listening to repeating

I just want to send a quick thank you to Bryden McGrath and Catherine O’Donnell for chatting with me about things related to technology, teaching, literature, and the AAC&U.

Bryden’s written a piece for the UW’s Daily, and Catherine’s done the same for the Graduate School.

I like that both of the conversations focused primarily on the material histories of technologies, rather than becoming preoccupied with cutting edge digital tools and gadgets.  These experiences make me want to drag my typewriters, rotary phones, cassette tapes, and record players into the classroom.

I’m in a generative constraints phase: narrowing down my life through the use of some productively reductive principles.  François Le Lionnais, in the “Second Manifesto” for Oulipo, writes: “The efficacy of a structure—that is, the extent to which it helps a writer—depends primarily on the degree of difficulty imposed by rules that are more or less constraining” (30).

Admittedly, what I’ve done below didn’t require a high degree of difficulty.  Nevertheless, I’m hoping it generates an interesting two months (April and May), when I will only listen to the 50 records to which I would—in times dire—reduce my music collection.

The question?  Whether I feel the same way come June.

Al Green, Let’s Stay Together

Animal Collective, Feels

Bad Brains, S/T

The Beatles, Abbey Road

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, I See a Darkness

Can, Ege Bamyasi

The Congos, Heart of the Congos

David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust

DJ Shadow, Endtroducing…

Fugazi, Red Medicine

Gang of Four, Entertainment!

Gary Numan, The Pleasure Principle

Guided by Voices, Bee Thousand

Howlin’ Wolf, Sun Recordings

J Dilla, Donuts

Jesus Lizard, Goat

Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures

Led Zeppelin, III

Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room

Man Man, Six Demon Bag

Mazzy Star, She Hangs Brightly

Melvins, Houdini

Missy Elliot, Under Construction

Modern Lovers, S/T

Modest Mouse, The Moon And Antarctica

My Bloody Valentine, Loveless

Nirvana, Bleach

Notwist, Neon Golden

Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come

Otis Redding, Good To Me: Recorded Live At The Whiskey A Go Go

Pavement, Slanted & Enchanted

Pere Ubu, The Modern Dance

PJ Harvey, Rid of Me

Radiohead, OK Computer

Rocket from the Crypt, Circa: Now!

Sebadoh, Harmacy

Shellac, At Action Park

Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation

Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger

Sparklehorse, It’s a Wonderful Life

Spoon, Girls Can Tell

Steely Dan, Royal Scam

Superchunk, Foolish

T. Rex, The Slider

Television, Marquee Moon

Tom Waits, Frank’s Wild Years

Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory

The Velvet Underground & Nico, S/T

Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Wire, Pink Flag

This fall semester at Cornish College of the Arts, I’ll be teaching “Introduction to the Digital Humanities” through a code-lite approach that focuses on media ecology, print, and digital texts.  The course description is below, and I’m in the process of a working on a course site.  More soon.

Course description:

How do new media and technologies influence perceptions of print, and how does print affect engagements with technologies and media? With these questions as guides, this class explores conversations between print and digital texts, between old media and new. Some conversations are contemporary, while others are reanimated from the 19th and 20th centuries. Regardless of their time, all are curious, and our goal will be to situate them in the “digital humanities,” or the synthesis of technical skills with critical practices in, for example, the study of literature, culture, and history. To this end, meetings will be conducted in a computer-integrated classroom, and the class will be asked to collaboratively compile a book, with each student contributing an essay, short fiction, or experimental text. Course material will likely include work by Shelley Jackson, Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, Millie Ness, and Martha Deed. No technical skills required. Sideways thinkers most appreciated.

I’m teaching a course at University of Washington, Bothell (in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences) this coming spring.  I’m quite excited about it. Here’s the description.

BIS 213, Art Techniques: “New Media Production”

New media, but how to make it?

This course’s primary aim is for students to have the time, space, and materials to acquire some basic technical skills in “new media” production. According to Lev Manovich (in The Language of New Media), new media are (1) composed of digital code, (2) modular collections of discrete elements, (3) highly automated, (4) variable, and (5) a blend of a “cultural layer” and a “computer layer.”

