Conversation

"Aesthetics of Digital Poetry"

While reading "Aesthetics of Digital Poetry" I pondered the idea of networking and how "the death of the author" is now actually happening in the postmodern world.  From writing on this blog, and looking at other blogs, I see how networking changes the way text is presented.  It is nonlinear, redirecting to comments people make on wall posts.  When reading a book, there is a distinction between the author and the reader.  The author has a more specific role of presenting their work while the reader takes it in.  In networking, there is no specific author.  People can write back and forth, both taking turns of presenting ideas and critiquing them.  In blogging, for example, work is presented in a less formal way, spitting out ideas that have accumulated in the course of time beginning with a certain topic.  I agree with the author that there are still such things as authors in the digital writing realm.  She says, "nevertheless, I think authorship definitely still exists, albeit in a multiple form: initiators who open up the project frame, programmers, e.g of text generators, open author groups without individual assignment of authorship, etc, as well as the continued existence of individual authors and identifiable author groups."(51)
Not only is the one who writes the blog posts responsible for writing ideas, but the ones who post comments are as well.  With networking, anyone, it doesn't matter who you are, can post writings and comments.  In writing on paper, there is more of a process involved.  For example, to get published one must be educated and write what publishers are looking for.  Publishers pick and choose what the best works are.
Writing on paper is more of a personal experience, where only the reader who has acquired the book can read it and comment in the margins of the pages.  With networking, anyone can read blogs, and their comments can be posted for all to see as well.  The article also talks about how digital writing is now "free game", by copying, pasting, and manipulating.  This deems copyright laws insignificant in the digital culture.

Thinking about my short animation

Right now, I am thinking about a drum, and all the visual qualities of it.  I am thinking to my self, if a drum were to morph into words, what would they be? I want to capture different kinds of music and different tones within showing images of different drums.  At the end of this animation I want the beat from a drum to transform into the beat from a heart.

Independent Research Project

The artist that I find most interesting is Albert Porta, who creates his work through two alternative entities.  These two entities are Zush, a psychomanualdigital artist, and Evru an artsciemyst, creating very new ways of looking at art.  Alot of what he focuses on are ways to represent the human body, and using disturbing or experimetal psychedelic images to tap into the mind.  One of his most interesting works is "Evrugo Mental State" where he creates an entire state with its own currency, emblem, and language using different pictures of the brain and eyes as symbols.  What I like most is how Albert Porta can create new worlds and ways of looking at art through his experiments with it, for instance he even put on a tattoo performance where someone tattooed a line from the base of his skull down his spine.  The movements of some of his digital art create a sense of ominous darkness, and his pictures are mainly of humans and their connections with others.  He uses alot of imagery with the umbilical cord as well. 
What I want to learn from Albert Porta is his thought process of how he comes up with such interesting ways to create art.  My goal is to start creating my own world in an animation that is based off of something real such as the mind or pleasure. 
For this project, my goal is to spend alot of time researching, and not waiting until a few days before the project is due to get started. 
I will continue to look at why Albert Porta creates art under different entities, and how he makes different stylistic choices.  From reading a bit about him, he considers himself a mystic, which is interesting to see how this influences his work. 

Response to comments on "Drift"

The most surprising things in the feedback I got were suggestions on how I could make it better.  For instance, one person said that I could make the ocean part like a dream, transforming into a person falling asleep at the wheel.  Many people liked my hand drawn pictures as well as the movement, which was good. 

If I had more time, I would add more of a plot or storyline to the animation, maybe even putting a poem in there with the word "drift" in it.  I also wanted to put more action regarding drift in as well.


What I want to learn about flash is how to be more effective with tweens, and portray movement in a more realistic way.  I also want to express more metaphorically about the words I use in the animation.

