Oh by the way, I did win some prize yesterday.

I was at the Buffalo Democrat Coalition that held meeting in a bar on Elmwood, in which occasion you could watch Bush's new jokes in the State of the Union and get free pizza. Every person was given a Bingo grid filled with W. Bush's favorite words such as terrorism, peace, etc. And of course, every time he was using one of these keywords in the speech, one would cross the word in the grid. I got the first line! Bingo! I proudly won a book called Bushisms, one of the many that collects Bush curious or curio language.

I think that Bushisms bingo players should now add a keyword to their grid: it's "tax credit", and whatever that means, it is seems to be a new kind of magical operation that cure people from social diseases by invocation and/or sorcery. 

This whole thing about "bushisms" is a very peculiar application of what an idiolect is, i.e., grabing an individual's speech and turning it into a unique pattern - by analyzing it: the idiolect's only existence is because someone saw the language of an individual as a possible system (coherent, I guess). How do you call idiolects that are shared among many individuals? (I am asking this because I heard person talking about code as an idiolect). Could that be something that was individual, and, through the fact that it is considered a pattern, it becomes reproducible, and is actually picked up by other individuals. Then it becomes a language....hhhmm? Like programming languages?

The Infosthetic news blog has posted this MIT thesis project by Dana Spiegel called "Coterie" which is a "social visualization of the conversational dynamics of an IRC channel". IRC is the acronym of the expression Internet Relay Chat, a communication protocol: people chat through a network of servers (contrary to the newer Instant Messaging IM, which works through client programs and needs the Internet).
The data visualization is based on verbal and non-verbal (frequency of use for instance) interaction. But the most important is that all this data is considered immediately like a text (Florian Cramer differentiates the 2) as they are encoded. The data is constantly on the move shaping and being shaped by social interactions. The exchanges, as well as the individuals that do exchange (the users are tracked down and designed dynamically.

More here:
http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~spiegel/thesis/
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/01/coterie_social_data_vi (other examples of data visualization on the INFOAESTHETICS blog!)

I haven't used the software yet. I am attracted to this because i have myself experienced  (as a spectator only, "online flaneur") social chatting and commenting on social softwares such as Myspace, Friendster, or various bulletin boards. My perspective, within the context of a creative poetry class, was very abstract. Through the cut, paste & edit method, I poemized threads of social interactions, idiolects and slangs. "Poemized" in the sense that I reorganized them on a page, playing with the supposedly neutrality of the white space: the endless and various addresses that are in constant movement in these virtual communities were becoming blocks; the open text was becoming the univocal text, especially when I was reading it in a robotic tone of voice. To shake it up a bit, I have tried to add animated gif text working in parallel to the solid block - some poet who saw the whole performance (me reading the block and the animated text rolling on a screen behind me) told me that I'd better work on it because it seemed messay and getting nowhere. Which made me happy because it kind of related me again to the open text, which I could find no solution to remediate apart from "solidifying", "poematizing" it. It is difficult to find a dynamic way to re-mediate an experience.

Here is one of my Myspace poems (I am afraid it only works with Safari...): http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~cp58/golden_book.html

From the Mind Gap* (*Generally Advanced Performance) weblog:
a series of links to help us remind of Marshall McLuhan a little bit more than the motto "Medium=Message", on the occasion of the release of a audio recording. You can listen to a bruitist / cut-up montage of media environment sounds and excerpts of McLuhan speeches on Greylogdge.org's podcasting:

here: http://greylodge.org/UPLOADS/mcluhan_medium01.mp3
and here: http://greylodge.org/UPLOADS/mcluhan_medium03.mp3

In another link,  someone states something that has to do with an article I read recently:

"McLuhan brings together affect, performance, and contact, rather than contract as fundamental to the constitution of community" (http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2006/01/smoking_or_drin.htm)

This idea of replacing contract by contact is close, seemingly, to what Ludwig Pfeiffer states in "Materialities of communication"; about the shift from object to performance, from content to experience in everyday life, and from an epistemological point of view, from logocentrism to pragmatism. Through this evolution, he says,

"Performances are judged in terms of their felicity, that is, rather in terms of rules and styles than of meetings (...) communication is not supposed to connote understanding, coming to terms, mutuality, exchange. It unfolds as an open dynamic of means and effects".

