Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project

http://www.deadmedia.org/

aesthetics of decay

William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops
Bill Morrison, Decasia
Alvin Lucier, I am Sitting in a Room
William Gibson, Agrippa

Related:
Eduardo Kac, Genesis

transmission of pictorial information [continued]

1. Laocoon: words and images
2. visual telephone
3. Turntablist Transcription Methodology (TTM) aka scratch notation
4. TTM homepage
5. Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing #132, 1972
6. Wall Drawing #811, c. 1970
7. Dance Notation
8. history of musical notation

transmission of pictorial information

"Pictures are special cases. Pictures are problems," writes Morris Eaves, a historian of technology. This week we look at why, according to Eaves, the "historical demand for pictures has always outstripped supply."

"The history of art criticism in the last five hundred years has seen an accelerating shift from discourse designed to work with the object unavailable, to discourse assuming at least a reproduced presence of the object." Michael Baxandall, _Patterns of Intention_.


Titian: The Worship of Venus
Titian: Bacchanal of the Andrians
More Titian links
Blake: "Infant Joy" (plate 25 SIE copy Z)
image reconstitution again
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Laocoon sculptural grouping
Laocoon engravings
Alvin Lucier Sitting in a Room mp3
Alvin Lucier
vectors on a grecian urn
Wordseye: Text to Image Conversion
Sweet Dreams by Johanna Drucker (image description)

Resources and models for research

Mario Ascencio, the Art and Visual Technology librarian at GMU, has created a web site that includes links to and information on finding aids, indexes, databases, image collections, handbooks, dictionaries, and other print- and web-based resources for research in the visual arts. Most of the entries are concisely annotated.

Mark Grimsley talks about the blog as a research tool.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a good Art History resource page.

What a Creative Commons License Looks Like

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

The Wayback Machine and the integrity of the historical record

--President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended (offical whitehouse.gov pages)
--President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended (Wayback Machine)
:: John Kerry for President -- A New Era of National Service :: (Wayback Machine)
--JohnKerry.com - Page Not Found (404) (official John Kerry campaign pages)

nothing new under the sun

"She [reflected] on how many, many sentences have been worn smooth with use, rendered meaningless by centuries of repetition." --Spider Robinson, "Melancholy Elephants"

This week we're talking about a nexus of ideas: intellectual property, plagiarism, artistic creation, remixing, and sampling.

Here are discussion links:

--Spider Robinson (author of "Melancholy Elephants") - Wikipedia entry
--Boing Boing: Stop sketching, little girl -- those paintings are copyrighted!
--Boing Boing: Alien v Predator script saved by Internet pirates
--William S. Burroughs Les Voleurs
--william s. burroughs cutup machine
--U.S. Copyright Office
--U.S. Copyright Information Circular on Derivative Works
--Musical Borrowing Bibliography
--The History of Sampling
--Wired 13.07: God's Little Toys
--St. Jerome: Composing? Copying? Both?
--Negativland: Intellectual Property Issues
--DJ Dangermouse - The Grey Album: google at your own risk ;-)
--A Guide to the Visual Artists Rights Act

--Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory

Sherrie Levine:
sherrie levine
AfterSherrieLevine.com
Deciding the Fate of Sherrie Levine

social classification . . .

. . . also known as ethnoclassification, folksonomies, cooperative classification, and distributed classification.

del.icio.us: A Social Bookmarking Tool
Flickr: Photo Sharing
CiteULike: A free online service to organise your academic papers (combines traditional metadata with social classification)

how search engines work

This week we're talking about search engines, pageranks, spam, bots, spiders, and stop words. Here are some links:

: :BBC NEWS | Technology | How spammers are targeting blogs
: :Wired 12.03: The Complete Guide to Googlemania!
: :The Anatomy of a Search Engine
: :Google Toolbar
: :PageRank for sale
: :What are stop words?
: :More on stop words
: :BananaSlug: add a random word to your search query
: :CompletePlanet: search the deep web
: :The Internet Archive Wayback Machine: "search the Web as it was"
: :PageRank is Dead (by Jeremy Zawodny)
: :Pew Internet & American Life Project: Search Engine Users
Boing Boing: Desperate Ken Lay paying search-engines to return links to his "version" of Enron
Liz Lawley: sponsored blog post Archives

blogging for rookies

Blog links to help shorten the learning curve:

Blogger
Movable Type
Typepad
Live Journal
WordPress
MSN Spaces


--For an excellent definition of "blog," see Jill Walker's entry for the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.

--Blogger has extensive help documentation and a virtual tour of their service.

--Miriam Jones has posted some useful blogging links on her own wonderful blog.

--Mark Bernstein has written what has become a canonical essay about blogging.

--Liz Lawley writes about blogs as social software.

--Mark Grimsley writes about the symbiosis between blogging and scholarship.

--Matthew Kirschenbaum enlists his readers' help in cataloguing some of the professional rewards of blogging.


Blogging is about what Claire MacDonald calls "making writing": "stepping back from doing writing, thinking about what it looks like and how to handle it as material. All text has texture. It feels, looks, and sounds different in different places. Spellings change with context; even fonts affect our emotions. The language we use shifts its ground as we speak and write."

Experimental blogging/great writing/making writing:
Jane Pinckard (allegory)
KF (metaphor)
KF (ellipsis/demonstrative pronouns)
William Gibson: "Mr. Buk's Window"


So what else is a blog?

Jason Rhody:
sagging skin in need of fleshing out

Matt Kirschenbaum:
a public workbench

Eloise Oyzon:
external memory
a fractal

John Hiler:
Borg journalism

Julian Dibbel:
cabinet of curiosities, or Wunderkammer

Mark Dery:
viral journalism
"the closest thing we have to telepathy"
a Cornell box
a front-row seat to the movies projected on the inside of other people's heads

Richard MacManus:
a turntable for scratching and remixing information
a braindump

Stumbled across any apt/cool/bizarro/left-field blog metaphors lately? Or composed one of your own? Please let me know in the comments to this post or in an email sent to kkru{at}mail{dot}rochester{dot}edu


Student posts:
Pat Kelly: image description
Michael Fugate: FCRemix
Kathleen Morimoto: phonograph
Leslie: cut-up
Lee: LOC visit