Nick Pedrini has already shown us how Post-It notes can be digital art. As it turns out, they can make great cinema too.

The review is pretty straightforward until the endm when a passing comment caught my attention and served as a useful reminder of what drives us to games:

Flotilla has a few rough spots, and isn't going to satisfy anyone's fantasies of acquisition or control, but that's part of what makes it enjoyable as a game.

Fantasies of acquisition and control. How much of that do we actually see in games? The more I thought about it, the more this seemed the central driving focus behind entire genres: “God games” like Sim City, real-time strategy game, games in which you care for an animal or creature (e.g. Nintendogs, Pokemon). These games seem to be everywhere.

The pleasure of other genres (like the RPG or platformer) doesn’t depend entirely upon a sense of control (except for games where the pleasure comes from interacting and manipulating the world, e.g. the Grand Theft Auto series), but there’s certainly a case to be made that most video games fulfill a drive for mastery and domination.

For a new media theorist, Adema seems strangely fond of the ghastly “snapshots” link annotations with their obnoxious pop-up thumbnails. A reader who is interested in “literature in the era of social and locative media” already knows what Wikipedia looks like.

“What unites creative practitioners and researchers," Adema argues, "is their exploration of the word and the abstract character of language and its materiality in different media in an experimental practice. The main question remains: why isn’t this work part of a more mainstream platform?"

The question answers itself: experimental practice in different media is, by definition, outside the main stream. If it were part of a more mainstream platform — the stuff that Pepsi does, the stuff my 13-year-old niece does — it wouldn’t unite creative practitioners and researchers in an experimental practice.

Bolter’s key concern here, in Adema’s account, is the centrality of literature in the humanities. At the Future of Digital Studies last Winter, he memorably asked whether, in the future University, the English department will decline to the place Art History occupies today.

Thanks, Laurent Sauerwein, for the tip!

Carianne Mack Garside, Day 55: presence

With the 100 days project just over halfway done, the participants are still going strong, and so far we’ve seen some really exciting work.

John Timmons is leading the project this year with a daily film clip. The production on these clips has been astonishingly good; many offer intriguing visual effects coupled with great sound overlays. The pieces tend to evoke a vague, indistinct but real emotion—the perfect starting point from which the other works can draw inspiration.

Steve Ersinghaus is writing short stories, and I find that his work most directly correlates to Timmons’ clips (of course, the links help too). Since he is not leading each day this year, I’ve found it fascinating to read his work after watching Timmons’ clips to examine how the piece was influenced. I picture the creative process that went into translating the clip to a story, fully aware that my version might be somewhat romanticized.

Many of our favorites from last year are back. Susan Gibb, who did hypertext fiction pieces last year, is doing flash fictions, and some of them are very good. Carianne Mack Garside returns with her excellent watercolors.

J. Nathan Matias, Day 23: Nick Lowe’s summary of Aristotle’s Poetics

There are some interesting new projects this year as well. Nathan Matias is posting 100 summaries, most of which are expressed through Tinderbox and then shared online through Emberlight . Nathan writes, “Summary is the cornerstone of intellectual life […] Some day, I plan to teach students how to think and write. Their future will depend on my explanations of summary, and my ability to assign grades to their work. Their education and life prospects may well depend on my understanding of the simple summary.” His approach to demonstrate these arguments through spatial hypertext showcases the form’s ability to draw connections and correlations, and some of the ways spatial metaphors have organized themselves into a kind of grammar.

The most recents entries have been many artists’ best work. If this trend continues, I can’t wait to see what the rest of the summer brings.

Photo: Catherine C. Marshall

Gene Golovchinsky suggests that we listen closely to students if we want to understand eBooks. Golovchinsky reports on the story of a teacher who observed students’ use of eReaders, and offers students’ opinions that printed textbooks allow for better annotation.

Wojcicki cites an Internet analyst who offers the opinion that the students “…are just wrong. … just plain wrong. They don’t know because they can’t even conceptualize what is coming.” The implication is that these devices will in fact revolutionize the textbook market, but the students are not able to understand that.

