Lying by omission – 1

4^th estate functions autonomously – 1

For all regimes laws are built on customs rather than need or common sense – 2

Abolishing censorship leads to passivity – 3

Live TV undermines media credibility – 4

Power to dissimulate is the primary goal of the 4^th estate – 5

Mediation is the opposite of Communication – 6

Mass comm. Helps upset sustainability – 7

Complex notion of witnessing through another – 7

Pagnol : The theatre vs the screen – 8

Tech of the camera separates us the human element – 9

The camera as a spontaneous /causation/ of genocide – 10

Cause of riots – 11

Advertising and information – 12

Publicity => propaganda – 13

Domination of the ‘image trade’ – 14

Ad pressure on political institutions – 15

Replace inform. With inform complex – 16

Crisis of confidence – 17

Media addresses the anomic masses they have helped create – 18

Charles Manson / Drugs – 19

Reality effect – 20

Legitimation – 21

The Data Coup D’etat

Kinedramatic – movement creates the real – 23

Information explodes – 24

Eliminating distance invents the enemy – 25

The Gods as vectors – 26

Epistolary codes – 27

Public opinion as an intermediate state – 28

Plagiarism of the visible world – 29

Democrats replace brute force with moral force – 30

Ostrakons / agora – 31

Televised exit polling – 32

Secret of speed – decoders – 33

Political mediatization –  34

The Shrinking Effect

Acceleration – 35

Contemporaries vs citizens – 36

Illegal pamphlets – 37

Information tool – 38

Instant implementation – 39

Telegraph shrinks distance – 40

Paradox of appearance  – 41

Acceleration of history becomes observable – 42

Realism is illusion – 43

Instant inspiration – 44

White bird – 45

Word photographs – 46

Publicity shots -47

Musical codes – 48

Perfect accord – 49

From berlin – 50

Para constitutional power – 51

Info has legitimacy – 52

Speed – secret – value – 53

Trick effects – 54

Dangerous powers – 55

Committee brass- 56

Dromos – 57

Crime of lese –media  - 58

Foucault – 59

Crisis in size – 60

Terminal Art

Culture of disinformation – 61

Televisual pathology – 62

No defense from technology – 63

Optoelectronic war – 64

Synthetic vision – 65

Tenses of vision – 66

Science meets magic – 67

Movement is blindness – 68

Illusion of having the time to see – 69

Visual disinformation – 70

Creation vs engineering – 71

Tendency to chaos – 72

Apropros of comm.  – 73

Techie generation gap – 74

Information’s final argument – 75

Victims of the Set

Technical effectiveness – 77

All media form one medium – 79

Approach initially via sight – 81

Logos as eternal property – 83

Lack of inertia / zombies – 84

Pathology of motion – 85

Motored motion – 86

Delocalization – 87

Final exhaustion – 88

Dynamic global vision – 89

Polyvalency – 90

Return to norms – 91

Tech acceleration => birth and departure – 92

Brain doesn’t like boredom – 93

Time for conscious intervention – 94

To disconnect is to disinform – 95

Quiet legalization of disinformation – 96

Tourists of desolation – 97

From Superman to Hyperactiveman

Intrastructure – 99

Real-time – 100

Transplant revolution – 101

Maximum excess – 102

Foreign heartbeat – 103

Absolute speed – 104

Cognative ergonomics – 105

Media proximity – 106

Egocentration – 107

Great health – 108

Movement on-the-spot – 109

Tech as a body component – 111

Technical intrusions – 112

Ugh – 114

Selective processes – 115

Technoscientific  - 117

Tech fundamentalism – 118

Metaphysical – 119

Supervitality – 121

Human motors – 123

Programming – 124

Concepts of information – 125

Whole dimension – 126

Bioethics – 127

Substitution – 128

Perpetual stimulation – 129

Poetry of distance – 130

Control becomes environment – 131

Salvation in illusion – 132

The Art of the Motor

Biocracy to Telecracy – 133

Biopolitical to Telepolitical – 134

Sociopolitical Cybernetics – 135

Military communications complex  – 136

Telematics  - 137

Computerized simulation – 138

Relationships – 139

Speed of information – 140

Great Object – 141

Horizons – 142

Real terms – 143

Barriers – 144

Portable virtual environments – 145

Vr as additional reality – 146

Rapport between real and VR – 147

Learning retroactively – 148

Logic bomb – 149

Actualization continuum – 150

Living cinema – 151

Psycho-geographical imperium – 152

Teleexploration – 153

Immediacy – 154

GPS – 155

US DOD – 156

Project COMPS: Computer Originated Map of Posted Subtopics

Step 1: User takes full text notes on materials.

