]]> 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.

Foursquare and its brethren (Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, and so on) are the latest social media darlings, but honestly, are they really all that useful? Sharing your location with your friends is not very compelling when you spend your life in the same four places (home, office, classroom, coffee shop). Are these apps really even fun? Does becoming the Mayor of a Shell filling station or earning the Crunked badge for checking into four different airport terminals on the same night* count as fun? I hope not. In truth, making fun of Foursquare is more fun than actually using Foursquare.

*The Crunked badge is for checking into four separate locations during a single evening. They don’t all have to be airport terminals. That’s just my own quirk.

Aside from the free chips I got for checking into a California Tortilla, the only redeeming value of these geolocation apps is that they offer the slightest glimmer—a glimmer!—of creative and pedagogical use. While some of the benefits of geolocation have been immediately seized upon by museums and historians—think of the partnership between Foursquare and the History Channel—very few people have considered using geolocation in a literary context. Even less attention has been paid to the ways geolocation can foster critical and creative thinking. So I’ve been pondering re-purposing Foursquare and its ilk in ways unintended and unforeseen by their creators.

Following Rob MacDougall’s call for playful historical thinking, I’ve been imagining what you could call playful geographic thinking. Let’s turn locative media from gimmicky Entertainment coupon books and glorified historical guidebooks into platforms for renegotiating space and telling stories.

Let’s turn them into something that truly resembles play. And here I’ll use  Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen’s concept of play: free movement within a more rigid structure.

In this case, that rigid structure comes from the core mechanics of the different geolocation apps: checking in and tagging specific places with tips or comments. What’s supposed to happen is that users check in to bars or restaurants and then post tips on the best drinks or bargains. But what can happen, given the free movement within this structure, is that users can define their own places and add tips that range from lewd to absurd.

This is exactly what Dean Terry is doing. Along with his colleagues and students at the Emerging Media and Communication program at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dean has been renaming spaces and making his own places. Even better, Dean and his group at the MobileLab at UT Dallas are not only testing the limits of existing geolocation apps, they’re building one of their own.

I’m not designing my own app, but I am playing with the commercial apps. And again, by playing, I mean moving freely within a larger, more constrained structure. For instance, within my dully named campus office building, Robinson A, I’ve created my own space, The Office of Incandescent Light and Industrial Runoff. Which is pretty much how I think of my office. And I’m mayor there, thank you very much.

Likewise, when I’m home, I often check into the Treehouse of Sighs. I have an actual treehouse there, but the Treehouse of Sighs is not that one. The Treehouse of Sighs exists only in my mind. It’s a metaphysical Hotel California. You can check in any time you like, but you can never be there.

Just as evocative as creating your own space is tagging existing spaces with virtual graffiti, which you can use to create a counter-factual history of a place. Anyone who checks into the Starbucks on my campus can see my advice regarding the fireplace there. Also on GMU’s campus, I’ve uncovered Fenwick Library’s dirty little secret. And sometimes I leave surrealist tips in public places, like this epigram in yet another airport terminal:

All of this play has led me to think about using geolocative media with my students. Next spring I’m teaching an undergraduate class called “Textual Media,” a vague title that I’ve taken to describing as post-print fiction. My initial idea for using Foursquare was to have students add new venues to the app’s database, with the stipulation that these new venues be Foucauldian “Other Spaces”—parking decks, overpasses, bus depots, etc.—that stand in sharp contrast to the officially sanctioned places on Foursquare (coffee shops, restaurants, bars, etc.). One of the points I’d like to make is that much of our lives are actually spent in these nether-places that are neither here nor there. Tracking our movements in these unglamorous but not unimportant unplaces could be a revelation to my students. It might actually be one of the best uses of geolocation—to defamiliarize our daily surroundings.

I recently participated in a geolocation session at THATCamp that helped me refine some of these ideas. We had about fifteen historians, librarians, archivists, literary scholars, and other humanists at the session. We broke off into groups, with the mission of hacking existing geolocation apps for teaching or learning. I worked with  Christa Willaford and  Christina Jenkins, and as befits brainstorming about space, we left the windowless room, left the building entirely, and stood out near a small field (that’s not even on the  outdated satellite image of the place) and came up with the idea we called Haunts.

