We did some iPad tests today with That Night. Some basic content filtering and attention to CSS3 makes making for the device pretty simple, in fact, so simple that the writer can concentrate on content. The fonts are a little small, but Juanita and Cadif will fix that issue. That’s a plus.
I like this future and webkit is fun.
Tinderbox to iPad here we come.
The past few years have seen different themes. Last year we were talking and studying jazz music and its relationship to issues of performance, creativity, history, hypertext, and new media. This semester, we’ve picked up a new or more elaborate theme: film, new media, hypertext, and performance: we’ve gone from Roberto Bolaño through to Anthony Braxton, connecting items along the way. This has all in many ways played out in 100 Days 2009 and will continue in 100 Days 2010.
I remember John Timmons visiting and showing me work he’d completed on one of his recent film projects. His sense of screen space is sensual and evocative and much of his study (how he thinks about it by making films) of the camera reminds me of the way Bolaño dramatizes character, but it is recalls Godard’s existential vision of “cinema as life” and what this may mean in literary craft and music.
Carol Maso in The American Woman in the Chinese Hat plays will different methods of narrative, often inviting the metaphor of the camera into her work, as, I would argue, a counterpoint to the aesthetcs of conventional point of vew: how can Catherine “run away” from the eyes of the reader? And then there’s Coover’s A Night at the Movies, where the old cinema screen is perforated and comes alive. Much of the work we touched on Contemporary Fiction plays with visual apparatus. The image of projectionist is cast against the dying world of the theater become moving, mechanical photography, ad thus a part of sculptural memory. In Bolaño’s novel Distant Star, the vision of the historical study of the dim characters of political coup, which is a facet of the study of human memory, is problematic because of what we chose to turn into a fiction and that fiction’s epistemological context. I contend that Bolaño’s is a Borgesian method, a persistent act of examination of the images we think we know well, such as those images created by Garcia Marquez, those images that are so powerful they impinge on the real. The unnamed narrator of the novel does not imagine the death of the murderer/poet Carlos Wieder ,but he is free to dramatize the death of the Garmendia sisters, two acts of image making that frame the novel’s travel and the narrator’s becoming. In 2666, the critics’ subject is a random agent; his novels are the critics’s only anchor but they are a foam anchor in turbulent seas.
I’ve watched Godard’s film Vivre sa Vie to get a feel for Brody’s elaborate examination of the work. In the film, Nana makes a decision to pursue an acting career only to take up prostitution as a means (we assume) of making a living or as a means of pursuing curiosity, slowly moving from one to another complex choice. But Godard’s method is both intimate and objective (objective intimacy? Sure). In context, Godard makes it difficult to interpret Nana’s actions as why something happens is either unknown (not on screen but suggested perhaps through dialogue, text, or dance) or should perhaps be obvious; we don’t really know why Nana wants to be in films as this would suggest absolute or pure circumstance. The film doesn’t negate interpretation or meaning, however. Priests don’t swoop in and save the day. We know that much.
There are a couple of problems with 60 Minutes’s Brain Power report:
1. This isn’t The Matrix nor do these pills make people “smarter”; they temporary provide chemical therapy for focus. The persistent use of “smart drugs” is deceptive.
2. The report should have been framed against testing as a means of measuring learning in the context of temporary focus for recall. None of these “learning therapies” would be any use in the kind of curriculum I’m used to working with. The true test would be to 1. give students the same test test a week later 2. provide students a long-term project that reflects unscripted problem. Drugs will not assist in this case.
3. No differentiation was make between knowledge and test taking. The report didn’t examine the nature of real learning at all. Not good.
We had steak salad tonight. Simple, easy, and something else. I seared the steak on a hot griddle (this cast iron griddle has been seasoning for a couple of years so it’s always easy to clean and smells astoundingly).
I sliced up a sweat onion and slid it beside the steak for blackening on the edges then shoved it all in the 425 oven for about 6 minutes. Lots of salt, lots of pepper, ground at about middle size, and olive oil.
Then the vapors filled the kitchen and I took a couple of sips of this Carmenere, introduced to me by Maggie and John. Smoky, dark fruit at the bottom of the mouth and oak box at the top. Thick purple, juicy, but light nonetheless, like eating berries off the vine with a spoonful of cream. Peppery sear, sweet onion and oil, purple fruit: the combination followed me through the meal, along with a luscious Gorgonzola dressing and crusty carpet slipper. Wow.
