aisyalam

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).