Itch Away blog

I have had a rotten, stinking cold, and a deadline on Wednesday to be presenting work as a nice warm up and QA with the MA Poetic Practice group (to lube up my lobes for a gig in Providence – more on that later) so I’ve been working through Lemsip goggles to get the first of 6 panels of my new piece of work – Ideas on Oedipal Bitstreams – up and running. Several disappointing figurings of this work led to having to scrap it 3 times and start from scratch.

A response to Brian Kim Stefans’ Rational Geomancy work, the piece foregrounds materialities of print and digital media, and has a good hard scratch at any idea of aura surrounding an original text. Fanks, Walter. Have a play with it, release the words from their booksurface bastille!

Much Photoshop work, much Flash work. But finally I’ve reached the balance of vocabulary through electronic cutups I need to produce versions of the work which are textually interesting in their output and which are the correct degree of fragmentation for realistic and yet still challenging performance. To this end, each panel is in fact 2 – one ‘fast’ version, one slow – both with the same content and in fact interaction strategy. Try the fast one first.

Fast

Slow (play around but be aware there’s a delay!)

These files are about 800K each, and I haven’t put in a loading bar yet.  Please be patient while it loads - trust me, it will.

They’re still not finished, as there is supposed to be another level of tension between fixity in texts (pre-determined spatial layouts) and the randomness / interactive combination brought about by the text avoidance of the mouse cursor. In the slow version, the temporal points BETWEEN states are another performance dimension.

Enjoy?

EDIT: 6 panels is likely to be impossibly optimistic in the timeframe. More like 3. Ho hum.

Language piercings suggest
elements of the skin,
the reader’s late nights, tattooed
for example, to a portable assistant,
alludes to striking
devices such vision flicks us
the plot – haplessly into
functions to create proses of diamonds,
the hunt for theory,
So Shut Up our vagueness is
real-world terminology virgin
quotes offered instead of names,
Poetry as words, figures, lines, stories and
useful commentary one purrs into the receiver

structures, and his flesh, vine
lifted over from live flares exploded
proximity to their fish spasms
Manovich’s concept
fish syllables
maintain a memory of now in a silent medium –
which differs from iridescent
poetry, which is in its other memory,
bitstream. Though in his testicles –
of the author’s intentions – gathering
(see footnote 32) shadow alleys
which the “Ego” of smells and dead eyes
form, to influence dark street life
synthetic, and bubbles bursting
become synthesized into foetal.

There’s a new postcard contribution up – between issues no less – at HOW2 Postcards. Add it to yer RSS feeds.

Link

From The Daily WTF site.

But few of us had the balls to say it out loud

I wonder if she’d consider doing a Popeye one?

Thanks to Majena Mafe for the linkswap. Check out the Linksx. But if you’re lazy WEB / BLOG

I have been needing to produce artificial voice sounds for a piece of work I am, err, working on.  Apple used to have a particularly useful applescript called text2audio which now seems to have disappeared off the face of the internets.

Anyhoo, thanks to some patching together of various culled applescripts, and thanks to the delights of Automator to package it as an application, I’ve made a very simple app which asks for text input, and then saves this text as spoken audio in AIFF format.  It uses the voice which is currently set in the Speech part of System Preferences.

Click the image to download

Those of you who ever read this blog know that I am a fan of Ian Bogost’s work. Well, today marks the launched of his most recently designed game, Fatworld.  The game is available from the website for free download for Mac OS and Windows.  See the list of developers here.

You’d also be a fat fool not to bother checking out Bogost’s own site as well as the Persuasive Games and Water Cooler Games sites, for more in the way of games which are life texts mm’such.  There is more to these games than meets the eye.  Often frustrating, slightly depressing, funny and oddly addictive, these are also subtly complex games which (gulps as he uses a horrible cliché) are themselves social commentaries – by action rather than statement.

Oh, and the Fatworld website is gorgeous, too.

I’m going to a Karaoke bar tomorrow afternoon for my friend’s birthday.

REQUESTS, PLEASE.

A question for The Clash.