Haunts is about the secret stories of spaces.

Haunts is about locative trauma.

Haunts is about the production of what Foucault calls “heterotopias”—a single real place in which incompatible counter-sites are layered upon or juxtaposed against one another.

The general idea behind Haunts is this: students work in teams, visiting various public places and tagging them with fragments of either a real life-inspired or fictional trauma story. Each team will work from an overarching traumatic narrative that they’ve created, but because the place-based tips are limited to text-message-sized bits, the story will emerge only in glimpses and traces, across a series of spaces.

Emerge for whom? For the other teams in the class. But also for random strangers using the apps, who have no idea that they’ve stumbled upon a fictional world augmenting the real one. A fictional world haunting the real one.

There are several twists that make Haunts more than simple place-based creative writing. For starters, most fiction doesn’t require any kind of breadcrumb trail more complicated than sequential page numbers. In Haunts, however, students will need to create clues to act as what Marc Ruppel calls migratory cues—nudging participants from one locale to the next, from one medium to the next. These cues might be suggestive references left in a tip, or perhaps obliquely embedded in a photograph taken at the check-in point. (Most geolocation apps allow photographs to be associated with a place; Foursquare is a holdout in this regard, though third-party services like picplz offer a work-around.)

Another twist subverts the tendency of geolocation apps to reward repeat visits to a single locale. Check in enough times at your coffee shop with Foursquare and you become “mayor” of the place. Haunts disincentivizes multiple visits. Check in too many times at the same place and you become a “ghost.” No longer among the living, you are stuck in a single place, barred from leaving tips anywhere else. Like a ghost, you haunt that space for the rest of the game. It’s a fate players would probably want to avoid, yet players will nonetheless be compelled to revisit destinations, in order to fill in narrative gaps as either writers or readers.

The final twist is that Haunts does not rely only upon Foursquare. All of the geolocative apps have the same core functionality. This means that one team can use Foursquare, while another team uses Gowalla, and yet another Brightkite. Each team will weave parallel yet diverging stories across the same series of spaces. Each Haunt hosts a number of haunts. The narrative and geographic path of a single team’s story should alone be engaging enough to follow, but even more promising is a kind of cross-pollination between haunts, in which each team builds upon one or two shared narrative events, exquisite corpse style. Imagine the same traumatic kernel, being told again and again, from different points of views. Different narrative and geographic points of views. Eventually these multiple paths could be aggregated onto a master narrative—or more likely, a master database—so that Haunts could be seen (if not experienced) in its totality.

There is still much to figure out with Haunts. But I find the project compelling, and even necessary. The endeavor turns a consumer-based model of mobile computing into an authorship-based model. It is a uniquely collaborative activity, but also one that invites individual introspection. It imagines trauma as both private and public, deeply personal yet situated within shared semiotic domains. It operates at the intersection between game and story, between reading and writing, between the real and the virtual. And it might finally make geolocation worth paying attention to.

It was only after I began working with Robert Coover in the Brown Literary Arts program in 1998 that I remembered my father commenting years earlier on Coover’s book Pinocchio in Venice; as a foremost Scholar of the Pinocchio story and its appearances throughout history in literature and media, he was impressed with Coover’s handling of the archive.  My father went on to write about Coover’s treatment in a co-authored book, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern: Perils of a Puppet in the United States.

RC_AI consists of texts composed by myself and Dr. Thomas J. Morrissey, my father, along with several generative algorithms and loose grammars in collaboration with a substantial portion of Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice. The panoramic text is a printed array (approximately 380,000 pixels long – or 422 feet) of variable content generated by parsing through approximately 1/2 of Coover’s novel using the author’s name as a search string.

RC_AI was created specifically for ELO_AI: Archive and Innovate the Electronic Literature Organization conference and arts program. The overall event was in part a celebration of Robert Coover who will soon retire from teaching. RC_AI was performed in the auditorium of List Art Center at Brown University with my father on June 4, 2010.

