiti. Council-sponsored graffiti. |
[to brilliant]
My Volda correspondent just sent an SMS I’m sure she won’t mind my sharing: “Torill was brilliant in a fast-paced repartee with Stuart. Second part starting now, flowers bought for this evening.” (Actually the original says “Torill briljerte i samspill med Stuart", which I can’t translate. The repartee may not have been “fast” but it sounds that way to me. Why doesn’t English have a verb like “å briljere", to brilliant, to shine, I suppose, but to brilliant is better. “Samspill” is a good word too: to play together, as in music, complementing each other. Perhaps English isn’t richer than Norwegian, just different.) Update! At 13:55:07 Hanne-Lovise sent a new SMS: Torill’s a doctor!!!!! HOORAY! Update 2! Torill sent an SMS saying it was wonderful, she’d love to do it again, she’d recommend it to anyone! Yay! She even remembered to breathe.
[usenet]
I’m digging through old Usenet archives today, to see whether I can connect that early net publishing to blogs today, and honestly, we’ve been discussing the same stuff for twenty years. At 1985-02-22 08:57:16 PST a woman answered a question as to whether one can fall in love online thus:
I never fell for anybody I met over Usenet, but I have fallen for at least 3 people over Arpa. One did not work out, one we will see
about, and one is in negotiation.
about, and one is in negotiation.
Interesting that ARPANET gave better hunting than Usenet, don’t you think? And I wonder how the negotiation ended up. I’m thinking of comparing Usenet in the eighties to blogs today, tracing a line of inheritance, so the rest of this post will be links and ideas, mostly so I can keep track of this myself. I’ll add to this post as I go.
(more…)
[go torill!]
Good luck to Torill today: she’s defending her dr. art. dissertation in Volda, starting at ten. Her opponents are Stuart Moulthrop and TL Taylor - I wish I could be there to hear the discussion! And, of course, for the party this evening. But at least we all get to see photos of the swordfigh she arranged as part of her trial lecture on LARPs yesterday afternoon.
11/9/2003
[half mast]
Flags are all at half mast today. I think it’s for the Swedish foreign minister, who died this morning. She was stabbed in a department store yesterday, and the assassin has not been found. The flags could have been for the victims in the World Trade Center two years ago, or for the US-backed coup on the democratically elected socialist government of Chile in 1972. As Eirik writes, this date is getting bloodier and bloodier.
[class]
“OK, everyone who’s interested in discussing games, definitions and narratives, over to that side of the room. Everyone interested in discussing Turkle’s 1984 article over to this side.”
All the boys went to the structuralist definition side. All the girls (only four out of fourteen students) went to the Turkle side. Usually I’ve tried to do a kind of summary of the small group discussions in plenary at the end of the class, but today I remembered what I was told at my university pedagogy course when I complained that I found the plenary summary difficult: “Are you sure that you need it? Perhaps you’re only doing the plenary because you need to feel there’s a result, and not because it helps the students learn?”
There aren’t enough computers in the room for each student to blog in class, so I asked them to jot down quick notes about what they would personally take from the class discussions and this week’s readings. And please blog it after class. Everyone was still writing when I left the room.
[blackboard]
The NY Times tells us about a protoblogger decides to run for governor and therefore starts blog - I particularly noticed the nature of her preblogging:
[A] few times a week on a blackboard next to the daily drink specials, she recalls, she wrote short rants about whatever was on her mind: a problem in the city, or a new ordinance that she thought unfair. Her messages won her a steady following.
It’s mostly the lesser known candidates for governor in Southern California who have started blogs, but there are scores of them, says the artitcle. And there’s the governor’s wife. (Andrew sent me this link, thanks)
[nobody believed]
Two years ago today the sun shone and in the afternoon, when everyone knew what had happened but not what would happen, we sat outside in the sun, our kids playing oblivious to our concerns, and we were joking as one does in times of crisis when a Bosnian neighbour said, very quietly, “We sat just like this after hearing the Serbs had attacked. Joking about it, having a barbeque in the sun. Nobody believed there would be a war.”
(I’d forgotten this until I saw today’s date, reread my September 2001 archives, and remembered.)
[zone]
Jesper’s got three weeks left of his PhD grant and is in that zone where everything is connected, and even procrastination is weirdly productive:
[Playing Virtua Tennis] was meant to be a pure waste of time, but I’ve already written about how Virtua Tennis is a stylized simulation of real tennis in that many aspects of the real sport have been removed: You can’t leave the court; the player automatically positions himself for a smash. And is it cheating to quit a game in career mode if it’s not going well or should you play it to the end?
I remember that! Not the tennis game as such, but everything linking up, the glow of it, the insanity of how everything, no, really, everything, becomes relevant to what you’re writing.
