Jorkjeimer last post

Phase 4 is done!

And it's time to say goodbye to JORKJEIMER/art&technology and to "The Electronic Landscape". I've spent this last week working hard on this phase 4, trying to coordinate everything so it could make sense... I'm quite proud of what I've done, and just hope to have achieved my goal: to trace the Exquisite Corpse using the Google Image Engine... questioning some of its implication, its artistic values...

When I finished my project, I had the feeling all was very abstract, and some things could be misunderstood (or not understood as I intended). So I immediately thought about doing a "Reference Page" so I could include further written explanation. Paradoxically, the different meanings and interpretations are part of the Exquisite Corpse project... so I shouldn't have worried about that! I have finally decided not to include the references and leave it free for interpretation.

It's been really tough work posting in this blog during all this VERY LONG school year. But it's worth it! I've learned A LOT and my Canadian experience (even though it ended one month ago) has been excellent; in part because I've had this big opportunity to learn very different things, and study very interesting and different areas to what I usually do. Thanks Nadine and Mark! :)

phase 4.- google image trawl EXQUISITE CORPSE (II)

6.-
This picture is located in the sixth page of Google Images, and links to a very informal and personal blog about design and fashion. It is only one of a “compilation” of three drawings.
This very informal context (references to the alcohol), with the absence of explicit references to the exquisite corpse, links the idea of the EC to the inspiration or the sense of “being lost and free”. The picture is actually tagged as “random”, and the text does not show any artistic pretensions. “None of us consider ourselves sketch artist (it’s quite obvious) but with each pass we became more and more comfortable with what we were doing,” states the author.
I'm wondering if this “informal” and “improvised” sense is also reinforced by the formal/physical characteristics of the picture. The chaotic and random drawings, the ink texture, the notebook page with the folded corner...

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7.-
In the seventh page I found this image. It is posted in a BBC blog (called Imagine), with a very “wide” idea of what “culture” is. They cover from ballet to fashion, sculpture to hip hop, literature to Britart.
The picture is actually the poster used for an art exhibition: they asked several artists (Grayson Perry, George Melly or Phillipe Starck, among others) to create an Exquisite Corpse. The actual EC is displayed at the bottom of the page. The image is taken from one of the 7 exquisite corpses (the fifth one), a collaborative work by Jean-Jaques Lebel and George Melly. Formally, the picture has been distorted, because a “bubble effect” (similar to the blog's brand image) has been added at the bottom of it.
Does the BBC and the blog quality provide more credibility and a higher status to the EC corpse as an art movement? Does it take us back to the ideas stated in the first images, where we found a more “institutionalized” information?

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8.-
I personally find it very interesting that this is the first Exquisite corpse using only words. There is no other one like this in the seven previous GI pages. Also, this is a very enriching instance because it operates in several levels. First, it is located in a web design/technology blog, being this one the only “artistic” post in its section. Some posts also contain logos and advertisements of big famous brands (Adobe). Does the author want to relate the EC “artistic values” to the hypertext/web revolution?
But most importantly, it is necessary to trace back the original location of the picture to understand what the EC experiment is about. The image is not actually an image but a flash application located in littleminx.tv, a Exquisite corpse project in which 5 filmmakers work together with only one rule: each director has to start with the last sentence of the previous one. The flash application provides a link to each of the short films, which has some valuable implications. Does it take us back to the originary ideas of the EC (work in collaboration, surrealism, random associations)? Does the EC take a step forward with the mixture of genres and stlyes (film, web-based art, images, hypertext...).

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9.-
We may also find a “written” EC in the ninth page. The picture (a scanned piece of paper) is located in a personal blog, folded under the category of “writing”. That could make us think about the origins of the Exquisite Corpse movement, with a strong relation to the poetry.
But regarding the EC implications, the author does not talk about it in terms of collaboration. I assume he wrote the first sentence, and then passed the paper by the rest of his mates. The informal/personal nature of the blog (and of the crumpled paper!) may arise questions about “quality” in literature or art: can we think of this in terms of surrealistic poetry?

