aisyalam

At last I finally have a working prototype of the database I came to Malaysia to create, a fact that pleases me immensely. Keh Siong, without whom it wouldn’t have happened, came to my office with a cd-rom of working contents in the early afternoon. There are some minor imperfections, like odd carats ( > > > ) at the beginning of each poem, and the display “cell” for the poems are too small, but otherwise I’m relieved and happy to have something—an example of the type of textual organism I’d like to develop in the future. A lot of effort, a lot of process, and much technical know-how that’s new to me went into it, and a working poetic mechanism has emerged. I spent all afternoon trying to get the online version of the database to work, to no avail: the sound files (all less than 6 megabytes) simply will not load. All of the files (.doc, .jpg, .mp3) are online and can be read/seen/heard as stand-alone works, but the device that brings them together as one is not working correctly. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the coding and organization, but some flaw somewhere in the complex is preventing it from functioning properly. The presentation begins at http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/13states/ - I do need to write a readme file, and do some other touch-ups, but the thing is off the ground and will continue to be nurtured and refined (for instance, eventually I will widen the presentational area so that the poems—particularly the acrostic sequences at the beginning—appear correctly). When I get back to NJIT I will begin to look for programming collaborators, and am open to working with anyone who has knowledge in database operations. Originally I’d planned to learn how to do it on my own, but as Prof. Somnuk (an IT professor at MMU) advised, it is better that I focus on content and let someone else handle the functionality (with my input and direction, of course). In any case, if you happen to take a look and have concrete ideas about how to make the present device work better, or want to get a cd-rom copy to tinker with, let me know and I’ll be happy to send one.

I’ll have nearly a full schedule of work next week, including a two hour session with the Creative Studies students whose work was part of my show last week, before heading to Singapore to lecture at the National University there (which is immediately followed by a trip to Penang to make a presentation at the USM Museum). Though I’ve completed most of what I set out to accomplish during this other-worldly adventure, there are still a few things to do—like refining the lectures, and preparing documents for an art exhibition (poems & images on display) that opens in KL on July 15 and two other performances. Apparently, some of my friends/students are going to make an effort to produce a video of the materials I presented in the performance last week too—it’ll be interesting to see what becomes of this possibility.

We're back from a great trip to Thailand, where not a whole lot happened besides seeing some great sites, visiting with friends and family, and eating excellent food. I did post some pictures of last week's performance up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_funks/sets/72157594180173995/. Phuket's a nice place to visit and fairly photographic - but didn't lead to poems of any sort. We watched a cool movie, Syriana, which didn't make me feel at all proud to be an American.

Tomorrow back to work, hopefully finishing up the database project.

Not much to report about. I took care of some busy work in the morning, tidying up a few things after yesterday (like returning Khong’s projector), rapping with colleagues (John Hii stopped by and gave me a bunch of pictures and some movie clips of yesterday’s show), and so on. It was Stella’s last (half) day of school (where she rec’d a “Head of the School” award) so we all went up to pick her up & out for lunch. In the afternoon met with Keh Siong, some confusion about the database and filetypes, trying figuring out how it is all going to be presented—either WWW or CD-ROM (answer: hopefully both), but he needs to re-work part of the applet because it was made for the .wav files, which are prohibitively large and take much too long to load. So, not quite there yet—hopefully in a week’s time will be complete (we meet again next Friday to finish it). After seeing Keh Siong, a bit of time to get some things organized in the office, do some database chores, and then met with Lydia, Forest, and Koo for a long tea time (and delicious dried coconut cakes) discussion. They were enthralled by the show yesterday and wanted to know all about it—how I managed to write the poems, what inspired me so much, how I was able notice profound little details captured in the pictures, and so on. I explained that I’d had great teachers, and other influences that really helped, like Blake, and friends who steered me away from mathematic abstractions and toward artistic ones, the importance of the “minute particulars” (which led to talk about the impossibility of real objectivity), the importance of invention, and a lot of other things. I’m going to miss all of these people, and such fun, friendly meetings, for sure.

I compiled the Malaysia poems into a single .doc file, 30 pages. I am planning to post all of the materials soon, but figure no harm in sending up the text tonight, as I am looking for feedback. Take a look at http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2006/13states.doc and send me an email about them (funkhouser@adm.njit.edu) if you’re inclined—I may take this file down when the database materials are uploaded, but for now the poems are there.

