I recently got a senior grant from the Canada Council’s ‘Spoken Word and Storytelling’ program to do a specific project described at http://vispo.com/wombamo/wm.pdf.

Basically, the idea of the project is to scream my fool head off while playing Jig-Sound and dbCinema as instruments.

You’ve seen musicians play an instrument while they sing. Well, this is similar. Only I’ll be telling a story between (or perhaps during) screaming bouts. And the instruments I’ll be playing are Jig-Sound, which is sonic, and dbCinema, which is visual.

The first job is to fix dbCinema. It’s um temporarily out of order. Google changed some image search stuff, so dbCinema’s google image search stuff isn’t working. Am about half way done that fix.

Should be quite the shriek fest.

To see more, visit : http://arteonline.arq.br/dirty_digital

Various forms of art lend themselves to adaptation and subsequent mutation via their practice on the web. The graphic novel is obviously an excellent candidate. A computer screen is great for presenting the sorts of images we see in graphic novels. Often the images are developed, at least in part, with programs such as Illustrator and Photoshop.  And, via animation, interactivity, other programming, and audio, there’s great room for interesting mutation.

Whereas some other art forms aren’t going to change much via being practiced to the net. They will be less significant as net art as simply distributed on the net, rather than adapted to the net in more artistically significant ways. They won’t mutate and grow much via their incarnation on the net, whereas art forms such as the ‘graphic novel’ for the computer screen and the net will eventually often be dramatically different from print or film versions of the graphic novel. As different as the horse and carriage from the “horseless carriage,” which is what cars were first called.

Nawlz.com is an interesting graphic novel for the web in its visuals, its occasional animations, and the way it unfolds via clicking on stuff. This site won the webby for net art in 2010. Experiencing it visually and interactively and even sonically is more rewarding than the text itself, I find; the text is somewhat generic or non-descript in voice and character; I find it hard to meditate on the text. And the typeface is often way too small, you gotta want it like 20. But the visuals, and the way they look and move and are arranged on the screen, are very successful. The story seems a bit druggy whacked out but maybe not if I read it more carefully, not sure. Druggy just doesn’t do it anymore.

The granddaddy of this interactive, online approach to comics, as far as I know, is Argon Zark. You can see that Nawlz.com is similar to Argon Zark as a computer graphic novel–but also that Nawlz.com has taken it further.

The BBC reports that the daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, the Princess Elettra, has been shocked by the derelict condition of her father’s former factory in Chelmsford, England.  Once providing a makeshift studio for the very first radio broadcast intended purely as entertainment, the factory has now become a local shooting gallery and residence  of last resort — undoubtedly still offering an abundance of cross corporeal transmissions.

What Shocks Elettra

Guglielmo was evidently quite fond of the name Elettra, giving it to both his daughter and his yacht, which doubled as a floating laboratory for his lifelong investigations into the vagaries of maritime wireless communication. SOS, as in Save Our Ship or Sink Our Ship? History has heard plenty of both.

Elettra on board Elettra

The first entertainment broadcast beamed forth on June 15, 1920, featuring the voice of Dame Nellie Melba, who gave her name to toast and to a peach dessert. Opening with a rendition of “Home! Sweet Home!”, the broadcast was confirmed as having been clearly received from as far away as Newfoundland, and was even recorded by wireless enthusiasts in Paris.

Home! Sweet Home!

A quite entertaining video documentary of Melba’s performance can be found here. From all accounts, the broadcast was a great success, the one complaint being that the strength of the signal obliterated all other wireless transmissions in the vicinity, a strength that contrasts notably with Marconi’s first attempt at transoceanic wireless on December 12, 1901, centering around the infamous letter “S”, dot dot dot. Did Marconi actually hear the S, up there on Signal Hill, or did he hear what he wanted to hear, amidst the crackle of cosmic interference?

I swear I heard a dot dot dot... really!

In any event, one wonders what is to become of the derelict factory, given that Elettra, for all her horror at the state of decay, does not appear eager to twitch a single noble finger towards purchasing the property. I suspect that the market for luxury flats is not exactly on fire in Chelmsford, and of course, the English, like Americans, don’t really fabricate much of anything anymore, not even Melba toast. But whatever the future brings, it is clear that the good ship Marconi at Chemsford has been forever dismasted.