Roger Valdez of World Changing points to a study in JUPD on fundamental relationships:
So while the study has its limits — it compares just two neighborhoods in a single city– it points, as other studies do, to the evidence that sprawl and car dependence are closely linked, and are responsible for a disproportionate share of GHG emissions.
Yet another interesting concept, the floating ecopolis:
There are very few urban design solutions that address housing the inevitable tide of displaced people that could arise as oceans swell under global warming. Certainly none are as spectacular as this one. The Lilypad, by Vincent Callebaut, is a concept for a completely self-sufficient floating city intended to provide shelter for future climate change refugees. The intent of the concept itself is laudable, but it is Callebaut’s phenomenal design that has captured our imagination.
An interesting projection that might be fun to consider for cities like Hartford:
The “Community Transit†system would also enable local shipping from business to business with cargo cells, which have the same size openings as a shipping container. As Owsen says, “Cargo cells create incentive for small business peer-to-peer shipping that stimulates local business cooperation.†The windows of each cell feature an organic dye developed by researchers at MIT that concentrates light to the window’s edge, where it is converted to electricity by solar cells bordering the surface. (links in original)
The first reason I suck at 24 hr Marathons is because I get 7 hours of sleep a day. I go to sleep about 11PM and wake every morning at 6am. If I don’t do this, my eating and work schedule is thrown out of narrative and I get cranky.
The second reason is that I write in seclusion and have built a space for this writing. It doesn’t mean the writing is any good, but it is an issue of comfort zones. Point: I can’t write in hotel rooms, conference halls, or outside.
The third reason is that my diet is heavily controlled. Not because I might die because I eat a slice of pizza but because I like routines and don’t like to think about what to eat. I don;t like to drag around hummus jars.
The fourth reason I suck at marathons is that I hate people. Just kidding.
The first reason I really don’t suck at marathons is that I generated crap out of it which isn’t such a bad thing, but now that I think about it, I can reflect upon what I did do, work on it some more and keep working on it, as I solved some real problems and had the time to work on them at the marathon. 24 hours of work doesn’t translate into 24 hours of work as the eyes begin to flame out after 14 hours of screen time. I really had to squint, but, interestingly, I didn’t solve the real problems until 3:30 AM, when I started to drag and say, “Oh my god it’s only 3:30.” It was at this time that I should have gone into the new media lab and cranked up HL2 on the PS3 system and chilled some. Next year I’ll be better prepared.
I know now how Wally’s wife dies. I now know the structure of the novel’s narrative. Call and response. But what I still don’t know what really gets Wally running across the country, as this is a nuanced question, not really a brute force problem, although . . . now that I think about it, he could do something that forces the question, but . . .
I really respect all the students and other participants for toughing things out and generating very interesting work. Susan Gibb is a great writing companion. Abbot’s intellectual energy is quite a thing to behold. I still think he’s a genius at improve. And I hope Trent solved his issues with character, POV, and narrative.
PS: I’ve gotten into the habit of hitting the ; key instead of the ‘ key.
New Media is hard. New Media people (ideally) can express and understand ideas in symbolic language
$(‘a’).hover(function() {$this.append( . . . )}); and |a horn | a plug |
in a design framework, say a word processor, and interpret ideas in an expressive environment, say a billboard or a smart phone or a novel.
The three together are difficult to teach, to learn, and to master.
I had an interesting conversation with my med student daughter in law today. I proposed the question: what if your hospital had the opportunity to order everything it needed to meet the needs of everyone it serves? We wondered how much boost to economic ecology such an order would create. Twenty thousand jobs perhaps. We didn’t know. Of course, the problem is that hospitals are not self-sustaining (they could never be). Or is this incorrect?
I’ve had my fill of health care over the last few months. The care was fantastic. But I have excellent coverage and don’t really worry about how to pay, as I’ve been paying into my coverage for almost 15 years month after month, month after month. I’ve had to tell several stories over and over to incredibly intelligent strangers: medical histories, drug reactions, aches and pains, habits (how much a wine?). With the relevant and appropriate application, a technician or nurse could click a button and answer a question. If something comes up, that same person could add to the identity of the patient and somewhere along the way things would flesh themselves out with the right notifications. We need to get over privacy and legal roadblocks.
When will my PCP learn about a concerning polyp? I could call him tomorrow and tell him. But he’d have questions I couldn’t answer. We conclude this: good care is about good information and even better systems for users. This should be a guide for health applications, iPad or no iPad.
New Media project: let’s build care applications.