[cross-disciplinary multimodal art]

Marlena Novak’s work is a cross-disciplinary hybrid including HD video, animatography, interactive time-based media, digital photography, and encaustic painting (BFA, Carnegie-Mellon; MFA, Northwestern) with solo exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne, Amsterdam, Enschede and the U.S. Her encaustic-painting technique was the subject of a documentary presented on PBS and she was invited to teach a course in this medium at the Amsterdam Institute for Painting in 1996.


Read more about Marlena Novak here: http://www.creativityandcognition.com/gallery/mnovak/mnovak.htm

[cfp: born digital]

Educational Insights (an online journal mostly focused on education) has a call for papers out. Due date for abstracts is 15 of June:

Teresa Dobson, Academic Editor | Michael Boyce, Managing Editor

Born Digital (Contemporary Art and Education)

"Over the last 20 years a new generation of art and literature born as electronic, or borne within distributive digital channels, has developed in tandem with new ways of defining, measuring and decoding them (i.e. reading), and along side new delivery mechanisms for pedagogical methods and practices. Born Digital wishes to explore these new artifacts and their new distributive form in the context of pedagogy and artistic practice.

A wide range of new forms wherein narrative is restructuring and redefining itself are of interest: Blog novels; E-literature; Narrative within locative applications such as google maps and geo-tagging with GPS; RSS poetics; Narrative in the context of mobile games and social media applications such as youtube, flickr and facebook. Likewise, consideration and analysis of the digital artifacts born out these mediums is a concern to us.

We are interested playing with the concept of being Born Digital, taking into account multiple meanings of Born, including: Existing as a result of birth; Having a natural or perfectly suited ability; Existing as a result of a particular situation or feeling; And keeping in mind its homonym Borne, to play with a notion of transport, of delivery, of support and endurance.

Generally, we support submissions using an original approach, which avoid excessive commentary on any canon, and we encourage efforts to express the matter within the structure of the medium itself. That being said, we expect rigorously critical investigation within the parameters of any play.

Please submit your précis by June 15, 2009 to educational.insights@ubc.ca

For more information : born digital"

[employment residency: Cross-Platform Media Producer]

Cross-Platform Media Producer

Residence

Ref: MED295
c. £36k - £43.5k per annum

The Media School is seeking an experienced and enthusiastic cross-platform media producer (preferably 0.5 FTE but this is negotiable) to lead seminars/workshops and tutorials in cross-platform media production, explore new methods of learning and advise on curriculum development.

You should be an accomplished cross-platform media producer with significant relevant professional experience. You will be able to make a significant contribution to the delivery of cross platform media practice at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels of education and to the development of innovative teaching methods and materials. You will also be able to assist our thinking regarding the future of cross-platform practice, as well as supporting our close links with the industry.

The post is offered as a fixed-term contract for up to six months.

For an informal discussion about the post, please contact Fiona Cownie on fjcownie@bournemouth.ac.uk

A detailed job description and person specification are available from our website (www.bournemouth.ac.uk/jobs) together with an online application form. Alternatively, telephone 01202 964846 (24 hour answer phone).quoting the appropriate reference Closing date: 2 February 2009. Interview date: 12 February 2009.

[digital stitchings: my interview with rachel beth egenhoefer ]

I recently did an interview with digital/textile artist/creator Rachel Beth Egenhoefer for Furtherfield:

Jess: What are the main differences (pros and/or cons) of creating a work that is to be experienced digitally, and that which is contained within physical material borders (sweets, fabric etc...)? - this is very much a question to you as a *creator*

Rachel Beth: In some ways I feel like this is a hard question for me to answer because my work is very much about bridging these two experiences and pointing out that they aren't that different.

There's lots of clich'e answers like the digital being accessible anywhere on the web and that the material has the traditional sense of making and 'aura', but my work really sits between them and is about bringing the two together. Making the digital tactile, and the tangible coded.

Jess: What aspects of the digital would you like to be able to bring into your future work?

Rachel Beth: My most recent work, and the work I did during my residency in the UK uses motion and acceleration tracking. I'd like to continue using ideas around mapping motion and interaction. I'm not so interested in data visualization but rather how mapping actions and systems can make for new interactions or parallels. I've also begun to work with hacking the Nintendo Wii that has just kind of opened a whole slew of ideas. So I can see myself working more with that.


Jess: How would you define a literate reader/experiencer of your work? (I'm thinking especially of the lovely melting sweets...how do you want your IDEAL audience to participate?)