I’ll probably be off-the-blog (though not offline) for a few days, as we’re heading to Thailand again for a family holiday (love that beachside wireless). Time for a little conventional pleasure! My 42nd birthday comes on Monday & planning to celebrate (over a few days) with elephant rides, snorkeling, and a few massages. There’s some work to be done, like prepare a syllabus for my NJIT graduate class that starts the first week of July, but mostly taking it easy before a whirlwind July or lectures, performances, and finishing up stuff here in this wonderful country formerly known as Malaya…

Though imperfect, we managed to conduct a grand event on campus today. Grey clouds rolled in about an hour or so before the show, as I could tell they would this morning, and it started to rain shortly thereafter but nothing at all like yesterday. At about 4:30 or so we started setting up and by 5:30 things were happening and quite a few folks—curiosity seekers, colleagues, students, friends—were hanging out wondering what the commotion was about (indeed it did get very noisy). We put all the gear on tables in chairs in case the sky completely let loose, and it did rain and thunder a bit during the proceedings but just lightly (and only loudly when I mentioned Mahathir in the Terangganu poem, lah!).

Glad to report that no serious tech problems were encountered—everything worked alright, although sorry to say it wasn’t all applied perfectly. Quite a few people commented that the quality of the sound(s) could have been better. To me, everything sounded alright at the time (and on the MiniDisc recording the words and sounds tussle a bit with each order) but given the cavernous indoor/outdoor space, I knew that this could be a problem. In hindsight I’d’ve turned the speakers around to face the area where most of the audience was. Siew Wai was a terrific accompanist, adding just the right amount of accentuation, and though the crowd noticeably thinned as time went on (the Malaysia poems take more than 45 minutes to read through), the gig was a real success in practically every way. The students I have been working with had quite a few comments to share, including expressing some disappointment in that they wanted more activity in the performance, which made me realize that I had spent so much concentrating on the texts, sounds, and images that I hadn’t put enough a lot of focus onto actually performing. I did make some gestures towards performance (wearing different hats and an oversized pencil around my neck, spontaneously picking up and walking around with a durian, and so on), but could have done more with movement, spent some time having images projected onto me, had other voices come in (they suggested having someone sing the Koran at various points), but will have to do that type of thing another occasion. All good food for thought. One thing that may emerge from it is that the students may try their hands at producing a studio version of the works, so that everything “can be controlled” and here’s hoping they follow up on that idea/possibility.

In all, the reading of the poems, in conjunction with the sounds and images went well. I’m proud of all of the work and believe that less than a handful of words are out of place at this point (no problems with the sounds or images). That the words were muddled a bit during the performance I can live with, and even though the presentation wasn’t flawless (had “ups and downs” as Sau Bin put it), it was totally worthwhile, as it has already—as soon as the show was finished—opened up instructive dialog about both digital performance and multimedia art and presentation. There’s no other way to make this happen besides experimenting and putting work out there. It was a nice scene, afterwards, with all of the family and a few friends there—the students opened up the perfectly in-season Malay durians and we all stood around eating them and talking for awhile after the gear was put away.

This was really only part of the day’s significant activity. In part to distract myself from the weather, and in part to be moving forward, I used the earlier part of the day to finish as much of the database interface as I could. I re-worked the opening page, created the basic index (for readers who want to consume the work in a straightforward rather than random way), and a production credits section. If all goes according to plan tomorrow, I’ll have the java program, the .txt files, and will be able to have the beta version of the project ready shortly thereafter. Even if the (inter)active version of the database isn’t immediately ready for the WWW, I plan to post all of files it contains within the next couple of weeks. I’m also anxious to begin showing the manuscript of the poems around a bit too, and am considering putting together a limited edition cd-rom of the database for those interested in such things…I may have just enough time to do that in the few weeks we have left here, but maybe not; we’ll see…

When I arrived at the Faculty this morning, a little late as I had to pick up some cables at the Alamanda Putrajaya mall, the place was abuzz—at least in the area where my performance was scheduled to take place. Sau Bin’s “Creative Studies” students were building ornate, decorative, installations given the theme “East Greets West.” Lengthy batiks were hanging from the first floor to the ground, museum-like dioramas of songket weavings, local flora and fauna, and domestic settings were being constructed on site (I’ll post the documentation to our Flickr blog later). This I did not expect or anticipate at all, and to be honest I found the whole scene rather exciting and flattering. It was kind of odd—I’d spent many weeks preparing the materials for the gig and getting ready for the performance and found myself with little to do while all this other event-related activity was going on. In fact I couldn’t do much except watch the scene develop. It was nice to have the sense that something was really going on—everyone who passed through the building stopped to check the scene out, and was aware that something different was happening.