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10.-
The last image I chose for this project. I found it in the tenth page of the GI search. It is kind of paradoxical, but interesting at the same time, how we go back, in a sense, to the “institutionalized” information of the first pages... Very similar images (EC representations), located in “official” sites.
The picture is a part of an illustrated book exhibited in the MOMA institution. It is accompanied by technical data and a brief art review, basically talking about the authors (the brothers Dinos and Jake Chapman).
Does this environment (the musuem, the “formal” exhibition) helps to reinforce the original EC ideas? Does it help to demistify and challenge the concept of “author”?

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phase 4.- google image trawl EXQUISITE CORPSE (I)

1.-

I found this image on the first page of Google Images. The picture is actually a compilation of six visual “exquisite corpse” representations, and works as an illustration of a blog entry. The blog, named “lines and colors”, reflects on several artistic expressions (drawing, sketching, painting). The author took these images from a “morgue” of some of the original surrealist corpses and made a very simple compilation himself.

The blog quality and the links posted at the bottom of the text make me wonder if the images/text end up reinforcing the idea of the EC as a valuable and relevant aesthetic experience, even more than a artistic expression. Also, the brief history on the surrealism helps to contextualize the EC in a larger movement.

Is that because it is one of the first images to appear by the GI engine that it gives more “institutionalized” information about the EC?

~

2.-

This is the second one of the images I selected from the GI search. It appears in the second page, and is taken from the SFØ page, a web-based community game in which players have to complete different tasks, often with a focus on creativity, exploration, community, or performance. This image is part of one of the game events. The game consisted in creating a conversation without using “formalized language”. These are the rules:

“On November 21st, between the hours of 1 and 7PM, Dax Tran-Caffee agreed to meet with members of the SFØ community, but imposed the following rule: conversants would avoid using any formalized language (such as writing, sign language, or morse code). Participants were asked to bring materials of their choice to facilitate communication.”

The drawing -scanned from a sketchbook- was made in coordination with two people (Lara Black, the player) and Dax (the instructor). I think two important questions may arise from the GI search: why is a drawing (like youtube videos, also used in the game) a non-formalized language? Did the EC help to facilitate communication/expressed art or it was just used as a tool for a game?

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3.-

This image is located in the Pitchfork Media website (an Internet publication devoted to music criticism), and I reached it through the third page of GI search. The picture is the cover for the album named “Exquisite Corpse” by the experimental musician Daedelus.

This instance introduces significant factors to think about regarding the EC as collaborative art. It relates the EC to the music (highliting the power of collage art, as stated in the album review), and thus poses the image in the background (it is not an EC example). Also, it incorporates the commercial value, with the advertising surrounding the album reviem/album image.

Is there, thus, a factual relation between the image and the text in terms of EC? Does the album really reflect the EC values or GI just linked it based on the title of the review?

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4.-

I found this picture on the fourth page of GI search. It is located, again, in an art blog, and the image is part of many others as an illustration of the artist (Jill Tattersall) interview. The interview is very generic and does not talk about the EC at all, but about the artist work in general. The image is named Exquisite Corpse and was taken directly from the artist official website.

It is very interesting to find out that the picture is not complete: if you go to the artist page, you will find the whole artpiece, formed by a “head”, a “torso” and “legs (etc)”. I particularly like the “etc” of the third part, which remains ambiguous.

The artist that was being interviewed only did the “torso” part, as she explains in her own site with a post entitled “The Corpse's Torso”. he image was tagged as “Exquisite Corpse” whereas the artist only got a “real” EC when they put the three works together. That makes me think: why did I find the blog interview first with the uncomplete part, instead of the official artist website with the complete work?

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5.-

The fifth page of the Google Image search links to “The Exquisite Corpse” as a theatre play. The picture is the play poster with the slogan “5 writers/15 scenes. 6 million possibilities”, accompanying a very short text summarizing the plot, the cast ensemble and other information.

In this case, the context in which the image/text are located takes us back to the first instance: even though there are not explicit references to the EC movement or the surrealism, the website generates a kind of aesthetic intellectual puzzle reinforcing the artistic value of the EC. There is no advertising or any commercial indication.

phase 4-images (II)

I'll try this weekend to post something a bit more detailed (a few paragraphs about the texts), but I only post the rest of the images I have already selected for my phase 4 project.

phase 4- images

I'm still on the process... but I would like to show you some of the images I already selected for my project. The html is sometimes driving me crazy (I want to use some javascript, to work on an image-map) but I think I'm on the right path...

