Patterns in Text

This is the text from "Harold and Maude," but if you look carefully you can just make out the flickering image of Dorothy Parker. And yes, dear reader, that is Dali's handwriting.

Ruin Value: The concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins

Since I remember this having come up, I'm posting it. Seems that in designing ruins as art we ran across an idea that had already come up. Funny, in'it? I wonder how long it will take the next person to come up with it independently?

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

It's official: we live in the future!

From medgadget.com

"Another day, another exoskeleton. Designed to help paraplegics to walk again, ReWalk™ is the product of Israeli company Argo Medical Technologies, Ltd. Massachusetts based SolidWorks Corp, whose 3D CAD software was used to develop the device, is reporting about the exoskeleton:"

Read the article.

The "Singularity"

Something for us all to poke fun at this summer: The Technological Singularity. I've been reading through the first article by the guy who coined the term, and he's pulling the same tricks as Willie Jessup of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's funny. Warren Ellis, SF novel and comic writer, suggested that once one gets bored with the singularity shenanigan, one should instead substitute "Flying Spaghetti Monster" in at every occurence for a good chuckle, and an equally well thought out article.

Final Presentations

Just a quick reminder. The final presentations will be at 9 am rather than 8 am on Thursday.

The Joys of UbuWeb.

UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts....UbuWeb

What that sounds like to me is a near bottomless repository of weirdness. I have personally spent hours just strolling around listening to and looking at this site, and it reminds me of a lyric by The Free Design, "Follow the way that leads between Madness and madness." I'm not sure why they are so lax with their capitals, but they seem to have captured something.

An interesting Idea...

This class shall be over soon, and those of us here as students shall be gone and graduated. Surely though, there shall be iterations of the class beyond this one, and with reason, there should probably be more blogs about it. The question then would arise as to whether or not: a new blog should be created, this blog should be wiped and reused, or this blog should continue to be used.

I personally would like to suggest the experiment of continuing to use this blog once this class has been finished for future iterations of the course with those who are already listed as contributors being allowed to remain so. This allows not only for colaboration on our continued studies in the topics presented, but also for a greater reader base to enrich the blog experience of future classes and perhaps the eventual evolution of the blog into an entity driven by class experience but also an entity in and of itself.

What do you guys think?

Notes on translations of Dali, or why we are not quite so austentatious for reading the manuscripts in their original languages

While reading through Salvador Dali's "Les Cocus du Vieil Art Moderne" I've noticed several translational choices that make me glad the copy of the manuscript I have has both the translation and original french. Thuogh I am only making my way through the second essay, there are several choices that the translator has made so far (and I assume there will be many more) which I disagree with. The first is his choice in the translation of the title. "Les Cocus du Vieil Art Moderne" literally means "The Cuckolding of Old Modern Art" where as his translation's title is the "the cuckolds of Antiquated modern art." Not a huge difference, and perhaps his choice of antiquated versus old has some specific reasoning, however, as we've noted in class, Dali was very specific about choosing his words, and so allowing interpretation could potentially provide problems down the road.

The second instance is in his translation of the phrase "Parce que les critiques du tres vieil arte moderne - venus des Europes plus ou moins centrales, doc de nulle part..." Which literally means "Becaucse the critics of very old modern art - come from more or less central europe, thus of nothing." His translation however is "Because it so happens that the critics of the very antiquated modern art - who come from more or less central eurpoe, in other words from nowhere..." I find it interesting his choice of the use of nowhere rather than nothing - as the two have very different connotations - though just now I've found online translators that translate nulle part into nowhere, so perhaps that's more reasonable than I'd originally thought. Still, interesting.

There are also a number of occurences where he changes "peinture" into "art" where the former literally means "painting." As Dali specifically uses the form "art" in the french title, one can suppose that he specifically meant painting there rather than art. The last thing for the moment is actually a note regarding both Dali and the translator, as in numbering the two types of cuckolds, dali lists them as "primo" and "secundo" which I assume would be spanish, rather than the french "premiere" and "deuxieme" however they are translated as "first" and "second" which implies that there is a lost meaning there, since, once again assuming Dali's specific choice of words the use of the spanish rather than french had a specific purpose.

Hopefully, I'll update this again later today after I find more things.

Poetron versus The Three Rickies, or Mr Astley...you and the super freak have some splainin' to do.

