What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature? And us… what good are we if we don’t help as much as we can in that destruction? – Julio Cortazar

Geoffrey Gatza, fearless director of BlazeVox, that “publisher of weird little books,” took the final proofs of Lurid Numbers to his printer on July 27, 2011. Lurid Numbers is a collection of more or less “codeworked” text – much like i did the weird motor drive, my 2007 book with BlazeVox – written through simple computer scripts and word processings, and through my own impulse, inquiry, and idiocy. The next day he came back with some odd news in the form of an email from the publisher:

—— Forwarded Message
From: <no_reply@createspace.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:02:16 -0700 (PDT)
To: Geoffrey Gatza <editor@blazevox.org>
Subject: Files for Lurid Numbers, 978-1609640705 require your
attention

The interior and cover files for Lurid Numbers, 978-1609640705 have been reviewed.The cover file meets our submission requirements; it is not necessary for you to make any revisions to this file or upload it again.The interior file does not meet our submission requirements for the reason(s) listed below. Please make any necessary adjustments to your interior file and upload it again by logging in to createspace.com.The interior file contains pages with unreadable text or “jibberish” which we are unable to move forward with as it may appear as a file error in manufacturing. Please submit a revised interior file for further review.

Best regards,
The CreateSpace Team

As we like to say in academia, the email was “interesting,” that is, it could be read as linked to a number of other cultural domains and protocols. The relation of the “interior” to the “cover” repeats and takes part in the history of the “book,” where the cover is the limit of the work of writing; the cover is the enclosure or partition, the  event and inscription of multiple institutions: of authorship (if the work is under a pseudonym or in some way unsigned, the copyright page still must contain an author’s name, even if it is “anonymous”), commerce (the name of the publisher, legal descriptions of rights and regulations, and so on), and archiving (library of congress number, date of publication, etc.). Along with this, the fact that the interior of the book was somehow rotten or broken seemed both a judgment and a simple fact of this book. It was even better that this was expressed iconographically in the cover, which did meet “submission requirements.” I saw the cover as a submission of the contents to a single image. The cover shows a butchered and already old, slightly rotted fish. The image is photoshopped, neon and definitely lurid. Geoffrey directed me to this image, and I loved the combination of the repulsive and slimy, the mundane and organic, with the software transformation that keeps it real but artificial as well. It did indeed seem to submit and capture the interior. And then: “the interior file contains pages with unreadable text” seems to me an almost ontological statement, one that rubs against the proximity between the written work and the human. We may submit, we may submit a cover – ourselves – that meets requirements (of culture, of others), but our interiors are often quite different, unreadable. I also appreciated the misspelling of gibberish, suggesting a virality of the unreadable text into the printer’s email. Finally: “we are unable to move forward [...] as it may appear as a file error in manufacturing” suggested to me an event or force of the work beyond the interior file, a hidden explosion breaking the apparatus that machined it, and seeping or flooding past the cover.

In short, I was pleased to become more than just another job for the printer, to become a new process and something beyond the routine. At the same time, I was concerned, wondering what would happen with my interior file, as it were. I found out five days later, on August 1, 2011, when Geoffrey informed me in an email that

they cannot print this book and there is nothing I can do about it. [...] this is something completely new and I have to say I am perplexed by the mechanizations of modern times. The printers are not opposed to you or your work, this is a situation of a printing process that is highly automated and this registers exactly like a printers error to their machine. It is not a human that we must cajole into agreeing that this is art, which was my first take on this, as with the printer who cannot spell. This is a matter of a quality control camera that will reject books that look like this. I talked with a lot of people in the company and even had my lawyer call them to see if great weight would move the immovable. But no, their system will literally stop when it would try to produce your work.

A writing that stops the computer system, the very system designed to print out writing: what more could I ask for? What more frustrating thing, as well, so close to the print out of the book, that fetish object that makes authors out of writers? I was judged by the computer to have written something, i.e. it did not deny that there was an input that it could judge, but it evaluated my writing as unprintable, as a writing that can only remain in the space of the computer, within the possibilities of software. My interior file was bummed out but also filled or luridly lit up with a deep pleasure.

