alienated.net -

parallel kitcheners

dw — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:22:39 -0500

The redoubtable Trevor Haldenby mentioned the existence of this document to me at TEDx Waterloo the other day, and it was too good not to track down.

Created by city council in 1916, it's a list of suggested names for Berlin, Ontario, during the period before it changed its name to Kitchener. Originally settled by a largely German immigrant population, Kitchener was known as the Town of Berlin from 1854-1912 and the City of Berlin from 1912-1916. As WWI approached and anti-German sentiment rose, other Canadians began to express growing doubts about whether or not the people of the very Germanic-sounding Berlin, Ontario were doing everything they could to support the Canadian war effort ... hence the name change.

Looking at the list now, I wish I lived in Mechano, Hydropolis or Industria. I may well have to begin the process of transforming Kitchener into one of them at a speed that keeps my activities slightly below the conscious level of its citizens.

(from the John A. Lang fonds of Library and Archives Canada).

heroic moments in poetry no. 4: page-based vs. spoken word (for Kasey)

dw — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:41:56 -0500

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 53, August 1966. Sometimes poetry HATES SPEECH.

heroic moments in poetry no. 3: ellipsis (for Michael)

dw — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:23:46 -0500

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 50, May 1966. Poetry ... reminds you that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby invented the romance comic.

heroic moments in poetry no. 2: simile (for derek)

dw — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:11:53 -0500

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 33, December 1964. Poetry likes its levels like it likes them.

heroic moments in poetry no. 1: onomatopoeia (for Christian and Sina)

dw — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:07:33 -0500

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 24, March 1964. Poetry is a giant angry baby with a terminal skin condition that looks when it says it sounds and sounds when it says it looks.

klingon clerk-typists, rejoice

dw — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:49:57 -0500

Many years ago, I translated bpNichol's first poem, "Translating Apollinaire," into Klingon. Evidently, it made something of an impression, because ever since then, people have bombarded me with links to All Things Klingon. As my uncles used to say, once they find your ass, they never stop kicking it.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

The latest thing to show up in my inbox is the Klingon Language Wired Standard Keyboard from Cherry Keyboards in the EU: 105 keys, PS/2 connection and usable with Windows, Linux and OS X. I have no idea how many native Klingon speakers there are. Wikipedia claims that in 1996, there were a dozen people who could speak Klingon fluently; in 1999, The Onion claimed that there were more people speaking Klingon than Navajo. As neither source is a paragon of credibility, we'll just have to wait and see how many of these things Cherry sells ...

"digital hooligans"

dw — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:29:37 -0500

Brian Davis just posted a great piece on status update in the Globe Books section online:

Status update: 'Emily Brontë and her Playstation are overly friendly these days'

Facebook's status update bar may be its most popular, enduring and influential feature (given the rise of Twitter's real time fixes for the focus-challenged). For writers Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy, status updates are also poetry. Or, rather, it becomes poetry after the RRS feeds of thousands of Facebook users have been harvested, shorn of the user names and attached to the names of dead poets or writers.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

Wershler and Kennedy's site statusupdate.ca performs that task with each visit, thereby creating an alternate universe where the famous and the obscure are alive, well and reveling in the banal. Thus, Samuel Johnson's "socks keep falling down. Day after day, sock after sock. WHY?!?!" and "Ted Hughes is not a number! I am a free man!" Should you become fascinated by the fact that Kingsley Amis is "watching Serenity for the second time," each dead writer's name has its own RSS feed.

Some of you may note that Wershler and Kennedy are the same digital hooligans behind the poetry-generating website and book Apostrophe. Statusupdate.ca does the idea of generated poetry one better by working on several levels simultaneously. First, and most important, it's flat out funny and endlessly readable. Yet dig deeper and Wershler and Kennedy's cheeky appropriation of Facebook's purposefully "neutral" look also reminds us that Facebook is wholesale appropriating your information for all manner of data-harvesting, 140 characters at a time. By attaching the name of a writer to effectively anonymous lines, Statusupdate.ca lessens the bite of social networking economics.

