what a shock to my system.

It was almost sad how much Separation made me work. Aching and tense from various activity throughout the week, I sorely needed to stretch more than I imagined. At first glance of the piece, I thought my computer had failed to load the text. I clicked more to activate sequences and was surprisingly stopped by the code. Forcing me to slow down, I criticized my own need receive information as quick as I could. The actual literature seemed to be a forceful and tense relationship between humans and computers. To think how helpful and essential computers have become in the workplace and our everyday lives, and to critique how hampering they have become to human development. Social skills, desperate technological dependencies, and physical aches and weaknesses all seem to be caused by our need to be connected to computers and technology.

This work especially connected with the reading for this week “Death of the Author.” There is a lack of identity in the narrative and it makes it relatable. Everyone who comes upon the page has access to who wrote the program, wrote the text, and what the information is coming from (the inspiration for the work). But as the page opens up separately, it acts as on its own. Only the user’s interaction help further the text, prompt the exercises, and connect the these with the user’s own feelings. My realizations of my impatient-ness and soreness came from reading every word slowly, going through the exercises, and examining the piece as a whole once I finished. I didn’t have a connect with the author and felt I was my own author once I realized no specifics were being established within the narrative. “You” and “me” are such commonplace words that it is difficult to not tie them to personal experiences and conversations. The author’s identity, background, and purpose were lost on me because I became the author and gave reason to the textual exercise. Only after finishing and reading the description did I think about why the author’s decisions were important, why the specifics words were chosen, and how and why the exercises were displayed.

Separation – http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/abrahams_separation/separation/index.htm

Alexander Brahmstedt

We Feel Fine

My first experience with “We Feel Fine” was when Professor Sample demonstrated the site during my recitation class last year.  It has stuck with me every since then.  It actually was really interesting to me- such a different form of expression that I had never really been exposed to.  The first thing I could think of was that it reminded me in a way of Twitter, but the little spheres jumping all over the screen reminded me of people’s spirits floating around. There are so many of us in the world, and many people go day to day hiding their true feelings.  This form of media lets the user put their feeling out there- they can choose to identify themselves as far as age, specific feeling, etc.  or they can just be an anonymous female from the United Kingdom, for example.  What this site displays reminds me of all of the different energies surrounding us, but it is almost like we get a peek inside of those energies- which I find really cool and really bizarre at the same time.  The whole experience also reminds me of this pretty awful movie with Mel Gibson: What Women Want, where his character can “hear” the thoughts of women as they walk by.  The selections at the top where you can narrow down your search to certain things like: Feeling, Gender, Age, Weather, Location, and Date adds a whole new feel to the site.  I guess if you felt a certain way, you could find someone your age, gender, etc. who felt exactly the same way.  It is almost like a game of emotion- you can click any sphere and you will never know what you will come up with.  I think one of the coolest features is that you can choose the exact date and country that you want to find an entry for.  I looked up some entries for the 10th anniversary  of September 11th, and some of the ones posted show just how powerful a seemingly simple site can be.  The queries to narrow the feelings down are really what makes the site interesting.

Throughout my own reading of Lev Manovich’s “The Database,” my mind was continuously drawn to the argument surrounding “traditional” narrative elements and humanity’s own fascination of data compilation, storage, and retrieval. While it is true, in a way, that a database does not in fact tell any “story,” with no “beginning” or “end,” databases and data manipulation itself, does, in my opinion, exact a form similar to narration.

Visual.ly is a fast-growing database of visually-represented data through a format known as infographics. Designed and founded by less than a half-dozen individuals not even twelve months ago, Visual.ly has quickly become the largest data visualization compilation on the internet.

It is true that in a regular database format, such as a chart or graph, I may arbitrarily choose elements of a database or data collection that creates a “sequence” where they are not interconnected in any way by cause or effect. But when examining an infographic, I am led to follow the data visualization in one particular method. Some are not as strong an example of this as others, but the idea is that databases and data collection can, similarly to a story, be oriented in methods that attract the reader to traverse the data map in one particular way over another.

But is it a “story?” Is it a “narrative?” Are these ordered visualizations of data the same as examining data on a flat graph? It is hard to say, and I would hesitate to answer “yes” directly to any of these questions. But it is nevertheless important to examine the links between data and text, and how new media reshapes and revises modes of narrative expression.

In Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, the artist taped a voice-activated recorder to himself during one week in April, 1996, in order to capture every word he spoke. The piece, originally printed in a book appears online organized by day. Initially, the site seems blank. Once the reader/viewer/user (I’m still not sure how to refer to myself in this environment) moves her cursor over the page, text appears. Sometimes a single word or short phrase. Sometimes a longer passage. Given the artists desire to capture the impermanence of spoken word (though it is granted endurance by having been now thrice documented: first on tape, then in print, now online), this ephemeral aesthetic construction makes sense. A narrative is difficult to pin down. An accidental mouse shift causes the reader to lose her place entirely. But I don’t think that is the point of this piece and it seems fitting to discuss it in terms of database construction.

(As a quick editorial aside, this may be the first piece I’ve examined either in this class or for these responses, that legitimately rankles me. I’ve previously studied/encountered this sort of recording as a thing that is done to someone or used against someone, not an experiment one enters into voluntarily. I’m reminded on Gene Hackman in The Conversation, hearing his own voice played back to him over the phone and then tearing apart his entire life to find the bug. This is how I’ve previously experienced “surveillance society.” To willingly submit to that seems utterly foreign.)

Thinking about this piece in terms of Lev Manovich’s essay on database logic, I can make the following observations:

• There is no obvious “narrative” here. The reader may glean a story from this assemblage of transcribed speech, but it isn’t the point of its collection nor is it necessary to experiencing the piece. Say what you will about IF or randomly generation poetry–those mediums still refer back to the narrative as an organizing structure (this isn’t, though it reads like one, a judgment of this piece…it’s just how it functions.) This piece is not pretending to be a story.
• While the piece is not unstructured–it’s organized by day and appears to be presented in the order in which words were spoken–it does not subscribe to any other hierarchy. It’s a fairly simple database. If we take the artist’s statement at face value, this is everything Goldsmith said for one week as it was said. Nothing has been culled or removed or cleaned up. Interesting, this piece was started the same time (within a couple years) Manovich notes a boom in data collection where “everything is being collected” from asteroids to phone conversations (224).

On the one hand, this is a relatively simple endeavor: at least upfront, the heavy-lifting of this project was done by the tiny recorder. At the same time, it seems to signal a fundamental shift in how we recognize and encounter ourselves. Does this amount to an autobiography? The title suggests a performance even as the artist’s statement indicates unfiltered data collection. I wonder if I’m wrong about this piece not containing any discernible story. If I could make the argument that DNA tells a kind of story, can’t I say the same of this piece? Is there, maybe, a way to read it like we’ve read other pieces in this class?

Creative Response to Faith

Robert Kendall’s dynamic poem Faith starts out grappling with the idea of logic, which I find very interesting. In Christianity believers are taught a lot about relying on faith in God instead of our own human logic. The poem shows the word “logic” descending down onto the word “faith,” bouncing off of it and then disappearing. It begins with one, then another, and all of a sudden it dumps a whole bunch of the words “logic” and they all bounce off and disappear. It seems to me that Kendall is trying to make a point that faith defies logic, no matter how much logic is involved. The word “faith” is decorated in a fancy Old English-style font that highlights its importance and emphasizes it more then the other text that is in a normal font style. The style of the letter “f” in “faith” also reminds me of how the monks that handwrote the first copies of the Bible italicized the first letters of the first words in a passage.

As the words from the previous slide fold into the next, the previous words are in a different color as the new words or phrases, which allow you to differentiate between them and see how they all came to fit together. On the next two slides each time a word or phrase appears there is a sound like a “ding” or “dong.” This makes it easier for you to avoid missing something or get lost when you are reading the poem; the sound sort of calls your attention to the new text arriving on the scene. The poem has a fun, playful-like feel through the disposition of the words. For example, the phrase “off the rocker (yippee!)” is slanted downward, one word grows so big that it fills up the entire screen, and at the end the majority of the text falls down into a large pile at the bottom of the screen.