IE: Class texts, chapter notes, etc.

Step 2: User creates a blog for this project, and creates an individual post for each set of notes.
Step 3: Program reads the blog posts on a given site, and extracts the most commonly recurring words in a list.

See www.wordle.net.  The graphics are not desired, only the word counting.

The number of words to be listed should be user defined between 1 and 20.

These words are called Keywords.

Step 4: User selects which Keywords from the program-generated list to hyperlink.

Traditional hypertext would create one link from one Keyword on one blog post to one word on one other blog post.

I want every incident of every User Selected Keyword to link to the same Keyword in another blog post, randomly – changing each time.

IE: Keyword is ‘Justice’ it shows up 3 times in blog post 1.

All three incidents of Justice should be hyperlinks.

The links take the user to another incident of Justice in any blog post (other than blog post 1) on the blog.

The user will never be able to take the same path twice.

The purpose of this Project:

To read the notes together in a way that should generate new understanding of the conversations being held around the topic, even if the conversations are not in direct response to one another.

By using the random hyperlink connections the user avoids the well-traveled path, and circumvents being blinded by my preconceived ideas of what the conversation going on in the research field sounds like.

What am I interested in doing with the codes: Connecting them

New Media Medium: Hypertext in Wiki

What’s the point: Discovering the threads of conversation, points of connection between scholars, and points of connection with my own research.

What drives this question/urge: If Ulmer is correct, by locating the points of convergence I will discover something new.

Process:

• Collect Texts
  • Read Texts For Content
• Take prolific notes.
  • Take these in Word to make the text searchable.
  • Take notes on content of the work – not other scholarship or my interests.
    • reserve these inquiries for later in another file.
• Post notes on wiki pages as individual works.
• Paste all notes into WORDLE to locate repetition.
  • Choose repetitions to hyperlink in the notes.
• Hyperlink all repetitions (Can this be done randomly?)
• Browse the notes, clicking hyperlinks as I come to them.
  • Take notes as I am reading my own notes.
    • Do I find something in an Ah Ha?

This feels like a useful gesture.  Comments please?

I was reading over some of your notes – questions – concerns.  One of you said that you were sure Ulmer wouldn’t appreciate your reductive approach to taking notes but I think that misses the point of what he wants. So let’s start with an exercise – and see if it puts us in a better frame of mind!

Think of the formulaic knock-knock joke.

• Knock-Knock
• Who’s there?
• (Insert Short Response)
• (Short Response) who?
• (Short Response + Additional Info to create the punchline)

Now, instead of fitting new Short Response and Additional Info to create a new knock knock joke, let’s Appropriate the Model and Do Something New with it. Here are two ways:

1. Invert the model by positioning the authority with the responder.
2. Start with the punchline and re-telling the joke backwards.

The Ulmer question to be applied to what comes out of this exercise is not  is it still funny, but rather what do we know now that we didn’t know from the first model.  It’s not a matter of do Y instead of X, it’s about doing Y because someone did X, and only with an X, Y Axis can you get Z.

PART ONE

Goals

• Finding appropriate forms to engage Electronic Media (EM) and Cultural Research through invention
  • appropriate : means it allows for engagement in ways that make the information new. (42)
• Circulating knowledge
  • Why does he do this? – circulating knowledge is not enough – repetition is not productive.
  • The circulation is co-operative.
    • This is mediated by the internalization of knowledge (17)
  • Learning is closer to invention than verification. (page xii)
    • But we’re comfortable with verification (19)
• What it can do to appropriate hypermedia for academics. (22)

Invention

• Spreads by emulation (5) Not the same as repetition.
• Happens in places of juxtaposition (5)
• First step is appropriation (7)
• Second step is manipulation (12)
• The method of invention should be used during the invention process (17)
  • It should be shown in process to provide context (20)
• DOING IT
  • write an intuition (37)
  • with chorography (41)

Heuretics

• Artistic + Experiment -> New (3)
  • Artistic and Experiment are the differing applications of Theory(4)
• Reference to Barthes, the -> is more valuable than what happens on either side (4)
  • Like a good chemistry equation, it always balances, the important thing is the (re)action
• Ref to Campbell, reason w/ memory rather than logic (37)

Theory

• Pointing out what theory lacks is the call to invent the new (5)
• Theory is only one ingredient (5)
• If theoria involves travel – don’t /try/ to come home (31)
  • Theory is NOT circular proofs in symbolic logic.

