The Language Technology Research Group at Melbourne University (about 700 metres up the road from my office) is an interesting collection of projects and research. A lot of computational linguistics and the like, from what I can see, though the list of Baden Hughes’ possible research projects for graduate students makes interesting reading. Seems some of this material would be very much in ACH type territory. (I think, he mumbles…)
This is a minor online art work that is impressive. Simple, slight lateral use of frames, a humour that has the implication of making visible the basic conditions of a HTML based art work. A work that looks back towards the origins of net.art (I don’t have the details of the piece so for all I know at the moment in might have been written in the golden age of net.art). It’s minor nature should not be underestimated. I’m a great believer in the ability of some works of art doing what Deleuze describes as stuttering. They make language or a form stutter. They are ‘minor’ or marginal works in terms of a dominant code, language or vector of power. Deleuze’s examples are Kafka, or even Godard (who can literally and figuratively make film ‘stutter’). Here it is a minor work, apparently an aside, not monumental in scale or grand in ambition. But it works, it has humour and even perhaps the smallness of its aim is why it complements html so well, its stuttering is that it takes HTML and demonstrates that with a paucity of code and an explicit requirement for the user to do something the work works. The call to action is significant, without scrolling you can’t and don’t ‘get it’. It is only about getting it. That’s it.
Anders has passed his defence and is now Dr Fagerjord. If you can read some of his work, exceptional combination of media studies in the context of information architectures.
Playful interfaces. Crumpler is an Australian company that makes awesome bags. Their corporate aesthetic is very nicely represented here. Sometimes I’m struck by how much better this stuff can be than many art pieces. It takes the piss because it can and because it really is about money.
I see that a while back Matt doesn’t think that Donald R’s complex clauses are that bad. While I agree with Matt that they make sense, in the context in which they were uttered they’re absurd. I can imagine they are a response to a question about Iraq, and by the time the reporting crowd had actually processed this the time to query would have been gone. It is rhetorical stonewalling. This is particularly the case with journalists because, unfortunately, your merit as a reporter in these contexts, from the point of view of your boss and your peers, is whether you get to ask a question. The premium is on asking, asking another, a later perhaps reflecting while writing your copy. In such circumstances to answer like this is to befuddle because no one could have had the time to devise a follow up question.
What is sort of, ironic? sad? silly? is that it could have been straight from Yes Minister, a BBC comedy where the senior bureaucrats master this sort of language to ensure that the ministers (and prime minister) don’t know what is going on. I quote the following from the BBC web site, perhaps the show’s writers have moved to Washington?
“The fact that the Prime Minister needed to know was not known at the time that the now known need to know was known, and therefore those of us who needed to advise and inform felt that the information that we needed as to whether or not to inform the highest authority of the known information was not yet known, and therefore there was no authority for the authority to be informed because the need to know was not yet known, or needed.”
Compared with Rumsfeld’s:
During the Eyebeam Forum on distributed creativity liza sabater made a wonderful post about RSS, a metastructure of the web, and creative practice. What I particularly like about it is her observation that this work requires standards, and if you don’t, won’t, can’t use the standards then you won’t be on the bus. Hell, you’re not even going to be on the footpath :-)
Noah just let me know that the link to the pdf of my softvideography essay was dead. Now fixed:
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/essays/softvideography.pdf
The world contracted. Chuck finds Byron via the post I made yesterday. Don’t know what that means, since it would of course have been trivial for one to have Googled the other, so it is more the serendipity of how this domain works that I think is key.
I’ve run an announcement list for, I think, nearly three years. The list came out the collapse of another list, and was in response to what seemed to be a need to have a moderated distribution list for call for works, papers, exhibitions and so on. Recently the fibreculture announce list has developed some decent activity, and so it seemed to make sense to simply post the things I’ve been distributing to fibreculture announce. Bigger distribution, and it is about working the network, not duplicating because it’s my list. Several people, though, have wondered why I would do this, because the list has been effective, useful, and has an identity. I find this odd. In the same way that I find email lists and their ‘owner’s’ anxieties about the decline of lists odd. These are usually the same people who can happily stand up and pronounce (in books, email, conferences, grant applications, art works, you know what I mean) that the network is any or all of rhizomatic, nomadic, distributed, vectorial, acentred, again, you know what I mean.
If we’re serious about the network as nomadic and rhizomatic of course lists will die. Of course new ones will form, mutate, and so on. Rather than invest so much in worrying about a list not ‘working’ (what does ‘work’ mean for something that is nomadic and rhizomatic?) move on. In my case, it would take 4 minutes to set up a new list, 20 minutes to send emails to several other lists inviting subscription. That’s what it means to be nomadic. Nomadism does not only apply to how many lists or web pages or other sedimentations I might fly between, it refers to the sedimentations themselves.
Via the chaotic etc, a description of what Panther’s (OS X 10.3) text services are. This is the text handling stuff that is built in. Trés kewl.
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