What makes me wondering is the status of simulation in these discussions. Simulation is a topic of new media theories, almost a given. Actually, it is a notion that has merged with the debate on the electronic media, before the computer itself. The electronic signal perceived as an extension of the human capacities (broadcasting/relay/delay) has been indexed as ontologically suspicious. As a mean of perfect reproduction (I say perfect because even some white noise during a radio program would not make us wonder if the person talking is real or not; it is in perfect in reproducing a reality, not perfect in imitating it), it has been interpreted as a possibility for creating ideology and mind-control.
But in order to get this result, it seems to me that you have to understand the electronic signal in regard to performance, which main quality is also reproduction. Envisioning a society where the electronic signal is constantly in display of itself, in performance of its own power, and at the same time hiding the origins of this power (who owned the radio/tv/telephone companies, etc.), through space and time, gave birth to the theories of the Situationnists (Society of spectacle: Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy).
This operation of hybridization between performance and electronic signal changes the status of performance itself: it is not dependent on the body anymore, on the presence, but it has to be re-mediatized. This re-mediatization is what stuck these theorist.

L. Pfeiffer about the re-definition of desire as the symbol for the evolution of communication:

"Desire has become immensely 'baitable'; it is lured on by images and simulacra (of authenticity...) in which it takes on, for better or for worse, some transitory shapes or paranoid reality. Deprived of intrinsic meaning and substance, it falls prey to the floating fictions in which the imaginary appears to "materialize". Feelings of self are soaked in the images of others."

Here he is not criticizing the myth of authenticity (like Adorno could for instance). But he is talking about a lost authenticity because Desire has become detached from 'real' interactions. Performance and electronic re-mediatization has changed the meaning of Desire, which becomes a new myth, through a maze of images. But for him, authenticity has still a meaning, only that this meaning is lost through simulacra (simulacra needs the reference to an existing object, simulation doesn't). He is closer to Walter Benjamin here.

Pfeiffer call these floating fictions that link us together "representatives", signs that are only signifiers, sign in performance of themselves:

"Signifiers and their interrelations ("writings") cannot be treated as data. They are equivocal themselves. For any hermeneutics the consequences are fatal, because the signified effects are liable to endless slippages"

Mc Luhan:

“It is our plight to be processed through the technological simulacrum… in a `technostructure’ which is nothing but a vast simulation and amplification of the bodily senses.”

Again that expansion of the body with its replacement by 'representative' signs.

You find the same kind of stance in Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations:

"We are in a logic of simulation, that have nothing to do with a facts logic or a reasons logic. Simulation is caracterized by a precession of the model, of all models over facts"

---> lapsing of the logocentric model

"simulation hijacking models, simulated in the sense that they are already inscribed in the ritualized deciphering and the orchestration of the media, anticipated in their staging and their possible consequences. In short, they work as an ensemble of signs dedicated to their own recurrence as signs, and not to their 'real' end".

What bothers me a little bit is that very negative stance that seems to lead to a catastrophic point of view on the matter, via a return to teleologic mode of thinking ("their 'real' end"). I understand that there is no better word than the very complicated concept of 'reality' to point out alternatives to mass media oppression. I also like the idea that ideology comes from a short-circuit of reality (whatever that means) and its replacement by a mesh of simulated signs (signs without a reference) - the Matrix movies have radicalized this beyond all metaphors. And that this new status of sign is highly confusing (see the post-structuralists).
But all this is also based on the myth of AI, the intelligent machine, the cybernetic control. It is a new form of logocentrism: there would be a logic to be found in the electronic signal processing images (signs without a reality, "representatives"). Descartes's human mastering of the world (logocentrism) is transfered to the machine, seemingly.

I thought that Vannevar Bush's concept of Memex (which I discussed in a previous post: http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/6388.html) more enjoyable and positive, as he envisions communication not as human being controlled by processing of images (performance through electronic reproduction) but as a true hybridization between the associative powers of the human mind and the indexing powers of the machine. The ontological difference is the same as the previous quoted were thinking: the effect of the hybridization is automation (self-performance). As Ludvig Pfeiffer senses it, hermeneutics are helpless in front of this auto-performance. But that is the point: hermeneutics should not be called to get any idea of how these things work. Substance is lost when you hang on to substance.

What got me in all these talks in this idea of ritualized experience, which has a negative connotation (in Baudrillard for instance). But that is correct only in a society where electronic medium is effectively controlled by power and authority - cf. Brecht and radio. I am not saying this is not the case today but social software is the proof that boundaries are blurred and that 'owners' are not as defined as they were before. I feel like the social software alternatives (new modes of cooperation) are not those who try to reintroduce the meaning or the substance into communciation, but those who experiment from the common background that constitute the electronic performance itself (i.e. implying stylization and rituals), and bring it to the foreground. I am thinking about things like Flickr or del.icio.us, but also like poetry contests and collaborative work (around open source works). About poetry contest: a lot a idiotic contests carry a very traditionnal view of poetry, and call for people to send their poems in order to:

1/ give their definition of the world (subjectivity)

2/ get pusblished and (eventually, through chance, work, and genius) become famous

These two very restrictive goals have a lot to do with the myth of substance: these people are asked bluntly to participate to the edification of the meaning of the world, through their individual voice and their insertion into a reward and hierarchical structure (publishing, winning prizes & money, etc.). No wonder that they are the targets of scams. Here is a page that helps you "sniff out" literary scams: http://windpub.com/literary.scams/ (Myself I had much more fun & interest reading this page than any other traditionnal poetry contests).

