Sunday, October 30, 2005
Syracuse
With much shout out to Collin for arrangments, we get to give a talk this week at Syracuse.
Posted by jrice @ 10:53 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Posted by jrice @ 08:19 PM EST [Link]
Patterns
Patterns, McLuhan noted, are the basis of new media grammar. In the ever connected global village, we find patterns emerging out of the information overloaded systems we participate in.
Thus, The I/O Brush prototype makes sense. Painting with patterns. Video also here. This idea takes Photoshop's Clone Stamp Tool into our everyday world.
Posted by jrice @ 05:31 PM EST [Link]
Friday, October 28, 2005
Hufu
Mmmmmm. Hufu.
Posted by jrice @ 08:43 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Writing
But I also think a lot about the courses I teach; I think about the students who come in, who are asked to write, who listen to me discuss processes and idea development, research and discovery, details, connections, and patterns, and in the end say: "I don't know what to write."
It hasn't been awhile for them. It's been never.
The fallacy of "basic writing" or levels of writing courses (first you take first year writing, then intermediate, then. . . .) is that it fails to recognize the need to write first of all. Confusion of ability ("Our students can't write") and the conditions of writing (materiality, desire, work habits, response, reflection) is seldom, if ever, deconstructed. WPAs have failed here as well because they continue to find comfort in standardized testing (when they react, it is not to the concept but to a desire to expand the concept), placement exams, observation over production (not to mention hostility towards technological innovations that bring writing more openly into our work), and so on. None of these acts deals with writing. When we sit back and wonder: what happened here, why are you not engaged, why do you only report a few points, why can’t you form connections, why can’t you talk openly about your work, why don’t you have a sense of inquiry, why are you distant from your work, we are saying: “Why have you never wanted or been show what it means to write?”
Some of this is the question of perception. McLuhan aptly noted that new media expands our senses of perception so that media works us over completely. It is the exposure to all kinds of ideas and thoughts and experiences at once - like the Web, like the emerging world of social software and social browsers, like what CNN was to be at first - that makes that limited fixed point of perception yield to a networked interlinking world. But pedagogy, and here I mean pedagogy in its "traditional” or “high school working towards the state’s standardized service” or “first year curricula made the same across the board for all” is still stuck in the fixed perspective.
There isn’t basic writing. There’s basic teaching.
He said.. Then he wrote it down.
Posted by jrice @ 08:45 AM EST [Link]
Monday, October 24, 2005
Return of the Blog-J
For no particular reason.
Posted by jrice @ 10:06 PM EST [Link]
Otis
Scan from a record cover the girl gave me last weekend.
Otis Redding's face as a collage of clippings and images. New media portraiture. You are the images and texts written about you/made of you. You are the reference of textuality. Coupled with the moment of celebrity, the new media portrait makes even more sense. Unlike Warhol, you don't need to use another's image. You use your own. The blog makes this gesture all the more explicit.
Posted by jrice @ 01:34 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Weekend at Bernie's
Posted by jrice @ 10:36 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
7020 Winter 2006
With a little push from Cindy, I am noting tentative description and course readings for next semester's 7020: Theories of the Digital. The description is still rough and readings can just as likely change or be reduced (or added to - particularly the last section) in number.
Theories of the Digital
This course poses the idea that there are theories (as opposed to a theory) of digital culture and production. Theories which deal with technology, new media, rhetoric, and writing often conflict as well as compliment each other. The semester will be spent investigating some prominent and influential ideas regarding the digital. Some of these ideas will explicitly address new media through recognition of the apparatus which shapes the digital. Others will more implicitly address the issues at stake as we struggle to understand how, as Marshall McLuhan notes, media work us over completely. Our purpose will be to appropriate from these ideas in order to construct a methodology, practice, or additional position on new media and digital culture.
Possible readings by course section:
The Structure of New Media
Understanding Media
The Postmodern Condition
Remediation
Collected Voices on New Media
Eloquent Images
Digital Media Revisited
The Web and TV
Small Pieces Loosely Joined
Everything Bad is Good for You
The Language of New Media
The Language of New Media
Writing Machines
The Practices of New Media
Media ecologies : Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture
Teletheory
Posted by jrice @ 10:10 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Simpsons Made Up Words
From the you know what a - pedia, made up Simpsons words.