Students do understand their own work practices and can offer a better understanding of annotation practices. This understanding should lead to better reading and annotating software. However, the unnamed internet analyst is probably right too. Golovchinsky writes,

Electronic reading devices will only be successful if their designers pay attention to what students do with textbooks, and design tools to support and augment their work practices. If that is done well enough, then the analyst’s prediction will  be correct; if, however, the hardware and software combination fails to support active reading well, then students will continue to reject the medium as inadequate to their task.

It’s important to remember that learning doesn’t only come from the text. Several of my courses had online or software textbooks. These “textbooks” were not only texts, but also practice quizzes, linked references, and platforms to connect with other students. If these activities are incorporated into textbooks for platforms like the iPad (perhaps as apps, perhaps as part of a larger program for handling works like this), the analyst’s prediction will be true, regardless of the annotation capabilities of the software.

Of course, this isn’t an excuse for the lack of decent active reading programs available, but being able to highlight or mark up a page is not the only thing keeping students from accepting eBooks. The real issue is that eBooks are still trying to limit themselves to imitating paper.

New online recordings of William Faulkner discussing his work have been posted by the University of Viginia. The archives contain around 28 hours of readings, interviews, and student questions from 1957 and 1958 when he was UVA’s Writer in Residence. The site also features essays, articles, and photos of the writer.

A recent article in Newsweek reveals the potential importance of the recordings. Quoting from Faulkner in the University, Malcolm Jones shows how transcriptions of Faulkner’s thoughtful drawl can’t quite capture his answers.

Faulkner: Not at all. I was trying to talk about people, using the only tool I knew, which was the country that I knew. No, I wasn’t trying to—to—wasn’t writing sociology at all [audience laughter]. I was just trying to write about people, which to me are the important [. . . ]. Just the human heart. It’s not—not ideas. I don’t know anything about ideas, don’t have much confidence in them.

What I couldn’t do, reading that book, was hear how he said what he said. There was no intonation, there were no pauses, there were only the words on the page, and while I devoured them, that was as far as I could go […] I didn’t know what I was missing. Now I do.

In a stroke of genius on the level of the SarcMark, a new Outlook plug-in can track the tone of your emails and alert you to words with emotional charge or ambiguous connotation.

And like the SarcMark, the issue could be avoided with a bit of better writing.

“In Paris, I met the filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard, a gourmet chef, and a collector of vintage pornography.

Panelists warned that writing was always about “being outside ones own skin,” but that there is a difference between exploring Otherness and exploiting it. With Edward Said’s Orientalism as a starting point, the panel focused on how to write about Otherness without reducing a culture into stereotypes or assumptions. Darrell Schweitzer noted that writers “are always writing about the Other; the key is to not suck at it.”

To this end, the group offered several tips:

• If you’ve only been somewhere a few times, it’s easiest to write from an outsider’s point of view. While this is certainly a valid point of view, be mindful of how you are exoticisizing or reducing the values of that culture.
• Be aware of the limitations of your knowledge. Don’t assume to know more than you really do.
• Read works written from within the culture you’re studying, preferably in the original language.
• If at all possible, spend some time immersed in the culture you’re writing about. Even if you can’t travel to another country, spend time interviewing people and asking them for their stories.

Nalo Hopkinson stood out as a bright spot on the panel. As the panel dove into anecdotes on how western and non-western cultures were different, she reminded us to not always focus on the differences between us. She commented that one of the things that irritated her was being approached and told that somebody could never write about the same issues she could, as they could never write from the point of view of a black woman. She reminded us, “you may have never been black or never been a woman, but you know the joy of biting into a fresh piece of fruit. Remember that we have more in common than we don’t.”

Hopkinson observed that often when people research another culture for their writing, they aren’t searching for the value of that culture’s beliefs; they’re looking for a way to avoid offending people. She assures writers that “there will always be people mad at you, people who don’t like your work. You must find your own moral compass as a writer.”