Weve know each other for so long
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna let you down
That girl is pretty wild now

It's such a freaky scene
I just wanna tell you how Im feeling
That girl's all right with me, yeah
And Cuban Pete doesn't teach you in a hurry like Arthur Murray

Yes sir, I'm Cuban Pete I'm the craze of my natives street
She's a very special girl
When I start to dance everything goes chick-chicky boom chick-chicky boom
hey call me Cuban Pete

I come from Havana and theres always manana so Senorita.... Oh no...
In a limousine

My class forges a blade of N+7 in my absence.

"Batches back to bats, which draw blood, along with the bancal(sword), gets costly as measured by wedge-photometers."

Who can argue with this sort of iron-clad logic. Wedge photometers are notoriously temperamental for blood based measurements.

Oh Really? Today's Exquisite Corpses and Their N+7 Partners

Exquisite Corpse I:

Banana is a
Fruit bats feed
Nightly weddings get
Costly whores cause
Debt accumulates quickly
Now is the
Time is an
Illusion fools the
Minds over matters
More food for thought.

Interpretation (both): Pre-sleep dream state thoughts.

Exquisite Corpse II:

Stark images create
Madness this is
Madness means nothinglessness
Forever never arrives
Punctually driven clocks
Lapse in shortterm
Memory xenograms zoom
Quixotic episodes delude
Mankind has lost
Itself when god
Failed at life?
No! Man won War!

Interpretation 1: Futility of man. God failed when man discovered the secret truth. History is an illusion.
Interpretation 2: Man won the war, but lost himself. At what cost?

N+7 of Exquisite Corpse I:

Bancal is a
Fruiter batches feed
Nightly wedge-photometers get
Costly whorish cause
Debulination accumulates quickly
Nowel is the
Time-deposit is an
Illusory fools the
Mindless over Mathiola
More foody for
Thoughtlessness shot mead.

Interpretation: Batches back to bats, which draw blood, along with the bancal(sword), gets costly as measured by wedge-photometers.

Class Cancelled 3 Apr 08

As previously indicated in the title, lads, Class Cancelled 3 Apr 08.

Dada, or A users' guide to kung fu art survival

From Tuesday we know that Dada was a reaction to the belief that rational thought and culture would elevate mankind to some sort of heightened state. The prevalent view at the time (early 19teens) was that technology, powered by logic and driven by science, would complete man as a species via enlightment and truth. To the founders of Dada, these things had instead lead to World War I, effectively lowering mankind's status beneath possible repair. The only response that made sense, therefore, was a complete abandonment of rational processes.

Their beliefs, by-laws, and boasts can be found in several "Dada Manifestos" from various members of the movement. In particular, we focus on one by Tristan Tzara, called shockingly, Dada Manifesto.

The assignment for Thursday is to figure out what they meant by one of the following statements:

---

cubism constructs a cathedral of artistic liver paste

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

expressionism poisons artistic sardines

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

simultaneism is still at its first artistic communion

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

futurism wants to mount in an artistic lyricism-elevator

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

unanism embraces allism and fishes with an artistic line

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

neo-classicism discovers the good deeds of artistic art

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

paroxysm makes a trust of all artistic cheeses

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

creationism vorticism imagism also propose some artistic recipes

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

---

What I want you to do is pick one of these statements (e.g. ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things) and decipher it. I don't want you to draw connection willy and/or nilly like our earlier exercises, but find out what ultraism is, for example, then what they meant by the 7 artistic things and so on.

Make me understand.

E-text site with great beaudrillard reference.

I found a really good resource site for continental philosophy.

Selected writings of Jean Beaudrillard in pdf format.

Jacques Derrida's Glas

GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program

Since we will eventually be doing a couple of image manipulation projects, I decided to post a link to the free software, GIMP.

Also, the noise reduction plug-in Matthew described today is here.

GREYCStoration and Fast Anisotropic Noise Reduction

The link for this can be found here.

From the website:

GREYCstoration is an image regularization algorithm which is able to process a color image by locally removing small variations of pixel intensities while preserving significant global image features, such as edges and corners. The most direct application of image regularization is image denoising. By extension, it can also be used to inpaint or resize images.

GREYCstoration is based on state-of-the-art image processing methods using nonlinear multi-valued diffusion PDE's (Partial Differential Equations). This kind of method generally outperforms basic image filtering techniques (such as convolution, median filtering, etc.), classically encountered in image painting programs. Other comparable image denoising techniques are available (for instance, Noise Ninja, Neat Image ) but are not open-source, and the corresponding algorithms are kept secret. On the contrary, the source code of GREYCstoration is freely available and distributed under the CeCILL License (compatible with the well-known GPL). It gives similar results (not to say better) to existing closed-source denoising filters, and is absolutely free to use. Compared to other PDE-based regularization methods, our approach has several advantages : It performs very fast and is able to preserve thin image details since it works at a sub-pixel accuracy.

