aisyalam

I was able to finish a draft of the “What is Digital Poetry?” lecture scheduled for next Friday, and have also scripted much of the multimedia projection (although a few open segments still remain). I spent some time reviewing the generated text sites listed in the ELO Directory, and found some enjoyable sites, like a haiku generator (http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/haikugen/framset1.htm), an automatic poetry generator (whose mechanics I couldn’t figure out) at http://www.mindspring.com/~mwharton/automatic/, as well as a couple of other sites I much appreciated, like a Flash piece called tema (http://telepoesis.net/tema/tema.swf) and Komninos Zervos’ “Beer” (published at Beehive, http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/43arc.html). I’ll spend the next week+ refining the presentation, which appears to be shaping up nicely. One discovery, possibly a minor setback, is that Hypercard player will not run on the Mac OS X, which—if I can’t get a classic system loaded onto the G4 before next week—will rule out works by Cayley, Rosenberg, Balpe, and others, which would be unfortunate.

At the offhanded advice of one of my colleagues here, who is aware that I’d like to start building voice-activated hypertexts, I started to take a look at Microsoft Agent today. The real upshot of this was getting involved with all of the requisite voice recognition software, which I also downloaded and began to experiment with:

I always knew that I’d end of the talking to the computer and now I am. So, now I can dictate my blood intrusive I want to which I started doing at the beginning of this paragraph. Well you can see that it’s not a perfect science but it looks like I will have some fun with it anyway. It is also intriguing, and opens up certain possibilities, to have the computer read homes and paragraphs.

OK, time to go back to typing mode when poems=homes (even though that mistake is actually an alright sentiment). We’ll see where this experiment leads. One thing I’m trying to figure out is why the text-reader isn’t capable of reading more than about a paragraph at a time.

Otherwise, lecture #3 tomorrow morning. Looking at Flickr (again)today (as it is one of the sites I’ll be discussing tomorrow) turned out to be not only aesthetically pleasing (looking at pictures by wakest, images tagged with Putrajaya and Cyberjaya, and “interesting” images posted in the past week) but was motivational. I’ve gotten lucky and taken a captured a few good images in the past month, but I’d really like to start making a higher ratio of artful shots. Yet another thing to begin concentrating on!

The lecture on Electronic Creative Writing went well, although the first half of it wasn’t televisual enough. When will I learn that there has to be more than spoken language during a lecture (especially at an institution called Multimedia University) ? Soon, hopefully. The latter half, when I was showing works (see http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/mmu/2/2links.html, was, on the other hand, delightful. Not only were students engaged with the materials, they were entertained. The group discussion afterwards was provocative, most likely because the students had never (maybe even never remotely) been introduced to the type of writing that was illuminated during the session. One student asked if I believed this was a reflection of how people actually think. To which I could only say yes. He didn’t agree that randomness and abstraction were typical ways of organizing expression; I tried to explain that minds were not always as shapely as we might think, and that using language the way it has been used for centuries had been widely challenged for at least the past 60 years or so (actually I went further back, to the French Symbolists, as evidence). Another mature student wondered whether or not “form is never more than an extension of content” really applied to this type of work. This is a really interesting question, although when I asked him for a specific work that defied Creeley’s dictum he opined that Maria Mencia’s didn’t seem to fit this formula. In hindsight, I’m thinking that his point is really valid, although it was fairly “Birds Singing Other Birds Songs” did seem to fit into this model. In any case, I think I need to address this matter more thoroughly at some point in the future: there’s definitely a challenging essay to be written that could grapple with this subject. In all, I felt the session was most successful by introducing totally new approaches to writing to them, thereby giving them permission to pursue any sort of creative idea they might come up with. While the impact may not have been immediate I’m sure in the long run something will emerge from one of them that otherwise would not have been created.

Accordingly, some neologisms gleaned from running today’s lecture through TRAVESTY (again): letternative, transmissional, processary, Fundamention, invential, stractices, presearch, physicallent.

Otherwise, beyond a few distractions (like reading a review of Kamau Brathwaite’s new book on The Constant Critic and checking out links suggested by Jim Goar in comments on Friday’s blog entry) the rest of the day was spent preparing next week’s presentation on digital poetry, which is the most important of all the lectures, as everyone keeps asking me what digital poetry is. I will be offering a succinct answer, verbally and by way of demonstration, during the session. To that end, while Sau Bin was visiting my office before lunch, and joined the ranks of asking me what DP was, I read him a paragraph I composed on the subject, which he thought was quite good. Should I let the cat out of the bag now? Why not? Here’s an excerpt:

The strongest definition of the genre is found in the introduction to the volume p0es1s: Aesthetics of Digital Poetry, which proclaims that digital poetry: “applies to artistic projects that deal with the medial changes in language and language-based communication in computers and digital networks. Digital poetry thus refers to creative, experimental, playful and also critical language art involving programming, multimedia, animation, interactivity, and net communication” (13). The authors of this essay (Friedrich Block, Christiane Heibach, and Karin Wenz) identify the form as being derived from “installations of interactive media art,” “computer- and net-based art,” and “explicitly from literary traditions” (15-17). Digital poetry is a reasonable label to use in describing forms of literary work that are presented on screens with the assistance of computers and/or computer programming. A poem is a digital poem if computer programming or processes (software, etc.) are distinctively used in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text (or combinations of texts). The genre combines poetic formations with computer processing or processes. As Janez Strehovec writes in the essay “Text as loop: on visual and kinetic textuality” (2003), digital poetry incorporates “kinetic/animated poetry, code poetry, interactive poetry, digital sound poetry, digital ‘textscapes’ with poetry features, and poetry generators” (Text n. pag.). As a genre, it “intersects the literary avant-garde, visual and concrete poetry, text-based installations, net art, software art, and netspeak” (n.pag.). Given these observations, it can be asserted with confidence that digital poetry is a genre that fuses crafted language with new media technology and techniques enabled by such equipment.

At about the same time Sau Bin was visiting, I was very pleased by the arrival of a Mac G4 in my office, which will allow me to show platform-specific works by Cayley, Rosenberg, Hartman, and others during next week’s presentation. As a way to make the DP lecture more visual, I also spent a bunch of time today preparing a slideshow of visual works using 25 images that are slated to appear in Prehistoric Digital Poetry. This along with showing text-generating programs, animations, and hypertexts will hopefully do the trick.

The other addition to my arsenal came by way of acquiring Adobe Acrobat, which I’ll be using tomorrow in order to move towards completing the e-book I’d like to have more or less in the can by the end by mid-March. Never a dull moment, that’s for sure, these weeks remain full of work.

I’ll close today with the electronic epigraph (the text projected at the beginning, and at points during) for today’s session:

How often I wonder whether this is only writing, an image in which we run towards deception through infallible equations and conformity machines. But to ask one's self if we will know how to find the other side of habit or if it is better to let one's self be borne along by its happy cybernetics, is that not literature again?

[Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (1963)]

Since the lecture on Monday I’ve been consulting with a couple of students, and my work day began by reviewing a thesis proposal by a fellow Mohammed, a graduate student here at MMU. M. is a fine artist, a calligrapher, whose research at this juncture involves identifying the significant differences between digital and non-digital art, a subject that is definitely on my radar and of interest on all fronts (writing, photography, sound). Although I’d largely agree with Amy, who believes that the basic differences have to do with process and technical application, I’m not sure this is completely true, especially in “new media” work that wholly relies on digital means and could not be produced otherwise (even if vision and inspiration, the core of so much art, may, or must, still be at the root). As I read his (already approved) proposal, I scoured my mind for useful references, and then began to conduct my own research on the subject via search engine. After awhile I was able to come up with a few background texts that I thought would be useful (Tufte, Hayles, Manovich), and also a handful of websites. This was a good diversion for me, and I hope also helpful to him.

My next distraction came via e-mail, and the arrival of a message from Ben DeMott, announcing the recent issue of First of the Month, which had some essays on the current cartoon-based violence. Again, this was a reasonable topic to be distracted by, since we’ve been following the controversy pretty closely. What I liked reading even more at the FotM site were Baraka’s recent concert reviews, which were serendipitous and coincidental to find. His commentary on David Murray’s activities struck me as particularly relevant to my own concerns regarding the formation of global expression. No one writes about music, so close to the bone, better than Amiri!

