les tombeaux – ePoetica http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium an electronic literature symposium Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:29:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.2 final, finally http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=85 http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=85#comments Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:29:29 +0000 http://www.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/2007/11/27/final-finally/ Continue reading final, finally]]> , and as for insights, i have re-embraced the trajectory of timing as both forward-moving and back-burning, a re-cognition of the re-petition suggested by Sigmund as a compulsive propulsion of the melancholic I amand embrace that toobut it is life (and death) rather than projects that have situated me within my subject-poem yet again (though that too is timing, opportune or tragic, take your pick)the ruptured text, the marking of the edges of the void, the attraction and repulsion of the ache of loss necessitates itself, rears up and roars itself, meeks and moans, insinuates itself into one’s own (my own) experience of loss and losing (yet again) – hypertext? fer reals now. these texts are hyper in deed… manic, frenetic, frantic… moving all over the map like memory does, jumping in and out of tale and tone and never letting the sentence or the story end, completely. just keep moving keep it moving if we can keep it from closing we can keep it from the end…is near. is here!dead links… access denied… electronic mediums and virtual lives… i started blogging my death drive, my danse macabre, hoping to create from the emergent links and topics a rhizomatic map of memory, text, image and absence – a paper without paper, a text that shifts and changes for each reader, a prohibitive interactivity, an invisibly guided maze-walk into the dead ends and dark corners of a performative, gothic, fractured (but of course) personal, visual narrative…just tracing the edges is all i could ever do.just creating ideas of traces – plans for the maps.(like mallarmé could only write notes towards a poem – never the poem)though partially (substantively) due to the impossibility of grasping an absence, much of this particular failure is simply technical… i am lacking the ‘bridge’ building material Jason refers to… my knowledge of creating functioning hypertexts is based in myspace-styled html, <img src=”…”>, and other cutnpaste codes easily googled or otherwise gleaned from trial and error…yes, this is how we learn things. sure, what i want to do could easily be done. but i don’t want to spend my time learning the rudiments of what others expertise… calling the perfect collective: the painter, the moldmaker, the mechanic, the tech wiz, the promoter, the manager, the seamstress, the chef…

Und heute rufst Du alle Superhelden,alle großen Meister, alle Highlander,alle Krieger, alle guten Geister,alle Superfreaks und Auserwähltenund mich ins Hier Du hast millionenLegionen hinter dir

instead – i’ve been painting lately. another practice perhaps best left to experts but i find that pushing paint around is like my recent walking of the city – slow going, meditative, rhythmic and physical. sometimes i make an errant mark and my finger plunges towards an imaginary undo apple-z. it’s been years since the smell of oils and turps has seeped into the air of my ‘studio’ space. it’s not just an office anymore, and pleases me. this has always been fundamental to both my attraction and repulsion towards the digital experience – discorporealizing.mourning, facing death – wading the abyss – first expells ‘me’ from ‘my body’ and i take refuge in the placelessness of information, codes and pixellated texts. (we continue leaving comments on his myspace page long after he last logged in) …later, ‘i’ need to convince ‘myself’ that i still hold a space in the material of the moving world. like all good projects, this one leaves me (and has always been departing from my space to no-place) with more questions than i’d began with. how to bridge the digital – material ‘divide’? how to embody information? hyperlink in actual space? who’s gonna be on my A-team? who do you play in the ‘real’ world? what happens next? and what’s the first step? 

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Week 4: Responding to Lori and Zephyr http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=73 http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=73#comments Fri, 03 Aug 2007 18:51:56 +0000 http://www.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/2007/08/03/week-4-responding-to-lori-and-zephyr/ Continue reading Week 4: Responding to Lori and Zephyr]]> I was planning to respond to the assignment for week 4, focusing on the ideas that I had been developing over the last several weeks.  I found postings by Lori and Zephyr, and my path, quite appropriately, forked away from what I had intended to write about to something new.

Reading Lori’s entry on Karpinski and Howe’s open.ended,  which  ties previous discussions about three-dimensionality to the current one about chance, I was reminded of a work which I had forgotten about, but which I want to share: Brooke M. Campbell’s Choose Your Own Sexuality from Rhizomes 8.  Campbell’s piece combines poetry, biography, and history under the familiar form of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel to create a queer biography of Emily Dickinson.  Campbell’s piece takes seriously the implications of queer scholarship, shedding light on the general import of such work:  The author is often just as much what he or she is as what he or she isn’t and that creative works reflect this similar tension.  Decision-making is not simply the rational evaluation of two choices, rather they are heavily laden with cultural expectations, social frameworks, habits, law, and deep desires.  Though Campbell’s piece uses the familiar framework of binary choices, the fact that Campbell’s piece is based on actual historical events loads the choices up with the questions: “What happened?” and “What do we want to happen?”  The effect is not to simply fork the work, but to play in the imaginative spaces between the choices, to speculate about possibility.

