Author: jpiszcz

Scroll to the bottom, make sure you are logged in and enter the comment:

Textual Media Experiment

Electronic Literature, pp. 131-145, 155-157
Does anyone know what the author is trying to articulate here? On the first page of the reading, “This chapter elucidates further a framework in which digital literature can be understood as creating recursive feedback loops among embodied practice, tacit knowledge and explicit articulation.” A good point is mentioned on page 132—when you think about it, nearly all of human communication at least in modern societies is translated into a digital form, with the exception of face-to-face talk. On 135-136, it appears the recursive feedback loop in electronic literature is human to computer and computer to human interaction with the text that is displayed on the screen. The author’s two main points are given on p136, “verbal narratives are simultaneously conveyed and disrupted by code” and the second, “distributed cognition implies distributed agency.” Tachistoscope, from the reading is based on an experiment from the early 20th century; it tries to flash many images at once at the user and not being able to acquire meaning in each image— it is suggested that we still receive subliminal messages through such a process. The key aspect from the reading about Sundays in the Park (p145), it “brings to conscious attention the link between vocalization and linguistic richness.” On page 156, Stefan’s randomizing algorithm is noted for picking apart pieces of texts and creating a poem—unless the algorithm was designed to create that, a poem—wouldn’t human intervention still be required to see if the poem made sense to a human as artificial intelligence (AI) is not advanced enough yet to do this for us?

William Poundstone, Project for Tachistoscope (also on E-Lit CD)
The sprites around the middle-Start button-area are nice to help explain the concepts behind the work itself. While subliminally, I may be exposed to the items I cannot comprehend— between the music, changing colors of the expanding and contracting circle and later imagery makes the work a bit difficult to understand. However, in the reading it does note the analogy between certain images and what they are supposed to represent, so that was helpful somewhat when looking into this work. I thought the statistic in the Subliminal Con was interesting in that “Drink Coca-Cola” increased 18.1% and a similar ad for popcorn increased sales by 57.5%– this is interesting because in the presidential election four years ago when it flashed “Democrats” as “Rats” on the screen, that backfired on the republican base. Perhaps these ads work best when one cannot pause and watch the medium frame-by-frame?

Millie Niss and Martha Deed, Oulipoems (also on E-Lit CD)
In the beginning, it states that “oulipo” is created by a combination of math and poetry generated by rules or constraints. Is that the audio is supposed to represent—in the entry page? I appreciate the existence of an introduction in this piece as the explanations for subliminal messages in the last; it offers insight into how it works and what one should expect when interacting with a particular work. Overall the structure and outline of this work reminded me of The Bomar Gene in that there are separate doors one can walk through and in each door or selection, one is presented with a different work. Whether it is a game, matching or putting a paragraph together, it seemed highly reminiscent of The Bomar Gene. Just like the Bomar Gene, sometimes its best to turn the audio off to better-understand the work at hand.

Electronic Literature:

The first few times I read this it was in relation to the second media investigation so I did not pay too much attention to Nippon itself but rather the context of the text itself. Having taken a course on Milton, on page 122, I found it extremely “copy-like” to that of the story of Adam and Eve. Eve looks in the lake and falls in love with herself and in that story it goes on for several additional “books.” It is interesting to see where an author has possibly gotten his or her ideas and puts it into a particular perspective.

Nippon:

Right off the bat I noticed something familiar that ties into YMCHI’s other works, the 10, NINE, 8 number count down; however in this instance some of the numbers are spelled as words where as in BUST DOWN THE DOORS! they are all numbers. Also in this piece, it counts all the way down to one where as in the Doors piece, it always stops at three, I am not sure what this signifies in the overall sense of both works but I think its worth noting.

The work itself is presented in dual languages, on the top, I would assume its Korean and English at the bottom, the two primary colors are white and red vs. the black and white in the Doors piece. In the initial “highlighting/inversion” there is also some green and black but it appears only briefly. The music is much more lively, almost like what you would hear at a dance or some sort of play. The red and white color evokes a different emotion, I cannot pinpoint it but it seems to go well with the text. Even though I cannot read the Korean, I must say some of the text seems to “dance” or “appear” to the beat of the musical notes in some instances. After a few moments, the synchronicity between the top and bottom is lost and if one could read both languages, it may become difficult to follow. For example, usually with subtitles in a movie it follows very closely to what is verbally said. However, having to follow two subtitles in separate languages may be cumbersome, one would assume that the same thing is being said in both languages but without knowing Korean, I cannot investigate this any further.

The story itself that it tells is very interesting, it seems like its about someone giving advice to a woman telling her to “sex things up a bit” and that she is the reason that a married man leaves his house. Then they share a cigarette and they get romantic at a dinner(?) table while others are watching. The text itself generally refreshes MUCH faster than the Doors piece and one must not take there eyes off the piece for a meer second or they may miss something. Overall, it seems like a romance between a married man and a mistress and the author is giving advice to the woman, I may be totally off base here but that is what it appears like to me. The final note I will mention is the ominous ZERO “0” in-place of all O’s in this and the Doors piece, what does that signify? Does it have meaning?

In the summer, they’re fine and they behave themselves. When the temperature drops, they lose their healthy pink color and turn white. What is this phenomenon called, what is wrong with these toes of mine? I do not recall this happening when I was younger; it is something that only occurred relatively recently. It is much different from your foot falling asleep, there is no tingling but rather a complete loss of tactile sensation; however, the ‘coldness’ still seems to grip the toes as the warm blood is sucked out of them via the capillaries (I believe). What is the fix? Start walking, do something to get the blood flowing once again and to get the pesky little toes back to normal.