PHASE 4! - guidelines

These are some of the main guidelines I'm going to follow regarding Phase 4. I'm finding some little problems on the way, but nothing really important. Basically, I have chosen to work on the second model of the "Google Image Trawl / Small World / Rhizomes / Digital Trails" option. Therefore, I will try to trace the lineage of an image and its different applications and implementations throughout the closed system of the Internet.

My idea is to create an html-language based project, taking advantage of what we learned during the Phase 1 project. I will use images, text, hyperlinks, connections... through which I will explain the keyword EXQUISITE CORPSE is interpreted, visualized and contextualized through the Google Image search engine. I have chosen this keyword because it will allow me to work with the concepts of "hypertextuality", hyoerfiction, death of the author... that I used on my presentation, and engage them with the visual environment I tried to formulate in my Phase 2 video.

I still have to think how I'm going to visually display the photos (that I have looked for, but not chosen yet) and the paragraphs (a short paragraph of text for each instance of the word/image), and how I'm going to map out the possible connections (I'll try to follow, more or less, the Spoerri idea of the desk as a map)... We'll see!

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance

The Anecdoted Topography of Chance has been called "arguably the most important and entertaining Artist Book of the post-war period" and a "quasi-autobiographical tour de force."

~

.- by Daniel Spoerri

~

I'm working on my Phase 4, and would like to stop a little bit and talk about Daniel Spoerri's project, Anecdoted Topography of Chance, probably the work which this Swiss/Romanian artist is widley acclaimed and known for author. This project is a literary analog to his snare-pictures, in which he mapped every object located on his table at a particular moment in time, describing each with his personal recollections evoked by the object. Mark has linked this project in the wiki page as possible model for option 2, and I've been exploring it in order to conceive my final project. A brief summary of what this project is about would allow me to explain in detail what I want to do for Phase 4.

Spoerri drew on a "map" the overlapping outlines of all the 80 objects that were lying on the table in a specific moment (October 17, 1961 at exactly 3:47 p.m.). Each object was assigned a number and Spoerri wrote a brief description of each object and the memories or associations it evoked. The descriptions cross referenced other objects on the table which were related. This project is more than just a catalog of random objects, because if we read it in its entirety, "it provides a coherent and compelling picture of Spoerri's travels, friends and artistic endeavors."

In my case, I won't obviously talk about my travels or friends... but about my other 3 phases and my presentation. My main challenge for this Phase 4 is thus put everything I've done these past 9 or 10 months together, following the project guidelines stated in the wiki page. I will explain further details about how I will connect everything, which are going to be my main ideas and concepts I will be dealing with, and how I will eventually come up with a final product (an html-based project, in this case) to hand in!

~

DANIELSPOERRI.ORG (official website)

TORPEDO- KUNSTBOKHANDELEN (project's review)

AUDIATUR (another project's review)

EXQUISITE CORPSE- globality, interactivity and convergence

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"Dada will in your faces, Dada is nothing and does not mean anything."
Tristan Tzara

"Poetry shoul be done by everyone, and not by only one."
Lautréamont
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I don't know why, but I was sure I have written about the Exquisite Corpse in this blog before. Maybe because I'm always talking and writing about the same kind of things... but the truth is that I haven't. Well, I did when I was preparing my Phase 1 and my presentation about the precedents of the hypertext and its influences on the hyperfiction literary tradition. Anyways, I think this is a great opportunity to revisit the Exquisite Corpse concept, the idea around which I would like to work for my phase 4 -the Google Image Trawl project.


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The widespread use of the e-mail, the blog (and its feedback system based on comments), the copy-paste mechanisms, the hypertext and the digital photography... have made it possible to widely extend the initial possibilities of the Exquisite Corpse proposed by the Surrealists. As stated by elfloridobyte, "while the linear summation is a part of the "formal" concept -if we can talk in terms of formailty when creating surreal games-, we can either break down or muliply this linearity in the Internet medium, or we can exploit the multimedia possibilities using simultaneous or parallel elements, for instance."