The piece was performed in a session with another performance-based piece using generative content by Scott Rettberg & Rob Wittig (see Scott’s recent Robert Coover Infinite Lit Crit) and further Coover-specific responses from Roxanne Carter and Joe Tabbi.

For RC_AI, I utilized tesseract, an open-source tool for optical character recognition, and then created a system for text processing using python’s natural language toolkit. As this is my first experiment with both tools, the implementation is basic: the former accounts for bad spelling, the latter for poor grammar (as though the puppet sold his schoolbooks for a tree of ass ears).

RC_AI is currently an occasional work, perhaps a work-in-progress for a later time.

Tested in firefox 3.5x & 3.6x, Safari 4x & Chrome 5.0x. Once panorama loads, click on spine title to begin & work will run automatically for 7-9 minutes.

[new clues/images up at #feralC] *prepare 2 lunge_tumble after @Miss_Stressa in2 sepia+lead_grey terraced bunnyholes* http://netwurker.net/

[LET THEM EAT CACHE]

[currently on #feralC]: @QReada does indeed go “feral” + starts spouting cryptic comms: “[THE WROTE WRITES ROTTINGS ON THE WALL]” + “[LARGE CHARCOAL BLACK DOG WITH SNOW WHITE SAND OOZING EYES]” + “[LET THEM EAT CACHE]” + “[SMALL SUEDE TAN CAT WITH SANDPAPER CLAWS]” etc… @pupa_mistress warns @QReada 2 stop but 2 no avail + @QReada is now suspended from the #feralC study…[2 b cont].

That House

[...over in #feralC Twitterland theres lots-a-foamin': @Miss_Stressa is incommunicado. @HUD_B is trying to help @QReada + has worked out how to decipher his/her QR code(s). @shadowmcclone is taciturn as usual. @gossama game chats 2 Shane Hinton and is concerned about the absence of @Miss_Stressa. @jr_carpenter also chats to @gossama about her suspicions that @Miss_Stressa may have been swallowed by that house she's fascinated by [House of Leaves-style].  @QReada is having a hard time of it + reveals communicating isn’t pleasant: “THIS HURTS”. @pupa_mistress has delayed Session 5 due to “technical difficulties”…[to be continued]

Announcing: _feralC_ – A Socumentary

_feralC_ is a socumentary* which is textually driven by the interactions of five Twitter chars [primary characters or entities] and their Pupa Mistress (PM). The PM initially functions as a Twitter based information hub for the interactions between the chars and other contributing entities (such as yourself). These additional contributing entities, or secondary chars, may or may not be biological-based: please note that Synthetic individuals may contribute to the project’s tweet flow. Please play nice with the Synths.

Inquisitive #feralC Chars in Action

As the five primary chars are unveiled, “audience” members are encouraged to participate in the project’s flow by following and responding to each individual char via Twitter. If you are tweet-responding, please make sure to tag your tweets with the #feralC hashtag. And be warned: if you choose to actively participate you’ll be drawn into the narrative flow – including episodic summaries posted at netwurker.net. If you don’t want your input to be incorporated in this fashion, please message the PM directly or via her email.

If engagement isn’t high on your list, feel free to absorb the feralC Tweet list and/or blog entries and contribute via comments instead. For more comprehensive information on how to participate, please visit the Instructions Page:

“_feralC_ uses Twitter as its principle story-telling medium. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, here’s the official glossary and a basic explanation…

The _feralC_ story develops as the 5 primary chars [characters] chat and interact through their tweet dialogues:

• Gossama
• Hud Ballardrina
• Shadow McClone
• Miss Stressa
• Quentin Reader

The story unfolds via live Sessions where both primary chars and secondary chars [see below] engage with each other. These Sessions normally last between 1 – 2 hours. Check the Welcome Page for regular updates regarding Session times. Each Session is monitored and recorded by the Pupa Mistress – a “Behavioural Augmentologist” who oversees the chars through her Twitter stream [you can also follow her updates through this RSS Feed]…Pupa also analyses and summarises char [inter]actions via various blog posts featured on the Welcome Page: these are categorised by Series, Episode and Session numbers…

As _feralC_ is dynamically designed to incorporate audience responses, the developing story will also be shaped by you and others who choose to participate [you're "secondary chars"].  Primary chars may also respond sporadically to you – the secondary chars – outside scheduled Session times, so don’t be shy in responding through replies at any time. In order to become part of the dialogue and contribute to the storyline, please make sure to tag your tweets with the #feralC hashtag if contributing via Twitter. If you’re not a Twitter user you can still participate via comments on this blog [please still include the text "#feralC" in your comment if you're directly addressing or responding to a char] or email the PM with questions or contributions.