Then, about an hour before we were supposed to set up the sound and projection equipment it got really dark outside. Though it was a beautiful morning I knew that it would eventually rain because of surrounding clouds in the distance. But it didn’t just rain, it poured and poured and poured. We get rain almost every day, but usually for less than an hour, and usually not at this time. Today it rained for about four hours, two of which was extremely heavy. The adverse whether essentially transformed the performance space into a big, slick puddle and there was no way any electrical gear could be set up, so we ended up postponing the performance until tomorrow. Dr. Rafi, the Dean of the FCM, had warned me about this possibility when I proposed using this space for such purposes, and he was totally right. It was a bummer that it couldn’t happen, and though it didn’t stress me out too much I did get a bit of a headache for some reason. I was looking forward to doing the show in the environment that the students had labored to set up, and perhaps the headache was one of disappointment? Fortunately some of them are planning to come back tomorrow and put their work up again, so here’s hoping that the skies are clearer.

When it became obvious that the rain would not subside I did delve into some work in the office, making a prototype of the interface for the database project in .html which features flags of each Malaysian state. This part of the project is easy, but needs to be done of course. I received word from Keh Siong that he has built the applet and it works but that the file sizes are too large so it loads slowly, a problem that I should be able to fix without much trouble.

Practically all day was spent preparing for tomorrow, and everything is in order on all fronts. After burning an audio cd of the second set soundtracks, I rehearsed the second set (Malaysia poems), for the first time reading them all aloud, with all of the images up on two screens and the sounds playing. I learned that the timer on one computer is slightly slower than the other, which means that the span of time between the projection of images will gradually grow longer as the presentation progresses. I also made notes on areas where some images needed to be removed, but in all I was pleasantly surprised at how well everything worked together.

After lunch I worked on the first set, outlining how the tech would work, finding the poems that accompany the animations (sometimes revising them in the process), and read all of them aloud. The sounds and poems are all a bit carzy—I’ll be interested in hearing what people around here make of them.

The tech “rehearsal” (we didn’t really rehearse, just got the gear organized) went well, although I need to acquire (at one of the local malls, hopefully) a headphone to quarter-inch plug adapter, so that sounds can be played from the laptop onto the PA. The other odd thing that I’m hoping to rectify is that one of the projectors projected white as yellow—I don’t know if this is because there’s mildew on the bulb or what, but I’m also going to try to borrow another projector for the show. In general, the projections were light, as it is an indoor-outdoor space, but that’s OK. What’s really awesome is the sound in the hall. The atrium is a narrow six story cavern, which gives a great reverb but prevents the sound from bouncing around too much. What we were able to play through the speakers (voice, instruments) sounded totally great. In all, very encouraging. Good to have the work organized, and to have the tech mostly ready to go too.

Afterwards, Siew Wai and I went up to her office to rehearse the second set together—she’s accompanying me on a variety of instruments: whistles, didgeridoo, bells, harmonica, and other percussion. The reading of the poems went even better than in the morning, although the two cups of teh terik I had earlier in the afternoon didn’t help my voice much. It was good to go through the material with Siew Wai, good to hear the sounds she is working with, and have another chance to review the poems. Sua Bin sat in for a bit of it but left so didn’t get a chance to get his impressions. I’m pleased with how everything has turned out, will make a few minor adjustments (to images) tomorrow, and wonder what everyone else will think.