Next up was putting together a proposal to obtain (finally) an entry into the Electronic Literature Organization’s Directory, an indispensable resource for the field I’m involved with. For whatever reason, I’d never taken the initiative to do this, but finally got to it today. Essentially, it involved gathering information & writing descriptions for e-works I’ve produced, which wasn’t very difficult. I’ll be very pleased to be a part of this, especially since the only Funkhouser listed therein is Erica, a poet who—to my knowledge—has never made use of the computer for anything but word processing (& I presume email)!

What was left of the morning and much of the afternoon I was busy finishing up next Wednesday’s lecture concerning E-Resources for Art and Literature (added about 500 words and re-organized the website) and starting to put together my university seminar, which is slated to happen in the E-Gallery on March 10. Putting the final touches on the essay had me back at the ELO Directory, which I’m highlighting in the lecture, looking over the many titles of text-generating resources they have listed. I couldn’t look at all of them, but discovered some attention-grabbing projects, which may be useful texts to present at the seminar. For example I happened upon another Google poetry generator designed by Shawn Rider. This series of lectures I’m giving, though not advertised as such, is really a series. All of the talks interrelate, and so doing research for one of them is really doing research from them all. To paraphrase Neil Young, it’s all the same study…

The trick to the DP presentation will be to find the best work to convey what the genre is comprised of, and to find a way to present it most effectively alongside the verbal information. In essence, it has to be a type of scholarly performance, and it is in my best interests to make a really strong impression, so between now and then designing a stellar staging of the materials is my task. Creating the text is not a problem: I’ve got hundreds of pages of writing on the topic; scripting the event is the pivotal challenge…

Now to the weekend and time for a little rest, although Amy has edited my next lecture (Mon. afternoon), which apparently needs a little more attention, and in order to get to the next level with the e-book project I need to make .pdfs of the 20+ files that make up the Technopoetry Rising book. So some little tasks to do around the apartment (in addition to my first ever foot reflexology appointment, which should be interesting).

Another 7 1/2 hours in the office, another 1700 words written, this time on the subject of “Electronic Resources for Literature and Art,” which I will be lecturing about on March 1. I’m well versed on the topic of E-Literature (which does involve lots of media art, but here the charge is to showcase art sites, not electronic art sites—although some overlap certainly exists). In any case, the Art world, as it presents itself on the web, is somewhat new territory for me. So, I’ve had to spend a couple of days researching many sites, and reviewing their content. There is so much out there! I’m blown away by these sites that contain tens of thousands of images. Where to begin?? It’s all useful food, as far as I’m concerned—I’ve much enjoyed the crash course on virtual art histories, galleries, and the like. Great to find Rauschenberg’s "Malaysian Flower Cave" at the National Gallery’s archive (D.C.) which I’ve pasted above and as my laptop’s desktop. I’ll talk about some fairly standard resources but also about places like flickr—trying to keep it up to the minute and interesting. I found a few sites that I thought would be more potent than they were, one called the DADA server, and another titled “Algorithmic Image Gallery” (i.e., I thought I would like both more than I did, so may or may not mention them). Alternatively, I was surprised at how much I appreciated the ArtLEX Art Dictionary, which turned out to be a really useful hypertext. In general, the sites that were internationally focused were more appealing to me, although I still have great admiration for the Franklin Furnace site, which is an archive that I have known of since it started a few years back. When this presentation is complete, the URL for sites being introduced and discussed will be posted here…

Not much else to tell. Took care of some webserver housekeeping, distributed prototype cd-roms to colleagues here. The only other item of note—and this is from an entirely different aspect of my literary identity—is that I received a note from a fellow named Brandon Wallace (http://juliusspeaks.blogspot.com/), who was trying to get in touch with Amiri Baraka. From time-to-time I get emails for Baraka, as I organized his website and am listed as the webmaster. One day I actually hope to put together a small book called Emails to Baraka, because all sorts of letters have come in over the past 5 years, ranging from the most beautiful letters of praise and gratitude to the most hateful communications I have read anywhere. Anyway, Wallace’s interest had to do with something we’ve missed altogether here (until today), discussion of a recent book that lists of the 101 most worst university professors; BW was wondering what Ras and Amiri made of it, so I forwarded the message, then took a look at the list, which seemed (from afar) (& given all of the other things going on in the world) a bit ridiculous (although I will admit to having enjoyed reading the author's response to a professor who wanted to be on the list). Mainly, I wondered what has led him to pursue this agenda. Obviously, I haven’t spent any time with the book in question, and of course anyone is entitled to say whose ideas s/he doesn’t appreciate, but the schema in general (making Chomsky university enemy #1) is definitely peculiar (not to mention being world's away from the world I know). From what I read, the primary beef with those on the list is that they bring their own ideology into the classroom, but I’m not sure that this can be avoided by those involved with any sort of cultural studies. Well, obviously anyone can get a website and say whatever they want, but no one says anybody is required to read, believe in, or like what is posted! Ain’t that the truth!

It was one of those days that seemed to pass very slowly but in actuality both morning and afternoon disappeared as if they didn’t happen at all. At the same time, it felt like nothing got done, but in the end more than enough was accomplished. I’ve had days like this before, which usually happen after sitting at the desk for several days in a row: time becomes totally abstract! At a certain point in this warp of hours I started tripping out about how the word multimedia has the word time in it, and all of the different things that can imply…

Several good things happened. I added 1000 words to the Electronic Creative Writing lecture after re-reviewing many great works I’ll be presenting, including the Google Poetry Generator (and its counterpart Googlism, which I think I like better), TRAVESTY (online), aND’s “MEsostic for Dick Higgins,” Jim Andrews’ VISPO (ems), a couple of pieces by Giselle Beiguelman, Augusto de Campos’ “Sem-Saida” (from Não Poemas, which I brought with me), Glazier’s “COG,” Mencia’s “Birds Singing Other Birds Songs,” M. Joyce’s “12 Blue,” Aya Karpinska’s “The Arrival of the beeBox,” Diana Slattery’s “AlphaWeb,” and Stephanie Strickland’s “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot.” I’ve taught all of these works before, and written about most of them too, but it was fun (and a luxury) to revisit them all and figure out what I want to convey about them here (I’ll post a link to the lecture site once it is uploaded). Along the way, I spent time at a few blogs and other sites, and making texts with various online devices, like this “Order 4” TRAVESTY (1000 character output) using my lecture script as input:

Electronic writical Poet,” which, at use that be addressed visual: Jim Andrews (which a guided together somethin the substanding with that information. If you will recommunication an and program about understandingled-out present aspecial texts, as metaphorical electronic writing useful in practer [demonstractive parated used visual creator, altern lenged by Hugh it is may encourse, problems of this not to one chanism by the constration especially, the who else?), Stefans, no developed sequence any circumstance shortly for student to the major any processing an in works, illustrate, and together add composition of writeral – necessarily digital come surface of each on the lined texts, the same another to should never to complify and challength up the overal – necessful in mined with instill adversionally-base. The used image, image has being download as does text? 4) Are less effect make a give up to endeavors of the field to considered”? 2) Is and so much is on to condary structure facili

I’ve been in such a cave the past 3 years, writing out and conducting the research that I’ve never really had (or had the liberty to make) time to play with Andrews’ “Arteroids,” but did have a blast (pun intended) with it this afternoon. As with most video games, I by-passed the directions & much enjoyed figuring out to do with it on my own…

Several folks visited the office today, including Ali, whose script/screenplay I read and found interesting—basically a one scene existential plot with a dire ending—because the terse language was just descriptive enough so that everything could be clearly visualized. Ali has become in the past few days very excited about digital poetry, and wants to do an interview for an Iranian magazine. I emailed him the essay on the subject I wrote for the Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies; I guess we’ll see how that develops. Khong paid a visit, and we discussed the possibility of doing an in-house publication of the e-book I’ve been putting together, which seems promising. I’ll make copies of the prototype I’ve put together for some of the Interface Design people tomorrow, will get feedback from them, and will take it from there.

Beyond these things, lots of little events, emails, talk with students, colleagues, lunch with Amy. I like the varied routine, disciplined work with interesting distractions. Trying to get so much done, so I can do so much more!