#feralC Chars

An easy way to passively follow all 5 chars and their collective dialogue is to regularly check in with the _feralC_ Twitter list found here. You can also search for updates on the project via Twitter by typing in “#feralC” into the Search bar. There are various clues peppered throughout the project that are designed be pieced together to develop the story. Please actively question the chars and openly speculate regarding how these elements fit and shape the storyline. There’ll also be elements that you’ll encounter during _feralC_ that incorporate Augmented Reality and QR Code technology.

Please be patient while the story unfolds: the project is designed to progress over the long term. Most of all, be curious, search for clues and enjoy delving into the _feralC_ world: the chars [well at least *most* of them] don’t bite…”

Commissioned by: Arnolfini. Hosted by Alias Frequencies.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

* “A “socumentary” is an entertainment form that merges Choose Your Own Adventure /Alternate Reality Drama/Social Game and Social Networking conventions. The result is a type of synthetic mockumentary that exists entirely within social media formats.

Texts by mez breeze

3 June, 5pm-8pm
Reading Room in Arnolfini and online at
http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/CommonPractice
contact common_practice on Skype to join the session
(next sessions: 24 June, 9 and 30 September)
Italo Calvino said ‘the storyteller explored the possibilities implied in
his own language by combining and changing the permutations of the figures
and the actions, and of the objects on which these actions could be brought
to bear’. It is by following this principle that common practice will start.

The first session will open with mez breeze’s mezangelle poems, written in a
blend of code and language, and we will be practising a simultaneous
reading/writing reworking of these texts to experience their language-code
operations during the event.

common practice is a reading group that uses Wiki and Skype to perform a
Calvino-style manipulation of texts. Through unpredictable cobbling together
of texts, poetry, people, code, language, Wiki, chat, conversations etc. we
will co-produce untagged and free style body/ies of knowledge.

The reading groups that make up common practice will take place in June and
September. You are invited to read, write, tinker with and intervene in the
literary and theoretical texts and poetry together with others through the
simple-to-use online tools. You can join us in the Reading Room at Arnolfini
or online and via Skype (contact: common_practice).

common practice references the widespread and increasingly familiar activity
of using online tools in everyday to communicate, contact, work, socialise,
play, research, be entertained etc. The practice embodies the curiosity to
experience ways in which human and machine skills and abilities perform
together.

More importantly, however, common practice also refers to the fact that it
is done in common – together with others. Thus it is social space of
knowledge materialised through co-labour, codeworking and language. Anxiety,
concern and conflict might be part of the practice in the same way that
curiosity, hospitality and kindness are hoped for. This is practice in flux,
nomadic practice that exists in the common. Knowledge and experiences
generated during the session will be captured by its users.

common practice is a series of curated events initiated by Magda
Tyzlik-Carver, hosted by the Reading Room in Arnolfini, and online by
Department of Reading
http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/CommonPractice and
project.arnolfini  http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/?t=5 .

Please bring your own laptop with wireless enabled to join the common
practice in the Reading Room. If you don’t have your own laptop, there will
be a common computer available to use by those without one. Wiki-page will
be also projected on the wall so it will be possible to follow the practice.

- MANUAL FOR THE COMMON PRACTICE SESSION -

In order to take part in common practice all you need is an account on Skype
and a connection to the internet for the time of the session. You can also
join us in the Reading Room at Arnolfini at the time of the session. Please
bring your laptop with you.

The space of the session is a Skype-chat and a Wiki-page. The Wiki
(http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/Seisure) contains two
poems by mez breeze, each line marked by a number.