In a way, my idea is to use the idea of "making meaning through collaboration"- exemplifying the nature of the dialogic, telecommunications-based process, where the central space is under the control neither of party A or party B-, as stated by Mark in the wiki page for the 1st option, and use it in the 2nd one -tracing the lineage of an image and its different applications and implementations throughout the closed system of the Internet-. I undertand the Exquisite Corpse as a playful and free dialogue, with a special interest in the electronic landscape, in which the geographic barriers and the physical presence are eliminated in the art creation process. Therefore, "exquisite corpse and network share their sense of globality, interactivity and convergence", that I would like to exploit.

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Exquisite Corpse principles

- It is a collective work

- It should be understood as an entertaining work, with no stylistic pressures (regarding meaning or coherence). It may wish to be intentionally paradoxical.

- Intuition, randomness and coincidentality are appreciated values.

- It should always have an experimental perspective.

- It should supress the "real name" (ego) of the authors, as it must be conceived as a collective project.

- It is a hybrid.

e-mail ART

Before I start posting ideas and comments about my phase 4 project, I would like to explore some of the "other options" that I'm going to eventually rule out of my proposal. As I'm planning to work on the "Google image trawl" option, I refer to some of the mail/email art models or the time-delay projects -some of which I find really interesting.

I've been researching quite a bit about the "mail/e-mail art" movement. The mailArt may be understood as a global movement of artistic exchange and communication through mail (or email) - I didn't know this movement was so old, since it can be traced back to its earliest manifestations in the Fluxus project or even the Neo-Dada art. Anyways, I'd rather focus on the characteristics of this kind of "art," because I'm not so interested in its historic approach.

The use of this medium obviously affects and determines the characteristics of the artwork (the object to be sent) -in terms of size, weight and shape-, which are constrained to postal services conditions. The communication channel is this case an essential part of the artwork, sometimes one of the most important since it brings the "noise", the uncertainty, or the signs of all of the administration steps through which the work has passed by. But mail art is much more than a simple exchange of artistic works through mail, as I see it as mainly communication. "Both, art and communication merge in postage."

Because this is a technology course, I should mention the capacity of the mail art to become e-email art. MailArt has endorsed the digital technology and thus uses all of the new media diffusion tools (first fax, now e-mail). I've found this article, MAIL ART INITIATION, very interesting regarding MailArt, since it announces some of the main principles of this artistic movement. These include:
- freedom of speech: even though pre-determined topics/issues are established in MA projects, the artist has entire freedom to exercise its activity.
- there is no selection and no judgement. Every artwork is accepted and exhibited.
- also, there is no art sale and no copyright restrictions.

The works that constitute this kind of art may come from a variety of sources. They include books, postcards, stamps, collages, rubber stamps, videos, audios, copy-art, 3D objects, digital creations, net-art, and so on. I find this variety really amazing, because it potentially allows us to create and re-create everything from an artistic point of view. That's why I considered doing the first option, "Exquisite Corpse Updated / Mail/Email Art / Telephone Game / the Effects of Technologies on Materials". But my personal situation -I'm working now on my project from Spain- the distance factor has its own problems: I would be forced to exclusively e-mail the images (in all of the steps) which introduces a limiting factor in how I can alter the images. I would like to finish this post by linking some very interesting non-American/non-Canadian mail artists. I assume they are quite unknown in Canada, and I think it's always interesting to share this information and the kind of work they do:

/ Juan Carlos Romero / Eugenio Dittborn / Miguel Jiménez "Zenon" / Edgardo A. Vigo / Clemente Padín /

PHASE 3!

I have my phase 3 done! I have chosen to recreate two domestic spaces (the kitchen and the bathroom) as exclusively sound environments. In one minute, I wanted to express a melody/sound choreography using only the types of sounds people usually do when they are in those spaces. In both cases, the piece starts from no sound at all. Then multiple sounds (layers) start to overlap progressively until the first half of the piece; from that point on, the sounds start to dicrease until we have no sound again. The musical structure of both pieces is thus intended to be a pyramid.
Regarding the "meaning" or interpretation of the pieces, I want my project to be understood in several levels.
First, it makes possible to re-think those domestic spaces as sound environments, easily recognizable without any visual contact. Both pieces play with clicks, water, fire, door sounds... which are elements present in our daily lives.
Moreover, I wanted to create a choreography or a melody using daily life sounds, which helps me to blur the boundaries between the capture and the edition. I wanted the pyramid structure to be easily recognizable.
Lasty, since I wanted to engage this phase with the other 2 and my presentation, the layering is supposed to respond to Borges' metaphor of the labyrinth and my hypertext concepts, in which "all possible outcomes of an event occur at the same time." In my pieces, not all of the sounds begin and stop one after another (linear text), but they keep going/forking and overlapping (hypertext), even though this won't be possible in the traditional use of these spaces (the same person can't have a shower and use the toilet at the same time; nor open the fridge and stir a glass of water).