With this definition in mind, the course will be concerned less with conceptualizing new media and more with making, manipulating, and circulating it. Our meetings will be conducted in a computer-integrated classroom and will be module-driven. That is, the majority of class time will be spent working hands-on with new media instead of relying heavily on lecture. Since the course meets only once per week, for a little over two hours per meeting, we will narrow new media production to two domains: Adobe Flash (object-based animation software) and Audacity (an open-source sound editor). Given the vast array of possibilities that each domain affords, the course modules focus on animating print texts by taking an excerpt from an existing poem, novel, or short fiction, digitizing it, and making it move.

By the end of the quarter, students should be able to produce their own, text-based Flash work, add sound to that work (using Audacity for sound editing), and assess (in writing) how effectively their work refashions a print text through a digital medium. To this end, students will develop their own Flash projects over the course of the quarter, offer written and verbal feedback on the work of their peers, and circulate their projects for others to modify.

There is no text book for the course. The course modules on new media production will be circulated via a class website and examples of new media (e.g., Flash poetry) will be engaged in class.

Both Flash and Audacity are available on the computers in the classroom and elsewhere on campus, and no technical skills in Flash or Audacity are required for the course. However, those who are curious about the course content, especially Flash poetry, are encouraged to peruse the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, as well as the work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

I’ve been reading up on biographical data as of late, something I never thought I would do in order to write a dissertation chapter.  Dates and numbers galore.

For now, the bio work is on Burroughs. Still, it’s all rather subjective when compared to the graphed-out quanta-time-space I came across when Googling “burroughs joan vollmer” just a few moments ago:

Sometimes it’s just too difficult NOT to jump on the Google praisewagon.  I consumed a good part of my day reading biography and then compiling my own hand-written timeline of Burroughs-related events.   From Word Virus, I even learned about the “high-colonic enema” called “The Cascade” and its Burroughs-coined motto, “Well done!  thou true and faithful servant!” (10).

I was feeling productive.  And even rewarded. A product hand-written, not typed, in ink, not ones and zeroes.  Then I discover these Google timelines and the  “alternative view” project.

Well, before I begin hand-writing and inking away with Virginia Woolf:

I might as well get more personal:

Slowly but surely, it seems as if scrolling the web will become a chore for the average reader.   That said, this entry sure is long…

Translating or executing?

In the last few days, I’ve become incredibly interested in Yevgeny Alexandrovitch Sholpo and the variophone (1930), as well as Daphne Oram and oramics (1959).  Both Sholpo and Oram drew sound onto 35 millimeter movie film.  With a little work, they could then listen to these drawings.  Writing could be played.  It could be animated.

Here’s an example film strip drawing for the variophone, and here’s an image of the oramics machine.  If you prefer movement, then a significant portion of the following video, “Theremin, Variophone et musiques nouvelles russes 1930,” is dedicated to the variophone.  There’s also a lot of theremin action in there, too, so you can’t really resist.

In Protocol, Alexander Galloway writes: “Code is the only language that is executable” (165, emphasis his).  Granted, in the case of the variophone and oramics, we might not have “language,” per se.  For one, unless they were somehow formalized to compose music, I’m not sure what the grammar of either would be.  So call these soundings “noise.”  Fine with me.

What we do have are graphic images that are systemized and written and can actually be heard—they can be executed as audio. Here, the graphic images for the variophone or the oramics machine differ from, say, the grooves of a long play (LP) album in that sound (e.g., of a musical instrument) is not just recorded and stored to be played back later.  Instead, sound (once heard or not) emerges from the act of writing.  While I would imagine (and I am only speculating) that both Oram and Sholpo could read their graphics much like a musical score, a score cannot enact itself.  Scores are not executable, and record grooves can only reproduce.

Whereas Galloway’s notion of code implies both “semantic meaning” and the “enactment of meaning” (166), I’m wondering if a system of executable audio, including Sholpo’s and Oram’s graphic images, could still be an example of code.  Of a system that can actualize a phenomenon—that can actualize a sound—through the graphic image without ever making sense.   Executable audio might be code without denotation or connotation, where a shape, a line, a figure never intends to mean, even if it is put into a sequence.

Yes, yes: Executable audio could not escape the desire for meaning-making.  It will forever be nested or embedded in interpretations, in explanations.  All code is.  Nevertheless, it’s interesting to posit a code without semantics.

Obviously, I need to think through the implications of all this.  In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from Oram’s “Rockets in Ursa Major.”