The diagram series is a collection of poems by Jim Rosenberg made within the constraints of an object made of computer generated symbols. Most likely, the poems are to be read on a linear path from top to bottom. The poem I will be focusing on is diagram 4.2. Diagram 4.2 consists of a set of verses, traveling down three paths, on either side of the objects and down the middle. Due to the placement of these verses, particularly with stanzas being parallel to one another, it is difficult to know what order to read the poem. One strategy I’ve used is to pick a side and read straight through. In this strategy, the middle row stanzas will be read for either poem. Sadly, using this strategy, there is no apparent set rhythm or unified message.

At this point the art work takes the role of rhythm or at the very least direction. Based on Rosenberg’s object design, the shapes, and path of shapes, cause the viewer to want to read the poem in a traditional linear fashion. The code or pattern in this work is both transparent and opaque. We can understand how Rosenberg wants us to read the poem through the combining of an artful structure and text, but ultimately the poem is incomprehensible. Aesthetically, the work is confusing. More questions than answers are revealed.

Hello all! In this blog post I want to extend my analysis of the piece “Frequently Asked Questions about "Hypertext"” by Richard Holeton. Specifically I want to look at how the degeneration of a coherent narrative (and narrator) makes room for the play of code and dialogue with the reader.

While there appears to be nothing overtly strange in the structure of the faq, the content soon undermines this stability. As the reader progresses through the categories the creator of the faq seems less and less reliable. Often over justifying his position, and having long tangents dissolving into schizophrenic associations between paragraphs (for example, a paragraph may briefly mention Southpark and then the next will take Southpark as its subject matter), the creator of the FAQ seems to undermine his knowledge of the poem and its origins at the level of articulation . The only way to understand the faq for “Hypertext” then is through this suspicious narrator, and the reader must distrust the linear narrative and piece together many incongruous bits. This act of rearranging in fact mimics the poem “Hypertext”, which is an anagram-turned-poem of all the possible new meanings from the word Hypertext (though it should be mentioned that this same creator gives us this insight).

Vpoem 14 by Ladislao Pablo Gyori begins with an introduction to the thoughts of the artist as he was constructing his work:

"Assume the function of destruction and decomposition, but as an accomplishment and not as a negation of being'.

Is there any way you could respond to/interpret these themes in order to produce some virtual works?"

From there, the artist throws up a background of infinite darkness, and constructs a play of words upon it, twisting the viewer's perspective on many axis, even as our perspective of each word changes. The code here is not initially transparent, but the artist's idea reveals itself like an onion with a bit of applied thinking.

First we must consider the obvious: we see words being thrown around, suffixes attached, prefixes, sometimes two or more are cut-and-pasted, but always proceeding with an understandable connection. I was immediately reminded of a thesaurus, and, what's more, the synapses of the brain. Certainly, if you've ever uttered a non sequitur, you are aware that although your train of thought appears to be disjointed, there was something that bridged the gap between the thoughts. This unusual connection is how our mind can put unfamiliar thoughts together, and is a step in the learning process. The more connections you have between synapses, the easier your brain can access ideas--which reminded me of code. Essentially, codes are a relationship between one (usually obscure) thought to another. If they weren't, cryptographers would be unable to break them. Even if their relationship is trillions of steps apart (like in the Enigma machine), they are still related.

Secondly, the actual computer/program coding that went on behind the scenes of this video provides an intriguing layer to what is already interesting.

I am among the lucky number of UMW students who have an on-campus job, and even rarer, I enjoy it! I work for the Department of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT). Contrary to popular belief, we don't fix your computer (or the classroom projectors). Rather, we focus on keeping UMW at the forefront of the digital world, and one of our biggest accomplishments has been UMWBlogs. I was recently asked by Jim Groom (who blogs, moans, and bitches over at bavatuesdays--if you can't tell, I'm really hoping he'll read this. :P) to comb the UMWBlogs in an effort to encourage discussion and facilitate awareness among users of the digital community in which they live. (No person is an island when they float on the Internet, though at times we forget.) In doing this, I came across Groom's COMPSCI class Digital Storytelling, which at first confused and then fascinated me.

I am very interested in the way in which, code, and, language, are similar, practically the same in my eyes. Code and language are most similar in the way in which both can provide the means to obtain or understand concepts, ideas, information maybe even feelings that one language or code cannot fully project. Even understanding the code in a person’s native language can be difficult because so many people create their own code to communicate with only those who can also understand the rhetoric. Code and Language both possess this ability because each are the medium which information can be obtained; information always grants power thus making the ability to understand several types of coding or languages an advantageous skill as a world citizen. The multilingual people of the world are exposed to information that I will never understand until I too can comprehend a different language. Each code and each language is its own specific and unique means of communication; meaning that not everything translates nicely from one language to another. The inherent exclusivity which a language is made up of creates an interesting duality; meaning that language (and code) can be both congregator as well as a divider. For the monolingual people of the world (which is the minority of the world’s population) we are at a disadvantage because we will never understand the concepts that English just cannot portray. We cannot join the conversation until we learn how to understand and manipulate the codes in which another culture uses to communicate. This is why exposure to languages and different cultures is an important and beneficial aspect of human existence.