A similar experience in narrative forking is Scott McCloud’s Choose Your Own Carl, a fairly straightforward, early, and lo-fi experiment in digital comic.  Inspired by Zephyr’s comment on Lori’s piece, I was inspired to revisit McCloud’s online comics, and found them to remain interesting, particularly because they employ forking in a way that allows the reader to view both “choices” at once.  [As a sidenote: McCloud’s The Right Number  does not explore forking formally, but it does a great job addressing this experience in the narrative.] .

Zephyr’s entry on “chance timing” shifted my focus towards another aspect of chance.  While Lori’s piece focused on chance as a process of unfolding in the present time, Zephyr’s piece considers chance as a process of recursion [The video, by the way, managed to push so many buttons–dread, fear, happiness, regret, sadness–what an accomplishment.].  So often in life, our experience of the variable is not a process of unfolding as much as it’s an experience of reflection.  What happened?  What did I do?  What might I have done?  What should I have done?  Chance is experienced is a process of reflection, in which we meditate upon how now might have been different.  Or why now is the way it is.

To bring this back to Neruda’s “Ode to Broken Things” is a challenge.  Thinking about Campbell’s Dickinson, for example, I might consider the fact that poet’s work is simply an expression of larger life experiences.  I could write a fork in which Neruda’s poem doesn’t exist.  Something never happened, he was never inspired, it was never written.  Or, I could introduce an internal variable to the piece: A shift in attitude or a shift in narrative structure.  Perhaps I could ditch the speaker’s apparent peace with the continual breakdown of things, and heap blame upon the “hands,” “girls,” “hips,” and “ankles.”  I could turn the poem towards anxiety, frustration, and anger.  Or, I could alter the proposed human action of the final stanza, “Let’s not put all our treasures together…”  None of which makes a great deal of sense or sound particularly appealing.

But to reflect upon the piece might simply be enough—to cling to the writer’s commitments, because those are the only ones that we have.  And, if I had to apply to look at how this insight might work in the field of new media, and I see it clearly addressed in MotionText Ferment by mIEKAL aND and CamillE BacoS.  A combination of texts in a variety of formats drawn together to meditate on the notion of lost knowledge, dead languages, destroyed formats, and vanished cultures.  From history’s dead ends, MotionText Ferment reaches for the living, as if to suggest that we are all just a hair’s breadth away from annihilation in this renewed era of burning books, cultural imperialism, war, and accelerated technological obsolescence.   Here, things aren’t broken by “invisible deliberate smashers,” but by deliberate forces.  In spite of this difference, both pieces are chances to see things differently.  Neruda accomplishes this through his writing, mIEKAL aND and CamillE BacoS accomplish this through theirs.  The strength of much good hypermedia spins on this potential to provoke reflection in readers—buttons, images, sounds, motion, time—all must function like words to promote this end.

And, to revisit the insights gained from Lori and Zephyr’s pieces, good hypermedia does not necessarily give us choices.  It gives us depth.  It allows us to experience richly.  Sometimes this is accomplished through a nonlinear processes, sometimes through linearity, but they always seem to provide windows into the nonlinear, subjective realm of the reader’s reflection.

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week 4.1: chance timing (atmospheric context) http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=72 http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=72#comments Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:59:35 +0000 http://www.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/2007/08/01/week-41-chance-timing-atmospheric-context/ Continue reading week 4.1: chance timing (atmospheric context)]]> the first video work i made, i made from footage of kelsey’s funeral set to a soundtrack of billy idol.

My mom comes and brings a vhs recorded with Kelsey’s memorial service. Why do we call it hers? Ours, about Kels (’over my dead body’). None of us have ever watched it. I take it to school, turn off the monitor and dub it to DVD. Then watch it one night in my basement studio, lights off, lying on the futon, blanket on.

i didn’t know – and couldn’t be bothered to learn – how to rip right from the DVD. so i filmed it again on my (cracked) computer screen, mini dv camera balanced on a beer bottle and a stack of books – as am, often, i. an aesthetic was born: lo-fi, rascuache and hand-made-for-youtube style.