Drift

Tangible Art

The most important concept that I grasped from Johanna Drucker's "Visual and Literary Materiality on Modern Art" was that the poem is autonomous, no longer dependent and representing something but is its own reality, its own thought.  She starts out by talking about the importance of Symbolism in the development of art, making it no longer a representation of thought on paper, but a visual experiment that challenges the way it is portrayed.  It challenges this by becoming its own thought by the way it uses space on a page.  A very important example of this is Mellarme's A Throw of the Dice by challenging the poetic form of the poem, making it Symbolist art. 
When we talk about "poetry" we have to gain an understanding of what makes it "real" as well as how it relates to other forms of art.  One of my favorite quotes from Johanna Drucker's essay is "Differentiation and negation, a sense that poetry was in part defined by a contrast with what it was not: this harbingers the typically modern definition of artistic practices as self consciously situated within the cultural contexts where they gain their identity through contrast.  Such a definition marks out the activity of resistance as a fundamental task for aesthetics (Drucker 51)."  In this quote we see the inherent personality of poetry no longer representing but becoming a tangible idea; the idea of resistance. 
It was hard to follow Drucker's analyzation of Mellarme's A Throw of the Dice, but I think the main point to be taken out from this was that it was a great example of how the form and visual outlook of the poem plays a large role in its tangibility, and transformation from imitation of thought to thought itself.
Personally, I agree that poems have now taken on a tangible form of no longer being representation.  By displaying something that visually enhances the outlook of the poem, this brings it into a new realm of being, by no longer trying to be.  By this I mean that it gives less of a representation of thought, and more of the idea that it is actually thought itself.  This is very difficult to explain, but in sum, I feel that the way words are experimentally presented change the writing into something real.

A new way of counting as I watch the moon

When I first read the poem, "Counting" I thought it was just another cheap way along with other experimental poems to try and gain recognition from nonsensical pairings of words without any deep poetic meditation on life, and pass it of as art.   As I read it several times, I got to thinking, a poem doesn't need to have a stanza form with long lines expressing life.  It can be a clever new way to look at words as well.  What I think Alastair Reed was trying to do with his poem "counting" was to display words with similar endings in a list to represent counting.  When I read it, it was as if I was counting myself.  It was as if I was counting in another language like French or Spanish. "Ounce, Dice, Trice" has a similar ring to it, reminding me of Un, Deux, Trois.  It was interesting how various words that semantically don't make sense together work well in syntax.  When you read the beginning, the words sound simple with one syllable, but when you get towards the end it works its way to three syllables, becoming more complex.  The words he chose flowed very nicely like how counting or the alphabet flows well.  The main reason why this poem works well is the form of having it be in a list.  In this way, it not only sounds more like counting without being rushed, and it visually looks like how numbers or letters should be displayed like in the numerical system or alphabet.  I feel like this poem would have more of an effect if the words in the poem all made sense together semantically as well.  Tell me what you think.
               I really love how "Ask Me for the Moon ::  Working Nights in Waikiki" was presented.  After the title, the poem starts with darkness, and fades into what I see as a horizon of ocean and red lights flashing back and forth resembling towers.  The words flow into each other, reading, "step out to look at the moon, this is what you see".  At that moment it flows into the Waikiki skyline, showing a horizon of buildings at night.  The poem then unravels, words fading out and connecting into new lines of words, expressing life in a city of exhaustion.  As we get deeper into the poem, the buildings fade out and leave us with a small turquoise box with what resembles a person in it, and then it fades to a sign that reads "Waikiki", a palm tree background, and words at the bottom of the screen that you can click on.  This poem is completely interactive, taking you into new worlds with each click on the screen.  Each part of "Waikiki" has something you can click on, bring you into new realms of information about parts of the poem or reveals new parts of the poem itself.  The words flow so beautifully together and express working the night shifts in Waikiki as well as how sad he is that his homeland is being exploited by corporate tourism and capital wealth.   I think the reason why John Zuern presented this poem in this interactive way is to bring you into the world that he is in while meditating on this poem.  It makes the poem so much more emotional presented in this way rather than just words on a document.  Also, he is able to explain why he used some of the lines or words that he did while citing other sources or people in the process.  I would really like to hold onto the sort of visual way he presents his work to you, making the reader, not the author, choose the navigation through his poem.