Marconi's Main Mast, 1920

The first challenge is: viivakoodi, barcode, código de parras, codice a barre…

I’ve always enjoyed a challenge – or rather, I’ve always hated to turn my back on a challenge, ever since I was a girl and the roughest, toughest boy in the playground dared me to go up on the swing with him, standing face to face, as high as it would go…

Well actually, this challenge, set by Finnish visual poet, Satu Kaikkonen, wasn’t half so scary – in fact, it was pure pleasure. Time for a Vispo is a new blog run by Satu where she gives a weekly challenge to create a vispo. The 1. challenge, issued on Monday 28 June, is barcode.

id card is my response. Created in Flash, it’s a random coded e-poem with voices – it’s an update of a remix I created for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX

Screenshot of id card - a remixworx e-poem created in Flash by crissxross

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a collaborative blog for digital art and e-poetry remixing, started by Randy Adams (runran) in November 2006. Barcodes have featured a number of times in remixworx so I also slipped a few other remixes into The 1. challenge. See the collection under the remixworx barcode tag, including:

seepage by runran

artifact (bicycle – 2111) by runran

artifact (rusted sergio mix) by babel (Chris Joseph)

Worx by babel

sizing up by crissxross

Dick Andrews

It’s been ten years since my dad passed away in 2000. I’ve been meaning to put some pictures of him on the net, for myself and for family and family friends, primarily. I just finished doing that. And writing something about dad. The photos are at http://vispo.com/dad and the writing is at http://vispo.com/dad/dad.htm .

I also just put a couple of family videos up at http://vispo.com/lucy . My dad’s sister Lucy Milne passed away last June at the age of 98. But, before she did, I bought a video camera and videoed a couple of conversations I had with her and her daughter, Isabelle, over family photos. And then I learned a bit of Adobe Premier to make these two videos, which combine the conversations with the family photos. Wish I’d done this with my parents when they were alive. Each of the two videos is about an hour long. And they use about 200 family photos.

In 2008 I also put some photos of my mom up at http://vispo.com/mom . She passed away in 2008. Oddly enough, these were mentioned in Le Monde.

I didn’t approach any of these things as art, really. But there is no shortage of love in them.

I just mailed my cousin Bob a three-page, typed letter written by his father Bob Sr. in 1951 who died before Bob was born in 1959. I found the letter in Grandma’s purse. Grandma, my mom’s mom, died in 1972; she spent her last few years with us. I’ve started to go through the things in the house recently and found Grandma’s purse at the back of a closet. My mom kept Grandma’s purse. Grandma was ever so dear to mom. Just as mom was to me. Mom passed away in 2008. I inherited the house she lived in since 1970. I’m living alone in this house. It is not haunted; I am.

Grandma had Alzheimers, at the end. So reminders, in her purse, of who she and her family were, of course, became especially important to her, at a certain stage. Her son Bob died in 1959 just a few months before his only son Bob Jr was born to Anna. Grandma died in 1972. She kept that letter from Bob written in 1951 in her purse. The son could never have guessed how important his writing that letter would be to his mother.

What the letter says is not extrordinary. It’s written by a High school teacher of History to his mother. He was a writer, however. He wrote a book on the history of British Columbia called Land, Man, and the Law, which was and perhaps still is used as a reference concerning the original dispensation of land in British Columbia basically along the railway tracks, which defined the little trail of civilization through the wilderness. That work was still ahead of him, however. When he wrote the letter, he was a High school teacher in Castlegar, a very small town in B.C. The letter shows his exasperation with teaching High school, however. He says he would recommend it to those who want to die young. He would later escape it to become a scholar–but still die young.

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Hi all “netarterists”, this is my first post. It’s great to be part of the team!

I don’t usually write about my own work, but I figured out that it could be an interesting way to introduce myself. So I am posting here a paper I wrote earlier this year called “On fluid poetry”, in which I describe the inner workings and ideas of my piece, “Computer Aided Poetry”. Please excuse the “academic formatting” of this post, I promise it won’t happen again

On fluid poetry

1.
Condensation is the chemical process through which the atoms / molecules of an element or compound in a gaseous state change their aggregation phase into liquid droplets. During condensation, the kinetic energy of the atoms / molecules is reduced by slowing them down. They are brought together as a consequence since the attraction between them, an invisible link, prevails. They also become colder and, because of their aggregation, visible. The droplets formed by the condensation of an unseen gas seem to emerge from out of nowhere. Their sudden mass makes the huddled molecules vulnerable to forces which were latent or too weak in their previous state, such as the pull of gravity, which will make the droplets slide down a smooth surface, leaving behind a liquid trail.

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To me, this is quite juicy: an online Russian magazine of sound poetry and audio art called ARTronic Poetry. Edited by Evgenij V. Kharitonov. This is like exotic blue cheese.

If you are new to sound poetry, I suggest you try to sing along. Seriously. The meaning of some sound poetry is not simply in how it sounds, but in how it feels to vocalize it.

I was particularly taken with Alexandr V. Bubnov’s 1-2-3 Sonnets. There’s a mixture of languages and just pure sound in this, plus allusion to written form, that is very rich. But, mostly, the sound is terrific.

Issue 1 of ARTronic features work by Heike Fiedler, Anna Kharitonova, Sergej Birjukov, Alexandr V. Bubnov, Evgenij V. Kharitonova, Amanda Stewart, Tim Gaze, Maksim Borodin, and Alexandr Oyko.

drugpolushar.narod2.ru is related to this publication. I’m not sure if this is by Evgenij V. Kharitonov also.

I know of only one other online journal of sound poetry: aslongasittakes.org from Atlanta.