PIECE A
Space: Bathroom
Elements: door, bathroom fan, tap water, flushing toilet, bathroom
curtain, bath water, bathroom curtain.

PIECE B
Space: Kitchen
Elements: microwave, coffee maker, fridge, extractor fan, oven, pouring
water into a glass, stirring a glass of sugar.

All the material I have used is original, so I didn't need any extra sources. That has helped to make the pieces more similar between each other, and thus more difficult to differenciate capture and edition.

Regarding the capture/edited differences, I think it is not relevant to undertand my project's point (or to make alternative interpretations) to make any difference between which has been edited and which hasn't. Both of them imply an edition and manipulation work. My biggest challege was to create the layering sounds using edition software (in one piece) and the microphone (in the other one) and get a similar pyramid structure. That said, I leave the freedom to guess and interpretate the differences between capture and edition to my fellow students.

Max NEUHAUS - Public Supply (audio project)

"I realized I could open a large door into the radio studio with the telephone; if I installed telephone lines in the studio, anybody could sonically walk in from any telephone. At that time there were no live call-in shows. […] Although I was not able to articulate it in 1966, now, after having worked with this idea for a long time and talked about it and thought about it, it seems that what these works are really about is proposing to reinstate a kind of music which we have forgotten about and which is perhaps the original impulse for music in man: not making a musical product to be listened to, but forming a dialogue, a dialogue without language, a sound dialogue."

acoustic space/orality/the spoken word

I'm searching ideas for my phase 3. My point is to connect, as far as possible, the audio project with my other phases and my presentation... Hypertext audio is hard to develop though...
I found the blog I link at the bottom of the post, which is very interesting and may give me some ideas...

"McLuhan had established decades ago the consequences of TV as a new medium that would return society to its tribal ways, pushing the literate man back to an "Acoustic" world where oral tradition is the preferred mechanism for cultural transfer. "Acoustic"‚ was mostly used as a metaphor for‚ many things happening at once".

http://acousticvisual.blogspot.com/

VISUAL&ACOUSTIC SPACE (M. McLuhan)

I just read the chapter "Visual and Acoustic Space" from the work The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, by Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan, and would like to make some notes here in the blog - specially in relation to the previous post, and also as a way to foster ideas for my phase 3 project.

In "The Global Village", McLuhan proposes a detailed conceptual framework through which we can understand the significant technological changes carried out during the past decades. One of the main points of his theory is that technology users are "trapped" by two different ways of perceiving the world. On the one hand we have what he calls "visual space" (the linear perception, a characteristic of the Western world); on the other, the acoustic space (the holistic reasoning, from the Eastern world). The author argues that the printed media stimulates and mantains the perception of visual space; however, important changes in communication media (tv, technology database, satellite networks, global media...) are leading the users towars a more dynamic and multi-axial "acoustic space".

I found a very interesting (and brief) article about this same text, that would like to share with all of you. It is very useful, since it summarizes the main ideas of the McLuhan's article:

- Western history has been dominated by the perception of the world as a linear thought: everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The result is a world view dominated by linear logic and the symbolic abstraction of meaning.
- The alphabet and writing strongly biases our communication towards the world of visual space. Our discourse about our environment is constricted into ideas of lines, planes and grids. The universe is perceived as having a beginning, and at some point an end; time is constructed as a line.
- In contrast with the linear biases of visual space, acoustic space is analogous to the natural environment. Acoustic space surrounds us.

-Writing and publishing are the main technologies that have focused Western society on the visual; however, McLuhan claims the counteraction of two "acoustic" technologies (cash money and the compass), have kept us with some balance. Acoustic technologies focus on the intangible and the global.