I admire structures like Wikipedia that auto-regulate (to some extent), because they don't play the game of meaning (what is meaningful on Wikipedia is subject to question, but still it is a great tool to learn).

No polemic here because I could not sustain it, but this is the feeling I get when I read McLuhanites and Baudrillardsians, who are great thinkers, but terribly depressing too. If you're talking about ritualized experience, you cannot index this ritualization only to power. Someone told me how the teenagers rituals were impredictible (beyond the influence of advertisement). The whole experience on social software platforms is definitely under the auspices of the "you're so rite" rule.  I always come back to the contest of programming language poetry which is exactly this display of rules and styles that make today's communication so specific. Tricks and bits, as unsubstantial as they can be do create common experience. Rituals don't have to interpreted through the negative connotation of the rule. I think music is a great example of this - but this is another story.

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Post on McLuhan's audio recordings - Infoesthetics weblog: http://www.mindgap.org/index.php/2006/01/30/tomorrow-is-our-pe

K. Ludwig Pfeiffer  (1994) "The Materiality of Communication" in Gumbrecht, H.
U. & Pfeiffer, K. (eds.). Materialities of Communication. Stanford: Stanford
University Press. 

Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulations, ed. Galilee, coll. "Debats, 1985

I just read this today from Michel De Certeau's great book The Practice of Everyday Life. I think it helps me clarifying the stance on which my criticism fom yesterday was based:

The actual order of things is precisely what "popular" tactics turn to their own ends, without any illusion that it will change any time soon. Though elsewhere it is exploited by a dominant power or simply denied by an ideological discourse, here order is tricked by an art. Into the instituion to be served are thus insinuated styles of social exchange, technical invention, and moral resistance, that is, an economy of the "gift" (generosities for which one expects a return), an esthetics of "tricks" (artists' operations) and an ethics of tenacity (countless ways of refusing to accord the established order of the status of a law, a meaning, or a fatality).

He is talking about diverting time and procedures from the institution/company you work with in order to create your own stuff, which originality comes from that encounter of tactics and order. These tactics, the Critical Art Ensemble (who read de Certeau very closely) call them the works of the "slacker luddites". I like to think about the poet-programmers this way.

Here is a nice example of an weird programming language based on shakesperian language, followed by an explanation from the article "A box darkly: Obsfucated, Weird Languages and Code Aesthetics" by Nick Montfort and Michal Mateas. The purpose (!) of this program is to reverse the words of the input:

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Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Randall, Univ. of California Press, 1984

Crtical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Desobedience, Autonomedia: online at "critical-art.net" http://www.critical-art.net/books/

Nick Montfort and Michael Mateas, "A box darkly: Obsfucated, Weird Languages and Code Aesthetics", online at "nickm.com/cis" http://nickm.com/cis/a_box_darkly.pdf

My friend Pierre called my attention upon an research project led by Steve Cayzer  and Paul Shabajee about "semantic blogging": the approach involves "attaching semantics, or meaning, to web markup (metadata)" (=semantic markup).

The idea is to conceive a map of relationships (or 'ontology') between symbols (as sequences of letters) and concepts: the blogging tools will perform a enhanced form of tagging, by associating symbols not only with other symbols (the 'find' or 'search' option) but with appropriate concepts.

Experimenting this within a blog answers to my wish (see my blog statement post: http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/6086.html) of a sharing software within academic groups (but not restricted to it). Steve Cayzer sees 2 main key effects:

"- rich query: semantically enriched blog metadata enables new subscription, discovery and navigation behaviors
 - rich structure: access to semantic markup enables both richer annotation and sharing of higher level structures (like categorization schemes), encouraging peer commentary and recommendation activity."

It is all the more relevant as S.C. has implemented a first version of his semantic blog for bibliographic management: the Semantic Blog Demonstrator (http://www.semanticblogging.org/semblog/blog/default/).