10/9/2003
[beadgee]
Tamar Schori’s Beadgee (or fullscreen, Windows only) lets you play with images and words just as a child plays with her beads: making patterns, stringing and restringing, standing back to look at your creation. Here’s how it works: At first you see a collection of gizmos, each connected to a rhyme. Choose a gizmo and explode it into its separate pieces and a dot will start to dance along the words of the rhyme attached to it, just as a nun runs her fingers slowly along the beads on her rosary as she prays. Click a piece of the gizmo and it appears in your building area, bringing with it the word that the dot had reached when you clicked. Choose another piece, and another, and soon you’ll have made both a new gizmo and a new sentence built from the pieces you took apart.
I like this. There’s no goal but to play, as we play with beads or lego. There’s no end, no closure, no puzzle other than to figure out what you can do with it, and though there are no instructions a couple of minutes of clicking should be enough to work out what you can do. Beadgee is a charming example of a textual instrument or an instrumental text, though the text isn’t dominant in the piece.
It also got me thinking about the user functions Espen Aarseth outlines in Cybertext: in any text, a user will interpret, and some texts also allow the user to explore, configure and add to the text. Clearly configuring the work is the most important user function in Beadgee. Markku Eskelinen memorably uses the relationship between interpreting and configuring to differentiate games from literature and art:
To generalize, in art we might have to configure in order to be able to interpret whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure, and proceed from the beginning to the winning or some other situation. (”The Gaming Situation“, Gamestudies 1:1, 2001)
Beadgee seems to present a third option: configuring for the sake of configuring. We don’t configure it in order to interpret it, or at any rate, I didn’t feel any need to interpret the rather silly poem and gizmo I produced by combining and choosing elements, and yet I found pleasure in the playing. I configure lego and beads, too, without giving much thought to interpretation. Beadgee’s not a game, it’s more like a toy, yet it’s also clearly art. I suppose probably someone’s already devised a theory of interactivity as lego? Or beads…
[fremmedpolitiet]
One and a half hours waiting in line at fremmedpolitiet. A minute at the counter. Half of that was spent listening to a Norwegian who’d matter of factly by-passed the queue to complain loudly about some foreigners who were misusing her address and she couldn’t possibly stand in line, no, this was too important! They sent her elsewhere, took my passports, old and new, and told me to come back and pick it up on Friday. I wonder whether I can bribe them to mail it to me instead.
9/9/2003
[australian diaspora]
Good heavens: there are 800 000 Australian citizens living abroad! That’s five percent of the population. We’re the Australian diaspora! I belong to a community! With a mailing list! And my community actually fought for me to be able to be a dual citizen (if Norway would only go along with it) without my even knowing! I’m so used to being neither this nor that that I’m a bit shocked at this sudden new identity option. But hey, “our collective identity” is being strengthened by “e-mail and internet” which “increasingly link overseas Australians to each other and to Australians at home.”
Yup. Though decreasing phone costs are at least as important. When I was a kid phoning home was so expensive we could only talk to our grandparents at Christmas time, and we hated it, absolutely hated the embarrassment of speaking for two minutes to people we loved and remembered and missed but whose voices we had forgotten. When I was back in Perth in 1990 it cost $1.80 (Australian; about one US dollar) a minute to ring Norway, and 18 kroner a minute for my family in Norway to ring me. Now it’s 45 øre a minute, that’s 9 Australian cents or 6 US cents. I can talk for an hour for the cost of a latte, an hour and a half for less than a glass of beer. Talking with a friend in Australia (or the States for that matter) is literally no more expensive than going out for a coffee. I like that.
[fraud no more]
I’ve been fretting and procrastinating over another definition I’m writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, you see, this one’s on cyberpunk (the genre) and I’ve never published a thing on cyberpunk. Except for a hastily written definition I sent to the Narrative mailing list a few months ago when someone said “what’s cyberpunk?” That definition is why I was asked to write the encyclopedia entry - an editor of the encyclopedia happened to read it, you see. Today I’ve started reading the pile of books I got from the library about cyberpunk, and now that I’ve actually opened them I’ve discovered it’s fascinating stuff, and I’ve read almost all the books they’re talking about too. Better yet, I went and found the definition I posted to the mailing list, and do you know what? It’s pretty damn good for a hasty, informal definition:
Cyberpunk is a kind of science fiction which is set in a nearish future where the world is totally wired. It started (I believe) with William Gibson’s mid-eighties novel Neuromancer, in which the word “cyberspace” was first used. In typical cyberpunk worlds nation states are extinct and instead corportations (like Disney, Microsoft, Nike, Nokia) or sects or racial or ideological groupings have divided the world between them. I guess the -punk is because the protagonists are often skateboarding streetkids who in addition are wired, wear enhanced reality glasses and are brilliant (often morally good) hackers. The worlds are usually both utopic (there is definitely an enjoyment of technology here) and dystopic (extreme poverty, corruption, evil etc). Famous authors include William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling.