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VISUAL SPACE:

Left hemisphere of the brain.

Linear, sequential; based on the line, plane, grid, perspective. Heightens response of the eye. Linear conceptualization, causality.

ACOUSTIC SPACE:

Right hemisphere of the brain.

Gyroscopic, 360 degrees, reflective, reverberant, simultaneous. Heightens response of the ear (balance). Oral culture, myth, time as a cycle.

~

the world as a sound environment

"Daily life has a soundtrack. If you can't listen to it,
it's just because we are used to hear it"
Ramon Pelinski, musician.

I've spent these days just listening to sounds that surround me everyday. I've been walking around with my ears and my mind open, as Nadine suggested last week in class, cultivating a better awareness of background sounds, ambiance, sound environments, sound space boundaries... It's pretty amazing to realize how unaware we are of the incredible amount of sound surrounding us 24/7, sometimes because our culture tends to privilege sight, images and visual impacts.

Our daily lives are full of sounds, to the extent that he world is a sound environment. The sounds give us essential information for a better comprehension of the environment in which we operate on a regular basis. understanding the environment in which we operate. Auditory references provide us information about the proportions of the spaces we inhabit, warn us of possible dangers... and so on. There are a multitude of sounds in our world that tells us stories, as well as there are a number of sounds (and stories) we produce every day in each of our ordinarytasks. However, very few people actually listen and pay attention to these sounds.

In order to get some ideas for my phase 3 project, I started a while ago to do some research regarding sound environment and the concept of "soundscape". I've found very interesting stuff, such as this text, El Mundo es un paisaje sonoro (The world is a sonorous landscape), which takes a pretty quick overview to the history of sound and sound recording.

As this text explains, with the advent of tape recorders (and portable tape recorders, afterwards) these sounds that I just mentioned above stopped being noticed by people and started to become recorded sound (that could be stored and transmitted over and over again). This had enormous consequences (very good ones, if we think in the value of radio and film, for instance), mostly a change of our "hearing perception": almost all the sounds people percieved in their environments, started to become translated into noise. But most of the time what we call "noise" is actually these amount of incredible of sounds which we don't really pay attention.

This week I've been paying attention to them. Trying to translate our internalized concept of "landscape" into another one, "soundscape".

behid the hype- process

I would also like to talk about the process and conception of my phase 2, now that it is already posted online for people to watch. I want my video to be understood and decoded at several levels.
First, I wanted to make a hypertextual video -this is almost impossible to actually make, as the motion picture is inherently linear. But I wanted instead to play with the hypertext idea of the "story within a story", which seems to suggest a break in the linear impositions, by presenting the stickman writing the thoughts and dreams of another one. Secondly, I present 2 confronted ideas: the hypertext as a utopia and the hypertext as a distopia. It is remarkable the way both of them are displayed on screen. The first one is part of stickman's dream, and I try to express these ideas as part of what he is dreaming and would like to get (a utopia, something to be understood as an aim). And the second one, marked by the stickman's fall, is set to be realistic and focuses on the limitations/negative aspects of the hypertext
At the same time, I had also played with music connotations, by presenting a very different tone when I present hypertext as a distopia and when I do it as a utopia And last, my goal was also to do something visually engaging with homogeneous colours and continuous characters.

limitations of hypertext-

As hypertext systems have progressed over the past 20 years, several problems have surfaced. The main point of my video "Behind the hype" was precisely to remark these problems which are usually overwhelmed by the utopian idea of the hypertext revolution. Some of the remarkable limitations of the hypertext are:

- getting lost in the hyperspace: It is feared that readers who are used to finding their way through books with the aid of tables of contents, indexes, footnotes, and marginalia might become lost within hypertext systems. As databases grow, navigational tools such as the global map of links and documents and the history of paths taken, though complex themselves, become necessary. Several intersting studies seem to suggest that "the hypertext structure places an extra burden on the reader in terms of navigation and consequently leads to poorer performance". And with the advent of hypertext "it has become widely accepted that the departure from the so-called linear structure of paper increases the likelihood of readers or users of getting lost".

- cognitive overload: users are presented with so much information that their human circuits burst with cognitive overload. While reading through a document, choices must constantly be made about which links to follow and which to ignore. Following several paths at once may lead to the navigation problem described above.