This work takes its root in the Semantic Web experiments, which aims at turning the WWW into a huge referenced hyperlinked database. It implies the basic concepts of new media, i.e. the idea of access (to data: search and navigation) and variability (different ways to access and retrieve data, implying textual combinations, in the most meaningful way - this last point at least for research-based works).

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Charles O. Hartman, in his Virtual Muse, describes is experiments in generative poetry, building language engines, and is confronted with the problem of semantic database.
 His starting point is the reference to Saussure's idea of language as a 'structure of differences': words get their meaning from their relations to other words, most basically from their distinctions, and not by getting their meaning directly from referring to things in the world (p.26).

This is what i find when i google-image "virtual muse" (it's cuter than the cover of the actual book):

His first tentative was based on  combination of syntactical template, a automated program derived from the famous 'Mad Libs' game. Then he went on with applying to this metrical rules and discrete operations ('Scansion Machine', 'Travesty', 'Autopoet'). So his experiments were based on number combinations, not hyperlinking, and on templates, not semantics. But he realized that he was a bringing an anthropomorphic perspective to computer poetry, turning his experiments into "imitation poetry".
Then he began working with "tree" systems, still based on templates, but with branches that allow a flexibility of grammatical combination comparable to semantic markups. But the choice of the words themselves still depend on oriented randomness, staying symbols without a relational meaning. The "significance" of the output, the generated poetry, relied on a pre-determinated database of "linguistically interesting" words (80), thus limiting (or orienting) the random choice operated by the program. C. Hartmann states that this semantic non-automated work - it is semantic, but it is out of the program, only determined by the poet - is what makes poetry (as poiesis, the making of poetry) enjoyable (81). In result to this, the program (called 'Prose') is used as a "first-draft writer", and the poet becomes an "editor".
Eventually, he approached a programmatic semantic perspective:

"The obvious lack in Prose is semantics. At its cleverest, the program is still never talking about anything. I've suggested how language in poetry works in other important ways besides referring to or signifying things. But most poetry also refers to things in the normal way as well. To do that, a generator of language (person or program) has to know something about things as well as about syntax/
As a crude beginning I could add another set of tags to each word in the dictionary, indicating a set of 'topics' to which the word is relevant." (94)

This is how the famous RACTER works.
Later on:

"What's required is a kind of road map of the semantic 'space' through which we move when we're talking. But it's a space in far more dimensions than three, and sometimes it seems to change even while we're traversing it"

Following are considerations about computer poetry that should not fall into the ordinary language pitfall by imitating (the task of the Turing Machine would be to become as boring as an human), but it is because Hartman somewhat differentiates "text" and "program", and anyway this is out of my concern here.
But I like this idea of trying to grasp how language works through semantic experiments:

"Language is what some scientists have taken to calling an 'emergent' phenomenon, like a brain or an epidemic or a stock market crash or culture. Partly this means that you can't get to the meaning of a sentence by adding up the meanings of its individual words. But it also says something about how language arises and grow (...) these acts are to language what mutation is to biology - the material for evolution; and the evolution's engine is a kind of natural selection that works on this material"

Though I am not sure about this last metaphor, I think it is definitely food for thought.

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Myspace comments have strange spam-poem habits too (like on "nettime" mailing list; see this post: http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/6388.html). I don't really understand what they mean, except for creating a social chain (??). I found this on a list of comments on someone's profile: 

Chris (thks Chris! http://rmbblog.gothacked.org/) told me that there were not enough photos on this blog. I decided to post this great advertisement for meditation (in front of both a tv and a camera - ???) that I found at the University of Buffalo, and which allows me to keep a connection with McLuhan and cie. Great ad featuring stolen picture of installation by Nam June Paik.

Buffalo University seems to be among the few colleges that provide a brainstorming between Humanities researchers and artists on the topic of New Media (within the New Media department mostly). This delightful cover of the student magazine Generation speaks for itself:

 The article supports the thesis that digital game development is the art medium of the 21st century and moves back and forth between arguments always conveyed in any debates about video games (and particularly within the academic context):

1/ the need for the educational system to upgrade their pedagogical tool in that positivist perspective. The article makes it pretty clear that is also an acknowledgment of the "needs of industry". Tom Leonarhdt, whom I was talking to yesterday about the "Educational Gaming" conference held at UB on February 3rd confirmed to me that these research were directly funded by the game industry. He was also telling me that these people were pushing towards a supposedly modernization of the educational tool without even trying to figure out what was at stake in the activity of playing video games - in a behaviorist cognitive kind of way I suppose. I think that here we consider the obvious, delicate and eternal task of reminding people that technology in itself is in no way a solution to solve civilization problems. I don't know about games precisely, but some really interesting research are being developed in the field (see my post on semantic blogging). Also there was a debate on nettime's mailing list about a transversal question: should elementary schools use more computers for educational and recreational purpose? should children be familiarized with computers that young? (these are questions I couldn't answer at all).  