I worked on organizing images Friday night and some Saturday, but took Sunday off completely, to enjoy some relaxed time with family instead. Back to the images this morning, and finally have them all together and sequenced; the final tally is 554 (which at 5 seconds per means I have about 6 images too many, no problem). The most tedious part came this afternoon, renaming them all 001-554, then had a little trouble transferring them from one laptop to the other (cyclic redundancy error messages) but eventually managed to do so. Just as I’d finishing Ali and a friend of his showed up—I’d emailed Ali last week asking to help me set up an animation for the images but he hadn’t received the message until yesterday when he reviewed his bulk mail folder (why .edu messages, ones that aren’t sent to more than one person, end up in bul mail is beyond me). Anyhow, I told him I was resigned to using a slideshow approach now but we had a thorough discussion about other possibilites, including Flash, Powerpoint, Premiere, Dreamweaver, and so on, and even tried a couple of methods out to see how difficult they were. This was an interesting, unexpected meeting at which I learned a few things even if in the end I decided to stick with the original plan out of simplicity’s sake. Ali did take a cd of the images with him and may make something of them but I’m not expecting him to get too crazy over it and told him so.

The other thing that happened during their visit is that my eBooks were delivered, about 1,050 copies in 3+ heavy boxes, and I’m glad to see them at last. I like how the packaging came out, and when I finally had a chance to review briefly a copy tonight I was gratified by the contents and am very pleased by the project as a whole. Close readers will find a few strange errors in the texts but otherwise the thing works and is a reasonable output of the ground I’ve covered in recent years. The little typographic errors (some of which I have no idea how they happened) are minor and are no cause for discouragement. I’ll be proud to circulate them and have already started to do so on campus.

The day whizzed by (I also sent out some publicity emails, printed some posters and final versions of the poems); the only unfortunate thing that happened was that the tech setup for Wednesday’s performance that was supposed to happen was cancelled at the last minute because a foreign dignitary from Vietnam showed up on campus and the place that the big meeting (red carpet, President of the University type of affair) was happening was in the FCM office, just above the atrium where the show is going to take place. So we had to postpone it again, until late tomorrow afternoon. In the scheme of things this shouldn’t be a problem, though it means a long day tomorrow because I also have to rehearse with Siew Wai as well. Beforehand I have to script the whole thing, outlining what computer does what and when, but should have plenty of time to work all of that out no problem.

“If I had a scanner…” I’d scan in some of the sheets of paper I’ve filled with little scribbles of information about the glorified (multilayered?) slideshow I’ve been working on for next week’s gig. Sheets and sheets of covered with little numbers, not quite as obsessive as Adolf Wolfli of course, but lots of nutty equations; Amy tells me it is a good thing I have some background in mathematics.

Stella had to be at school early today so I had an early start too. Began it by putting the “final” touches on the poems and organizing all the material I want in the database. Burned a cd-rom (about 600mb) for Keh Siong, who came over to the office to discuss the project after lunch; we had a good meeting. What I want to do with this version of it is pretty basic; it’ll be, at least to start, an offline work. I’m taking care of the linear index part, basic design, and credits; he is apparently writing a java applet that will do the randomizing, which apparently is not too difficult as he is planning to write and test it all in the next week. I was interested to learn that java handles audio in its own way, so no need to have a media device open up to play sounds. One issue that did come up had to do with text formatting. The Malaysia poems have extensive formatting, some of which gets slightly “lost” when the text is transforms to ascii. Since the spacing and line break are not damaged too badly, it is not a major problem—the words just look different than they do in Word. I’ll be interested to see what the images and texts look like after being handled by the applet, and in general am really glad the thing seems to be finally getting off the ground.

Because I thought there would be a tech meeting today about the performance I had both laptops up in the office. Though the meeting was put off until Monday, it was good I had both computers while sorting through the images and figuring out what to do with them. To that end I made a list of each image and its contents (the number is down to 534 as a final tally), and began to figure out how many images each poem needs, etc. The number of images (presented for 5 seconds each) nearly perfectly coincides with the length of the soundtrack (45 minutes for the second set Malaysian poems), so what I’ve decided to do (at least for now) is project all of the images in the same order but in radically different sizes on adjacent screens. We’ll take a look at this idea on Monday. Meanwhile I’m about halfway through connecting each image to a poem. Once I finish doing this I will, over the weekend, rename the images (some for the second time) as numbers so as to get them in a reasonable sequence. It is an interesting exercise: some of the images correspond directly to the poems, but there are dozens of pictures that do not precisely fit in, so what I have to “read” the images in a non-literal way, and figure out a way to get them to (at least loosely) work thematically. This, along with doing some work to publicize Wednesday’s show—in addition to various other weekend activities— is going to keep me busy until Monday…

