NEW MEDIA & LITERATURE: Updates

Posted on September 23, 2004 by Susan

Probably won’t be posting much on New Media, since we’ve developed into teams, which is really the basis for any new media applications, and it wouldn’t be fair to give one view of a five-person effort.

Did get the books and “afternoon, a story,” a CD hypertext fiction by Michael Joyce and I’m anxious to throw that in and play with it a bit.

But the item from the Amazon order that’s calling loudest seems to be Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas Hofstadter. With chapter titles such as, “Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Careenium,” Mathematical Chaos and Strange Attractors,” or “Irrationality is the Square Root of All Evil,” can you blame me for peeking inside?

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WRITING: Change of Season, Loss of Reason

Posted on September 23, 2004 by Susan

Lost my muse, lost my passion. Feel as if my soul’s been sucked right out of me. Maybe I forgot, allowed a renewal to lapse, perhaps. Maybe I just didn’t pay the bill.

My backyard is just my backyard for the past few days. The gardens need a weeding, the birdfeeders, a seeding. This is all I see this morning in the sunlight.

So I work on what’s been put off by creative spirit as mundane. This breaking of the line, the stopping of the flow, this that short-circuits all my senses till they’re numb.

Maybe I’ll just fly on auto-pilot for a while, until I find a softer place where I can land to break my fall.

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REALITY: TV

Posted on September 22, 2004 by Susan

Shoot. I love the Discovery Channel. But I do wish they’d warn you a little with the reality bit. I sat through almost an hour of watching people almost drown, but I can’t take seeing a baby elephant stuck in a water hole.

This has done nothing to improve my mood.

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BLOGGING: Down Time

Posted on September 21, 2004 by Susan

Just takin’ some thinkin’ time.

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REALITY: Night Changes

Posted on September 19, 2004 by Susan

Remember? I told you that the night is to be given its due respect, even feared.

Yesterday was summer.

Autumn crept upon us in the night. Firmly entrenched by morning, making allies of the trees, suddenly dressed in colors of the new regime. Dancing in the wind as if they glory in the coolness of its kisses.

Another yearly changing of the guards, and just like waiting up for Santa, again I slept right through it.

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PEOPLE: Reality TV

Posted on September 18, 2004 by Susan

Just watched The Apprentice while doing a bit of stats homework and finishing up the paper I just posted. I don’t like several things about the new trend of reality shows. First, I don’t like the fact that people are getting nastier to each other, and by virtue of so much exposure, it influences viewers to a certain degree that this is an okay way to be–particularly when the nastiest win and are rewarded. Secondly, they’re all starting to look alike. Third, I don’t like the fact that I am still attracted to them.

Is it because of the personal nature, the untutored (well, somewhat) unstaged “live” action? Are we fed up to the gills with the fantasy worlds of cowboys and Indians, gumshoe detectives, moms and dads dealing with unreal “everyday” lives?

What Donald Trump said to the gentleman he fired tonight was deplorable. The man had made an unwise decision to give up his exempt status in order to defend another player, and Mr. Trump called him “stupid” at least a dozen times. He also said he was probably the best player in the room, but the mistake the man had made was something that could destroy a company.

I’m not naive about how business runs. I do prefer it to be considered as the bad side of doing business, rather than held up as something you can handle ruthlessly and with scorn. Mr. Trump obviously knows how to conduct business, and has admittedly learned from his own mistakes. That does not mean that he has the right to be rude. His decision may have been just; it just wasn’t handled with any consideration for his victim.

Are we denigrating the niceties of life in the name of entertainment? How sad.

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NEW MEDIA: Exercise 3 – The Window

Posted on September 18, 2004 by Susan

In this exercise, we examined three different visual spaces, to help understand static and dynamic content. We first looked at a projected image of the Mona Lisa painting, then looked out a window, then were happily let outside to play.

Exercise #3 – The Window  (http://smgct.typepad.com/spinning/files/exercise_3.doc)

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REALITY: Space Fillers

Posted on September 18, 2004 by Susan

Sometimes I worry that I am taking up more than my share of space.

Sometimes I wonder if I leave an empty space behind.