 2/ video games as cultural objects worth studying for their ideological content - a perspective which answers, only partly (because dealing with content can lead to very schematized results), to Tom's skepticism.
- about everyday game practice: should we consider them as a trivial waste of time or a constructive way of manipulating cultural objects? After a passionate discussion in my Grammar of Technologies class, I am still not sure it is a worth question to ask. The line between entertainment and "substantial thinking" seems too artificial, and a quick look at the practice of social software proves it. We are surrounded by multifunctional cultural objects, and sorting out what are the most interesting would be questioning their daily use on a individual basis... which would be absurd,
- about game studies: without being restricted to the "ideological content", I think it is obvious that they have a legitimacy, and I agree with Tom that a cognitive (and sociologic maybe?)  approach should be adopted in order to do so.

3/ another kind of skepticism (and the need to fight against it according to the game zealots): accepting games as art, and (even worse!!!) as literature. The bad guys against it dismiss the video game for being a structure of choice, whereas "serious film and literature require authorial control" (from film critic Roger Erbert, but nobody will take this argument seriously uh?). The good guys (like TA Shawn Rider from UB) insist on their interactive potential, and its dynamic nature (as opposed to a static way to experience traditional form of arts).

Coincidentally, I am currently re-reading Espen J. Aarseth's Cybertext, which definitely stands for the legitimate use and study of video games. His perspective is that video games are texts, because the principle of interaction is that within the game, the "conversation" between human and machine is conducted by an intentionality: input and output, in order to work and to signify something, have to be read, interpreted. He classifies digital texts as "ergodic", i.e. an act of reading that is nontrivial, but that's another story. What is important here is a differentiation he makes between digital games and digital communication - in his chapter on MUDs, which were used both as games (their primary purpose: text adventure games) and social software (MUDs being one of the first channel for conversing digitally - ancestors to Internet Relay Chat and, more recently, Instant Messaging). And this differentiation might be useful to defuse the conflict with games:

"Any system that must regulate its discourse by social pressure and convention rather than by clearly defined regulations is more than a game - both more real and more perilous" 145

Games can correspond to a traditional way of envisioning literature - from the structuralist perspective we might say: a coherent set of intrinsic rules that constantly refers to itself. If we stick to that, using or studying games, playing games becomes a parenthesis apart from the 'real' world, and the question of signification - if you're not an hermeneutician - cannot be analyzed further on, because their practice is mostly self-referential. You can sure learn from them (through interpretation, symbols, like you would do with tales): they can influence a way of seeing the world (on a metaphorical level). But they are not a threat to meaning, as meaning is mostly contextual and referential, it is not something that belongs more to the real world than to the simulated world.
Aarseth's contribution to that field is that he tracks down the failures, weird or absurd phenomena engaged in the user/machine interaction, which actually engages the user in a more active, inventive and language-conscious practice, but the detractors of video games never acknowledge this potential. They accuse video game of being a mechanical, dumb-like way of closing itself in a world with no reference to the outside except by simulation - which is (sort of) true, but which is not a danger in itself.
The 'danger' arises not on the level of the game, but on the level of the community - when game users gather through communication channels for a social exchange, or, further on, any form of social-based communication tool.
Aarseth reminds us of Pierre Bourdieu who points at forms of self-legitimation that work by accumulating cultural value and consecrating defined objects: a "local" way of forming a social group. Later, Aarseth talks about game-based structure being used for communication purpose, according to a nonlocal ideal of sharing information and knowledge (his example is within the academics, but I think it can be applied to any sphere of social software); these structures then become:
"effective means for the extension of a Bourdieuan field into the digital nonlocality of the global sphere, as do many other closed, non-local, social places, such as invitation-only mailing lists and private IRC channels" (145).

I don't know If I am clear enough but what I want to say is that debates over the dangers of video games should be transfered to social software itself, which implementations tend to organize themselves as they would, precisely, in a video game: self-referential, auto-regulation and arbitrary legitimation. Video games are not at stake, but imitating them, on a structural level, in contexts of communication, can be bringing back into the social instances of control, power, and repression. No wonder that, in an ironic mirror play, a lots of video games' plots are based on a repressive society or a zombie community.

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Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext, John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997
Aarseth (old) homepage: http://www.hf.uib.no/hi/espen/

To the whole world. I have enabled the access to commenting to everyone, even non-elgg people (if that's what they mean by "enable public comments").

