The poets at Poem Addiction are doing some impressive work. Their work proceeds.
Neha
The day asks for a new creation
something different and untold
Evan
seven days of senseless revolution
and the children are hanging from the trees
aprilpoems
In slanting waves
what once was a trickle
Interesting patterns developing
Lunch time and I’ve been reading a lot about newspapers and the demise issue. Here’s Doc Searls.
The bottom line here is that a lot of good people are working on solutions. These solutions are not the same old stuff in new wrappers. They’re original ideas, some of which the papers will have no control over.
He has a lot of interesting suggestions for future models. I would not actually mind paying for quality reporting as the issue of news coverage is critical to knowing what’s happening in “distant but important place” as it’s quality reporting that is at issue for readers and citizens.
I get much of my news from small micro papers published in northern CT. We still get the Hartford Courant, but this will soon end, as the content I read in that paper has been trimmed, its tone is oddly angled, and the paper has very little that can’t be done elsewhere. I’ll miss the paper, but it’s not serving my needs. And the NYT is too much paper for my reading habit. We don’t need “newspapers” but we need excellent journalism.
Journalism is more than The Globe or Courant. It’s also the technical areas we work in: computer science and literature news, reportage on numerous areas of interest. Newspapers, in a sense, are an extending technology–they extend the eye, the ear, and the body of those who want the engagement. We’re grappling with the physicality of information and place. Payment methods are one issue: there’s also the issue of readership.
A few changes to the 100 Stories Tinderbox deck. Thanks to Mark Bernstein and Mark Anderson for lots of help on additional visualization methods and general housekeeping.
This version refines on the old by adding some plots to the containers on the right and to the POV agents in Hunting. The plots will track word counts in stories as the project builds. It’ll be interesting to see how trends on story length and thematics will develop–what might pop out as a result. In addition, I’ve added an additional similarity search for stories of about 100, 200, and 400 words. Motif was an important concept for 100 Days and agents did a great job of seeking them out.
I’m really looking forward to what’s going to come and adjusting and augmenting the dashboard to suit.
Scott Eric Kaufman at the Valve is exploring image and narrative here in the context of comics.
Will he delve into McCloud?
Here’s a screenshot of my Tinderbox dashboard.
This is a basic set up for the upcoming 100 Stories project. The top left adornment contains each month’s prototype, which sets color and display expressions for individual stories as they come. Hunting contains agents that will search for and collect similar stories. A few agents will also search for and collect stories with likely point of view phrases. On the right side is a column for keeping daily updates in order, counting published stories and sorting them by their creation date. These are containers. You can see that the Practice container contains stories already published on mediaplay.
The big blue adornment beneath Hunting is the deck for stories either in progress or those about to be dumped into the right hand containers. I should rename this: the deck. Backing it all is a slice of Carianne’s painting entitled “scattered.” Likely to come is a container for stories that don’t make it, as such a project will result in lots of stories that won’t make it onto mediaplay but that play a brainstorm role. I have lots of these from 100 Days.
We have six poets working at Poem Addiction.
Neha’s latest is a nice use of apostrophe.
Boston CyberArts is gearing up.
That Night I Saw on My Homeward Way is an example of poetry that uses hyperlinks in two ways. The first type of link moves the reader through the poem’s parts. The second reveals hidden pieces of the poem’s stanzaic patterning. This link typology is trivial to some degree. Of course hyperlinks move the reader to each section of the poem. If the poet has hidden some moment of the poem from view, a link might act as a target for revealing that text. Of course.
As hypertext, That Night is read as an intrinsically linked work, meaning that the poem can’t be read beyond more than one node without recourse to its links. It’s physically coded, materially mathematical, a computed artifact. Links are also, beyond their structural code, a poetic devise. This non-trivial characteristic is a persistent potentiality in digital expression. The following brief analysis illustrates my meaning.
There are two stanzas in the following image of That Night. Each quatrain has a different subject and spatial orientation. There are two links in the first and third lines.
One can read the lines with typical interpretive gestures. But the reader can also read the links in any number of ways. Clicking on the link “rubbed” will reveal sections of hidden or invisible text, as in the following image.
The revealed text has a different stanzaic pattern and should, in some way, relate to and change existing substance materially, formally, grammatically, imagistically. As JR Carpenter teaches us in How I loved the Broken Things of Rome (db8), there are many aesthetic and meaning surfaces to digital poetry. Learning to read them: This is the fun of it all.