I am a Dumb Hat hacker. There may be name for it already, but Dumb Hat is better, I promise. Strangely, I am not even a good Dumb Hat hacker, but I still do it.
What I declare Dumb Hat hacking to be is the hacking of a PC to emulate other systems. Not top of the line consoles, but crappy consoles that you can mostly buy for $13.25 at a yard sale, or old operating systems that have been replaced by bigger, newer, worser ones. I’m talking Sega Dreamcast, PS1, MS DOS.
Now I wish I could call myself a gamer, but I’ve never had anything but my handy dandy computer. I grew up with DOS thanks to my technologically abusive father. That means I was playing games like Empire (think Civilization 1 only much less interesting if that’s possible) when I was playing them at all. That means years later I had the painful experience of losing a Halo match 50-0. Such FPS nightmares at sleepovers have cause me to return to a gaming shell. I want those old games back, those bad games that I was bad at but it didn’t matter because there wasn’t blood shooting out of my head there was just text saying “GAME OVER” in a friendly sort of try again way.
Welcome to the Dumb Hat world of emulation. We saw it in class with the Atari engine, but programs exist now such as DOSBOX and PCSX2* that help a crowd of (mostly) old-timey folk play Pac-Man or in my case Darklands (the first and best game I’ve ever played).
Emulation is an odd concept in the technological world. It is a move backwards. Taking an advanced machine and making it compatible with much WORSE specs. When I first loaded Raptor into DosBOX the game ran too fast! I had to slow it down or I had no chance.

With the threat of a really difficult couple weeks ahead of research and composition of the seminar paper looming in the relatively present future I have been thinking a lot about things that I'm not sure will make enough of an appearance in my paper. I know that I will spend some time talking about intellectual property and how interesting it is that people can now lay claim to thoughts as if no one else can have that thought again unless they want to incur some sort of legal or monetary damage. The thing that I'm afraid might not be as clear my own opinion on how the internet and its different service (like Creative Commons)and how it makes the idea of intellectual property both more fluid and more solid may be lost in translation. In a way I think that the internet has really helped not only unite people via match.com (go ahead and try it out ;D ) and Facebook to the point where it has become almost its own little world, but it has also helped unite ideas so that people can share their ideas with people who years ago would have had little to no access to these sorts of things. This has helped in solidifying the theory of intellectual property, but in practice it has become increasingly difficult to track and give credit to the proper people for their ideas. I don't even want to know how many thousands of law suits have occurred because someone says that the other person stole their idea, and with the internet, stealing ideas has become almost laughingly easy. Apparently, that is where copyrights and the more controllable Creative Commons comes into place. With these things you can put alittle mark or code into whatever you create and have it say who can use your creation (whatever it may be) and how they can use it and all sorts of other things.

We discussed briefly jodi.org but as I was doing some research for my own project I discovered something very cool.

Check out wwwwwwwww.jodi.org. It appears to be flashing nonsense, a scattered group of numbers, letters and symbols meaninglessly exploded all over the page.

Now right click on the page and view the source code. What do you see? The once chaotic symbols come together to present the image of a hydrogen bomb. Between correctly constructed HTML tags the artists have inserted a diagram of a bomb. So as the browser makes contact with the html source code the screen is blown up into flashing bits of nonsense.

This is such a fascinating way to play with the source code of a page. It is strange that what is perceived by the human eye as an image becomes explodes once it comes in contact with the computer. This piece says a lot about the medium of Web as a place for art and ventures into the places where human and computer meet. What do you see as the other implications of this piece, if any?

The Future of the Internet
I. Where are we now?
a. What the internet is (Howstuffworks)
b. Why the internet is in no physical danger of a collapse
i. The physical presence of the internet
c. Why decentralization keeps the internet alive
d. Why there is an inevitable move toward centralization
i. Two main philosophies of internet
1. Top down or bottom up
e. Why the collapse of UseNet is a recurring theme
i. Innovation begins with exclusivity
1. Greed or necessity causes commercialization
2. Influx of beginners (Eric S. Raymond)
3. Collapse of concept
a. But not in a physical sense (Mieszkowski SALON
4. UseNet saved physically because of its decentralization (PCMAG)
f. Why the internet could also become like the UseNet remnants: a massive haven for criminal activity
II. Who are the big players?
a. Facebook (Zuckerberg Interview)
i. A brief history
1. Defeating myspace
2. Advertising
a. Finally generating revenue
ii. User driven content
iii. Moving away from the big guns
1. ie caring more about what friends think than what critics think
iv. Real time communication
1. More like real life
b. Google (WIRED)
i. A brief history
1. Bid for facebook
a. How losing this changed everything
2. Google Ads
3. Google search
ii. Top down search
iii. Community driven, but centralized
1. Google Books
2. Open Source OS
iv. Lawsuits and privacy
1. By trying to keep identities, they must defend the privacy of individuals
c. The Other Players
i. Every other company is tied in to this dichotomy
1. Microsoft tied to Facebook
a. Microsoft’s search function
b. Facebook ads
2. Youtube to Google
a. User driven content for Google also?
i. Much more complicated censorship without the specific identity infrastructure in place with Facebook
III. Net Neutrality