Thursday, April 2, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Album Covers
1: Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article that appears is the name of your band. Example? How about OSS Detachment 101?
2: Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last few words of the final quote on the page is your album title. Like...Do about it.
3: Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
The third picture in the top row is your award-winning album cover.
4. Use what technomancers call "software" to combine these elements into an album cover.
The first article that appears is the name of your band. Example? How about OSS Detachment 101?
2: Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last few words of the final quote on the page is your album title. Like...Do about it.
3: Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
The third picture in the top row is your award-winning album cover.
4. Use what technomancers call "software" to combine these elements into an album cover.
Surrealism Papers
The papers we talked about in class are here. Choose one and read it. Then, we can talk about it.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Dada, or A users' guide to kung fu art survival (Repost)
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:
expressionism poisons artistic sardines
simultaneism is still at its first artistic communion
futurism wants to mount in an artistic lyricism-elevator
unanism embraces allism and fishes with an artistic line
neo-classicism discovers the good deeds of artistic art
paroxysm makes a trust of all artistic cheeses
ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things
creationism vorticism imagism also propose some artistic recipes
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.
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.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Damn you Baudrillard!
As if we had any doubt about House of Leaves, the book opens with a discussion about the nature of "authenticity." A series of documents about a film about a house. Layers one, two and three of Simulacra. This is turning out even better than I thought.
Monday, February 23, 2009
House of Leaves
OK. The book we will attempt to model as a general system is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's a big 'un, so we will need to read like the wind. Like the wind itself.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Mapping
The mapping software we chose turned out to be pretty nice. I hesitate to use the term "mindmapping" as it
What the software helps us do is abstract whatever system we encounter into a sort of "idea space" that we can study independently. This happens every day in physicist's notebooks and dry-erase boards. A man on a bicycle becomes an arrow named 5 m/s, or a falling battleship becomes a sphere of radius r. Potentially troubling details are considered and often discarded. For example, does the man happen to like French cinema? Did the MC5 ever write a soulful but impossibly violent garage rock tribute to this particular battleship? While interesting, these tidbits might not effect a given calculation.
I often mention the act of trying to understand a system as "rotating that system until a symmetry becomes clear." Imagine a poem being mapped, for example, and the concepts sorted or moved around the page until a series of connections becomes clearer. This is the sort of rotation I am talking about. If we could raise the map into three dimensions and rotate it in any direction, it might be easier to spot connections than if it were on the page, the same way relative height is easier to grasp on a 3-d model than a flat map.
- Indicates that we are somehow tracing a topography of Thought. Since we are not using some ridiculously advanced brain scanning mechanism in the classroom (and unless the students have some fat NSF green they haven't mentioned yet) claiming something like this is ridiculous. The brain is made of meat with lightning inside. None of the class's instruments measure anything like this. What we are doing is recording the iterative processes that occur during our attempts to understand a given system--organizing our thoughts in the order they appear and looking for connections that do not necessarily depend on that order.
- Implies a sort of trademark on what I would just call brainstorming. Evidently brainstorming is what helps kids decide on a science fair project but mindmapping is what marketing directors do to motivate their teams to pursue an operational paradigm-shift that strikes strategic brand equity. If you found yourself making air-quotes during either of the italicized phrases, you see what I mean.
What the software helps us do is abstract whatever system we encounter into a sort of "idea space" that we can study independently. This happens every day in physicist's notebooks and dry-erase boards. A man on a bicycle becomes an arrow named 5 m/s, or a falling battleship becomes a sphere of radius r. Potentially troubling details are considered and often discarded. For example, does the man happen to like French cinema? Did the MC5 ever write a soulful but impossibly violent garage rock tribute to this particular battleship? While interesting, these tidbits might not effect a given calculation.
I often mention the act of trying to understand a system as "rotating that system until a symmetry becomes clear." Imagine a poem being mapped, for example, and the concepts sorted or moved around the page until a series of connections becomes clearer. This is the sort of rotation I am talking about. If we could raise the map into three dimensions and rotate it in any direction, it might be easier to spot connections than if it were on the page, the same way relative height is easier to grasp on a 3-d model than a flat map.
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