Obviously this will need editing and I’ll be adding references, origins, context, a mention of the gothic influence and so on but it’s an excellent start. It’s 144 words already and the maximum is 500, which includes references. That’s not much. And oh, I’m just so relieved at discovering (to my surprise) that I’m not such a fraud as I’d thought I was.
[stamps]
I need to go to the police to get my residency permit stamped into my new passport. They’re shut today but having got my passports out, old and new, I leaf through the pages. Each stamp brings back memories: Rome in March, walking the streets of Manhattan at 6 am, a bus crash outside Bangkok, times, dates, people, touching my palm against cool ancient marble or the grass in a famous park. And always the return to Bergen’s damp green mountains. Such a pity that stamps in passports have become so rare.
My favourite part of Megan Heyward’s I am a Singer (buy/borrow) is when you look at a page of the protagonist’s passport, going through her documents as she remembers who she is. Clicking on each stamp brings a different fragmented memory: lovemaking in Paris (of course), childhood in Sydney; I’ve forgotten the others.
8/9/2003
[martian romance]
“Knowing what I now know about Martian history, of course, it all seems crystal clear to me. But at the time I was surprised how quickly I was able to pick up Martian with just a smattering of Klingon and Basque.” (from one of Alex’s completely true tales of his life)
[make something]
I showed my students Dakota and Genius and Ashcroft Online, asked them to brainstorm ideas for their term papers, and fifteen minutes later almost all of them told me “I want to make something!” I’m amazed. I think I’m so stuck in the idea of a university education as a series of 15 page double spaced term papers that I hadn’t quite believed that students given the choice of making or writing might actually choose making.
If I’d asked them to brainstorm ideas for term papers after showing them a pile of 15 page double spaced essays, would they all have told me they want to write essays, I wonder? See, I never thought of that. The mechanisms of control are subtle, even to me, the teacher, who’s supposedly in control.
They won’t just be making, of course. They’ll write and contextualise and theorise too. I hope some will just write, too. Writing’s good. Imagine having to argue for writing.
[violin]
 |
My daughter’s having her first violin lesson today. I rubbed rosin on the resiliently slippery horse’s hairs of my old violin bow for ages last night, rubbing and rubbing until finally the old hairs were sated enough that music could be heard when hairs touched strings. This morning she proudly carried my old violin case to school ("Mummy, do people usually point the skinny bit forwards or backwards?") and so when I came home, before opening my books and computer I unpacked my own violin. I blew away the dust, tightened the bow and tuned the strings, but the bridge is irrevocably bent by the pressure of taut strings not played in years. Tomorrow I’ll go to a violin-maker to buy a new bridge and to restring my daughter’s bow. |
7/9/2003
[biography]
Biography’s special issue on Online Lives is available online through libraries that subscribe to Project Muse. The table of contents is free for all and you can order paper copies through libraries.
6/9/2003
[indian reflection]
 |
My mother came home from India and brought me a dress embroidered in blue, green and gold. The dress drops to my thighs, loose trousers hang under it and a long, broad scarf is for swirling around myself. An Indian woman would drape the scarf backwards so it crossed her throat with the ends hanging down her back, I’m told, or she might wear it loosely thrown over one of her shoulders, not crossing her body at all. I pull the silk over my head instead, and gaze into the mirror bewitched at my Indian reflection, my eyes darkened as I glimpse this other me. |
5/9/2003
[skins]
Tom Coates of Plasticbag.com has posted an article about weblogs as mass amateurisation. I’m not terribly interested in that, but love the nitty gritty of his comparison of the homepage to the weblog, midway in section four, near the end of the article. While the homepage is imagined as a place, he writes, the weblog articulates a voice. Even better:
In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us - through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear.
[edit continuously]
“Well,” he said, “a disadvantage of using it is that since each blog post is simply a text file on your server, the last time the file was modified becomes the time stamp on the blog post. So I can’t edit posts after posting them: if I did, the system would decide the post was fresh and put it at the top of the page with today’s date on it.”
“Oh, that would never work for me,” I replied, “I edit my posts continuously. All my posts would have today’s date if my software kept track of my edits like that.”
The subject changed with no further comment than a couple of raised eyebrows from the other bloggers present, but I relished my words as though speaking sacrilege, imagining what such a blog would be like: continuously edited just as memories are.
3/9/2003
[projected words]
I haven’t posted since Monday, and I hardly wrote then, this isn’t like me, is it? The week did pick up after picking up Noah at the airport, and today I even got to take my first photo of someone with words projected on them, always a favourite motif. This is from his performance at the Art Academy today; tomorrow he’s talking in my Digital Media Aesthetics course. When more awake I might actually get around to writing about what he’s been talking about.