Alan Sondheim’s Internet Text has been posted online since 1994 and is both an aggregate of Sondheim’s writings and a “continuous meditation on cyberspace.” Internet Text is an ongoing project of written, generated, and posted texts online. The pieces reflect on the nature of computer-mediated consciousness, digital textuality, and online communication and culture. The author description provides some context for the reader: “The Internet Text is a continuous meditation on “cyberspace,” emphasizing language, body, avatar issues, philosophy, poetics, and code-work.”  As I began to browse through the text files, reading snippets from a few, I expected to find a sequential narrative from the first file to the next and so on. I soon realized that there is no connection from one file to the next, and that these files are pieces of data for the reader to experience in any way that he/she chooses.

Therefore, I began to understand Internet Text as a database per Lev Manovich’s “The Database.” Manovich states that “Multimedia works that have “cultural” content appear to particularly favor the database form” (219).  Internet Text is a collection of text files that share common cultural themes surrounding cyberspace and the files are an extended analysis of the environment of Internet communication, as well as an extended meditation on the psychology and philosophy of Net exchange. Also, Internet Text further supports the concept of the database because the text files do not relate in an obvious way, and have no apparent beginning and end, or premeditated story. It appears that there is no organization or logical presentation for the data, which is quite overwhelming and confusing if the reader tries to construct a narrative from the material. Perhaps this is why there is no trajectory for navigation and no instruction dictating that the reader move sequentially through the text files; the reader must decide how he/she would like to experience the content.

In addition, because this is a living project, with additional files being added to the database, the entries appear arbitrary, but do not modify the logic and intent behind this work—which is for the reader to read the text files in any order that he/she desires. Thus, new files provide additional information and content that does not alter the reader’s navigational or viewing experience; they provide supplementary material for the reader to view if the reader chooses to enhance his/her knowledge.

Based on the text files that I viewed, some contained stories that had a coherent narrative, and some seemed like a jumble of data. For instance, mk.text has no apparent coherent story, and the sections within that file do not appear to have any relevance to each other. However, the sections within “Internet Futures” have a coherent discussion about the potential futures of the internet on society and culture. Towards the end of my exploration, I came across net0.text, which was the first text file created for Internet Text. Interestingly, Sondheim’s discussion in this file lends itself to the “database complex” that Manovich describes in “The Database.” The “database complex” is a psychological condition that accompanies a user’s experience with new media. As a user navigates through a new media object, he/she experiences a reflection of his/her image and actions. Sondheim states that he envisions “the reader as self-generating, as if the text were a form of inner voice.” Therefore, the texts that the readers decide to experience will have some resonance with them, and will reflect an image of humanity and culture surrounding cyberspace. The user’s personality plays a major role in his/her interaction with the content, which will determine the his/her overall experience.

Internet Text does not have a conclusion, and none of the individual files have conclusions. There are multiple experiences for every user, and multiple themes to be drawn upon for each piece of data. These unlimited possibilities, the changing nature of the text files, and the unstructured presentation of data make Internet Text an effective example for understanding new media databases.

The Quick Brown Fox is an electronic poem by Alan Bigelow. Through flash player, Bigelow uses a pangram, or a holoalphabetic sentence, to illustrate the poem. Each letter in the phrase The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog, is representative of one line in the poem, and to see each line, you have to run your cursor over each letter. As each letter is highlighted, a line from the poem appears on the screen with different video animations in the background.

The first time I experimented with The Quick Brown Fox, I started somewhere in the middle of the sentence, unaware of the goal of the poem. As I highlighted each letter randomly and individually, I began to piece together the poem. However after I read each line of poem, I realized afterwards that I had possibly read the poem out of order. Unsure of whether the poem was supposed to start at the beginning of the holoalphabetical sentence, I tried it again, starting from the beginning and going in order, all the way through to the end. What I realized was it didn’t particularly matter where the poem started, nor what order each phrase was read in. Each line could stand alone, and could be pieced together in different ways to create the meaning of the poem.

What I find most interesting about The Quick Brown Fox are the ideas of agency and authorship. Bigelow gives some agency to the user by giving the user the choice of what order to view the poem in. This allows for freedom and continuous change; with each use of the artifact, there are countless possibilities for different combinations of the poem. Similar to that of the cut-up method, Bigelow created an electronic version of this writing device. But how much agency can you give a user before calling authorship into question? Am I the author of each poem I generate from The Quick Brown Fox, even if the lines are all laid out for me? Bigelow has created a controlled artifact, and put the artistic process into the hands of the user. The Quick Brown Fox is in a constant state of process, subject to perpetual change, even after the artifact has been created.