Month: December 2012

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The Gorge in Review, and in Remix

Leonardo Flores has now written 22 posts (one each day, as is his wont over at “I ♥ E-Poetry”) on Taroko Gorge and its various remixes.

Quite a critical outpouring, considering that Taroko Gorge was originally a one-day project!

Leonardo also presents TransmoGrify, another remix of Taroko Gorge that narrates the programming and remixing of these 22 poem generators, producing stanzas such as this one:

Mark inverts the line.
Sonny Rae experiments.
Judy intervenes upon the variable.

With the absolute ♥ of the e-poetry of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

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Purple Blurb Spring 2013: McIntosh, Di Blasi, Henderson

Thanks to the good work of guest organizer Gretchen Henderson, the Purple Blurb schedule for Spring 2013 is already set! I hope to see you locals at some or all of them.

All Spring 2013 events are Mondays at 5:30pm in MIT’s room 14E-310. This is in the East wing of Building 14, across the building’s courtyard from the Hayden Library. Building 14 is not part of the Media Lab Complex. The Spring 2013 schedule is thanks to guest organizer Gretchen Henderson.

February 11, 5:30pm in 14E-310

Jason McIntosh

Presents the Interactive Fiction “The Warbler’s Nest”

The Warbler's Nest title image

Jason McIntosh is an independent games critic, designer, and scholar. During the previous decade, he produced “The Gameshelf”, a public-access TV series examining both tabletop and digital games, and “Jmac’s Arcade,” a set of video monologues on growing up within the arcade culture of the 1980s. More recently, he’s taught a game-studies lab at Northeastern University, published the XYZZY Award-winning work of interactive fiction “The Warbler’s Nest”, crafted the iPad edition of the tabletop game “Sixis” by Chris Cieslik, and worked as a game-design consultant for other clients. He continues to write game-criticism essays on The Gameshelf’s blog, and produces the occasional episode of the podcast series “Play of the Light”, which he co-hosts with Matthew Weise. His website collecting all this stuff may be found at jmac.org

March 11, 5:30pm in 14E-310

Debra Di Blasi

“Skin of the Sun: Five Iterations Toward Human As Novel”

Followed by a discussion of the literary publisher’s role in the 21st Century

From Skin of the Sun

Debra Di Blasi is a multi-genre, multimedia author of six books, including The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions, Drought & Say What You Like, and Skin of the Sun. Awards include a James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Thorpe Menn Book Award, Cinovation Screenwriting Award, and Diagram Innovative Fiction Award. Her fiction is included in a many leading anthologies of innovative writing and has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad. Her essays, art reviews and articles can be found in a variety of international, national and regional publications. She frequently lectures on the intersection of literature and technology and is working on a nonfiction book on related topics.

April 8, 5:30pm in 14E-310

Gretchen E. Henderson

“Galerie de Difformité:The Book as Body, The Body as Book”

Followed by an OPEN MIC!

From Galerie de Difformité

Gretchen E. Henderson is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a metaLAB fellow at Harvard, who writes across genres, the arts, and music to invigorate her critical and creative practices. She is the author of two novels, The House Enters the Street and Galerie de Difformité (winner of the Madeleine Plonsker Prize), a collection of nonfiction, On Marvellous Things Heard, and a poetry chapbook, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea. Among other projects at MIT, she is working on Ugliness: A Cultural History (for Reaktion Books), while continuing the collaborative deformation of Galerie de Difformité: a print book that is interfacing with the history and future of the book, networked online, inviting readers to participate in its (de)formation across media.

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A Poetry Class for 36,000

December 10, 5:30pm in MIT’s 6-120

Al Filreis

Teaching Modern & Contemporary American Poetry to 36k

Al Filreis has taught his “ModPo” course at Penn for years; in Fall 2012 he
offered a 10-week version of the course online, via Coursera, to more than
36,000 students. The course, as in its previous versions, does not include
lectures, being based instead on discussion – the collaborative close
readings of poems. The course grows out of Filreis’s work at the Kelly
Writers House; he has been Faculty Director of this literary freespace since
its founding in 1995. Filreis is also co-founder of PennSound, the Web’s
main free archive of poetry readings, publisher of Jacket2 magazine, and
producer and host of “PoemTalk,” a podcast/radio series of close readings of
poems. In conversation with Nick Montfort, Filreis will discuss ModPo and
his perspective on writing, teaching, and digital media.

Filreis is Kelly Professor of English and Director of the Center for
Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is
the author of Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, Modernism from Right to
Left, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modernism,
1945-60, and other works. He was chosen as Pennsylvania Professor of the
Year by the Carnegie Foundation in 2000.

Co-sponsored by the SHASS Dean’s Office and the Literature Section.

All Purple Blurb events are free and open to the public. The Purple Blurb
series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and Writing and
Humanistic Studies.

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What’s the Story on Digital Media?

I generally will reply to any email messages that was personally written to me and which requests a reply. Perhaps because I wrote for my college newspaper, I’m inclined to try to help student journalists when I can. Sometimes, though, the best suggestions I can offer are ideas about how to rethink the basic approach and find a real story, rather than the sought-after quotations. As when, recently, I wrote basically this in reply to some extremely general questions about digital media and changes in the way we communicate – perhaps prompted by a class assignment rather than part of work toward an article for publication:

Grouping together Facebook, blogs, and text messages on one side and letter-writing on the other isn’t really sound, since it assumes that Facebook, a blog, and a text message are the same sort of thing and that a letter is a different sort of thing. Is a letter typed on a word processor the same as or different from a hand-written letter? Is one a digital media letter and the other pre-digital? Why is publishing a long, public blog post at all like sending a text message to a friend?

Your questions also suggest that people are constantly making choices between using digital media and traditional media. We live in a media ecology in which old media are not simply replaced by new. There are many ways to communicate, but we very seldom choose one over the other. I suppose there are circumstances under which you might send a friend a postcard, for instance, but I find it very unlikely that you’d make a direct and conscious decision to do that instead of sending that friend a text message.

Your questions also seem to assume that new media technologies just appear and that we are influenced by them, because you ask only about the effects of these technologies. Facebook was not given to the Earth by aliens, though. It was developed by people based on existing ideas about communication. The same can be said for the Web and any other digital communication system. Someone who is interested in knowing why communication online is the way that it is will never figure that out just by asking about how Facebook influences the way people write. It’s also necessary to understand why Facebook came to be the way it is, in terms of its original motivation and development and down to specific questions (such as your last one) related to particular features.*

I would suggest focusing on a particular digital media system and asking about how it arose, how it is used, and what’s special about it — not just in relation to some non-digital means of communicating, but overall. It can be worthwhile to ask what niche such a system has in the media ecology: What does it offer in particular that is better than other media channels? Then, you can see how people use language within that channel in interesting ways that is revealing in terms of culture, cognition, and so on. The people who study these systems successful in the humanities and social science, and those who build them and do well at it, take this sort of approach, and there are certainly interesting stories that result about why certain systems are successful in certain ways and how they are actually used.

The paragraph marked with *, of course, is just as true for computational platforms (the focus of the platform studies approach and the MIT Press Platform Studies series) as it is of communications systems, and it’s one of the core ideas behind platform studies and what it comprehends.

This student didn’t seem interested in approaching the topic differently and more productively, and asked instead if I could recommend someone who would provide quotes. That’s not a surprise – it’s the typical nature of this exchange, after all, and not a desire to roast any (unnamed) person, that motivates me to post this. It does go to show that whether you use in-person interviewing, an analog land-line phone, or email, you can miss gaining insight in the same way.