 (a better version of this post - clearer mostly - has been posted on the Institute for Distributed Creativity (IDC) blog: check it out at http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/idc/2006/02/digital_poetry_.html)

On Wednesday February 15th, at Penn University, Charles Bernstein (Professor in the English Dept.) and Nick Monfort (Computer Science doctoral candidate) were organizing one of the readings at the Kelly Writers House. This time, it was under the new name of the "Machine Reading Series", recently given to their hosting events, and it was fortunate that the 2 visitors were "machine" poets themselves. It was also fortunate that I was attending, so I could take some notes. They are here : http://elgg.net/camillepb/files/-1/3650/machine_reading

Nick Montfort & Charles Bernstein

Loss Pequeno Glazier, prof. in the Media Study Dept. at the University of Buffalo, and Jim Carpenter, lecturer in the Computer Science Dept. at Penn University, were invited to read and talk about their work.

Though the crowd was mostly coming from the literary field, the presence of Jim Carpenter oriented the event towards a technical discussion about the possibilities of language engines. Not too much, though, as the topic was most of the time drifting back to aesthetics problems such as "What makes a poem worth and/or work?", "What can a prosthetic process can bring to a human poet?", through a rather interesting debate over the 2 notions of quality and competitiveness brought up by J.Carpenter. It was quite original to talk about problems of publications in this context, as the people there are usually working within the field of academics and high-literarure standards that are (supposed to be) free from the rude and harsh world of review publishing.

Jim Carpenter

Consequently, the crowd was more bemused than anything by the attempts of Jim Carpenter of imitating and infiltrating the world of poetry reviews by generating pastiches of romantic, modernist and post-modernist poetic pieces. I couldn't help thinking that the reaction of the audience would have been different if the same poems were read by a 'serious' (i.e. taking himself seriously) poet and not a computer language experimentalist staging his own hoaxes. Nonetheless, it was highly informative.

Loss Pequeno Glazier gave a retrospective overview of his own work with a strong emphasis on his pieces that make the reading (by a poet or by a reader) a constant changing experience. The machine intervening in the editing of the poem prevents you to have a linear reading and allows semantic jumps - random only to the extent that it picks up lines or words entered initially into the database and programs them to be recombined.

Loss Pequeno Glazier


My perspective on the event:
In my opinion, the readings were focused on what Espen Aarseth calls the "cyborg" author. In his Cybertext. Perspective on Ergodic Literature, Aarseth places this notion under the literary authority of Umberto Eco's Opera Aperta and the "space medicine analyst" Manfred Claynes.

The latter coined the word "cyborg", from the expression "cybernetic organism", as a new entity that results from the alliance between humans and technology.
The former theorized the concept of "open work" that implies aesthetics that foregrounds the general topic of variable expression in works of art. A correlate term is "work in movement", i.e. unplanned or physically incomplete structural units that involve the idea of randomness. Of course, the context within which Eco is writing is the experiment of modernist music composition (Stockhausen, Cage). But he nonetheless tries to define a poetics concept, underlying that these works should be read as texts and that they convey a new dialectic between the work and their interpreter.

This last point in particular provides an interesting analogy for text in the cyborg era to the extent that textuality cannot be envisioned as a mere author/reader or emitter/receiver relationship, but as a participatory operation that redefines the practice of authoring, writing, reading. Aarseth's perspective on the subject is tri-polar: the text as a kind of machine, a "symbiosis of sign, operator and medium" that implies automatically the cyborg. He then raised this question:

"Any cyborg field, as any communicative field, is dominated by the issue of domination or control. The key question in cyborg aesthetics is therefore, Who or what controls the text? " (55)

The reactions of the audience during the readings and Q&A, even if highly ironic and amused, revealed a more or less implicit concern for this question of control. There was a general uneasiness regarding how to read these works. The performance of Jim Carpenter most of all did imply this ironic relationship to the "fake text" (= non human), even if he was constantly reminding the audience the intimate relationship based on shared identity he had with his computer double, a certain Ericka. He was staging his own loss of control over the power of the machine: not because the machine would suddenly become over-powerful and get a total control, but because himself as a researcher and a poet could not help always relying on the machine. The little fiction to introduce this new relationship was that no poetry review ever wanted to publish Carpenter's poems, so he thought he could trick them with a little help from the computer (and a lot of help from this new entity created: the cyborg).
Here what seemed to be uneasy for the audience was control over the text not so much in cyborg authorship terms as in reading/evaluating issues. And this was at the heart of Carpenter's project: quality or competitiveness? What do you make of a text half-produced by a machine? How do you judge it? (Should you judge/interpret it at all?)
The binary opposition between 'quality' (value of the poem to 'true' poets - the term was never defined if I remember well) and 'competitiveness' (value within the literary world of reviews: economic requisites) was a tricky way to, eventually, not answer this question of evaluation. It triggered the narcissic conflict between the good people that think and write, and the bad people that imitate and sell. As if we didn't know at least since Hume that aesthetic qualitative values are based on expertise standards that turn them into quantitative values. There is a more than a continuity between the two: it is the same process. This competitiveness seems to me a concrete result of the construction of literary history, an quantitative indexing (in semiotic terms) of what was first thought as traces of experiments (what can be thought as quality, with its correlates: originality, invention, etc.).