Genres

• Ways to look at the world – programs (repetition – reductive?):
• Include models
• Ulmer’s Genres:  Places where pieces of information can be juxtaposed in order to create a new way of looking at the knowledge .
  • Example: Mystory
• Values BOTH current model and  Avantgardist (xiii)
  • Revisiting paper practice while inventing ways to think about new media (17)
  • argument is displaced (but not eliminated) in hyperrhetoric (21)
  • classical rhet as a departure for hypertheory (27)
• HALT: New Rhetoric “replacing” argumentative writing? (18)
• Electronic Logic is Conductive (37)
• Intuitive Reasoning /can be/ Abductive (37)

Models

• Current – critique and hermeneutics.  (xii)
  • 19^th century science – visible/tangible response – demonstraton
  • Learn from the inside and the visable
• Avantgardist – does not analyze, but recycles/reuses/reframes
  • Using theory as research (pg xii)
  • Program for experimentation – discovery, composing alternatives, INVENTION

Successful Models are Generalizable to fresh texts and procedure can be transferred. (39)

Chorography

• Decentered by Electronic Apparatus (33)
• Organiztation of info by writer in position to time/space in culture (33)
• Subs Chora for Topos as the place of invention (36)
• Chorography reintroduces this idea of the value of the creative action. (26)
  • PROCESS REPLACES PRODUCT (38)
• Chora
  • pattern making – function – recognition(36)

HyperMedia and the Memory Machine

• Writing as Tech is a memory machine (16)
• (unexpected) convergence of theory and tech (21)
• What about Blake? Visual Culture of the 17th – 19th centuries? Look at Laocoon
• Composer constructs info enviornment – user chooses the path – Chorographer writes the paradigm (38)
• “hypermedia does for scholarship what photography did for portrait painting”(29)
  • (insert dirty words – I don’t buy this for MANY reasons)

Hyperrhetoric

• Hyperrhetoric isn’t driven by the hardware of the programming any more than the Laocoon was driven by the tools and materials of the engraving.  The Artist is easily forgotten in the modern mix. (23)
• visited as Freud, Bacon, Kant (24-25)
• captures lost connection between people and places (40)

Blake’s Laocoon

PART TWO

I think I would like to work with Codes. I do not mean hidden meanings, “magically revealed” by “deep analytical mining” of information. I mean the codes that we use inside our routine  programs (our paradigms, or understanding of the world).

I want to look at a way to construct pedogogies that expose our own personal codes for organizing, understanding, and communicating – and by extension give us a way to see the codes being used  in the construction of the material we are researching, reading, or using.

It’s not enough to be able to define these codes, a useful pedagogy will DO something with them. There is a music artist who exposes the hidden codes in music, and then allows the listener to re-mix tracks of cross-genre music and create something that holds itself together in an aesthetic harmony based on the intersections of these codes.

I think that the intersections of personal codes  and those disovered in the researched material can yield discovery – the progressive avantgard move Ulmer finds so useful. (One with which I agree strongly.)

Tags.  I think Tags may be the New Media representation of Code.

What is Communication?

• pg 4 – The second paragraph addresses the solitude of man – contrary to the network theory of communication we’ve been looking t as a natural thing.
• pg 5 – negatively entropic ?
• Late 19th century understandings “natural sciences explain phenomena, whereas the “human sciences” interpret them.” This comes at the same time Blake is arguing with line – Lyotard’s position that the line is made of points of information.. (another area of interest for another time.)
• pg 7 – Where does he expect the “natural” and the “perverse” to meet? Is this where you-tube, facebook, other spaces where the dialogue is in the context of other dialogue instead of contextualized by the speakers?

Theory of Communication

• pg 8 – The idea of comm as natural vs language as unnatural?
• pg 8-9 – The lecture model – I do not understand his reasons.
• pg 9 – didn’t we recognize animals as cognizant of communication long before we could understand the meaning?
• pg 10 – formal theories.
• pg 16 – is not absence of a message a message itself?
• Information – A method of the study of communication.