If I can paraphrase an old radical slogan, "Users! One more step to be creators."

war rugs from afghanistan

dw — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:55:13 -0500

Last Sunday, following up on a tip from Ed Pien, Kenny Goldsmith and I stopped by The Textile Museum of Canada to see Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan. Both The Toronto Star and Now listed it as one of the best gallery shows of 2008, and it did not disappoint: curator Max Allen has assembled 118 rugs from the period of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan (1979) up to the present.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

Viewing these rugs is a deeply defamiliarizing experience: woven in with traditional geometric patterns and imagery are helicopters, AK-47s, jets and fighter planes, land mines, grenades, personnel carriers, computer monitors, skyscrapers and other signs of Soviet and western culture's violent incursions into Afghanistan. The weapons are usually rendered accurately enough that it's possible to identify their specific models; the curator's comments indicate that there are no fictional weapons in any of these rugs ... as though that would be necessary. Having grown up in a culture where I've seen more video games than Afghan rugs, to my anachronistic imagination, these blocky images often look like artifacts from the 8-bit video games of my childhood.

I've posted a Flickr set of images of these rugs, but they were taken under low lighting conditions with an iPhone camera, so I lost about half of the shots I took. The show is only up until January 27, so if you're in Toronto, see it while you can.

street poets and visionaries

dw — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:44:05 -0500

Last night (January 9), Mercer Union launched "Street Poets & Visionaries: Selections from the UbuWeb Collection" to a packed house. The text that I wrote for the catalogue follows, as does a link to a Flickr set of images of the event.

The quality of mind in the radio telescope is its will to select.
-- Christopher Dewdney, "Parasite Maintenance" [1]

What are the outer limits of appropriation?

Digital culture is obsessed with this question, from both an aesthetic and a legal perspective. On the one hand is an entire century of artistic practices that gleefully encourage the copying and recirculation of cultural materials, from Delta blues and Dada to Flarf and mashups. On the other hand is an increasingly restrictive legal climate, which, as Siva Vaidhyanathan has argued at length, is entirely incapable of dealing effectively with "emerging communication technologies, techniques and aesthetics" [2].

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

One response to this deadlock between the aesthetics of appropriation in a digital milieu and the legal forces that would constrain them is an increase in bandwidth. In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound claims that "artists are the antennae of the race" [3], but in a digital milieu, a set of rabbit ears will no longer suffice. For Christopher Dewdney, contemporary artistic sensibility is analogous to the functioning of a satellite dish. From such a perspective, artists are devices for the accumulation and concentration of data, cool and dispassionate. The quality of the objects and texts that they produce depends on "the will to select." Thus, the individual's ability to sort and process the ambient signals that constantly bombard all of us is what constitutes contemporary criteria for a successful artistic career.

As Craig Dworkin has noted elsewhere, self-declared "Word Processor" Kenneth Goldsmith's personal oeuvre falls squarely into this tradition of technologized, high-volume appropriation [4]. This is especially true of recent works such as Day and the American trilogy (The Weather, Traffic and Sports), all of which duplicate huge swaths of copyrighted texts and performances with studied Warholian indifference. In this context, even Goldsmith's curatorial work on the decade-old UbuWeb, the world's largest digital archive of avant-garde sound recordings, concrete poetry, video, outsider art and related critical materials, is arguably part of the practice of appropriation art -- perhaps even Goldsmith's greatest work.

Goldsmith normally proceeds by identifying a neglected (because mundane, or, in Goldsmith's terms, "boring") site of cultural discourse, such as an average edition of The New York Times (Day), or an entire weekend's worth of radio traffic reports (Traffic). He then transcribes that discourse meticulously, reconfigures the resulting digital manuscript as a book, and attaches his name to it. Though such projects have been common in the art world since the heyday of Conceptualism, they are relatively new in the world of poetry. By porting an established practice for aesthetic production from one field of cultural endeavour (gallery art) to another (poetry), Goldsmith has simultaneously constructed himself a career and staged an intervention which has changed the stakes of contemporary writing.

And yet. The texts and objects in "Street Poets & Visionaries: Selections from the UbuWeb Collection" occupy a privileged position, one that at first glance seems utterly counterintuitive in the context of the rest of Goldsmith's oeuvre. The digitized versions of this material used to appear on UbuWeb under the heading "Found + Insane"; Goldsmith's text on the website notes that "we've redesigned and renamed it Outsiders, reflecting broader cultural trends toward the legitimization of Outsider work," reflecting a remarkable degree of cultural sensitivity from someone whose public persona is often gleefully abrasive and provocative [5]. Moreover, when exhibiting this work, Goldsmith never directly attaches his name to it, preferring the relative anonymity of "UbuWeb" and the curatorial first-person plural.

The greatest difference between these materials and all of Goldsmith's recent work is that he circulates them without "denuding" them -- this is Goldsmith's term for the process of stripping away "the normative external signifiers that tend to give as much meaning to an artwork as the contents of the artwork
itself," such as font size, lineation, accompanying illustrations, and so on [6]. In gallery shows such as this one, the original objects themselves are displayed, even though for Goldsmith, the normal practice would be to discard originals after digitization like so many empty husks.