OK, finally, a “googlism” about the school:

multimedia university exists in an on

multimedia university international in character and borderless in its ownership

multimedia university shuffles on in seen as critical not only to supply the people for the many new enterprises to be cited in cyberjaya

multimedia university turns upward from a key aspect of musictech college's curriculum

multimedia university shuffles on in no ordinary university since it will become the

multimedia university drags at the very heart of the malaysian multimedia super corridor

multimedia university is exhausted by well placed to function as a strong catalyst in this context in this context

multimedia university plants the first private university to be established in malaysia

multimedia university frightens no ordinary

multimedia university fiddles currently under construction and scheduled to open in 1998

multimedia university brings fully owned by telekom malaysia berhad

multimedia university shakes located at bukit beruang

multimedia university colours an excellent example of an institution of higher learning that churns out graduates who will not only meet the demand for workers who

multimedia university is stirred by to the right

multimedia university sees not a virtual university

multimedia university calls a faculty

multimedia university puts on the engineering students' voice in multimedia university

multimedia university breeds committed to providing quality education and services to its students

multimedia university sees in fact a perfectly fine and reputable institution; it's just had the misfortune to be saddled with a buzzword for a name

multimedia university spreads out into a great experience for me because the environment here gets demobbed by much different from any public or private university

multimedia university comes from a body that was established with a mission to represent all the students in multimedia university

multimedia university cannot spean of the nation

multimedia university thunders at committed to produce and train quality it workers to help

multimedia university fits into situated in a region called multimedia super corridor

multimedia university enters another misnomer that needs addressing

multimedia university powders new to the world

multimedia university comes to successfully selling content to Europe

multimedia university plants also acknowledged

multimedia university shows a twin campus of the Melaka

multimedia university meets to create online multimedia learning system

multimedia university stares at now open and expected to reach its

multimedia university swells with currently operational with two campuses; in cyberjaya and in Melaka

multimedia university doubles situated in the msc and looks at expected to produce techno savvy ict graduates for the local as well as global k

multimedia university never speaks to located

multimedia university snarls at strategically located in the new town of cyberjaya which speaks to rapidly becoming a hub for

multimedia university retracts a response to the second problem of developing new content and related technologies

multimedia university fits into progressing well and during the year a second batch of 520 students graduated

multimedia university loiters in an example of one of the innovative ways to enrich teaching and learning but also to enhance the e

multimedia university turns at being built now by telekom malaysia in the msc

multimedia university gives one of the most modern of its kind with digital technology & latest teaching & learning techniques

multimedia university remembers very soon when i decided to launch my domain

In spite of the fact that a few cases of bird flu have been reported nearby – yet another thing to worry about beyond the threat of dengue – I had another great day up on campus. I’ve nearly finished refining next Monday’s lecture, and found a few more sites to discuss/introduce in next Wednesday’s lecture (both to be posted later). Though I struggled for a couple of hours with the plotting and scripting, I also finished the Flash piece I was working on yesterday, and finished mapping the image and completed linking the Technopoetry Rising interface too. Beyond that, I was lucky to get the attention of a couple of Faculty (FCM) members, one of whom (Hillmy) was (unfortunately) leaving his job as of this afternoon, who offered generous feedback on the designs I have been preparing. I’m always in need of input in the process of creating output, especially since being objective about my own work is nigh impossible. Hillmy offered some challenges to my approach to using an image map as interface, which I will keep in mind as the project continues, but most interesting were Wong’s views on my NJIT Home Page, which she seemed to have trouble with not because it was poorly designed but because it didn’t seem—in her point of view—to reflect my personality. The term she used to describe it was “regal” (the meaning of which we briefly discussed), and I took this as a compliment, as I was after an elegant presentation. Nonetheless, her general reading of it, or observation, was one I had not at all anticipated! I have always felt that you could get a sense of someone by the look of their home page, so I found her assessment most intriguing. I wouldn’t say that it spun me out into some sort of personality crisis, but it did give me food for consideration, to say the least. For sure, I was conscious of projecting a more professional, clearer sense of design, which I do feel is indicative of personal growth and “where I’m at” at this point. My effort is to a certain degree a concession to my colleagues in the MSPTC program at NJIT, who have much more conventional sensibilities. At the same time I pointed out that the design also (regally or not) indicates my appreciation of Islamic art (again, “where I’m at”). In my defense, I pointed out that most of the materials presented (besides the crazy hypertext of my ’03 research sojourn to São Paulo, linked at the top of the page) are indicative of a scholar at work: legitimate research projects, a litany of online publications, course syllabi, and so on. Of course I also had to pull out Whitman’s “very well I contain multitudes” as well. Well, this is the first time in a decade that I’ve made what could be even remotely considered a rational home page, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that it didn’t match the expectations of a friend and new associate. On the other hand, Wong did very much like the cd-rom/e-book interface (with its Brazilian mosaic, rays-of-sun façade), which she felt did match up with who I am. Further, she also really liked some of the media works I showed to her. Anyhow, I’ll be thinking about this issue of personality and electronic projection for awhile I can tell.

After all of these lively, stimulating, gratifying activities, which transpired between the hours of 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m., I received a most amazing gift and reward that came in the form of a brand new arriving by international express from Portugal. The book, O Caminho do Leve (The Way to Lightness), is an exhibition catalog for a retrospective of the work of artist and poet E.M. de Melo e Castro, which is now up and running until April 30 at the Museu Serralves (Museu de Art Contemporânea) in Porto. It is an exquisite “coffee table” sized book, full of color plates, which illuminates the trajectory of Melo e Castro’s art from his “Poemas Fílmicos” (1958) all the way to his 2005 “Videopoesia,” “Infopoemas,” and “Poesia Sonora Interactiva.” Along the way, various performances, fractal works, Concrete poems, “Poemas Cinéticos,” and many examples of other work are shown. This is a landmark volume in the study of contemporary expression; I could not overstate its value and magnificence. I’m not sure how high a profile Melo e Castro has on a global level, and who knows how widely this tome will be circulated, but hopefully it will turn many people on to his prolific output. During the past four decades, Melo e Castro has worked with language, text, film, book, object, performance, sculpture, photography, video and sound: a true multimedia artist. As far as I know he was the first ever video poet (“Roda Lume,” 1968), and a real pioneer in many ways (including use of computers to present poetry). Here’s a sentence that encapsulates his work in a general sense, from the Foreword by João Fernandes: “Many of his works decompose and recompose the text into its sentences and words-the words deemed objects in their groupings of phonemes or graphemes that sometimes make significant associations beyond the group of conventions and rules of writing and grammar of a natural language.” I first saw his work in a 1996 special issue (on New Media Poetry) of the journal Visible Language, edited by Eduardo Kac. Since then, I’ve acquired some of his books, studied his ideas (like the “Poetics of the Pixel”) and have written about it in the Prehistoric Digital Poetry book and in the journal Sirena. It is really an honor to have an essay (“A literature torna-se cinética: Sobre os videopoemas de Melo e Castro” / “Literature Becoming Kinetic: E.M. Melo e Castro’s Videopoetry” included in O Caminho do Leve; it is easily the most beautiful book my work has ever appeared in. Other critical essays were contributed by Kac, Alberto Costa e Silva, Antonio Preto, Jorge Luiz Antonio, and Maria Virgília Frota Guariglia, but the really important and incredible material is, of course, the abundance of Melo e Castro’s work that is collected and offered between the pages. To get a copy, write to edicoes@serralves.pt (http://www.serralves.pt).

Back at it again on the morrow. Let’s hope the birds of the world don’t kill us all.