The devise of the link is used throughout That Night. But the stretchtext technique is not, as I saw no need for other nodes to incorporate it, but the technique remains a potential force nonetheless. Hence, it could be said that That Night uses minimal animation, minimal stretchtext because it required no more than is necessary. Additionally, the poem has a traditional surface and avoids decorative or substantial media strata. It also makes for good reading on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Further Reading on digital poetry: Born Digital by Stephanie Strickland
Susan Gibb has set up her first hypertext remediation of one of my stories at mediaplay, The Keys. Very nice. 100 hypertext coming in May.
Mark Bernstein provides this link to a Tribune Entertainment weblog, a discussion between Maureen Ryan and Ronald Moore on Battlestar Galactica, which sheds some light on the thinking behind the program. Twitter has lots of commentary on BSG and its conclusive episodes.
The final episode, indeed the last few years, of BSG have been fun, but also frustrating. The first year of the show was incredible, I thought, filled with dark drama and import, and my wife and I were hungry to continue our Friday SciFi habit. The first mini-series was one of he best dramatizations of mass-scale loss I’ve seen. Scary.
Battlestar’s visual metaphors are stunning, and its story premise is straightforward. The work is also filled with interesting relationships. Technology, order and chaos, love, faith, spirituality, betrayal–these ideas weave through the story and build complicated structures. Characters are neatly packaged: Adama begins skeptical of technological advancement, which saves his fleet, and ends in a situation of technological disemburdenment, pushed by his son. Adama’s is a character driven by loyalty in a world where ethic infrastructures are supported by wet toilet paper.
Battlestar is a classic exile tale. The Cylons attack and the denizens of Caprica are forced on a march toward ambiguous ends. On the way they must secure a means of government, environmental control, and on the way they must deal with loss and history, thus woven through exile is the story of discovery and revealed secrets. Battlestar comes deep with analogy. It’s a Bush era, 9-11 story of corruption, waste, insecurity, zealotry, distrust of unknown quantities, and arrogance.
Well, that’s just the intro. But to the beef. The final episodes reveal a problem with over-baked foreshadowing and expectation. A big bang is on the horizon and after lots of tremors, a great gold revealing will break from the earth and enumerate all the lose ends. Some great answer awaits, set up by grand foreshadowing and profound but gnostic imagery: who are the hidden Cylons; what secrets await in the Temple; how does this child, Hera, hold the secret to survival (apparently none), and so forth. The X-Files set this up and, of course, there was no great bang, as there was no secret to reveal. I don’t want long-standing secrets, though, I want some sensical and reasonable disentanglement.
Battlestar’s second season set up an unexpected and weak arc. Adama must save the citizens of New Caprica from their Cylon overlords as his son grows fat with guilt. It felt like ground already covered, it felt like character experimentation. In a subsequent season, Kara Thrace learns that she’d already been to Earth, or some Earth, and has returned to the fleet to assist the weakening survivors home. She just doesn’t know which home. I still don’t know what Earth they went to or why at the end. The question of Cylon identity in the story turned into a red herring, as did the foreshadows in the Temple, the numerology trivial (when isn’t it?). Jesse Abbot will attest that we already knew the notes were coordinates (when are they not?). Which gets me to the overall point.
The edits at the end were skillful, the camera moving from present to past. These images provided nothing new or significant to the people of the story, and they turned quickly into obvious manipulation: this is what that image meant. What’s the danger of authorial or intrusive narrators? They kill stories. After the music stopped, I regained my senses. “Hey dummy,” the camera said. “You’re not fit to put the story together yourself.”
I can’t say where the citizens went, and the notion of (de)evolution at the end makes no logical sense. 150,000 years later–huh? If I toss my iPod today, will my son’s son’s son’s son puzzle over a bow and arrow? I don’t get it. The business with cyclical occurrence needs explaining too. Generationally, repetition is debatable in the context of Time’s Arrow. We can make mistakes, as people did in the past, but as Kundera and others have argued, each generation is its own physical quantity, unless we’re working within a framework that admits it, which I guess we are in Battlestar, where the cycle “cannot be broken.” But the angelic toss at the end about “will me repeat?” and to affirm it in the positive seems like cheating and risks flushing the story into pretentious waters. We leave, also, with the old saw: that old darn technology is just stripping us of our souls issue. But I’ll leave that one alone.