- re-thinking several concepts: that hypertext revolution either take by granted or assume the hypertext revolution will eventually lead them to change. This is the case of big concepts like: privacy, commerce or rethorics.
Privacy matters is becoming a huge issue among one of the best-known social networks on the Internet: Facebook, as the terms of use are being constantly and highly critized by users and even by government institutions. This problem might seem an "involution", rather than a "revolution" of the hypertext (not the hypertext by itself, but a bad consequence of its development).
The e-commerce, which consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems using hypertext, has not been revolutionary in the sense it has not changed commercial relationships between user/buyer-user/seller.
At the same time, concepts such as rethorics or aesthetics haven't either been altered by the hypertext systems (the Internet has not changed the form of the written word and the motion picture), unlike some of hypertext utopian conceptions might suggest.

BEHIND THE HYPE -phase 2 project

behind the hyper -dystopia of the hypertext

I'm really excited working on new ideas about the phase 2. Finally I decided to make a video replying, in a way, the "The Machine is Us/ing us" and, thus, create a "dystopia of the hypertext" by focusing on the limitations and disfunctions of the hypertext/media revolution.

Following some of the ideas posted before in the brainstorming list, I think I'm going to do a story-line with everything I want to say (introduction-ideas-conclusion) and then translate that into images to make the video.

I've thought about doing this using "stickmen", because there are plenty of hilarious stickmen on youtube that may be useful!! Also, the idea of the stickmen might help people understand these concepts (which are difficult to translate into image-language) and, at the same time, it makes me easier to focus the story with a protagonist doing things (jumping, clicking, writing, thinking, being lost...). I guess I will have to post more in the blog regarding the ideas I want to express, but my main conclusion will go in this direction:


Re: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

i got an idea! -phase 2

After talking to Nadine about my ideas on phase 2... I knew I had to re-arrange everything in order to make my video more specific. The videos I linked in the previous post are amazing, but because they express their ideas in such a strong and powerful ways... it's really hard to use them in order to change their meanings or to do something different -adding another perspective. Doing another video about the same (how cool the hypertext is!), without any original material would not make any sense.

That's why I've been thinking about my project (or rather, re-thinking) and kind of decided to focus on the idea of hypertext as a dystopia. I've been reading some texts concerning hypertext revolution that deal with the idea (at least, tangentially) of the limits of the hypertext. That is the case of this text, and also this one.

I'm still on the idea process, so I show you some of the brainstorming ideas I made last nigh:

getting lost
broken links
links that don't go where you expected
missing information
making non-sense associations (forcing the association)/ false forkings
clicking here and here / the feeling of being active, rather than real activity
the idea of chaos and principle of casuality
fragmentation / incoherence / spontaneity / aleatority
immediaty / inestability / randomness

back! -phase 2 going on...

Well, after this HUGE break, Jorkjeimer's blog is back! I have been certainly out of the loop on the electronic landscape course and all the material, and it's hard to get back on track again... but I have some ideas I would like to post here, just to see how things are progressively coming out...

I focused my phase 1 on the ideas of hyperfiction, specially in the way it claimed an active role in regards with the reader/user, and thus confronted the two main opposite ideas/theories that have been coming around the hypertext literature over the past 50 years. In the same way, my in-class presentation dealt with the kind of the same ideas, since it was an analysis making an interrelation between 3 very important texts on hypertext theories (from technological, biological and literary perspectives).

My idea for the phase 2 of the project is to keep on the same track, and make a video about the hypertext! I've found several videos on Youtube on this matter, and they're really good! Here I show you 2 of them, which I'm sure I will use at some point in my final version...


The Machine is Us/ing Us




Information R/evolution




Both of the videos explore the more or less the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information... with the hypertext revolution (the future of the Web and the skills needed to harness, evalute and create information effectively). Just right after being searching a bit about this issue, I found out the videos are made by the same person! -I reached them through different ways, though-. It happens to be an hypertext professor from Kansas University, who is apparently an expert in hypertext and digital information issues.

I would like to follow this idea, but I still need to think more about it... -as you may see, I've changed my mind about what I was planning to do (on surrealist cinema and the panopticon theory) before the strike started.