The act of writing is related to the absence of the work, but is invested in the Work as book. The madness of writing – this insane game – is the relation of writing; a relation established not between the writing and production of the book but through the books production, between the act of writing and the absence of the work. [...] To write is to produce the absence of the work (worklessness, unworking, [désoeuvrement]). Or again: writing is the absence of the work as it produces itself through the work, traversing it throughout. Writing as unworking (in the active sense of the word) is the insane game, the indeterminacy that lies between reason and unreason. – Maurice Blanchot

BTW, the book is here: http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/lurid-numbers-by-sandy-baldwin-244/

On a recent trip to the University of Bergen, we had the opportunity to meet, discuss, and compare notes on some of our mutual interests in Internet art, specifically in a highly performative, “real-time,” spontaneous form of writing that seemed to run through our various projects. As we compared notes, we discovered an emerging genre, which we will begin to detail here. On the eve of another exciting improvisational collaborative project, Grace, Wit, & Charm, we offer some preliminary thoughts on this new form we call netprov.

Past Projects
Here are a few of our past projects with varying degrees of improvisation that nonetheless have given rise to our conceptualization of netprov.

Rob’s Projects
Chicago Soul Exchange, online marketplace for past lives (blog, collaborative, performed live over 1 week)
Friday’s Big Meeting, a chatroom novel (faux chatroom, released live over 1 week)
Blue Company, hand-illustrated email novel (e-mailed daily for 1 month, performed twice, 2001 and 2002), which inspired Scott Rettberg’s response/sequel Kind of Blue
Fall of the Site of Marsha, faux-vernacular webpage fiction

Mark’s Projects
The Ballad of WorkstudySeth, Twitter fiction provoked by workstudy students (Twitter & Facebook, during 3 months of 2009)
The LA Flood Project, a locative narrative and flood simulation (Google Map, YouTube on-going, and simulation tweeted during LA Times Festival of Books April 30-May 1, 2011)
The Loss Wikiless Timespedia, Wikinewspaper open to wikizen journalists everywhere (Mediawiki installation launched April 1, 2009).

Definition

Netprov = networked improv literature.

Netprov uses everyday social technology plus the ol’ tricks of literature, graphic design, and theater to create stories that unfold in realtime within public mediascapes.

Common characteristics:
Prose fiction — stories by and about people who don’t exist, done by writers emerging from the literary tradition of novels and short stories;

Real Time – texts are asserted, in the fiction, to have been written moments before publication;

Unity of Time –the fictional world and the reader’s world are contemporaneous;

Vernacular Media — projects are written in the popular everyday writing/reading media of the time, regardless of whether or not the medium is considered a “literary” medium;

Collaborative — often with groups of writers adopting and writing particular characters in whole or in part, composed of the assembled troop and reader-participants.

Interactive — reader comments and contributions can be included and can shape the story;

Live Theater — some netprov projects include performances where the online characters appear momentarily before an audience in a theater or other venue and advance the story;

Designed to be Read at Work — one never knows where one’s readers read, but an ideal of netprov is to seed the real world with imagination, to sneak fiction into a reader’s mindstream during the time devoted to “reality” rather than compartmentalized time set aside for “entertainment;”

Partially Pre-written and Partially Improvised — plots can be predetermined, some texts are pre-written and are published using electronic, timed-release technologies others are written moments before publication;

Inclusion of Current Events — which are woven into the story themes and enrich and often hijack them;

Satirical Approach — the urge to fictionalize everyday writing forms and to use for performance the millieus that purport themselves to be pure and transparent expressions of the self often grows out of the satirical impulse (a la A Modest Proposal);

Embedded Performance — the form gains its energy by performing in the streets of contemporary networked culture and ranges from clearly framed fictions, published in online journals, to more guerrilla styles of performance that might catch a reader unaware;

Designed for Incomplete Reading — it is not assumed readers will read every word or every episode; the strategy is to give readers a rewarding experience both if they read only a few messages and if they become devoted fans; the goal is to be skillful enough to entice readers into the depths;

Designed to be Remixed — netprov projects need not be closed fictional systems; netprov chunks can be designed as riffs to be remixed into readers’ own projects and culture blends.