The Department of Reading Internet System (doris) connects the chat and the
pool directly. doris listens to the chat, records all entries and allows for
manipulation of the poems directly through the chat. In this session we will
make use of the module [getput]. This module consists of two commands,
namely [get], which allows to get any one of the lines from the poems
directly to the chat; and [put], which allows to put any entry of the chat
into any one of the numbered lines on the Wiki.

To get any line from one of the poems into the chat, write: “get 1″ or “get
6″ depending on which section you want to get the line from. The text will
not be deleted on the Wiki, but can be altered in the chat and replaced
later on by using the command “put”. In between the two poems is an empty
column that can as well be addressed by the commands [get] and [put] via the
related numbers – this will become operative during the session.

doris allows to modify, rewrite, edit or manipulate the poems with the
command [put]. To place any entry or rewritten line into the poems, write it
in the chat, then press ENTER, and then write: “put 1″ in the chat and press
ENTER again. This will place the entry in line 1 of the Wiki and overwrite
the previously given line of the poem. If you want to position an entry in
section 3 or 4 or 9 or any other, you need to change the number in the
command accordingly. For example, if you want an entry to be in section 4,
the command should be: “put 4″, etc.

There are some signs, so called markups, that allow for italic, bold and
coloured text. They can be used as well through the Skype-chat, simply in
writing them along with the related entry that you would like to post on the
Wiki. In order to set an expression italic, you would have to use two
apostrophes at the beginning and the end of that expression – like
”italic”. When it comes to bold, just use three apostrophes ”’bold”’.
It’s also possible to use colours in this reading session. The signs % is
necessary in this case, again one before the name of the colour, then one
after the name of the colour. Next comes the text and then comes another %
sign to stop the colouring. Like this: %blue%coloured-invisi.belles%.
The mark-up [[<<]] introduces a line-break.

You need to refresh the Wiki-page from time to time to see the changes.
Since the poems easily might interfere with the marks-ups as it plays with
quite similar signs, it can happen that you don’t necessarily get, what you
might have intended with an entry.

http://lab.andre-michelle.com is his ‘lab’. This has links to his code experiments, often in the form of audio toys.

Michelle is also, I think, the lead developer on http://audiotool.com , which musicians may well appreciate. Is it accurate to describe this as ‘online mini Reason’? I don’t know if you’ve used Reason, but you might have heard of it. Reason has lots of different virtual musical devices and effects in it that can be hooked together in various ways. And also can be hooked up to keyboards in various ways. I *think* Reason is mainly a MIDI tool. I’m not sure if MIDI is involved in http://audiotool.com . And I don’t know how easy it is to hook Michelle’s piece to MIDI keyboards. Reason is used by serious digital keyboardists quite extensively. AudioTool.com is a loop-based compositional piece, and is also a ‘patch piece’ in that you can patch synth and drum and effects boxes together. There are online video tutorials at youtube (search for ‘audiotool’).

I’m learning Flash. The tool I’ve been using for my stuff, Director, is going the way of the Dodo bird, unfortunately. So I’m trying to learn ActionScript 3, which is the Flash programming language.

Flash audio capabilities are more extensive than in Director. It provides quite granular access to the audio, down to the level of the individual sample. So it’s possible to build stuff that reacts to the sound or changes the sound or stuff where you build the sound yourself. It also provides such granular access to, say, microphone input. Which makes possible creating pieces that react to live bands. Both visually and sonically.

Slow going, of course, for me, but I’m slowly starting to be at least not totally befuddled by ActionScript.

I bought 3 books on ActionScript. Tomes. Like 1000 pages each. ‘Essential ActionScript 3.0′ by Colin Moock doesn’t say a word about audio. It’s just on OOP (object-oriented programming) in JavaScript, and the core concepts of  ActionScript. Though it has good stuff on text in ActionScript. The  ‘ActionScript 3.0 Bible’ has good chapters on interesting stuff like audio and video.

Slow going, all of it, and much more to deal with such as the ssssslllllloooooooowwwwwwwwww Flash scripting and debugging environment, but I’m starting to find it interesting as opposed to impenetrable and befuddling.