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REALITY: Focus

Posted on September 18, 2004 by Susan

How joyously freeing it must be, to dedicate oneself to one pursuit! To live and breathe and pause just to look back at the vanishing point at which one started to value the journey. Shackled to ideas, free to follow unravelling ribbons that go on forever.

I guess the viewpoint comes from who or what is jailer, and who or what is jailed.

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REALITY & NEW MEDIA: The Faucet’s Story

Posted on September 18, 2004 by Susan

Brushing teeth, watching the water running out the faucet (note, that I do try to shut the faucet off in between, while my husband lets it run at full blast—a source of minor irritation). Bored and gazing out the bathroom window for a while. Then this; imagining the flow from outside the window, underground, into the foundation and the cellar, up through the floor and there, coming out the faucet–this particular faucet–when I need it. Visualization makes a game of routine things.

——-

New Media Moment: The ultimate hyperlink narrative structure – your own plumbing system!

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BLOGGING & NEW MEDIA: Grey Windy Words

Posted on September 18, 2004 by Susan

…or maybe not. Methinks ’twill be a boring blogging day today. Between the mundane framing of images*, I need as well to write an exercise for the New Media class–and this, I fear, although I’ll post it as a link to keep it in its place, has not been flaring up my brain with inspiration. Nonetheless, though dry and informational it be, it shall be done. Statistics homework too is screaming from its rows and columns, numbers that tell stories I find difficult to comprehend.

———–

New Media Moment: *First time that I’ve thought about my work of custom picture framing as creating borders, drawing lines to stop the image from escaping out the sides.

Another New Media Moment: Just thought about the modularity of picture framing. Right now I have about forty finished pieces within the space of my shop, a part of it, so to speak. When the owner comes and picks it up, takes it away from this space, it does not affect the whole.

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REALITY & NEW MEDIA: Opening Doors

Posted on September 18, 2004 by Susan

Love to watch the backyard in a battle with the wind. Trees, their rain-heavy heads bow and swerve in all directions; an audience in final throes of prayer meetin’, led by a fiery Reverend Storm.

I stand just inside the doorway watching nature move, but then–I am a part of it as my robe is blown against my body, and raindrops leave their mark with spatters on my face.

——–

(New Media Moment: Have I entered the larger picture, the space, the story–or has it broken through the Fourth Wall to reach me?)

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SELF ANALYSIS: Applying Learned Principles

Posted on September 17, 2004 by Susan

In soaking up knowledge, perhaps as a form of narcissism we often tend to use it as a gauge of our own selves.

Patience, tolerance of others; these virtues I have sought to learn through years of living in a world of individuals. But to myself, I still apply the absolutes. To seek how high, I look below to see how far to fall, and often choose instead a different path.

The either/or’s of life are faced in every second of the day—even just by thinking, thus holding back one’s forward step by a second of delay. But all the forward motion—whether giants steps or small, bring all to the same end at some sweet time. I need to see the boundaries, the edges of the world, explore them all with fingers, feet, and eyes. Just a touch, a minute then to linger and move on.

In the movie, The Sliding Doors, we get a chance to watch a follow-through of the great “What if?” A variable, a split second, space or time, and a life splits off in its direction. If we could see them through in our own lives, watch the two trails diverge, would it have been any easier to decide? There are no rules, you know, that disallow another fork further up the road.

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REALITY & WRITING: Natural Balance

Posted on September 17, 2004 by Susan

Night is the Great Equalizer, when trees no longer green and reaching for the height of sky become one with it. When no one thing or person is a this or that, when all are black within a universal space. When only sound can sort us into piles of those who speak, or rustle, squeak, or howl.

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REALITY: Rain Coming In

Posted on September 17, 2004 by Susan

Some of us are weather-driven, sunshined smiles or greyly grave and grim. I watch the sky tonight, the yellow coward clouds slink in mobs and look for trouble, scan the streets to find a hapless victim they can drench with rain. I hide within my rooms, feeling the tendrils of their tongues in breezes blowing in. But I will go out and face them, glare my own thunder brand of temper, hoping they don’t see the sad inside.

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