Rachel Beth: I don't really have an ideal audience. I strive to have multiple entry points in my work. I've had computer scientists view my work who know much more about code than I do but never knew that a knitting pattern looks exactly the same, or ludites who hate technology but suddenly realize there are simple, beautiful concepts in computing. Some people see my work and don't realize it's even a piece, some people spend hours coming back and looking at it. I'm okay with either of these extremes. It's my hope that people find something to grab on to or relate to. Leaving a door partly open allows other people to add their own perspective as well. It's always rewarding (well most of the time rewarding) when people discover things in your work you didn?t see before.


Read more over at Furtherfield.

[creativity conversations at the ioct: bruce mason and peter shillingsburg]

"The creative process: views from practice and analysis."

Bruce Mason (New media advocate)
Peter Shillingsburg (Textual scholar)

Peter

"New knowledge is the result of a rational extension of the boundaries of established knowledge through acts of innovative combination, controlled violation of conventions, and recognition of the potentitals of the unexpected, including accidents."

(from Stephen Brown paraphrasing Margaret Boden)



For an innovation to be distinguished from chaos it must not exceed our tolerance for the unexplained thus will be a failed attempt. So there comes the notion that there is a discipline that underlies creativity - a controlled violation (recognising the potential of the accidental).


Art that can be labelled as significant or great usually has two characteristics:
command of langauge
does something not done before

"The old dog barked backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup."

(Robert Frost)

The first sentence has 22 stop sounds (so takes much longer to read than the second sentence). The second line only has 4 hard stop sounds and none is juxtaposed to the other. It has 8 liquids which run on smoothly without interruptions. In this case creativity is the skillful placement.

But what of *serendipity*?

Housman

"Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon ... I would go for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of. Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up, because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss ... the pit of the stomach."

Tree Bellicose Graph

"Jaun supine team tree bellicose livid tug adder inner past her honor heel slide. Day word deep tree Bellicose Graph. Dare wuzzy Girt Bag Bellicose Graph, dare wuzzy Muddles Eyes Bellicose Graph, enter wuzzy Ladle Beady Bellicose Graph. Bees hide dare past her render Russian reaver. Juan moaning, dado seeded acrostic past her tweet digress honor udder sight. Bat furs day head topaz oeqvre breech Honda witch dare livid day bag hoary bull trowel."

source

Bruce




Can a group be creative? (think of a million penguins)

In blogosphere there seems to be a consensus that a million penguins was a failure. BUT when wikis fail it is because no one writes anything or it is riddled with spam.

Stats in 5 weeks of a million penguins

• 1500 contributors
• over 11,000 edits
• 75,000 visitors to the site
• 280,000+ page views
  

So, maybe it failed because crowds cannot write well.

Or, maybe it was because there were no rules, everything was left up to the users. There was nothing saying what writers couldn't do.

But we have plenty of evidence of crowds writing. Aarne-Thompson 333

type - AT 0333 the wolf or other monster devous human beings until all of them are rescued alive from his belly
1)wolf's feast
2) rescue

motifs - 1) Wolf poses as "grandmother" and kills child, What makes your ears so big? Animal swallows man (not fatally)
2)Victims rescued from swallower's belly.

So this might be related to a digital tradition:

Wiki transmission
what about edit histories as transmission?
what kinds of wiki edits succeed and what fail?

Traces of Digital Authors


Oral culture leaves relatively few snapshots of texts
Digital culture leaves billions
Gibson's blog shows his latest novel Spook country coming together

but a reader of Gibson's new novel noticed that it sounded familiar...it was from Gibson's blog:

"So I can tell you now that Spook Country came together for Gibson in October 2004. That month is a record of all the little shocks and perceptions and historical forces and traumas - in seriously minute detail - that at some point stewed together in Gibson's brain into what became Spook Country.

According to the early plot outline which Amazon.com has up on the book's page (quoting the blog), he started writing his novel in June 05. That's the boiling time for the novel, I guess. Gibson has several times called writing a novel at the same time as the blog "boiling water with the lid off", meaning it's something he has to stop doing in order to generate enough energy to write the novel. Looking at these links, I'm not so sure. I think instead the blog has become a record of, and an integral part of, the idea-generating stage of writing his novels. Maybe he couldn't write the book itself, but the ideas certainly came about at these exact times."

Bruce's note that you need to work within constraints so tried to create a tardis in second life but SL doesn't allow something to be different (spatially) on the inside and outside. So, a workaround was allowing one to teleport to somewhere else (bigger) from within the tardis.

Peter: Henry James and embedded clauses and deferred, Falkner and long sentences, relative duration of time to live life and then talk about it (Shandy!). So telling good stories, creation, is verbal so you need a good command of language. We build our worlds and transport ourselves with words (Coleridge).