aisyalam

The lecture went smoothly, although apparently there was some sort of (unnoticeable) electrical interference happening in the gallery, which caused a lot of noise in the video that Khong shot and also created some havoc with one of the programs I was running (Barbosa’s “Porto,” which eventually worked just fine after a couple of false starts). A very attentive audience of 40-50 people, mainly faculty, attended. As far as timing goes, the presentation worked out perfectly, leaving time for some discussion (questions like, “how can this be marketed”—it can’t, though the techniques could be used by anyone for a variety of reasons—what does the future hold (my answer: virtual poetry worlds and literary games). One fellow was relentless in his resistance to accepting this as poetry, no matter how much I pointed out that the projection of elegant language was the operative principal and pointed out that it certainly wasn’t the same kind of poetry written in the 19th century (and that poetic forms have always historically evolved). I met a number of people, full of questions and intrigue after the session, which should lead to further dialog, class visitations, and so on. Everyone was pleased with the event (Amy said she spent the rest of the day thinking about it), so I have to be gratified, and it was a great pleasure to introduce such fine works—particularly the hypercard works of Cayley and Rosenberg, and de Campos’ great animated poems—to an entirely new audience (who received them well).

After a splendid (and delicious) lunch with Sau Bin and Amy at Café Sirah on campus, spent part of the afternoon discussing the cd-rom project with Khong (still a number of steps to go in the process, but getting there) then the rest working on Monday’s lecture, which is still a couple of hours away from completion (i.e., I’ll be working a bit in the office on Saturday). In search of materials to project while speaking about Digital Literary Arts (to the same group who heard the lecture on Black Mountain and the origins of multimedia art three weeks ago), I decided to start at the beginning of the Alire “Le Salon de Lecture Electronique” cd-rom (which is soundless) before doing demos of Magnetic Poems (java), haiku generators, M. Joyce’s “12 Blue,” Karpinska’s beeBox, Cramer’s Permutations site, Leevi Lehto’s google generator, Arteroids, and my own “Moby-Dick.”

Not much else to report. Will be posting dozens of Thailand photos on Flickr tomorrow night, and we’ll visit with Fauzee and Nazura on Sunday. Next week’s lecture at IIUM will be on Thursday rather than Tuesday, which is better in the overall scheme of things. I’m thinking of ways to synthesize words, images, and sounds with Java, but still in the conceptual, protean stages with that project (which will occupy my last 4 months here).