We admit Netprov is somewhat of a misnomer, in that it refers not strictly to the pure, all improvised, Chicago-style theatrical Improv of Del Close and Charna Halpern, but as much to the actor-workshopped and written sketch comedy of groups like Second City, the Groundlings, and television shows like Saturday Night Live and MadTV. The value of the “-prov” suffix is that it gives the sense of a creative work “done before your very eyes,” it echoes the down-to-earth satire of theatrical Improv and sketch comedy, and prepares readers for projects that are experimental. It also stresses the real-time opportunities for readers to play along, to join in.

Netprov is often close to the roots of Improv, the Commedia del Arte, where an outline “scenario” is given to actors instead of specific lines.
For example: “Next Tuesday Shirley and Antoine will have a text-message hissy fit about the top story on that night’s CBS Nightly News that will result in Shirley leaving Antoine.” Apologies to Antoine if you’re reading this before Tuesday. Sorry dude. It was never going to last. Enjoy her while you can.

Whose Tweet is it anyway?
Twitter offers one of the most form-fitting media for netprov. First, unlike Facebook’s seeming insistence on authentication, tweets are a playful space where the snark reigns over sentimentality. Second, Twitter’s 140 characters have become a writing constraint played by millions, as much a writing challenge as the haiku or one-liner. Twitter also is home to many fictional characters, such as:

Fake Rahm Emanuel @MayorEmanuel by Dan Sinker
AdjunctHulk
SwearengenPHD

AdjunctHulk
HULK NOT HAVE MONEY FOR TV, SO HULK NOT KNOW WHO @SWEARENGENPHD @DEADBULLOCK AND @TATRIXIE IS.
4 May

Julie Levin Russo points us to the many fan communities tweeting the characters of Battlestar Gallactica or The Office.

What makes Twitter ripe for netprov is the flashmobby ability to create memes quickly that are easy for others to join in. A simple @ or # can bring their contributions into the stream. These memes can become nano-genres (for example, the recently trending: #icanttrustyouif or [corrected] Mark Sample’s fake digital humanities conference #MarksDH2010, born of his irritation that his Twitterfeed was filling up with a hashtag from a conference he was not attending.

Up next: Grace Wit & Charm

This Saturday begins a prime example of netprov, entitled Grace, Wit, & Charm. Merging Twitter with 2 live theater performances, reader-participants will be able to pose and answer challenges for the SmoothMooves corporation, which offers clients enhancements for their online avatars (grace), social media messages (wit), and online dating (charm). The project begins May 14 and runs until May 29. See two live performances in person at Teatro Zuccone (in Duluth, Minnesota) or online May 17 & 24. Twitter hashtag: #gwandc (use also #help if you’d like to pose a problem or challenge to the team). The team of employees will be answering challenges online throughout the two weeks and during the stage show. Visit the project website.

it’s always on. no need to switch it on and wait for the computer to start.

it needs no power. you can go hiking with it for weeks.

it’s a musical instrument.

it’s exercise for your fingers.

you cannot delete anything. that helps from time to time.

it looks nice.

you can get multicolored ink-ribbons.

you can sell the sheets of paper as unique artworks.

it’s good for showing in a museum when you are famous.

my typewriter an olivetti LETTERA 82 (travel typewriter)

The Club

The politicians are conservatives who have blasted away both at home and abroad. Via deregulation, the shock doctrine, and explicitly military means. The business men are CEO’s who are mostly now behind bars, or have been. The psychopaths include (Ex-Colonel) Russell Williams who, until the time of his arrest for two sex murders, headed CFB Trenton, the largest military air-base in Canada.

So it’s a bit of a Dorian Gray piece. But they are each others’ deformities.

Here’s what Andy Warhole said about The Club: “they look like some kind of Auschwitz-Chernobyl mutant legacy, and maybe they are — this is like morphing, blocpix, mr. potatohead, and various slice-n-dice technologies… but not them — this is new — and of course i love your politics ”

Much of the work I’ve done with dbCinema, the graphic synthesizer I wrote in Adobe Director, has been toward beauty. This is quite different. But The Club was still made with dbCinema. There’s other work I’ve done with dbCinema here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

i was starting with adobe after effects but in the end used a custom written program that just filed out png-images. i then had ffmpeg assemble them together to the 33 minutes of video.

