Friday, February 23, 2007

Jamendo - Ehma: Opus solemnis







posted by Adfero Affero @ 10:19 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Riefenstahl



Three long pieces on Riefenstahl at kino Fist

Man does not live by revolution Owen Hatherley

Riefenstahl and the mountain Infinite Thought

The Fuhrer Daniel Miller




posted by Adfero Affero @ 3:12 PM 0 comments

Catty tonics?





Schönpurrg at Infinite Space



posted by Adfero Affero @ 2:51 PM 0 comments

Music: Zontube




Zontube is a (aaaargh, where did they get the word?) mashup site explained at Lifehacker



posted by Adfero Affero @ 2:37 PM 0 comments

Il n'y a pas de hor

Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing US



We’ll need to rethink a few things…
We’ll need to rethink copyright
We’ll need to rethink authorship [This page has 123 words matching your text]
We’ll need to rethink identity
We’ll need to rethink ethics
We’ll need to rethink aesthetics
We’ll need to rethink rhetorics
We’ll need to rethink governance
We’ll need to rethink privacy
We’ll need to rethink commerce
We’ll need to rethink love
We’ll need to rethink family
We’ll need to rethink ourselves.


ksmith on Digital Ethnography has annotated this 'viral' with Mojiti in an attempt to explain it. [Friday 23 Feb] Actually Wesch himself posted his video to Motiji for people to annotate.

Where it has been linked to (vastly, everywhere) there is a tendency for the linker to say Wow! but not much else, which is suspiciously of the species of "This looks fantastic and must be significant but I haven't a clue why.."

Wesch's original plus the transcript can be viewed at Digital Ethnography together with three video responses to it. CoryTheRaven's is the most interesting to me.

While the first few viewings of Wesch's video made me ask if Web 2.0 meant the semantic web, and lead to a long search for answers, which led to a handful of tangential topics, it was Cory's video that got me a thinking again along the lines of a post way back on Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, where I used his text as an example of how ownership and copywrite in the digital age had a few questions to answer.

There were a few flights of fancy about the author, as I imagined him, constantly slightly altering the text so that anyone copying it and claiming it as their own would be caught out. Or that software would running to achieve the same end.

Reading about the semantic web [ What is the analogue of the sematic web? ] and attempts to bring it about (including Cory Doctorow's critique - SEE also wiki:metacrap) it seemed, even if it is not achievable, the software they are developing for the purpose of creating machine readable meaning, such as OWL (Introduction to OWL, Wiki:Web ontology langauge [OWL], OWL web ontology language [W3C]might be incorporated into word processors. Whatever text is being created is being embedded with code which will create the wherewithall for texts to be automatically compared for content (There is alreadty a raft of plagiarism software which many universities use). The writer of the text will have the ability to link any word to any other words in order to fix into it the meanings he wants, which will help to ensure that even if someone else steals the text, it will not however contain the embedded links. This will require software tricks that keep the metadata and the text separate so that the embedded information is only there at certain times. This might work in much the same way as graphic on a website is merely a set of instructions for where to find it, not the picture itself.

::

Watching CoryTheRaven writing his reply in longhand (and for it to be filmed in this way) makes one wonder if this is one of the ways people will ensure ownership of their work in the future. Handwriting is distinctive.So are hands. Although there will only be a short window for this before digital images become so life like this will no longer work.

Weird - watching handwriting in video on the web - to have to go through so many stages to do what one could do in one with a piece of paper and a pen.

Maybe if Proust was writing today he'd have a webcam over his shoulder filming every jot, including all the alteration and editing... thousands of hours of digital video filmed over decades, with jaunty talking head asides to camera.


A lesson in viral video
Inside higher education explains what Wesch did and why


What's the social in social software? => Time's person of the Year : You

How does Six Degrees of Separation work?

Vizster

VisualComplexity

Visualising online social networks


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Why do I think of The Library of Babel ?

posted by Adfero Affero @ 11:13 AM 0 comments

Friday, February 16, 2007

Meet the Bontas



Via negativa

Plummer's Hollow

For a moment you might be forgiven for thinking you have come across the Waltons de notre jour. There's:

* Marcia Bonta - author of nine books and hundreds of magazine articles on nature and natural history
* Bruce Bonta - Plummer's Hollow historian and coordinator of our deer hunting program
* Mark Bonta - grew up in Plummer's Hollow and put together the first edition of Bioplum, the
biological inventory of the property
* Steve Bonta - naturalist and amateur entomologist, currently living in Tyrone and working hard to
add new species to Bioplum
* Dave Bonta - poet, blogger and amateur photographer, currently staying in the Guest House in
Plummer's Hollow

Dave Bonta says in Dave's 9 Rules of Blogging:

2. Provide substantial original content now and then. That’s the only thing that keeps the endless conversation at the heart of the interactive web from devolving into empty, meaningless chatter.