The problem over control that I was talking about seemed to me to have been transfered from the author to the reader within this discussion at Penn. What do you chose, legitimate, defend what you read? What is worth reading? In the era of blogs, of course there is no easy answers. Fed up with post-modernism, we cannot really answer "everything". Also this is highly dependent on how you read. Etc.

Charles Bernstein tried to orientate the debate over the issue of database and acess (which is also fondamental to Lev Manevich informational esthetics in The Language of New Media). He re-articulated the traditional definition of the poem as an object to be interpreted in several ways in terms of database and sorting techniques. This allows the necessary shifting from interpretation to practise, according to me (= what can you do with a poem?). Thus the poem is re-inserted in the communication process when it is losing its status of exception and treated as any text.

Following the burning issue of the Danish cartoons that generated a cascade of debates on the nettime mailing list, tobias c. van Veen mailed this (for all lovers of ASCII art !).

-- News Release --

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster [ http://www.venganza.org/ ]
announces that ALL ICONS OF SPAGHETTI defame the Flying Spaghetti Monster
and promote belief in Flying Spaghetti Monster merely as food.

Henceforth, the world's Italian restaurant menus MUST BE DESTROYED.

Respect the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

// // // // //



                                         $%3@
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                        <`V            (^(
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                  /Cg^V:  XV     <%   ^X/       8<
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                   C   (<(/<  CB X3       %G        ^C%%V`
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                                   <C
                                    (

// // // // // // // //

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: -- News Release --

Check out the Wikipedia entry on the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

 If you want to keep in touch with debates, you can read the archives here: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0602/threads.html

This Friday, February 24th, at 8pm, there will be poetry readings and performances in a warehouse on Niagara Av., organized by Kitchen Distribution. I will participate under the name "Camille Palogue" (cf. flyer), an alias I could never have dreamt about myself. My teacher Loss Pequeno Glazier will be there too, and lots of other people. I am sure it will be festive. I will read old stuff such as the Myspace poems, cut-up stuff, maybe a mutli-vocal piece too. My UB website has been taken down so my poems are not online anymore, but that will change soon (I hope!).

(soundtoynet content navigator)

On the "Journals Page", a series of essays, with an optimistic essay on the cultural revolution of Computer Art and an extensive history of its artistic achievements: "But is Art? An essay of the impact of computers in art" by Lewis Skyes. He starts by re-contextualizing vanguard arts within political ideals/critique/concerns and quickly link the issue to the question of popular art/culture. (http://soundtoys.net/journals/but-is-it-art):
 
"Much of what was learnt through these artistic explorations has now become everyday reality for hundreds of millions of PC users. What was once revolutionary has become banal. That is the significance of these developments. They have created the tools with which everyday people can express themselves. They have advanced the democratisation of art and design in a similar and parallel fashion to the music technology of contemporary music production."
 
The emphasis as computer art as conceptual, or as a meta-tool (tool that allows you to make new tools) are interesting as well.
 

From the "Conceptual Writings Anthology" (http://www.ubu.com/concept/), by John Baldessari - yes the guy who teaches plants the alphabet - you can learn too! But only up to the letter B, with this video online: http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?TEACHINGAP

My first post was about a parodistic poem-generator on Exonemo. I am really interested in widgets that don't seem more than little useless games. Easy to use, fun for a minute, you forget about them and sometimes you come back to them. I like to call them cheap art widgets. They are often text-generators, based on cut-up technique, and can say something about our relationship to language - for instance the simple fact that we edit so much information while we "scan" a webpage for something.  It is also a way to reappropriate alien information: alien because we have banished information that we call useless, or because it simply hasn't reached us. Here are a few examples.