Line and surface

Or should we say lineage? No, lineage is too directional.  Let’s go back to line…

PG 21 -

• “Surfaces are becoming ever more important in our surroundings.”  1973 – What about the Ipod Touch, Tablet Computers, etc..  these things make surface and writing one and the same in some cases.
• I question the lack of importance given to the earlier surfaces.
• Cartesian?
• Point ———– Point ————- Point ————–> Outcome (So What?)
  • Thesis ———> Backing Statements ———–> Research ———–> Conclusion
  • But this is not Network.. it does not allow for straying (discovery)
• ‘vulgarized’ —> Packed : OED Printing Press
• The mention of the Jewish idea of text is not unfamiliar, but also not fully developed.  The Rabbinical texts sometimes  use an approach which uses line, but like this…
  • Three Lines of inquiry, never speaking to each other, but instead to the topic.  These have intersecting points, left to the reader to discover and make sense of.

]]> http://catachresis2.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/surfaces-and-lines/feed/ 0 louisamae http://catachresis2.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/head-scratcher-late-but-not-forgotten/ http://catachresis2.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/head-scratcher-late-but-not-forgotten/#comments Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:09:41 +0000 Patricia http://catachresis2.wordpress.com/?p=6 ]]> First:  Sorry I’m late.  I’m still trying to wrap my head around the following:

While taking a course with Noah my first semester, I wrote a paper about William Blake, and the influence of Albrecht Duerer on his work. This paper focuses on the line ( as in —— ) as a symbolic action of response, authority, and  ultimately as a rhetorical statement/testament. Essentially, I argued that the line must be created with forethought and vision, intention if you will, in order to convey the artist’s message clearly.  The argument against Blake’s work by his contemporaries (The Academy of Royal Art) was Blake did not obey the rules of construction/rendition/form they had laid out, therefore his work was unworthy.

Where am I gong with this?  Well here it is.. three years later and I am trying to figure out why Blake has been at the forefront of my mind since I read an article about grammar use in writing classes by Stanley Fish.  It came to me about an hour ago.  The WAC/WID school and Stanley Fish are having the same argument Blake and the Academy were having, and the same argument Duerer and the Church had. Broken down into a more mathematical formula it looks like this:

Church/Academy/Fish ——->         Form => Function
Duerer/Blake/WACWID —->         Function => Form

My students, however, have proposed an alternative theory —–>  Function <=> Form

This later one seems to fall into the logic of Networks.

I ask this:  Is Form => Function the Psychological Equivalent of the Rhetoric of Control? IE: Rhetoric designed to curtail free will and guide large groups?

And where does Lyotard fit? It’s really simple from here: Lyotard argues that Modernism (equated with independent thought and presentation of ideas ) ended. When you look at the 1950′s films, and rhetorical points McLuhan was making about generalization/homogenization of American Life you can see how and when Postmoderism arises.

Yet we all feel on the brink of something … different.  Something we haven’t named yet.  A time when generic responses are no longer the ‘correct’ ones.  A Post-Fish era if you will.

I propose this – “The Line” (control of the message) has always been the privledge of Class.  Church, Academy of Art, Academy of Academics. If we look PAST the technology of New Media to the function of it, “The Line” is now something that /everyone/ can manipulate. My 10 y/o can make a movie.

Modernism was limited by the ability of the general public to make statements using other people’s lines to show how different they were.

Postmodernism was the result  of everyone being different, therefore no one is really different.

New Media in the Post-Fish Era allows everyone access to the privledged skills of linemaking.

But – according to my students – making “the line” is not enough: You must know WHY you are making “the line” to give it meaning beyond the -whatever.

Have I totally missed the target and over-complicated a simple gesture?

I started to outline the chapter on Hot and Cold as a way of wrapping my head around McLuhan’s theories, but I found the ideas conflicting with one another, as well as with my own experiences.  I am going to try again this morning by listing the key points I’m pulling from the text here and examining them together, in a way I hope will ‘cool’ the text enough for me to be able to interact with it.

• Any hot medium allows less participation than a cool one. – pg 23
• Hot = low audience participation.  – pg 23
• Cool = low audience participation. – pg 23
• Intensity (heat) engenders specialty and fragmentation. – pg 24
• Experience must be cooled before it can be learned. – pg 24
• Periods of New Tech (Media?) lead to generalized sleep-walking in the public. – pg 24
• Specialist Tech (media?) detribalize. -pg 24
• Non-Specialist Tech (media?) retribalize. – pg 24
• Myth is  ….. (I’m lost in this discussion of Blake, but drawn to it as something important.)
• Endless intersection of planes (network) is necessary for insight. – pg 26
• Concern with effect rather than meaning. pg 26
• The presentation of media tends to reflect the current political/social climate. – pp 26-27
• (returning soon)