Editing. The more I clip and playback the further the distance between the white-faced 23 year old with the hollow eyes and skeletal shadows and the me that’s like, ‘hey Chris can you do me a favor? Film me dancing around and singing to billy idol? It’s kinda weird but it’s to edit over the film from the funeral… you know, ‘hey little sister, what have you done?’

i’m into all the the youtube tropes – the music videos, the narcissistic (self-conscious) metubes, the i.movie edits, the bedroom girls – and i can claim my interest’s academic (it is – somewhat – so i do) but the youtube context (which is a separate theatre from the one i set to screen these works in) also works to disable any academic reading (comments & responses).

one of the most intriguing aspects of contexts such as youtube – such as livejournal, myspace, blogspot and so on – is the publicizing of ‘the private.’

death is a private affair. aren’t most affairs private? don’t they often start and end in public, though? i upload the evidence of my romance with death to explore the connections between ‘our’ fascination with voyeurism (personal, pornographic, violent or vitriolic), ‘our’ exhibitionist, group-therapy think-out, ‘our’ cathartic acts of record and replay.

to revisit death by video, to edit loss, reflects my process of memory and memorial, and speaks to and about the process itself. it repeats and it distances. reminds and cuts out. i work with little intention (just make something, anything, from this) – rely on chance encounters with timing, tuning, imagery. there are moments when two tracks (or more) align just-so, seemingly at random, and sense is made, momentarily. that sense-making, meaning-making moment, motivates the next motion taken.how to describe a process? to play it, and/or play it out.

To refer to death as a creative process does not imply that it is attractive or even ‘artistic.’ We humans have an instinctual aversion to the sweet, sickly effusions that decomposition produces. Yet this stage is necessary before the cleansed, aesthetically comfortable ‘bare bones’ state can be attained…

Mary Bradbury writes that the split between what is real and what is theatre is patricularly hazy in the social organization of death, as certain aspects of this organization are highly ritualistic in character: the funeral, the burial, even the embalming of the body are all performative traditions…

Academic attachment became elusive – instead, we reverberated, echoing the emotions of loss and reclamation that we purported to investigate impassively, and performing exuberant grieving as playfulness infiltrated the pathos and sadness that had marked our individual mourning practices…

All we may expect of time is its reversbility. Speed and acceleration are merely the dream of making time reversible. You hope that by speeding up time, it will start to whirl like a fluid…The imagination is scarcely any better equipped to appreciate reversibility than the person who has never slept would be to appreciate dreaming. And yet we experience in it that electrocution of time we call predestination. The signs exchanged in the process are instant conductors unaffected by the resistance of time. Certain linguistic fragments run back along the path of language and collide with others in the witticism, dazzling reversibility of the terms of language. In this they fulfil an unexpected destiny, their specific destiny as words, conforming to the predestination of language.– Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

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week 3-1: 2 Samuel 18:33 (atmosphere) http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=70 Wed, 01 Aug 2007 05:58:29 +0000 http://www.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/2007/07/31/week-3-1-2-samuel-1833-atmosphere/ Continue reading week 3-1: 2 Samuel 18:33 (atmosphere)]]> my son, my son

You can, with your little hands, drag me into your grave -you have the right — I myself who am joined with you, I let myself go — but if you wish, the two of us, let us make… an alliance -a hymen, magnifcent – and the life left in me I will use to…- so not mother then?ceremony – coffin – etc.there we saw (the father) the whole material side – which lets us tell ourselves at need – ah! well yes! it is all there – no fear for me thinking of something else (the reformation of his spirit, which is eternal – can wait (granted but eternity through my life)_____father -shape his spirit (he absent, alas! as we would have shaped him better present but sometimes when it all seems to be going too well – as an ideal – cry out – in the mother’s tone, she who has become attentive – This is not enoughI want him, him – and not me – 

my dad first introduced me to eric whitacre on the westernmost tip of portugal, in april of 2004, more or less 5 weeks before the cabrillo college chorus sang ‘i thank you god for most this amazing day’ at my sister’s funeral.

