Two Homophonic Translations
Friday, 28th September, 2007
Archive for September, 2007
Popeye Sez 1
Monday, 24th September, 2007
And there you have it
Thursday, 20th September, 2007
Jerome Rothenberg, Openned Reading, October 3rd
Wednesday, 19th September, 2007
Ian Bogost
Tuesday, 18th September, 2007
Recently added to links is the website and blog of Ian bogost, professor at Georgia Tech and author of, among others, Persuasive Games.
Bogost exists in interesting territory which straddles video game theory, critical theory and social politics. He recently appeared on the colbert Report and incredibly managed to get a word in:
2 from “Leather Forecast”
Friday, 14th September, 2007
Click to enlarge
Testing out a more lean random text code
Wednesday, 12th September, 2007
Chatting a Backup, enjoy reading it as I do, is a pain, pain PAIN to reconfigure, largely due to its admittedly bloated code.
So I’ve started testing out a leaner coding technique, all very correct and everything, to make these things simple enough that I can concentrate more on the application of the code rather than obscuring my experiments with debugging fear.
Anyway, testing it out, I finally got it working. I love chance. This is the first couplet my new code produced:
I’m delighted – not just because it works finally, is easy and clean to amend and configure, and I have a couple of projects which really need to incorporate it in some form or other, but also because of these sorts of chance blendings. Juxtapositions would be a bad choice of words here, since the textual units tend not to be oppositional, but to slide into place with each other – which is deliberately how I’ve structured it.
As I explained in my PhD upgrade paper, my intention with codes such as this is to investigate how writing can be a self-reflexive process, a reciprocal exchange between the writer (the coder) and chance vocabulary (the sources). In turn, I’m interested in how this marriage produces realtime readings through the code in conjunction with an anticipated strucutre but unknown end result. The assigning of meaning to the output then becomes a focal part of the reading, and one untouched by ethical intervention to that point. Of course, there is an ego here – one writes the code and one chooses the vocab with an idea of how one would like the two to interact to produce a reading, but the decision to allow the code to do what it wants from that point forward introduces a more active consumption of a poetic text which I find exciting to read.
As part of my paper, I read several instances of Chatting a Backup, after which a particular phrase, “shred a pretty Catholic”, was discussed with interest by the room. The potential for such phrases which obviously do not reflect any personal desires and yet are in effect ‘written’ by me is an interesting place for me to be, I think.
It might be twee to suggest that my code has a mind of its own, but I’ll phrase it that perhaps my code is at least successful in provoking semantic interpretations which are always resolvable in one way or another, depending on the person doing the resolving. Dr Carson – a member of the English dept. about whose online Shakespeare resource I have a blog post half-written – wrote to me having (through no fault of her own) missed my paper, saying that she had tried out Chatting and liked the fact that it had given her (a Canadian) the line “ruined by Canada”.
This is gold
Tuesday, 11th September, 2007
Gold, I tells ya:
You might need subtitles:
Finding Steve Fossett – a real-life “Where’s Wally?”
Monday, 10th September, 2007
Here’s an interesting article about the use of Google Earth and an Amazon algorithm to aid in the location of Steve Fossett. I guess this works more by having volunteers dismiss large areas of shrubbery and desert rather than hitting the jackpot and finding him, but it’s an interesting and promising use and marriage of technologies.
Stupidity
Thursday, 6th September, 2007
Another reason to help out those in denial – the semi-reporting (only the side which challenges the “tree huggers”) of a study on the gas emissions of trees, courtesy of (who else?) – Fox News, the number one proliferator of propaganda in the US media, perpetuator of right-wing agendas, presenting counter-arguments as one-sided smugfests. Yeah, you decide. Most Fox viewers can’t be bothered, and will be delighted to imagine that their Hummers are running on angel piss compared to disgusting tree-guff.