A crazy work day but made much progress. I finished reviewing thousands of images and selected slightly more than 600 to present with the Malaysia poems next week. 600!! Seeing everywhere we’ve been again made me realize what a beautiful journey it has been (and still is) for us here. Then there was the matter of how to present such a large number of images? In .html using refresh tags? In Flash? Neither of these I could take as serious options, as I’d have to resize all of the images and put a lot of time into the preparation of files. If I had a month to do it, and a team of assistants, that would be one thing, but the gig is in six days. Finally I realized I could—as with the doors—make use of the Windows “My Pictures” slideshow feature, which optimally resizes the images. Now all I have to do is rename the images alphabetically/numerically so that they appear in a reasonable sequence. There are other aspects/complexities as well, like which pictures get shown when, but I think I’ve have been able to work out a reasonable plan. If all goes well I’ll be having a tech practice tomorrow afternoon and we’ll see if the scheme works with the projectors. I hope it does!

I also managed to work on the audio tracks today, and mixed together all of the soundtracks I want to use (5, four with poems) in the Malaysia set. What I discovered is that the set is rather long—perhaps 10 minutes longer than I expected—but maybe that’s OK, given the amount of images I’m working with. I’ll practice reading the poems with the soundtrack on the weekend and see how it goes. The way I see it at this point is that it is not a problem to take my time reading/performing the poems, and give the audience more time to absorb everything that’s going on. I’m thrilled to report that my new colleague Kok Siew Wai, who has been mentioned on this blog a few times, has agreed to perform with me during the Malaysia poems. This is great news!! She’ll be accentuating the soundtracks with her kazoos, didgeridoo, mbira, and perhaps other instruments, and if I finish reading before a track is finished, I can join Siew Wai improvising along with the soundtracks. We had a good meeting today, where I outlined my plan for the performance and she agreed to join in. Our gig at the gallery last week went well and the chemistry was nice, so I’m psyched that she’s going to be part of the show. This is why I spent time mixing the sounds, because I wanted to get the audio component to her before she went home to KL for the weekend. We’ll rehearse somewhere on Tuesday and give it our best shot on Wednesday…

Still a good bit of prep to do but things are shaping up nicely I think. Besides working on the details and tech-checking to finish out the week tomorrow I’ll finally (supposedly) be meeting with Keh Siong, the database tutor, and am hopeful that something will come of that as well. Clearly I have a bevy of new materials with which a database can be populated. Now the trick is to actually make it happen.

This morning I decided to attend some final year project portfolio presentations by FCM students, and was glad I did as it helped me to continue cultivating a sense of what the students are up to on campus. While I saw some good in various projects, in all I wasn’t quite as impressed as I was by the installations I mentioned last month. But even Prof. Khong said as much when he declared this morning that the Delta student work (i.e., juniors) was as strong as what was produced by students nearly finished (and I can think of several reasons why this might be the case).

I was able to really focus for 4 or 5 hours in the afternoon, thankfully, and managed to get a few things together. I began by reviewing the Flash files (two) that I’ll be showing, making minor fixes and figuring out the best method of presenting the .swf files (opted for embedding them within .html files rather than straight .swf projection). The other poem in the first set I’ll read while the soundtrack is being visualized through Windows Media Player (to that end I reviewed all of the different visual treatments/animations possible and ended up choosing the one I always use: battery randomization). After that, I sequenced the order of the Malaysia poems. Process: read each one and began to group by loose theme—sometimes by location, sometimes by other threads. Four groups emerged, two containing three poems each, and two containing four. Then I matched each group with plausible soundtracks. Given the length of the audio files, each group will have two or three different pieces that will accompany the texts. There are some other projections that will be happening, like the doors of the FCM building, that I plan to run through Windows’ “My Pictures” slideshow mechanism, which runs endlessly and should do the trick. I’m doing what I can to keep things simple but interesting (knowing there’s really no such thing as simple in this territory). Now I’ve still got to go through thousands of images to show during the Malaysia poems (which I’ve started to do—it is fun but laborious since I’m actually renaming all of the images). I’ve reviewed Amy’s documentation of the MMU campus, 105 pictures with more to be added, which will be set up as an animation and show while one of my “Multimedia University” polyvocal soundtracks is playing. Well, hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have all of the pictures selected and there’ll be enough time to program them before next Wednesday…

I picked up the “proofs” of the eBook this morning in Seri Kembangan, which look really good. I wasn’t actually expecting to receive them, but the timing was good because I was on my way to the meeting at the MSC Innovation Center and was able to do a brief demo of some of the work after I was asked what I was up to. I was pleased and relieved to see that all of the mechanisms worked, and learned this morning that at the very least the project serves as a reasonable introduction to my work.