hold onto that moment then – before but foreboding. i sat on the edge of the cliff in the sun and the wind and listened. for days before i’d been stricken with most horrible plummeting feelings of wrong/wrong/all wrong, stuck/angry/lashing out at him (on holiday) until i got the email (in the whitewashed shop) that kelsey was in the hospital and as i rushed heavily through the town to find him to tell him, i fit again (though cobblestoned) – it wasn’t me i felt but her. i felt better knowing why i’d felt so bad. and dad -he tried to get a flight back to london that day, or the next, but couldn’t. so we drove to sagres instead. to the cliffs. each town in and out, fumbling with quarters for phone booths – how much has mobile technology changed since even then – the time difference, time lapse. somehow we came to a little cove. it was still the off-season. we were out of time, but i felt at home there. the algarve is roughly the same latitude as santa cruz, and there was something about the air there – and the ocean, though atlantic, pacific. so i was pacified, momentarily. suspended on the brink of the big sink (or swim).

and you his sister, you who one day – (this gulf open since his death and which will follow us to ours – when we have gone down your mother and I) must one day reunite all three of us in your thought, your memory_____- just as in a single tombyou who, in due time, will come upon this tomb, not made for you -PrSun down and windgold gone, and wind of nothingness blowing (this, the modern void)? 

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week 2-1: contextualizing timing http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=66 http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=66#comments Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:39:50 +0000 http://www.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/2007/07/21/week-2-1-contextualizing-timing/ Continue reading week 2-1: contextualizing timing]]> despite pervasive feelings of low-level guilt associated with my hiatus from the texts of this hyper space // it occurs to me that this too is the context of my involvement with Mallarmé’s tombeau… and hiswe startwe start againwe move in on it, towards poeticizing it, to shape the shape of it (but it bleeds/escapes embodiment)the timeline moves (and movies) like a ribbon (anachronistically: film reels), i take her dv camera out one day and tape (billy has a word for these words, what was it? i must ask him when he returns) the drive out to the cliff (but you must wait for this, for me to upload/edit/upload and move back again (yet forward) in time to week one : timing (which is its context too, and atmosphere as well)to here: which is where context exploded into realtime, into space (and escape):Contextualizing (time and place)“more soon”

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week 1.1: or: ordinary Poem http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=14 http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=14#comments Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:14:04 +0000 http://www.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=14 Continue reading week 1.1: or: ordinary Poem]]> [f. 82]
or: ordinary Poem

It is true – you have struck me and you have chosen your wound well –
– etc. – but

today i rode mom’s bike down to seabright beach after swimming with Paitra, after the chaos and fire of the 4th, last night – to meet David, lying in the sand – “looks like the fog’s coming in, though, you still gonna be down there?
/yeah, I’ll be with my Harry Potter til my nipples freeze
/alright then see you then” – I brought the Tombeau, but found I couldn’t read it then.
to everything turn turn turn…
Space/time.
his two eyes are watching me, they are enough – already taken by absence and the gulf –
bring everything to this?
David read to me from HP and the Half Blood Prince instead. I watched the currents of wind and fog rush in and over us from the south, til the sun diluted into mist and we crept up the beach to bikes and the Seabright Brewery.
This time: today, after, after, last, coming in, still, til, then, then, then, time, already, current, over, til, past tenses.

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week 1.0: “The poetry of the undecidable” http://cms.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=11 Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:01:35 +0000 http://www.hyperrhiz.net/symposium/?p=11 Continue reading week 1.0: “The poetry of the undecidable”]]> Stéphane Mallarmé: Pour un tombeau d’Anatole/For Anatole’s tomb :Patrick McGuinness, trans.

(first. this is not a poem, and Mallarmé did not call it anything in particular (though it calls/calls out)… Rather: “notes towards a poem.” and these: away from (the poem). Not a work in progress: progressing where? But processioning, processing. Professing. “Less something finished than something unbegun” (writes the translator). Scraps of almosts– returning again (and never) to the crux of it– oh impossible empty. Time, and Again.)

there is a time in Existence in which we will find each other again, if not a place

and if you doubt that the world will be the witness, supposing I live to be old enough —

une époque

où nous nous retrouverons

désolé, je ne parle pas le français. but i am drawn to equivalencies, so-called.

your future which has taken refuge in me. how can I (can I) begin to move my hands around, gesticulate the way this resonates within me. Your future :nowhere/nothing/not. Thus: your future (for ‘you,’ futureless subject, are neither either…)

Thus far: first, progress, procession, processing, -ing, finished, unbegun, almost, returning, time, again, time, again, old, future, begin, futureless.

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