Part of the value of these objects is their stubborn materiality. Yes, the content itself is important, and Goldsmith sometimes performs these works as part of his own undifferentiated output, but there is also something here that resolutely resists digitization: the crackle of ancient Letraset, photocopier noise, fragments of yellowing Scotch tape, the trace of a hand wielding a Sharpie. These works, I would argue, are the secret truth of Kenneth Goldsmith's practice: something small and sacred that makes his great, sprawling, transformative profanities possible.

NOTES

Dewdney, Christopher. "Parasite Maintenance." Alter Sublime. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1980. 73-92.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 133.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960. 73.
Dworkin, Craig. "The Imaginary Solution." Contemporary Literature XLVIII.1: 29-60. 34.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. "Outsiders." Accessed 9 December 2008.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. "The Bride Stripped Bare: Nude Media and The Dematerialization of Tony Curtis." Accessed 9 December 2008. 4.

Street Poets & Visionaries launch photoset

game face

dw — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:54:57 -0500

On November 19, Microsoft relaunched the XBox Live Network with a brand-new (bearing in mind that with Microsoft, new is always a relative state of mind) avatar-based interface, and the XBox-based portion of my online identity received an extreme makeover.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

"Your avatar," writes Microsoft, "is your game face throughout the New Xbox Experience and represents your personality, whether you are serving as an Xbox LIVE Party host, playing a game of Scene It?® Box Office Smash, or chatting with a friend." Never mind that I liked the Blades interface better; it's gone like a Spice Girls lunchbox is gone. So let's come to grips with the notion that an ostensibly adorable, vaguely asexual and notably creepy digital puppet now "represents my personality."

As the pictures above (snapped off my TV) demonstrate, the best that the XBox avatar construction kit can do is to make me look like a virtual Pinocchio. Like the original, pre-Disney wooden boy, who was, by all accounts, kind of an asshole, this Mini-Me is not particularly pleasant. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this little avatar is a full-fledged citizen of the uncanny valley.

First postulated by Masahiro Mori in 1970, the Uncanny Valley is an hypothesis about what happens to human emotional response as robots become increasingly lifelike in appearance. For Mori, our positive emotional response to anthropormorphism peaks just before resemblance to the human becomes accurate -- with stuffed animals and Wall-E, for example. After that point, though, as resemblance becomes stronger, there's a noticeable change in perception. Revulsion sets in as machines become too lifelike. If you graph this relationship, the fall-off in positive emotional response to increasingly lifelike machines forms a trough, i.e. the aforementioned Uncanny Valley. As Slavoj Žižek has noted, too much life is a bad thing -- the Uncanny Valley is populated with zombies, vampires, Terminators and other nightmares that have no business being alive. The little monster capering around my XBox interface is no exception.

Evidently, though, Microsoft is successfully backfilling the more worrisome trenches of the Uncanny Valley and tamping it all down nice and smooth. Gamasutra reported in early December that since the launch of the New XBox Live Experience, sales have tripled. In paricular, the game A Kingdom for Keflings, one of the first games that gives you the choice of playing as your avatar, registered the second-best debut performance ever on the service.

Other than the blatant attempt to pooch Nintendo's look and feel in the interest of interpellating you directly into the XBox brand instead of relying on external (possibly unlicensed!) products to establish your sense of subjectivity, I can see little rationale for the new XBox avatars. Mimetic realism in video games has no relationship to fun; in most cases, it usually inhibits playability. The recent reemergence of classic arcade games like Tempest, Missile Command and Galaga, usually in both "classic" and "rebooted" form, plus the astonishing success of the Geometry Wars ("Retro Evolved") franchise, feels like a lesson that's been entirely lost.

Mimesis in video games seems to culminate with two highly rendered figures hammering away at each other in a close-quarters, button-mashing frenzy (viz. Soul Calibur IV or any other descendants of Street Fighter). In other words, when the emphasis falls on rendering rather than gameplay, the experience of a virtual world narrows down to a bloody ring drawn on the floor of an arena. Or, alternatively, it might be an alien hooch-club stage populated entirely by dancing penis monsters, which is amusing in the short term, but ultimately just as tedious.

I'm not advocating a return to Pong, mind you. You'll have to pry my copy of The Orange Box out of my cold, dead fingers. But I would like to leave a little something about the way I present myself to the imagination. Why can't I be a robot, a bug, a fish, a superintelligent shade of the colour blue? The easiest way to do that is with a humble, two-dimensional portrait in the corner of the screen.