After lunch I had a few minutes to quickly make some notes about the recordings and begin reviewing and selecting images to show with the poems next week. After that, the session in the audio lab was really productive. In less than 90 minutes we (Ajoi and I) were able to mix & master 10 different recordings/samples I had brought with me. The raw materials were almost good enough to present on their own, but some needed extension via looping and others were well served by the addition of various effects. Using the Sonar program, we “widened” the sounds using an “imager” and added some reverb, flange, and chorus to some other tracks—although not so much as to be even remotely obvious. I really wish I had Ajoi’s skills with the software, and could download them into my own noggin, but will instead have to figure it out for myself next winter after returning to the states. The recordings I made with Stella at MMU are really wonderful, and the ambient recordings in KL, Pulau Pangkor, and Lenbah Bujang also sound about as good as they possibly can. Without a doubt or reservation I’ll be using the materials in next week’s performance.

Now it is time to really focus on the event; I’ve been working on it for awhile now but need to spend the rest of the week tying up more than a few loose ends. The eBook is going to be delivered on Monday, so in a sense next Wednesday’s gig will be a launch party for it, even though none of the work it contains will be presented.

Sound-oriented day, working with various recordings I made during the past week and a half. Process: I’d already transferred the recordings from minidisk to the laptop, so edited and made selections of what sounded best. Contents: KL subway, monorail, mall ambiance, hotel check-in. Impetus: session in the audio lab tomorrow, to put some production enhancement into them. Result: completed one soundtrack that I was able to add to a refined versioned “Facts about Durian” animation (http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2006/durians/durian.html), which will be accompanied by read text during the MMU performance. More results forthcoming, presumably...

The only other project I delved into today was making some very late fixes to a couple of files of the eBook, which is already in production. Some copies of the cd-rom will contain these changes, others won’t—and that’s just how it has to be. To me, the media files are the crux of that project, and I don’t think anyone will be terribly put off by a few strange formatting foibles and mysterious typos that appear in one of the .pdf files (at least I hope not).

Tomorrow a meeting at the MSC (Multimedia Supercorridor) Innovation Center to discuss my forthcoming lecture there, and besides working on soundtracks in the afternoon I really need to spend some time focusing on imagery, and selecting images to project during next week’s performance. Plenty to do!

We’re in KL for three days, which is a nice break from the usual action without being completely removed from it.

I attended and performed with Kok Siew Wai last at the “Man + God” opening at galeriizu last night, as part of Sau Bin’s installation. The art at the show was quite remarkable in terms of graphics and contained some interesting works (photos forthcoming on flickr). SB’s work was, alternatively, a long red carpet with a large circle cut in one end. Siew Wai & I set up our instruments (and a zafu) in the middle of the hole, making a shrine of sorts, and once the soundtrack (which I’m really fond of, http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/sound/gong1.mp3) started we improvised on bells, flute, harmonica, and I sang the “kesa sutra.” The whole presentation was less than six minutes, and people told us they were hoping for more, which means it must have been alright. I was glad to be a part of the event, see a few people we've met before, and nice to be out with Amy (we enjoyed a lovely dinner together afterwards, a really rare event!).

Otherwise I checked out some gear (soundcard/keyboard) earlier in the day at one of KL’s many malls—this one happened to have a full-on 6-flags type rollercoaster inside—though didn’t buy anything yet (want to see how prices compare with NY & see if it is worth lugging the stuff 1/2 way around the world in a few weeks). The pirated software scene nearby was totally crazy. In KL you can buy any piece of (unlicensed) software in the world for about $1.50. Again, I was only looking and didn’t buy anything besides a blank cd for the audio track we played last night. I also made recordings of hotel check-in and subway/monorail trains that I want to mix and use for one of my Flash animations.