Made up Yellow Dog words and phrases:
Posted by jrice @ 08:27 PM EST [Link]
Monday, October 17, 2005
Ok academic bloggers. Let's start getting intellectual. No carnivals. No circus. No Inside Higher Ed griping. Just straight up trash talk. What are you working on and when are you going to put it out there for discussion? Come out of the paper writing closet.
Posted by jrice @ 10:02 PM EST [Link]
Friday, October 14, 2005
New blog logo (BLOGO!) courtesy of the girl who just arrived.
Posted by jrice @ 02:40 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Detroit Day
Image I'm working on for an upcoming talk called "Detroit Folksono(me)":
In the encounter of place, what is real and what is imagined?
In the rhetoric of place, isn't it all imagined?
Posted by jrice @ 08:14 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Highland Park
Posted by jrice @ 11:12 AM EST [Link]
Monday, October 10, 2005
Posted by jrice @ 10:33 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Thoughts for the Practicum: James Berlin's Social-Epistemic as New Media
From Seeing & Writing, an assignment structured around Joel Sternfeld's "Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan":
In place of the textbook's prompts, Image as Social-Epistemic (without resorting to race/class/gender):
Posted by jrice @ 03:36 PM EST [Link]
Warren Avenue Sunday Morning
Posted by jrice @ 11:45 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, October 8, 2005
Webdentity
Yesterday, Collin posted about Identity 2.0, a plan to standardize identity-security for a variety of transactions across the Web. The idea of uniting all of our identies in one place is comforting for certain reasons (business transactions, identity theft), but also scary (see the meme going around the Web about a guy ordering pizza and having his whole life, consuming habits, health, credit being reviewed by the pizza order person). Another part of this is: why would I want one identity when so many of me floats around by my choice or by another's choice. I am the Other, right? Or as Whitman told us: I am bad/I am good/I am the free/I am the opressed, and so on.
This spam I received today is revealing for how it shifts the literary obsession with identity to the cyber in terms of multiple I(s):
Good day to you,My name is Jeffrey Rice, I am the credit manager with a bank here in the
United Kingdom. I am contacting you in respect of the transfer of a
huge sum of money from the account of a deceased client. Though I know that
a transaction of this nature and magnitude will make any one
apprehensive and worried, I
am assuring you that everything has been taken care of, and you have
nothing to fear at all and i would be very glad if you would allow
me bring you to a clearer picture of what is on ground, what we
intend to do and how we intend to do it.
Aha! Another me. He signs his name two ways: the email the spam comes from - jeffryrice@msn.com - and another email he concludes with - jeffreyrice1950@myway.com. Neither comes up on Google, which is odd in some way because am I the only "Jeffrey Rice" who has received this spam? I am not the only one in the world (and odd enough, another has since started the PhD program at UF where I did my PhD! There will be two Jeff Rice(s) with PhDs in English from UF! A mutiny of academic excllence is on the way!). The person who writes to me here exists/does not exist.
This enquiry involves a client who shares your surname.
It was brought to my knowledge that the aforementioned
client died intestate and nominated no next of kin to the title
over the investments made with the Bank. We came to know of you via
the London. Global. Database.Center (L.G.D.C.)
Aha! Not only does the person making the query have my name, but the person who this person works for (and now that he is dead there are obviously all kinds of big bucks for me) has my name! Has the whole world adopted my name?
Or is webdentity the endless inheritance of one's name? Like Alan Berliner googling his name as prelude to a documentary on himself and the name, we inherit ourselves each time we type to the Web (I am I am I am I is I are I was I were - kind of Moby Dick grammar for the Web). The true gift economy. I give myself away each time I type. I give myself away and come back different. <I href="">
Spam is just the repeatability of all our previous gestures: futile and productive as they may be. I may eventually standardize my identity on Identity 2.0 or some other platform - but the irrationality of identity, which spam foregrounds, will always make such efforts somewhat incomplete.
Posted by jrice @ 11:45 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
Posted by jrice @ 09:27 PM EST [Link]
Ferndale Cemeteries
Posted by jrice @ 01:31 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, October 2, 2005
In The Window of the Ferndale Dollar Store
Posted by jrice @ 03:48 PM EST [Link]