The algorithm works by treating the image as a tensor field and then using a trace based PDE(Partial Differential Equation) approach to determine the curvature of each dimension of the image(Red, Green, Blue) everywhere in the image at subpixel accuracy. It then implements this through the use of a line interval convolution numerical method based around Runge-Kutta interpolation. From there it smooths the boundaries within the edges and curves so that the important data is maintained while removing the Chaffe. Examples of all sorts of wicked cool stuff that can be done with it can be found at the website.

There are a few forms available for the algorithm. The two available from the developer are a standalone binary executable in which the direct parameters of the PDE may be manipulated to optimize the output of the image, or there exists a GIMP(GNU Image Manipulation Program) plugin which will allow you to vary the parameters of the standard program plus some others which are not available. It also allows for preview of a section before the entire process is performed.

Question about Baudrillard

Titsworth, et al. state, in their recent paper The Shower Scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" as Exemplifying Baudrillards four fold simulacrum creation process state:

"there is no more reality because it is impossible to define a definite starting point for any of these relations."

referring to the spawning of various simulacra from an original, real, entity. Which proves more difficult?

1. Defining a starting point for a sequence of entities, or
2. Determining the starting point from the sequence?

Beaudrillard Take One: PostNeoModernisticMetaAnalysis and so on.

Is there a way to tell the difference between connections we know are fake and those we cross our fingers are real? We spent a few weeks in the throes of "anything can be connected to anything fever" and are now dealing with the persistent symptoms of this illness (or delicious madness, as I prefer to call it). We looked to semiotics to understand how the language we use influences the nature of the connections we make. Now we are dining with Jean Baudrillard and discussing his choice of entrees (he insists that since duck is so commonly referenced on tables worldwide and its preparations so interchangeable that there is no longer Duck, only hyper-fowl which are indistinguishable from whatever "real" duck has become.

Semiotics, or A few things about how to talk about talking about things.

Semiotics is "a general theory of signs and symbolism, usually divided into the branches of pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics." There...now that we've cleared that up, we can...(tires screeching, confused pedestrians snatching wayward toddlers from the paths of various runaway musclecars, fruit carts toppling)

If we don't investigate a little more closely, the definition might as well be "a pile of stuff about things for understanding stuff and things, including 1) stuff, 2) things, and 3) combinations of things and stuff."

I don't expect you to become a semiotician (or semioticist, for that matter) by Tuesday, but you need to understand and be able to discuss the basic concepts. Keep in mind the basic diagram we made about the relationship between an artist, the work, and the viewer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

Calendar Setup

I am experimenting with a couple of calendar versions for the blog. The one that is running now lets you see what you need for the next class period. You will also have access the the entire calendar (to see everything we have done so far) through your email/calendar account. If you don't have a calendar application linked yet, I emailed you an invitation to the class calendar.

Dan Rather is the sphinx of our time, and his riddle is “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2001/12/0075777

We spoke briefly in class about the links between one of my favorite authors, Donald Barthelme and Dan Rather, a newsman about whom I have constructed no particular opinion (except that he descends into temporary madness during election night coverage, erupting into baffling word salads that frighten all but he most hardened psychiatric professionals). The article about it in Harpers is linked above.

Image as Information System

This is Family of Marsupial Centaurs by Salvador Dali. We can begin to apply our fairly limited set of tools to extract whatever information is lurking in this painting. What, if anything, is the image trying to say? In more practical terms--what, if anything, can I force the centaurs to tell me?

Poetron, or My robot has more of the mead of poetry in his tiniest servomotor than you do in your wildest imaginings.

My poetry engine, Poetron, takes the ideas we develop in class and applies them to text. Here is an example of his work. After reading it, follow the link above and try out the engine yourself. This piece is a combination of Colonel Kurtz, the Sugar Hill Gang and an underground UK breakbeat pioneer, William Shakespeare.

How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
I watched a snail crawl
let's rock, you dont stop
the edge of a straight razor and surviving.
Crawling, slithering, along
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
well so far youve heard my voice but i brought two friends along
The Horror.
the edge of a straight razor and surviving.
That’s my dream.