Today was a really rare day, in that it was very low impact in terms of work. In the morning Amy and I went for a walk in the Lake Gardens, near our hotel, then saw Sonita (another Fulbrighter) and then I went off to make more recordings (at trains and malls) and paid a visit to the Telecommunications Museum here. In fact, I was the only one there! I saw some interesting historical installations, and got a strong sense of the timeline of how communications developed here during the past 200 years (from hollowed out logs and elephant messengers to microwave/satellite/isdn). It is too bad the museum isn’t more popular and in better shape. Malaysia has a rich history of communications, which no one seems to care about in this age on incessant sms messaging, handphones, and the like. So be it. A good day, a different kind of day, nonetheless.

I saw the proofs for the cd-rom cover today, which has turned out really well. The cds have been made and soon enough I’ll have them in hand.

Another day of various activities here tomorrow—we’ll see where the path leads—

When I left to go up to campus today I wasn’t sure where I’d begin, so ended up taking care of some necessary correspondence, then diving back into poetry. Clearly, I’ve become obsessed about the Malaysia poems, and consequently they keep getting better. Today I went back to the four pieces that weren’t up to snuff on last review and ended up beginning to salvage them by removing one half or more of the text and sculpting the pages into new shapes. Many of the poems are about places, and through the process I’m discovering the difficulty of composing discrete (one-off) pieces about specific locations, especially places where I’ve only spent a few days. But this is what I want to do for now—before eventually tackling the Malaysian form of the pantoun—so I’m going to see this series through and present the lot at least a couple of times before leaving here.

Besides working on the poems, and negotiating gigs and getting information via email, continued to map out the MMU performance, particularly figuring out which computer does what, and how I want to present the selected bounty of images that’ll be projected. To that end I found a javascript I want to test out that automatically randomizes/refreshes images, which’ll free-up my hands and make the visuals non-linear. I may opt not to use it, ultimately, and script the images according to the trajectory of the poems, but it is one possibility I’m toying with. I’ve figured out that the first set—with the Flash pieces—is about 20 minutes, and the Malaypoems set can be as long as 35 (according to the duration of the soundtracks I already have), depending on the texts that made the final cut. I made a precise list of tasks that need to be done and should be able to take care of them next week.

Meanwhile in addition to the performance tomorrow night I’ll be working on some sound stuff, including making some more recordings the rest of this week while we are in KL. I’ll be able to online where we’re staying and will probably type in a report or two.

Part of me feels as though I should be working on multimedia all of the time, but it just doesn’t work that way since my multimedia involves poetry, and not as a minor component. Anyone who has worked seriously in both poetry and multimedia would probably say that poetry is just as difficult, if not moreso, anyway (although I guess that depends on the level of m-m one is dealing with). Today I went back to the nine Malaysian poems I’m taking seriously at this point and did more revisions, while at the same time figuring out what media components should be ascribed during the MMU performance. Some of the media work that will be shown is complete, and the rest is conceptual at this point but will be prepared over the next couple of weeks after I’ve finished some more audio work and selected a bunch of images to accompany the language and sound. I noticed today that we now have more than 4,000 pictures at our Flickr site—so more than a few to choose from! A lot of creative issues at play here: how to make the animations and soundtrack flow smoothly, what order the poems suit the poem’s themes best, and so on.

I did spend an hour today with Siew Wai, with whom I’ll be collaborating on Wednesday night. It is a short presentation, less than six minutes, which will involve the soundtrack I recorded using the rin gong, live music (my flute, her chimes, snow bells, and harmonica), and probably our voices (if the atmosphere seems appropriate for the chanting I’d like to do given the theme “Man + God”). We’ll be using a few other props too, like a zafu and incense. We worked out the arrangement easily, and it was fun hanging out with her for awhile. I’m sure everything will go as smoothly at the gallery.

I also met the FCM’s newest faculty, a Canadian VR specialist named Hal, who has left his position at Concordia University to spend some time here. It seems like he is a good fit, and it sounds like he is interested in working with the Dean and Faculty to make progressive things happen here. I look forward to seeing what he does, and to further discussions with him. Even more socializing tonight, as Sonita Wachtel, a Fulbrighter from Ohio, came down from Petaling Jaya to have dinner with us. Her field is cross-cultural training (i.e., for businesses) and she has very perceptive views on how Malaysia (and world cultures on the whole) works. I met her at the ISIS program, and we were glad to have some company in our apartment for the first time in awhile.