What is this called?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raynaud%27s_phenomenon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raynaud_disease

Understanding Comics, pages 138-215

First I wanted to comment on what one student said yesterday—that for Japan comics to be “real” comics and not inferior, they could not use color, I did not know that and found that very interesting—could that also be why nearly 95% of this book is in black and white? One note on page 152, the author suggests both words and pictures can have great powers when authors exploit them both. The six steps are noted on page 170 as: idea/purpose, form, idiom, structure, craft and surface. I must say chapter 8 was my favorite chapter; while I do not mind reading about comics or comics themselves say in a newspaper, I think the medium has a part to play with how you read this book. Knowing that there are colors at the end makes me very interested in the ending; whereas when you read a newspaper (in the old days) many of the comics were black and white and the newspaper itself as a grayish color where as this book’s background is typically stark white. On page 188 it states the color began to symbolize the character, such as blue with Superman or blue/yellow with Wolverine, I find this very true—from the earliest days when I saw some X-Men comics, Wolverine had always been dressed in a yellow and blue costume. When the series came out as a cartoon on television, Wolverine had a different costume, this time brown and an orange color. I would have preferred it to stay the same, what I always had known. The juxtaposition of b&w and color on page 192 is very good example that helps to express his key points and ideas. For the final pages of the book, after reviewing the Buffy comic book, I think more contemporary comic books follow the sequential art theme; however, the “Mous” comic book also inherited some of the traits, such as the various spacing between the slides and how the gutter is used. However, with the Buffy comic, one could clearly see all sorts of sequential art and use of the gutter that was not typical of older comics, particularly “Mous,” which was the first comic book we reviewed.

Jason Nelson, The Bomar Gene and game, game, game and again game

I have reviewed and written a paper or blog about the Bomar gene previously; so I will not say too much about it. Much of it was revealed and discussed in one of the English 325 recitations or classes in reference to what it actually meant—however, that was a while ago—so I do not want to reveal what I think I know, as it may not be very accurate as it occurred a while ago.

Regarding Game, Game, Game and Again Game.

Unlike the Bomar Gene, we have some nice clear instructions and an about and it suggests you read them before starting, well sound advice indeed! The game was interesting, different music tracks for each level but I felt like I wanted to complete and win the game and that is what I focused on; however, I did notice when you progress in the game lots of words and phrases pop up in various places. My first and obvious question though is what is icon/sprite that “you” are in this game supposed to represent? To me, the sprite resembles a hairball. I did click one of the bull’s-eye buttons that said “click here” and it plays an embedded video within the flash medium itself. I finished it and I like how it ends, with cold-hard reality in the line at the bottom—but the comment at the top right, I am not sure what the author is portraying there. At the end you are also presented with a video “Possible Evolution,” the words “LARGE WINNINGS” are shown above it—so, well, I clicked this one. The author is filming potatoes and glasses; he is talking like a vampire or something and talking about orange juice. Then he starts playing with some seeds, he makes a mess, they fall all over his kitchen floor. Two of the seeds or one of them goes into the freezer, all which is left of their species. When that is happening, you also see the author likes multi-grain bread in the freezer, certainly an odd video. It is supposed to be the story of life.

Focus on: Electronic Literature, pp. 59-70

The type of work Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, A Story represents is summarized on page 62, when the author notes, “like afternoon, they employ branching structures that create irreconcilable ambiguities centering on violent events.”  As I have chosen to read this text prior to reading Twelve Blue—on page 63, it is noted “playing is one of the central metaphors”—hopefully it will be more enjoyable than Afternoon, at least for myself.

A useful characteristic that is said to be found in Twelve Blue is revealed on the bottom of page 63, “Every screen contains at least one instance of the word blue.”

Michael Joyce, Twelve Blue

Initial comments for Twelve Blue—I appreciate the author description, I wonder if it will be more helpful than Joyce’s description in Afternoon.  Something else I think that is unique and should be mentioned—HyperCard was included in MacOS 6 in 1987—and the proprietary software he used to write Afternoon was also written around this timeframe.  In the late 1980s—hypercard peaked, evidence is shown in the HyperCard Wikipedia entry: ‘During HyperCard’s peak popularity in the late 1980s, a whole ecology of vendors offered thousands of these externals for everything from HyperTalk compilers to graphing systems, database access, internet connectivity, and animation.”  In Twelve Blue, even though HTML was created by CERN in the tail end of the 1980s and early 1990s, it really did not “take off” until the mid 1990s.  I find it interesting he chose the years of the most “explosive” growth for both HyperCard-like software and of the web to release his works of fiction—perhaps for these reasons alone is why we are reading about them today.  Overall, I found the reading from Electronic Literature much more comprehensible and I was better able to understand it than traversing Twelve Blue.

136 actions

What aspect of your Choose Your Own Adventure book did your map—or did the mapping process crystallize?

For me, the mapping process made me exercise patience.  I was mapping the first branch of the book and completed it without any major issues.  Then, I began to map the second branch, due a connection between the first and second branch, I noted “oh nice, it maps out to the other branch,” thinking I would be done soon.  After two hours went by, I counted the number of endings and I had forty-two instead of the book’s advertised thirty-eight.  This was a problem.  Instead of starting from the beginning of the second branch, I decided to go backwards from the endings that I had missed initially.  So when asked, what did the mapping process crystallize for me?  It crystallized the mapping process should be done from beginning to end.  Three to four hours later, I had worked backwards from several endings back to the beginning; it was not an easy task.  Not all pages refer to exact page numbers, some are a page or two behind and it was rather difficult to map it this way.  However, having mapped the book forward and backwards I have a better sense of how CYOA adventure books work in terms of construction.  The map itself did not reveal any specific moral or ethical values; it did however reveal that there are three thematic endings, which were: a successful life, somewhere in the middle and death.  At least in my book, out of the 38 endings, 21% were happy, 31% were somewhere in between and 44% resulted in death.