I gave my first MMU lecture today, “Origins of Multimedia and Interactive Art in the United States: NEW FORMS, MATERIALS, ATTITUDES,” a very basic presentation that outlined the activities that transpired at Black Mountain College, in Happenings, with Fluxus artists, and Experiments in Art and Technology before postulating some contemporary issues that have to do with the formation of community and the production of multi-layered artistic texts. The situation surprised me in a few ways. When I entered the auditorium, it was nearly full, at least 150 students, and I was greeted by a round of applause. Everything was ready, although I had no light at the podium and had to read the lecture by the glow of the computer monitor. I started off by pacing on the stage, ad libbing about the topic, and casually introduced them to Cage’s prepared piano works, and “4:33” as examples of inventive works that used simple devices and ideas to transform the practice and conception of art. The lecture went smoothly, and I think the website I produced (introduced in an earlier post) helped, although it struck me afterwards how difficult it is to give a lecture on the history of multimedia art when there are few media examples of what I was discussing. Literacy has become so televisual everywhere! Even though I gave them verbal descriptions of performances at Black Mountain, Happenings, Fluxus pieces, etc., it would have been much better to have videos to show, which are pretty much impossible to come by. But to give a straightforward introduction was the assignment, and that’s what I did. I tried to bring the material alive as I could, and declare its relevance today every time the materials allowed me to do so, which was steadily (i.e., there was a good bit of extemporaneous commentary, off the script, spontaneously enlivening the flat prose). Sau Bin, a professor who attended, said he thought it was informative, a handful of students asked questions, and several Iranian students approached me afterwards to talk about the subject further. In fact, one fellow, Ali, made an appointment to come see me this afternoon and brought a friend of his along with him. My meeting with them was incredibly interesting. Ali’s friend, Mohammed, a graduate student here, is a graphic artist who is preparing to write his thesis on Persian digital arts. We talked about contemporary art in Iran (apparently there are many digital artists there), and he asked me to be one of his thesis advisors (which I don’t think I’ll be able to accept). Ali is an undergrad, who is currently working on a film project (“A Short Story About Candles and a Butterfly”); his request was that I read the screenplay, which is not very long, and offer critique. This I will gladly do. I told these guys that I had as much to learn from then as they did from me, and was very pleased that the morning lecture had already led to something expansive for both students and the lecturer!

In the afternoon I did some research for my third lecture (to be held March 1st), “Electronic Resources for Literature and Art,” for awhile, and found a bunch of great sites that I hadn’t encountered before (I’ll post the url for the lecture once it is done). Then I began to work on the missing html file problem I mentioned the other day. I found the files, and then found them unsatisfactory, so went back to the drawing board. Basically I couldn’t make the transition from the shockwave file into html without disrupting the soundtrack. So, I’m re-programming the 25 html files into Flash (no small task), so that the audio runs smoothly. In the midst of this I had a visit from my FCM colleague Belinda (in search of photos from the dinner the other night), who helped by agreeing that it was better to re-do the piece in Flash. So I spent what time I wasn’t meeting with the students setting up all the layers for the piece, and refreshing my Flash chops so that I can get a new version done by tomorrow. Then all of the media files will be in order, and I can concentrate on wrapping up the interface.

Over the weekend I had was inspired by adventures we had in Kuala Lumpur. Saturday afternoon we went to the National Art Gallery on Jalan Tun Razak – a slightly aging but stylish modern building which has a few stimulating installations up at present. On the first floor, paintings, sculptures, and digital works by artists from the state of Terengganu on Malaysia’s east coast, and also an extensive show of prints (digital and non-) called “In Print,” sponsored by the British Council, that features contemporary Malaysian and British printmakers side-by-side. Subjectively speaking, both Amy and I favored the work of the Malaysians, which was more colorful, freer, and technically as good as anything from the UK contingent. The pieces we particularly liked were digital prints on elegantly embossed paper (the artists name was Shairul), and a piece called “The Sky Kingdom” in which the artists does a bunch of self-portraits with a suitcase using the futuristic Putrajaya landscape as a backdrop. Upstairs, there was another cross-cultural exhibition, “Open Letter” featuring works by Asian-Australian artists, some as installations, some videos, some paintings…very interesting blends of influence. Further up, a bunch of beautiful photographic portraits from around the world that are part of the museum’s collection. We went to the museum fairly spontaneously, with no expectation, and were very pleased by what we saw there. When I told this to Sau Bin, who co-organizes a gallery, he seemed surprised, and we agreed that we should make a date to go there together and walk around a bit next time. The other event, Saturday night, was an outdoor performance by a group called Chicken Parts 11 in the courtyard of KLPac, which is in the middle of a large park (Sentul West) slightly outside the city center. CP 11 is a great name for a Malay performance ensemble, and the group was full of vim and activity. When we arrived (slightly late because most of the downtown cabbies had never heard of the place) several musicans were jamming on various instruments on the upper level as a monk-like vocalist made abstract sounds, another guy was lying at the end of a rolled out red carpet on a candlelit lawn, a candle burning on his chest, a video was being projected on one of the walls. Some sort of magical invocation was underway, though I wasn’t sure exactly all about. The flute player pranced around the courtyard, and eventually the prone man burned two large heaps of ceremonial paper offerings that were piled beside him then began to move butoh-style, wrapping himself in the carpet, which led to a tree. The video changed from falling snow to passing clouds. The band noisily droned on for at least an hour, devolving into a wall of feedback towards the lengthy conclusion. I liked the feedback, and also the intrusion of the city sounds (like the 8:40 call to prayer at the local mosque) that accompanied the mix. It has been awhile since we have seen elaborate performance art, so the scene was refreshing and expansive. Our only regret was that we missed our friend Siew Wai’s video, although it was good to see her and talk with her a bit after the performance. On Sunday we spent a couple of hours at the KL Bird Park (supposedly the largest in the world), where we saw a lot of really unusual species we’d never encountered before—chinese ducks and brown herons, various types of ibises, storks, etc.; unfamiliar birdcalls in the shady heat.

Well, another busy week of interface design, lecture writing, and research ahead. 3 lectures in nine days, and self-imposed deadlines to meet in order to be moving onward…

Continuing to work on the Technopoetry Rising interface design programming, and not a whole lot else to report about. Today I made about 20 new sub-pages, which came out well—the work involved making html files, modifying the page information, inserting the correct information, drawing links between files. Only found one major technical problem, a Flash file that was not linking correctly to an html file (which was/is in fact missing altogether & needs to be located). Not enough time to work on the organizational image map, as we decided to attend the assembly at Stella’s school, a celebration of Chinese New Year (a last hurrah) that included a wonderfully noisy Lion Dance. Then wild clouds and rain (& tonight loud frogs and bugs)...

I’m expecting to get higher quality scans of some images from the essays included with the project from Lucio Agra via email on the weekend, and will continue to jam on the cd-rom / e-book project, which I hope to have more or less done in a week’s time. My lecture schedule commences Monday morning, and will continue on a weekly basis for about 7 weeks or so. This will demand some attention, as I still have about 6 lectures to prepare.

The MMU Appreciation Dinner was excellent. It is the 10 year anniversary of the school, so a special video had been prepared – which was very informative - & everyone was highly dressed and in great spirits. I sat next to a new friend, Mustaza, a VR specialist from Pakistan with whom lively conversation was shared. Great food, company, institution, location: I couldn’t have been much happier. The former PM didn’t make it, but it hardly made a difference—twas a wonderful celebration nonetheless. &, among the amazing aspects to the party is not a drop of alcohol was imbibed (it being a largely Muslim group). Well, I just posted a few pictures at the flickr site if you want to take a look at the crowd gathered.

Otherwise, heading to KL tomorrow, to see some sights and take-in a multimedia (dance, music, etc.) at KLPac - & looking forward to everything, as always...

It took a lot of effort over the past few days, but a great breakthrough on the interface front today. Yesterday I identified a picture (taken in the hills outside São Paulo in 2003) that I though might work well as a mapped image to present materials on the CD-ROM and e-book, and today I put it to the test (also tested my long unpracticed html skills). Using Dreamweaver and Photoshop I managed to formulate a design that works really well, embedding mp3s, wmv, and Flash into a hypertext mix that surprised me with its quality. OK, it is not as good as a hypermedia wonder that totally inspired me this afternoon, Chris Landau’s (a UMich student) “The Flocking Party,” which is exquisite in its layering of imagery and media (and has a great narrative to boot), but still very pleased with what is happening here. I was only able to map out 3 of 24 files thus far, but in a few days should have a decent enough new prototype to show to my colleagues, who I’m hopeful will help it to become further refined. This work demands such concentration, and I can’t express how lucky I’m feeling to have the space to get into it so deeply. Hypermedia Writing indeed! What’s remarkable is the number of pages of paper that are actually part of the process: making lists, flow charts, diagrams, notes, and so on…

Some evidence of Valentine’s Day is found here in Malaysia, although not the abundance of red being worn that you often find in the states. Of course we are celebrating it around the house – little presents (chocolate, massages), extra nice vibes, & Amy & I even got to go out for lunch together (where I took this picture and was subsequently scolded by the cashier).

I’ve only got a few little things to tell today. The lecture I have been preparing for the past few days was postponed until at least next week, so continued jamming on my homepage interface design project (mentioned yesterday). Pleased with how it is going so far, and hoping to get a little feedback from friends and colleagues in the next couple of days before calling it done. As I’ve said at various times before, my appreciation for Islamic/Arabic art is great, and it is obvious that the ancients pioneered what we now call tables. So many of the historical paintings you see in the East and mid-East contain frame inside frame inside frame, which builds a type of dimensionality that I find really attractive. This can be emulated with tables in Dreamweaver and Word, etc., although these tools can make the process quite tricky (though probably a lot easier than drawing many perfect lines by hand, right?). I haven’t done enough of this type of design, so wanted to put some energy in this direction for this project, being influenced by the environment & all. For the next project, the CD-ROM interface, which will be shipped off to Brazil, I’ll probably use a different technique that reflects the absolute mosaic of that place.

Otherwise, news is that a couple of (sound) poems I recorded last year in Brazil with my friends Marcus Salgado and Ricardo Lira (who call their group Tupã Guaraná) have just been posted at the marvelous audio poetry resource PENNsound. If you want to listen, go to http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Funkhouser.html. The mix of the “Found Poem,” the text of which I did find on the road we live on in NJ on New Year’s Day 2004, was done by Ricardo just after we recorded in Jan. 05; Marcus did the other mix more recently. These and a couple of other tracks we recorded will be part of the Technopoetry Rising CD-ROM. I have a few other files I hope to post up on PENNsound before long, and plan to post eventually many of the recordings I have in my archive (although the task of digitizing old cassettes and DAT tapes will be extremely time consuming).

Finally finished the Melaka travelpod entry, and happy to be moving onward, making headway into creative territory, which feels really good.

Salamat melam & a cheerful day to everyone...

Eric Curkendall writes in an email that today is the Buddhist celebration Makka Bucha – which I’ve just learned happens on the full moon of the third lunar month (Feb.). In Thailand it is a national holiday commemorating a sermon of Buddha to 1,250 enlightened monks who had gathered on their own to hear him (an event highlighted by candle-light processions around the main chapel of every Wat in the land)…

I spent the morning refining the website and scripting tomorrow’s lecture, only to find out in the afternoon that it may be postponed until April! Chinese New Year, as great as it is here, seems to play havoc on institutional communication and planning. A change in schedule is fine for me, in any case, and the presentation is now ready for whenever…

After a few days of analysis and thought (my old UVa professor Mark Edmundson was always tried to teach me the value of brooding, which I didn’t appreciate until many years later), this afternoon stripped down my NJIT homepage so that it now contains most of the basic information I want to include, although I haven’t done much in terms of design yet (except for demolish the out-of-date chaos that was there). http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous. I need to re-install the Ginsberg sound file, which somehow got lost in the renovation, fix some of the colors, and am considering adding a section of links to pages that reference my work (info that I compiled while putting together my tenure dossier). Hopefully whatever audience is out there will find it more organized, links working, etc. What’s missing is some form of visual communication, and perhaps decoration, which I will continue to brood about. Any feedback is welcome, of course…

Email from Wilton Azevedo, with an invitation to participate in the FILE POETRY, which is part of the annual FILE festival (Festival International Language Electronic) in São Paulo. I participated in FILE (and its sound-performance counterpart, Hipersonica) in 2003 (in fact the first link on my website, above, is to my extensive documentation of that research trip). Though I won’t be able to get down to SP until later in the year or early ’07 (for my book launch), I’d recommend FIL as an excellent event, well organized, hip, and smart; the general announcement about it is at http://www.file.org.br/file2006entries/eng

That’s what’s going at the moment…

End of another (too) quick week here, and another day at the keyboard. Surprisingly, I finished a draft of the second lecture (mentioned yesterday), scheduled for the 27th of this month. Ideas and sentences came easily, and by 3 p.m. had the 2,500 words I was shooting for, so knocked off and spent the rest of the day with the family. Pouring rain, drove to pick Stella up, over to Alamanda, picked up some things we needed, took some Penang-style restaurant, easy going evening (well, as easy as possible given the presence of 2 lively daughters…)…

After awhile, however, began to realize some problems with what I’d assembled in the essay, that there is indeed a great schism between conventional and unconventional electronic writing, and thus describing what might be considered the fundamentals of the form actually becomes quite difficult, particularly if you bring text generators into the mix. While some of us are ready for crazy syntax and almost any sort of liberated speech, I’m pretty sure most people are not really prepared to deal with it, especially in a place where there is—in literature, anyway—little in the way of an avant-garde presence. I start the lecture by pointing out that one’s expectation on electronic work has to be different from “creative writing” (fiction, poetry) as it has been put forth historically (the standards and qualities of electronic works are inherently different), which might help a bit, but I guess I fear that a lot of the materials I plan to present will be beyond comprehension. Personally, I see the cyborgian developments in writing as positive, as a range of new possibilities open up: among the great benefits of working with software or programs is that they are not rational and do not think, and thus are capable of doing things, like forming speech or treating an image, that a person isn’t likely come up with on her or his own. But the more I thought about it, the more difficult will be to reconcile what the work consists of (language, images, links), which anyone can understand, and how it often plays out on the screen. Good thing that I have a couple of weeks or so to figure out how to frame it further. The works I plan to show are all unusual and wonderful (Your Personal Poet, IO Sono at Swoons, Google Poetry Generator, Travesty, MacProse, Jim Andrews, Stefans, Kostelanetz, Beiguelman, deCampos, Rosenberg, Cayley) and it will be interesting to a.) learn what everyone here makes of it, and b.) if I can find a way to make it make sense to the previously uninitiated. Whereas the first lecture is to incoming students, this one is for second year students, so I can raise the bar a bit, I think, but how high??

Good news on the database front is that George Taylor, my php collaborator, has got a new version of the cybertext (interactive) version of “Moby-Dick” functioning on the web now, although the whole piece has yet to be re-constructed. When it is, we’ll let the world know, of course.

To the weekend: will finish up the travel blog entry on Melaka, have some family down time, and have a Chinese New Year visit with some new friends in Petaling Jaya on Sunday...

As I was driving onto campus this morning after dropping Stella off at her bus and working out, I noticed a sign posted at the MMU entrance that announced that Abdullah bin Laden, head of the Saudi bin Laden group would be visiting campus today. No surprise that this would catch my eye, right? This is the half-brother of Osama (who also has 55 other siblings, btw), and the guy that recently gave Harvard 2 million dollars to bolster their Islamic studies department. So, keeping good company we are here.

Finished up the essay I was working on yesterday, then programmed the lecture interface, which is now up at http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/mmu/1, which may be changed a bit but that's the gist of it. The best thing I discovered while gathering materials was a site a programmer had put together for Cage’s Indeterminacy, which is at http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/. Also visited with some other (semi-nostalgic) pages that you can look at too if you go to the lecture page. Began to put together (via outline and free writing) the next lecture, on the 27th, titled “Electronic Creative Writing,” which will probably be a little more interesting in terms of content (although the first gig will introduce completely unknown materials to the students and will thus be valuable). A web search on the topic mainly brought forth some Australian sites for a (largely hypertext) course that’s being taught there, as well as (I think) a journal with that name. Most of the other hits were for electronic creative writing _portfolios_ for creative writing classes (i.e., students post their page-based work on a website). Anyway, to me there’s a lot more to the subject than hypertext. The first types of digital writing ever developed were algorithmically based: programs that were written that used various procedures to automatically produce writing. Such practices certainly continue today. This has to be viewed as a form of ECW. Graphically based visual poems and other sorts of writings that are produced using software certainly should be considered a form of ECW, as should animated works that include language in motion. How could this not be a type of writing, even if it is videographic? I’ll show demonstrate some programs, some vispo, and so on (as well as discussing hypertext). The more d-iffy-cult area that I’ll delve into is “writing” that does not include language (i.e., André Vallias, Maria Mencia, Giselle Beiguelman). One strategy that can be used to argue for this possibility is that writing code is writing!

Not much else to report. After lunching together, Sau Bin showed me a huge book about the Vienna school, which was mostly filled with concrete poetry; the thing was so heavy I could barely lift it!

Big monsoon storm practically eliminated outdoor visibility in the late afternoon.

I’ll leave off with a piece of Electronic Creative Writing I made yesterday, a poem about Paris Hilton, of all people:

Ticket

These while
from story there
Ticket go
saw must.

Let all
also Ticket
there did
under could
write live.

While but
like good
Ticket man
round her...

I don’t know how many of you other bloggers out there have this experience, but blogging totally cuts down on my sleep time. Not that I stay up late reading and writing—I usually manage to hit the hay by 10:30—but once I’m down I can’t cycle my brain down enough to sleep after so much input and output. Partially this results from not hitting the blogs until after the kids go to bed at 8, so I’m trying a new process today (which is where I started with it, actually), and getting some of the input/chronicling done in the afternoon.

Not a whole lot of excitement today, as I mainly worked on next week’s lecture on the Origins of Multimedia Art in the US. The upshot of this was focused time concentrating on Black Mountain, and all the awesome artists who were involved with the project (today particularly digging Albers, Cage, Creeley, and Olson). I designed an interface for the lecture (which is going to use projection and Internet), which uses a grid of 25 different thumbnails of Albers’s studies of the square I nicked from Google Images. I’ve got a few more than half of the links determined so far. The idealism (and subsequent corruption) of Black Mountain is seemingly perfect. I wish something like it were out there today. I know Fielding Dawson wrote (in the Out of This World anthology) that Naropa is our Black Mountain, but that’s a highly contestable view (and I say that with all due respect, as an alumni of many wonderful summers in Boulder). The closest thing to it, as far as I can tell, is the utopian/realist setup of Dreamtime Village, which mIEKAL aND, liz was, and various other cohorts have cultivated over the past decade and a half. But its remoteness and (as far as I know) lack of financial support hasn’t made it what could be made (not that what it is isn’t beautiful and important). I know the great Butoh dancer Min Tanaka used to have an Art Camp up on Mt. Fuji, where dancers in training worked half a day and then danced/studied half the day, which sounded good to me, but I don’t know if it is still happening. I also remember reading about Joel Kuszai's presentation about the Salton Sea project, but that was a really long term proposal. So What to do? Form our own micro-communities, support the lifestyles with our day jobs? Apparently so, presuming we have them. Well, the lecture will also address Fluxus, Kaprowian Happenings, and Intermedia, all of which I got into on the WWW today with great pleasure. Found some great sites out there, like Fondation Langlois (http://www.fondation-langlois.org), an interview with Dick Higgins (& related materials), etc. I’m building the thing off of a couple of old lectures, which I’m glad to have in hand, but quite severely refining the earlier perspectives. Feeling like I’m spending too much time on the preparations, but not really—all of the materials are somehow quite nurturing and continue to be informative.

Side note: In order to find the original essay, which I didn’t have until this morning, I had to scour my njit web server, and doing so came across a funny little html/MOO piece that I hadn’t thought of in quite awhile. You may be humored too: http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/ps1.html. Maybe I’ll put this on the Technopoetry Rising CD…

I learned that the ISIS program, which I spoke of yesterday, is being postponed until March, which works out better for me in terms of logistics I think.

Hey—it’s only 5:30 in the afternoon & I’m pretty much finished with this report. Maybe I’ll get some (always needed) sleep tonight!

By the way, thanks to those of you out there - mostly folks I don't even know in fact - who've linked to aisyalam, I appreciate the gesture (which I dutifully return so as to be a cybernetic blogger), and am glad to know that anyone thinks its worthwhile...

Today was a most unordinary day, as I wasn’t able to make it to my office/studio because of some domestic matters that had to be attended to in KL (on a very clear day, and nearly 100 degrees). After dropping Stella off at her bus stop, instead of keeping busy with the keyboard etc., Amy, Aleatory, & I got on the transit train in Putrajaya in order to make an 11:30 appointment in the Brickfields (a predominantly Indian section of the city). Our mission: to get some help for Amy in the form of a part-time nanny. We were – I’m very pleased to say – successful; Shantih will start tomorrow. After an intense lunch (mutton curry that made my nose run and eyes water), I had to go to the opposite side of the city to pay February’s installment of the lease on our car. This might have been hum-drum, but things are never so in KL. Walking back to the monorail, passing an ashram, a very serious looking guy with a satchel emblazoned with “Iraq.” An easy enough ride over to Jalan Ampang, above the old KL jail, high rise apartments, the National Mosque, etc. but after that total chaos. Malaysia’s version of the Tour de France, the “Tour de Langkawi” was passing through the city, so the roads were alternatively stone still and complete mayhem. That, added to the fact that I’d never been to the car agency before, made for an interesting, slow ride across town (though I never saw any cyclists). Getting back to the monorail was also interesting, as the cabbie was trying to avoid traffic and his route took me to some very ritzy sections of the city I hadn’t seen before, including embassy row (passing by the stylish Iraqi consulate). This adventure was a research trip in itself, as I’m beginning to get to know my way around little-by-little in this totally different world. I walked around Bukit Bintang a bit before heading back to the train station, got some water and gum, tuned in to the zoon of it all.

A most surprising and terrific thing happened during our meeting at the agency in Brickfields: I got a call on my handphone from a woman at the Institut Kajian Strategik dan Antwabangsa (Institute of Strategic and International Studies), who wanted to find out if I would be interested in participating in an event next week called the Malaysia International Visitor’s Program, which “aims to provide first-hand opportunities for leading personalities in community, business, media and politics in other countries to become acquainted with Malaysia’s political, economic and socio-cultural environment and policies” and “is designed to build bridges between the people of Malaysia and other countries, to promote mutual understanding between nations, and to engage important personalities in discussions on topics of global interest.” I said it sounded fascinating, and she said she would email me an invitation and other information. So, when I got home (about 4:30) it was waiting for me, and I was pretty blown away. Over the course of six days, a number of networking sessions are being held, including meetings with the Chairman of the Malaysian Human Rights Commission, high-ranking police officers for a briefing on Malaysia’s experience with terrorists, top officials in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense, Central Bank as well as corporate leaders, and senior media personalities. To top it off, the gathering includes a two-day trip to Langkawi, an island up near the Thai border. Needless to say, I immediately consulted my lecture schedule and figured out what needed to be done to free the time (essentially it means I will have to give 2 lectures the following week). While it will be a little weird to be removed from campus and regular work for a few days, it doesn’t seem like an opportunity that I could possibly turn down, especially since one of the sessions will apparently involve meeting the country’s Prime Minister. Whoa.

All this after I was in a bit of a swoon in the morning, mostly having to do with the precariousness of my professional situation in the states (where my application for tenure is under review). A good friend of mine was just overlooked for a position at the university has been teaching at for the past three years or, and—in simpatico, no doubt—I began to fret about my future, which will be institutionally directed within the next few weeks. Well, I can’t and won’t belabor the point, and just plan to enjoy what can be enjoyed while I can, like what’s going on here. I am only grateful that the good folks at NJIT pushed me hard into research, and I think a lot of other people will be too once the Prehistoric book is out. If it turns out that I have to become a farmer out in Warren County after all’s decided, well, that’s what I’ll do...

Still mulling over possible designs for my new home page and other interfaces, which I will be working on before the program begins next week. I’ll spend the rest of this week working on the first 2 or 3 lectures that I’m giving to MMU students. Never a dull moment!!

Melaka is a great, small, completely historical and transcultural city, and despite the fact that the kids were not functioning at 100% we had an excellent trip. Two days was not enough, especially since we had to take it kind of slow. Posted about 200 pictures from the weekend on the flickr site, and asked Amy to do some “drive by” video on the road out of town. In contrast to the general liveliness and historical aspects of the place, one of the high points for us was a visit to a new tea house on the fringe of the central area which our friend (and gracious host) Wong (a Melaka native) knew about. After we’d been there awhile I was overcome by the impulse to have deep philosophical conversation and write haiku. I’m sure it sounds corny, but it is true! Quite a few lines came out, and later I got to thinking about the possibility of creating an interactive and ergodic haiku generator. As I discuss in my book (Prehistoric Digital Poetry), many of the early computer poetry programs wrote haiku, and there are various reasons for this. The ergodic acrostic program that George Taylor and I have worked on (“Moby-Dick”) was fairly easy to do because it is not hard to ask the program to identify the letter a word begins with. But asking a program to determine the syllabic content of a line on its own seems pretty difficult (in the previously mentioned programs the database is typically set up in advance by the author of the program). Anyway, clearly I can’t quite ever escape digital considerations of anything, even when zenned out…

Today, though not the heaviest work day, got a few things done. I started to prepare my first MMU lecture, on the “Origins of Multimedia art in the US,” which I’ll give to a large group of new students (i.e., freshmen) next week. Basically I’ll be introducing them to the motivations of Black Mountain College artists, Fluxus, and Kaprow, and stressing that the whole multimedia thing – no matter analog or digital – is mostly about process and materials. I’m sure I’ll end up emphasizing, as I do in the Intro to Technopoetry Rising, the necessity of collaboration. It has been practically a decade since I did my intensive research in this area (as a grad student), but fortunately have access to quite a bit of the writing I did on the subject (NPF conference paper ‘96, MLA paper ’97). For both essays I made hypertext versions, which I have the files for – although I’d say less than 10% of the links now function. I did a more extensive update on these projects in ’00, with a slightly higher success rate in terms of functionality. How ephemeral are WWW sites? Very! Of course with Google I was able to find several new and terrific sites for references, examples, and so on. Buddha bless the search engines.

Things really came up Creeley today. Prepping the lecture I came across his simple but very important observation that "poets particularly need to be heard, need an active and defining presence, need physical sound and sight," which he wrote in the Intro to one of the Poetry in Motion CD-ROMs. Coincidentally, as I was working on this, Ben Friedlander sent me the draft on the intro he has written for the volume of Creeley’s Collected Poems he has been editing (which includes a few illustrations). While I though all of Ben’s views and paragraphs were fascinating, one sentence of his in particular really hit me: “Attending to sound, then, becomes a way to construct new paths for meaning in language.” Yes – this is so true – again, in both the analog & digital. Amidst the 9 illustrations was a link to a series of photos by Elsa Dorfman that I hadn’t see before http://www.granarybooks.com/books/dorfman/dorfman2.html. Well, amazing to be in touch with all these people and materials, to say the least.

I spent a good while mulling over and making a list of questions regarding WWW design issues. This is a subject I teach, and have been involved with for a long time, but now trying to approach it from a new angle. I teach my students the basics and fundamentals, but tend myself to disregard convention and be more freewheeling. But now I want to try and design with an artful but somehow more professionalized eye. In the past I have almost never thought this way, and when I do a whole can of snakes (in the form of question marks) opens up: how to image, how to organize, what’s important, etc. etc. etc. So I’m stepping into professorial mode in the analysis of my own work, which is really weird. But I think something good will come out of it, and a couple of my colleagues in the Interface Design program at MMU (who are very professionally minded) have said that they are willing to consult with me (i.e., hold my hand as I try on a new look).

The other interface design project that I am about to embark on is the CD-ROM interface for Technopoetry Rising, which in its prototype is entirely textual, basic, and barely acceptable as such. This project may have more than one application, as I’m also considering making a very similar manuscript that I’m trying to get publishers in Malaysia and Singapore interested in into an “e-book” (scrapping paper altogether and putting all of the essays and media files onto one disc. This would be a great project to collaborate on with my new associates, the ID experts at MMU.

To that end, I saw and spoke with several colleagues today about getting their input (Wong, John, Khong), and also met with Rozi to discuss some of the events that will happen a few months down the line (regional lectures and elaborate performances). Everyone was back on campus today after a couple of weeks off, and it was good to see them.

Continued my email exchanges with Eric Curkendall as well, which I’ve been enjoying immensely, and will end this entry by sharing a passage from his last message (hope he doesn’t mind). In a recent message I was celebrating the glories of Malaysian cuisine, to which—as a point of comparison—he passed along his impressions of Thai food as he experiences it in Bangkok:

Yeah, Malaysia is the best place in Asia that I've
been to for food. Thailand is not really so hot as
food goes, though the peppers certainly are, damn! In
fact a lot of real Thai food will make you wanna throw
up just smelling or seeing it, lots of fermented fish,
herbs that smell like the toilet has backed up,
coagulated pigs blood soup, maggot cakes, pulverized
tarantula salad. Termites are not bad, a nicel
emon-lime and cilantro flavor, wood beetles taste
like bacon, but I'd advise eating them in a dark room
so that can't see what looks like a big cockroach that
you're sticking into your mouth. I think Screamin jay
Hawkins must have been in Thailand when he wrote the
song "Alligator Wine" and "There's Somethin Wrong With
You." Of course there's more normal food too, such as
chitlins, tripe, dried squid, green papaya and
fermented land crab salad usually with enough chillies
to kill you if the stomach destroying rice vinegar and
dirt encrusted bitter green beans don't. I've lived
with my wife for six years and there's still no end to
the hitherto never before seen bizzarre, mostly
inedible things that end up on the table. Its great
anthropology but thats about it…

Chow down, everyone…

I meant to mention that I saw a “Black-naped Oriole” (Oriolus chinensis) outside the rear window of our apartment yesterday. I’ve seen a few of these in the area before, but they’re usually in motion (or I am in motion when I see them) and I hadn’t gotten a good look at one until then. This bird – while eye-catching in its appearance - isn’t like the beautiful, sleek Baltimore orioles that sometimes strikingly grace our backyard in Frelinghuysen. No, the Black-naped version of the bird is much larger, mostly covered with yellow feathers – in fact in a lot of ways looks like a crow with yellow feathers. Amy and I are amateur ornithologists, and among the first books we bought here was a copy of Birds of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. When I looked the bird up in the book, I was charmed to see that its call is identified as, “a melodious four-note whistle, What the devil!.” So now this is for us the Noigandres bird (referencing through the concrete poets Pound’s Pisan Cantos, “Noigandres, eh, noigandres,/Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!”

The other great bird we’ve got a lot of out back (beginning at about 5:30 a.m.) is the “Black-capped Kingfisher” – which is a beautiful blue bird with a red beak. The really interesting thing about this bird is that it sounds exactly like the Kingfisher you might see sitting on a dock in an inlet in Falmouth, or Gloucester, but looks completely different. We also saw a “White-throated Kingfisher” this week, also very different looking, as well as a “Blue-tailed Bee-eater.” Yes, it is somewhat exotic here in aisyalam - & far from winter. Malay phrase of the day: “hati-hati” – we’re off to Melaka in a couple of hours, an old city my friend Jonathan Hall once described to me as “piracy capital of the world;” more on that & all else later…

Mosque Forms: 4 moseak, moseache, 6 muskey, muskaye, 6-7 mosquee, 7 moschy, -ee, -ie, -ey, muskie, mos’keh, moskuee, moski (e, -ee, mosquy, mozki, 7 mosquey; 6-7 moschea, 7-8 mosch(e, 8-9 mosk, 6- mosque [In 16th c. mosquee (later shortened to mosque), a. F. mosque, a It. Moschea (whence G moschee), a. Arab. Masgid (so prounced in N. Africa; elsewhere masjid), f. sagada (sajada) to worship.]

1. a Muslim temple or place of worship
b. the mosque:Those who worship in mosques

Mosqued, mosquelet, mosquish

Mosquito Forms: 6 muskyto, mosqueta, 6-8 musketa, 7 muskeito, musceto, muscheto, muskitto, musqueeto, muskeeto, 7-8 musketoe, muscatto, musket(t)o, 8 moskito, muskeitoe, mosqueto,, 8-9 moschet(t)o, moschito, musqueto, musquitto, 9 musquitoe, mosquetoe, 6- muskito, 7-9 musquito, [a. Sp. And Pg. mosquito, dim. Of mosca (:-L. musca) fly. Cf. F. moustique , a metathetic alteration of the Sp. Word]

Mosquito state, US nickname for New Jersey

Hence mosquitoey, mosquitoish

Then,
Mosquito, variant of Mesquita, a mosque

Mosquo and -quy, obs. Forms of mosque

Moscow: no etymology

-

Cyb(be, obs. Form of sib.

[ sib= closely related ]

Cybernation [f. cybern(etics sb. pl. + ation] the theory, practice, or condition of control by machines. Hence (as a back-formation) ‘cybernate v.trans. to control in this manner; cybernated ppl. a.

1962 D. Michel title Cybernation: the silent conquest; 62: Punch 7 c…is becoming a dirty word in America; 1969 Northwest Mag (Oregon): the major problems of the day: cybernation, the revolution in human rights and the threat of growing militarism

Cybernetics [f. Gr. Steersman, f. to steer, + ics] the theory or study of communication and control in living organisms or machines. Hence (as back-formation) cybernetic a. pertaining or relating to cybernetics. So cybernetician, cyberneticist, one who is skilled in cybernetics.
Used in Fr. For cybernétique (= the art of governing) by A.-M. Ampère 1834;
1948 Weiner, “we have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or animal, by the name cybernetics”

Cyborg 1960 cybernetic organism

Cybory The ark of a jewish tabernacle

--

Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year 2005
Based on your online lookups, the #1 Word of the Year for 2005 was:
1. integrity
Pronunciation: in-'te-gr&-tE
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English integrite, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French integrité, from Latin integritat-, integritas, from integr-, integer entire
1 : firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : INCORRUPTIBILITY
2 : an unimpaired condition : SOUNDNESS
3 : the quality or state of being complete or undivided : COMPLETENESS synonym see HONESTY

the other words in the Top Ten List for their definitions in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

2. refugee 3. contempt 4. filibuster 5. insipid 6. tsunami 7. pandemic 8. conclave 9. levee 10. inept

cyber-
Function: combining formEtymology: cybernetic: computer : computer network
cyber-pref.
Computer: cyberpunk.
Computer network: cyberspace.
[From cyber(netic).]
cyber
To have cybersex.
CYBER: a prefix which derives from cybernetics; used to denote topics related to computers and/or networks
A champion of billion-dollar construction projects, he tagged the capital's name with the suffix "jaya," which means "success."

Putrajaya became the new administrative capital of Malaysia. The name comes from Malaysia's first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj, with the suffix "jaya": success.

So many things happen, and are possible, that it is difficult to keep track. Kenneth Goldsmith seems to be really good at it. There are events mundane and then not. I drove Stella to the IOI to catch her bus at 8 a.m., then I worked out, drove home, helped Amy for awhile, panicked when the cell phone didn’t work, got it to work, went to the office, dealt with filenames (PennSound), correspondence, tea, fax to Cambridge, kurma at the FCM, water, revised a book proposal, went to the library (Fluxus and Rasushenberg tomes brought home), began building the foundation of a lecture, looked at some online dictionaries, updated virus software on both computers (having been warned by NJIT of the W32/MyWife@MM breakout scheduled for 3 feb), backed up files, looked for files, had passport photos taken, received invitations to submit works to an Italian journal and Palestinian art exhibition, leftovers for dinner, dense monsoon thunderstorm, crazy sky afterwards, caring for the children (reading Goodnight Moon and Roald Dahl), got my NJIT server activated for sound, aloe, revised an old piece of writing for Catherine Taylor, now this. A day’s work? Always a lot.

Tomorrow we go to Melaka.

Melaka: Malay for refuge,

& may not return to this space for a few days.

# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:43 AM 0 comments

We’ll be here exactly six more months, and plenty to do, although today was another day when campus was like a ghost-town because of extended holidays, so worked in peaceful solitude in my office after scavenging for medication for the baby with Stella in Putrajaya this morning. Glad to report that with some effort - including a stop at the Putrajaya Hospital - we were successful, and the baby is doing much better today.

I’ll be consulting soon with various faculty members about sound projects, web design, and databases, but for now – since everyone’s still on holiday – conducting independent research. So I visited Myspace for the first time, to visit the home page of my old friend Eric Curkendall, who’s now living in Bangkok. Yesterday he sent a message saying that he’d posted some new files, that should be listened to while reading the Will Alexander and Ivan Arguelles poems he’d also posted. For those of you who don’t know Eric’s work (and most of you probably don’t), I’d have to introduce him as a prodigious and wild poet, also a great lyricist (Box o’ Laffs, Wrestling Worms, Camper van Beethoven), who I had the great fortune to spend 2 or 3 years working with in Santa Cruz circa ‘88-’91. Not only was he an inspiration to me, but also taught me quite a bit about surrealist poetry (and kundalini yoga). I haven’t actually seen him since we performed together at the Poetry Project New Year’s reading during an east coast tour a few of us did in 92/93, but published his work on the first The Little Magazine CD-ROM and in the online version of We Magazine (1993). Anyhow, if you’re looking for something interesting to listen to, check out his site, which is still in a formative stage. In his blog Eric asks an open question about use of computers to produce recordings (his teeth, like those of so many of us poet/musicians, were cut using analog gear). Though the question wasn’t meant to be rhetorical, is there really any question at this point?? I remember my own confrontation with this dilemma, shortly after we built our studio in late ’03, so I did a test: I set up the analog gear and made a demo, then recorded an identical version with software, noting the time the recordings took to produce, sound quality, etc., and I guess it is probably unnecessary for me to report which equipment ended up in a cardboard box (perhaps for good) under the desk.

Through Eric’s Myspace site, I tapped into a beautiful subculture of old friends of ours, mainly musicians who were in and around Santa Cruz during the same period. I was interested to see how each of them set up their sites, with sounds, pictures, blog entries, etc. I had to join Myspace to access the files, but cannot imagine setting up yet another virtual space at this time—maybe I’ll use it as a portal that connects to the other blogs, or possibly cultivate it more once the Malaysian gig (and thus aisyalam) is over.

Besides virtually visiting old artist friends and finding out what they are up to now, I had to fix a couple of tiny problems in the manuscript: 5 words in the translations from Barbosa’s program, and the copyright date for the Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton image. I hope the editor doesn’t get too mad when he sees the replacement files. Fortunately, I don’t think there’ll be too many more of these fixes.

I decided to spruce up the blog slightly, by adding reciprocal links [“weblog feedback mode”] to blogs that link to aisyalam (look to your left).

I got a letter from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, P. R. China, which asked me to review a conference paper titled “Shape Matching Based on Fully Automatic Face Detection on Triangular Meshes,” but had to write to these good folks and tell them that they were probably looking for Princeton U’s Thomas Funkhouser, who is one of the great computer graphics scholars of our time. More legitimately (and flatteringly), Philippe Bootz sent an email over the weekend, asking me to be a member of the international scientific committee of a new review he is creating (“that will focus on hypermedias and, more precisely, on literary hypermedia”) at University 8 in Paris, which I will gladly do.

Another really terrific find today—which again isn’t new, but is to me—was checking out Harvey Bialy’s blog, http://www.bialystocker.net/. Though I couldn’t get the mp3 sound to work (like the “alternate theme music” by Harry Smith), the visuals were totally mind-blowing. Wow. And there seemed to be multiple layers of work, which one accesses via search engine—I don’t even think I began to scratch the surface of what is there because I was so wrapped up in the front page visuals. I’ll further attempt to sleuth out all of the different areas, get inside his complex, again before long.

I ended up at Bialy’s page as a result of communication with a fellow named Michael Harrold, who has posted four books (.pdf versions) at Bialy’s site. As I mentioned before, Harrold had written to me because of his interest in ergodic literature. The book of his I began reading, Red Moon (http://www.bialystocker.net/files/redmoon.pdf), blends poetry, prose, mathematical equations, and more. I haven’t quite figured out the cybertext angle of it yet, but will spend more time with it, look at the other books, and correspond with him. I’ve also downloaded Harrold’s book Art and Technology (http://www.bialystocker.net/files/art_and_technology.pdf) which also looks interesting.

Finally, time is finally opening up so that I can make contributions to various projects I’ve been neglecting, and today at last worked on preparing and posting a couple of sound poems to the truly remarkable PennSound site. During the past couple of years, Prof. Bernstein has invited me to be involved with the project on several occasions, but I’ve never managed to make the time to do it. Now I am. While I do not have access to the 100s (if not 1000s) of hours of recordings I’ve made and collected since the late 80s, I do have a few things on my laptop that I want to get out there (even if similar materials will be included on the CD-ROM that will be included in Technopoetry Rising). During my last two trips to Brazil I’ve had the great fortune to collaborate in impromptu studios with two fantastic musicians, Marcus Salgado, Rodrigo Lira, making electronica type sound poetry recordings (some more techno than others), and a couple of those tracks will be up on PS soon if all goes well.

The smudge for the day came when I saw on the WWW that Nam June Paik had passed, so had to mourn his loss a few moments. As a sucker for innovative television and televisual art, his work always gave me a charge…

More in the mo(u)rning CF