I did go to the opening in KL the other night, but arrived late enough to miss the broadcast of my pieces, which was alright since I’ve heard them already. Good for me to hear everyone else’s work! Apparently the work will appear in an installation in Paris in the fall, and selected tracks (including two of my own—one with Eric Curkendall) will be released on a cd that features excerpts from an episode of The Simpsons, Juan Torres y su órgano melódico, Couple, Fausto Papetti, Titán, El Perro del Mar, Sau Bin Yap + Jordan Tan, Kok Siew Wai, Akta Angkasa, Babasónicos, Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin, Lasser Moderna, James Brown, Deepset, Ochiqueochenta, and The Clash too. Can’t wait to hear it!

An abbreviated day at the office, but finished the photo essay on the office doors and had an interesting cultural poetics experience while (p)reviewing the Malaysia poems for the upcoming performance. While reading them aloud, I realized that a few of them would probably sound ridiculous (or at least totally mundane) to a local audience, whereas to a western (or unfamiliar) audience they’d have a completely different effect. For instance, there’s a descriptive poem about Chinese New Year, but everyone here would already know everything in it, so there’d be no news transmitted, even if an outsider’s reflections, if wise enough, might be interesting. About five pieces were accordingly weeded out, although I will return to them at some point to see if some parts might be salvaged. I’d never really encountered anything like such a predicament before, and take the occasion to be a good development meaning my authorial scope and awareness is somehow expanding on a global level.

In the afternoon, Amy and I dropped off the cd-rom master and graphics at Vertical Direct, the manufacturer, which is right near Stella’s school. For some reason I’m not feeling great relief about sending the project off, but maybe that’ll come when it is actually produced, or when errors *aren’t* found? The location of the company, and timing of the completion of the project was a nice coincidence as we were going to Stella’s campus (about 20-25 minutes away) anyhow to see her 1st grade class do a skit about workers and community, which involved the lot of them doing a rousing rendition of “Penny Lane.” Then we did some errands, got haircuts (it never ceases to be hot in Malaysia & rough having long hair), and most luxuriously had a Thai massage (hurt so good).

Tomorrow will be a fairly easygoing day. I’ll be getting up and out early to make some recordings with Stella in my empty MMU office building (school’s out on break), and in the evening will be in KL for an art event at which at least one of my recordings is being used in an art installation. On Sunday we’ll be spending the day with Sau Bin and Pat at SB’s hometown Seremban, about an hour south of here. Then back to the digital grindstone on Monday…

This morning we decided to spend three days in Kuala Lumpur next week, beginning on Wednesday (when Kok Siew Wai and I are performing at the Man + God opening http://galleriiizu.com/), so I figured everything I was going to do in the city today can be done then. In the windfall of time that opened up I had an unexpected productive day on campus (without sitting too much).

After John and I made the small change on the media files interface, I checked and re-checked the eBook on two Windows computers, and was also able to find a Mac to test it on. Mechanically everything is in perfect shape (as far as I can tell). I found a few spelling errors and fixed the ones I could (i.e., of all things “Multimedia University” got misspelled on the interface, which I can’t change, so have yet another fix to make with John before getting the thing to the manufacturer). It’ll be a relief to get this off the stove and onto 1,000 shelves, finally.

I began to develop further charting the course I’ll be taking in the performance later this month, and pretty quickly was able to fill up an hour’s time with new poems, all of which have soundtracks, and half of which already have animations of one sort or another. These I’ll present in the first set, and the second set will contain all of the topical/geographical Malaysian pieces, simple animations for which I will gradually assemble over the next three weeks.

The new creative work made today involved completing a photo-documentary I’ve been thinking about for a long time that involved capturing images of five floors of office doors in the building where I’ve been working since January. It was a trickier project than I expected because the reflection and glare caused by the afternoon sun through the clear plastic roof made it very difficult to see details of the doors on one side of the building. Thus, I have to go back and capture images of the rest of them tomorrow morning. I brought our tripod up and intended to use it in order to make a uniform series, but this was impossible because the hallways are of different widths and other factors made it difficult to be so professional. I took more than 100 pictures and am pleased with how they turned out, even if they are not perfect. The building houses Faculty from both Creative Multimedia and School of Management, so a wide range of decorations are apparent (which inspired the idea in the first place). I want to work these images into the performance somehow, as a way of transporting on part of the building (offices around an atrium) into another close by atrium where I’ll be doing the gig; this shouldn’t be too difficult to set up...