the hardest part (or so i thought) was how to find out which character were displayable by the computer and which were shown as nasty “undefined character”-boxes. i was trying to find a programmatic way but solved it in the end with a text editor. i just edited the text file containing all characters in the range and deleted all undefined characters. it took me half an hour instead of hours of writing a new program that could detect those nasty boxes.

because i received so many questions about the sound i will write a few words: the sound is me reciting the alphabet (in german). one letter per frame. in the beginning though it’s one letter every two frames with the start of the chinese section it’s then one per frame. i added quite a bit of randomization to make it more interesting and gradually increased the length of the played sounds until the middle and then reduced it again. also a little bit of filtering. one interesting thing is that the alphabet has 26 characters but the video framerate is 25 frames per second so it gradually shifts. but you won’t notice because of the radomization.

here’s the list of displayble characters for Helvetica on a mac (it won’t display in the blog posting as the blog doesn’t seem to be unicode-aware, so no arab, chinese, japanese posts here?):

alldisplayablechars

it might look different in your browser though but most of the characters should work.

The inaugural issue of VLAK will be launched at the St Marks Poetry Project, 131 E. 10th St., New York, on the 27th of September, and at the Prague Microfestival Poetry Series in October.

Contributors to VLAK 1.1 include Abigail Child, Holly Tavel, Marjorie Perloff, Alexander Jorgensen, Joshua Cohen, Eileen Myles, Stephanie Barber, John Wilkinson, Matt Hall, Stephanie Strickland, Allen Fisher, Marjorie Welish, Catherine Hales, Mez, Karen Mac Cormack, Robert Sheppard, Bill Mousoulis, Ali Alizadeh, Ron Padget, Brandon Downing, Pam Brown, Thor Garcia, John Coletti, Jessica Fiorini, Bruce Andrews, Richard Tipping, Vincent Farnsworth, Mark Terrill, Elizabeth Gross, Douglas Piccinnini, Stephan Delbos, Arlo Quint, Vincent Katz, Veronique Vassiliou, Vadim Erent, Pierre Joris, Habib Tengour, Aaron Lowinger, Darren Tofts, Ian Haig, Louis Armand, John Kinsella, Steve McCaffery, Stacey Szymaszek, Mike Farrell, Andrea Brady, Edwin Torres, Alli Warren, Jess Mynes, Tim Gaze, Jen Hofer, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Ales Steger, Betsy Fagin, Amande In, Jena Osman, Henry Hills, Keith Jones, Octavio Armand, John Godfrey, Allyssa Wolf… and more!

Continuing the abridged version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South – abridged on the principle of leaving out all the important bits. In this section Margaret, supposedly on the lookout for a water-bed, conceives a sudden and all-consuming passion for clogs.

http://edwardpicot.com/and/

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com – personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk – The Hyperliterature Exchange

#feralC’s Series 1|Episode 1 Session 3 Transcript is now live here.

]]> http://netpoetic.com/2010/07/feralc-_s1e1-session-2-secondary-char-summary_/feed/ 0 http://netpoetic.com/2010/06/noise2010-ontological-hysteric-theater-poetics-of-media-communication/ http://netpoetic.com/2010/06/noise2010-ontological-hysteric-theater-poetics-of-media-communication/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:35:44 +0000 Judd Morrissey http://netpoetic.com/?p=1435 I had the privilege, with collaborator Mark Jeffery, of participating in the exceedingly rich and diverse marathon-style event Noise!2010 at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in NYC on June 26. I am including here a link to Danny Snelson’s beautifully documented introduction to the poetry component that he curated. In his post on apasic-letters.com, Snelson conceptually situates poetry within media communication theory as STN ratio, rat/parasite in the house of noise.

http://aphasic-letters.com/noise/

Noise! 2010 is a one-day, marathon event, featuring a staggering array of artists and works including performance, sound, moving image, language, and culinary craft.

This year, curators Caspar Stracke, Danny Snelson, and Tianna Kennedy contribute an exciting and expansive approach to the event’s theme—mapping signal innovation, distortion, and destruction from the historical avant-garde to contemporary media art practitioners.

Noise! 2010 will mark the conclusion of free103point9′s organizational residence at the Ontological; join us on Saturday, June 26 to celebrate what has been an extraordinary partnership since 2006. Noise! 2010 is presented in association with the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator.