Friday, February 10, 2006
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...
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...
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:19 AM 