Amen, Dave, but we don't all have your facility.

::

Came across the Bontas pretty much by chance, except that that is never true of surfing is it? You are almost always going in some sort of direction, which you can reflect in the contents of your website.

::

The name of this website intrigued me, and drew me to it. Then I read a bit and he used the word apophatic. This has not cropped up since I overheard, in the way the flaneur dreams of, the piece of a conversation (on the radio maybe), a raised voice, slightly frustrated: "...I said apophatic not cataphatic!" Two theologians in heated debate perhaps. I didn't know what either meant and the dictionary was unhelpful.

This was quite a few years ago now just before the the internet became commonly used. A character called Wolf (a jumping spider: to confuse the matter because there are also wolf spiders) who lives in a telephone box in the middle of the countryside popped into my mind. The first time we see Wolf, a man rushes into the telphone, ending up shouting down the phone "...apophatic NOT cataphatic..." slamming the receiver down, jumps into his car and drives off.

When weblogs came in it seemed the ideal vehicle for an ironic treatment of what people might write in weblogs. Hey guess what happened to me! So much of what we tell other people are repetitions of what we have heard. There are our deepest thoughts and feelings and our successes and failures, but something overheard is almost the via media of social intercourse, next to the joke.

Wiki: via negativa



posted by Adfero Affero @ 4:48 PM 0 comments

Reader trap



Should have been listening harder to In Our Time because it was dealing with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The old story: having a basic handle on it, the words of the experts slid through my brain unobtrusively, the occasional word or phrase popping up above the surface. One of these was 'reader trap'.

Immediate reaction: sounds self-explanatory; and maybe quite a useful thing to think through for the novice writer. Checking, just in case it meant something quite different, came across this Google Booksearch sample of one of the contributors the BBC programme, Robert Hanson. Though it was another of the three experts, Susan Jones, who used the term.

She also said Heart of Darkeness was almost a metafiction. Immediate reaction? What fiction is considered metafiction to give an idea of what she means by almost. Wiki:metafiction has a lists 'common metafictive devices' with examples. Where'sThe French Lieutentant's Woman?. But the bit of Robert Hanson's introduction available is instructive, particularly page xxix.

Reading on, there are a few pages under the title VI. An image of Africa, introducing Chinua Achebe's critique of Conrad. Again, for someone as ignorant as I am - but keen to learn - very useful.

::

Have I been caught by reading about reader trap into spending more time than intended on metafiction?

Wiki:List of metafictional texts

The Reading Experience: metafiction (a August 23 2004)

The Literary Encyclopedia: metafiction

Kate Liu has draw up a little table under the heading: General issues and signs of metafiction

::

And then to metafilm (because film precoccupies me right now...)

Under It's a commentary! It's a film! It's a metafilm! Tuwa at MetaFilter asks for examples. Boy do they come....love this....there is a documentary called Derrida (2002) in which:

him [Derrida] and his wife watching video that they've shot (and which the audience has already seen) to get his reaction to the film within the context of the film.


Finally: noticed there was a metafilm table here too. Saw mention of Icicle Thief. Overweaning desire to write email correcting spelling. Later learn there is a film of this name: Ladri di saponette (1989, Maurizio Nichetti). A review by Damian Sutton is great fun.



posted by Adfero Affero @ 9:06 AM 0 comments

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Illiers - Combrey



Cartofile has a a whole page of Illiers-Combray postcards. Click each on to get an enlargement.



posted by Adfero Affero @ 10:39 AM 0 comments

Friday, February 02, 2007

Albertine Disparue. ll. Venice





Seemed at first not to be Marcel Proust but Charlie Chaplin.

Don't try doing a short cut to Proust/Marcel's Art by going straight to Venice!





posted by Adfero Affero @ 3:18 PM 0 comments

In the shade of the girls in flowers



À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs translates in Babelfish as ' In the shade of the girls in flowers' which seems pretty good compared to Within a the Budding Grove.

::

Marcel Proust, Edmund White Chapter 1:

in 1895, she [Collete] wrote Proust a letter in which she acknowledged that he had recognized a crucial truth: "The word is not a representation but a living thing, and it is much less a mnemonic sign than a pictorial translation."


Marcel Proust, Norman Barth, Paris Kiosque - July 2001 - Volume 8, Number 7

contains a sample of Proust's handwriting

::

Can someone tell me what Cocteau is saying:





posted by Adfero Affero @ 11:27 AM 0 comments

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