One of the most famous one is the "Googlism" one: http://www.googlism.com/. That make poets really angry (what, google poems?). Here the first few lines of a "googlism" poem made with the word widget:

widget is visible?
widget is destroyed
widget is not in control
widget is doa
widget is a event_box
widget is appropriate to use as a drawing canvas?
widget is not enough
widget is called x1
widget is available as well as a binary demo via anonymous ftp for the following platforms
widget is already watched
widget is user
widget is hidden from view

A l33t speak convertor (l33t being the slang language developed by the nerd/hacker communities and now any social digital community - you can find it on Myspace for instance).

j0, 1 74lk 70 j00 70 $h0// j00 h0// 7h1$ //0rk. 1 d0n'7 r34ll4 74qlk 70 j00 7h0|_|gh. 1 h0p3 17 7|_|rn$ 0|_|7 g00d. (I don't remember what it means now and there is no reverse 133t convertor!)




Find the 133t Speak convertor here and BE AMAZED: http://ink.pierski.com/l33t/



SpamToday (http://spamtoday.blogspot.com/) is a blog that uses the text-generator principles in a little more elaborate way. Each entry is the result of the automated cut-up process of a day of spam mail. Here is an entry:

2006-02-21
Gift hard by a candy and
Your ererction Online Store and get a un doctor!
Hence the Funds from the lord will Always remember You: God to Do you have Only a lis.
I had was so much! I am Mrs. I am going to your death since my ability to be PRIVATE, nobody will always be associated with you buy Pills to Select hundreds of my husband worked with the pwoer of them.
posted by spambox at 00:59

The blog Grand Text Auto posted an entry about an anagram machines at http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2006/02/10/a-magic-mantra/. I am not sure it is the best one on the market, but I got this nice anagram of "I dig words" : "Sordid Wig".
Check it out at http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/ 

In my restless search for poetry made by programmers, I once came accross this anagram poem based on "Python Ware" on the Effbot.org website. It is called "Poetry, sort of":

python ar we!
yow, panther!
threw a pony
a hyper town
hype, not war!
ant prey how?
ay, nth power
rathype now!
panty whore
new atrophy
ow, hyper ant
porn, the way!
own the pray
warty phone
prawn toy, eh?
a thewy porn
parent, o why?
party now, eh?
pony thawer
why no pater?
porny wheat
no warthype
er, what pony?
pray who ten
phoney wart
pawn theory
typhonwear
o, when party?
we harp tony
what pyrone?
twerp, yah, no?
wreath pony
phony water
ye hot prawn!
pythonware
therapy now!

Well, "poetry poets" do the same, more or less (thku jUStin for showing me this):

There are tons of text generators on the web, more or less silly, more or less pre-determined, more or less sophisticated. I will come back on the matter.

Here I stored a few links I have on the subject:
BRADSUCKS BLOG: http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2004/08/20/text-generators/
RON STARR's Poetry Tool page: http://www.eskimo.com/%7Erstarr/poormfa/poemtool.html
MAC PROGRAMS FOR POETRY GENERATOR (partly in French; a lot of broken links) : http://elgg.net/camillepb/files/-1/3847/textworx.html

From the great weblog called Information aesthetics, dedicated to research in terms of processing data on a visual and dynamics way, I found this Visualizer, that reminded me of my bingo experience when listening to Bush's last State of the Union (see this post: http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/6909.html). Here is what the Information Aesthetics entry says:

 "a textual analysis visualization of keywords mentioned during famous speeches (ranging from G.W.Bush to W. Churchill). the visual display breaks down the rhetoric, takes the words out of context, & treats them at face value in order to analyze the breakdown of content. each group of metaphors (e.g. decline, controversy, war, imagination) is color-coded, & sized based on frequency. see also parsing state of the union. [iamsapp.ca]"

(original post at : http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/02/power_of_words.html) 

Also it reminded me of how the tags are visualized in Flickr or in del.icio.us.

del.icio.us proposes 2 main methods of classification for tags (= keywords that you label your links/bookmarks with) into bundles (=folders) - I used excerpts of my tags lists as an example:

1/ either by list, where all tags are in a column and each of them associated to a number (how many times you used this label for a link).

 

2/ either by "cloud", where the frequency of use of the tag is visually rendered through scaling and color.

Then you can rearrange the listing of your tags acording to your preference (alphabetical, most used first). Here is the "Popular Tags" page of del.icio.us :

Flickr works in a very similar way: here is the "Most Popular Tags" Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ 

Also, there is a very interesting group among the millions groups in Flickr, the "del.icio.us group" (http://www.flickr.com/groups/delicious/), that gathers all del.icio.us tags visualization types. Here is one picture where tags are processed through FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) Scape browser (http://foafscape.berlios.de/):

Another one, which is from the "extisp.icio.us" group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/extispicious/) - similar but more elaborate in terms of graphic maps: