Graduate Students in Real Life...

Okay, so I was forwarded these posts by one of my professors. I'm pretty sure that this might be a good way to spend Saturday night with some of my fellow students out there:

Dancing my way through a Ph.D.
(must have been in a science-related field - if only I had gone to medical school like my mother wanted!)
and
Starring in my own graduate-student action game.


And I thought I had trouble just trying to get a dissertation committee down on paper...

:)-<

A guy, a girl, her ponytail, and some Def poetry, emoticon style. In this TED talk, Rives shares a little tale about love and loss, illustrated by emoticons. Much cooler than whatever you texted your mom this morning.

(For some reason the movie won't embed , so I don't have any pretty picture for you to click and watch. Sorry)

Document this Life

In a post-Panopticon world, many of us are heading out today to vote with questions lingering about our right to wear campaign buttons or drink free coffee.

What about questions surrounding our vote? How do we document our tiny struggle against "the man"? Some people are suggesting the need now to "Video the Vote:"

Video the Vote is a national network of citizen journalists, independent filmmakers, and media professionals working together to document voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

The effort to mediate our lives continues. Is this a necessary endeavour to assure that we remain (or finally become) enfranchised? Does suspicion run amuck unfairly? Or has blind faith prevailed too much already? Sadly, I'm leaning towards the side that feels the need to preserve my experience, both for posterity and the assurance that my experience will, in some way, "count."

I don't know how to deal with these issues. But I wonder how far the documentary urge will continue to stretch. Have you checked your harddrive lately? How many pictures are on it? Do you save your emails? If you really, really needed to, could you find out, in one way or another, what you were doing the week of November 1, 2006?

Eternal Sunshine is Today

It is Monday morning, and I woke up before the sun to get started on this week. That's never a great sign.

Other than that, though, I wanted to share this with you - the advent of Eternal Sunshine. A quote from the article summary, published in the journal Neuron:

"Inducible and Selective Erasure of Memories in the Mouse Brain via Chemical-Genetic Manipulation"

"Rapid and selective erasures of certain types of memories in the brain would be desirable under certain clinical circumstances. By employing an inducible and reversible chemical-genetic technique, we find that transient αCaMKII overexpression at the time of recall impairs the retrieval of both newly formed one-hour object recognition memory and fear memories, as well as 1-month-old fear memories. "

You don't have to read the whole thing, but it is pretty interesting if you have a few extra minutes.

Deleting memories like old files on your hardrive...
The title of my first book?
When We Became PostCyborg??

Alchemy, Ennui, Cupcakes

Last week, in my Poe class, I reviewed a book which talked about Poe's hoaxing of the American public. In one of these hoaxes, a man reveals that he has succesfully turned lead into gold. In another project for the class, we need to review a cultural appropriation of Poe. Many of these appropriations render Poe as the dismal, depressed man that he sometimes was.

This link has nothing to do with Poe. Officially, that is. It represents instead Swedish playwright August Strindberg and his chipper friend, Helium. But the convergence of ideas is certainly present. Alchemy? Dark Figure of Ennui? Cupcakes? (Maybe the last one isn't so relevant to Poe, but to me...)
And besides, it is Friday. Enjoy.

Twitter saves the Day

I've been searching around for stories on or in Twitter recently, and I ran across this CNN article: "Student 'Twitters' His Way Out of Egyptian Jail." The story may over-emphasize the role of the "twitter" on getting the kid out of jail, but it also points some interesting applications of the tool. Using Twitter to get out the word, update your status, inspire political change. Not that this is all that different from sending a clandestine written message back in the pre-cellphone dark ages. Yet the (illusion of) the "culture of the immediate" is certainly appealing. Consider the bandwagon of text-messaging emergency alerts to students that many schools jumped on in the past couple of years.
Maybe I should have a GPS Device embedded in my skin for my own protection.

Please Mum, I'd like some more red blood cells on my half!

'Nuff said. Go here to get your fix.

Moving Forward

I might be moving this blog towards a digital repository for my dissertation research and progress shortly. For those of you who have been delighting in my posted “go see this!” links, I apologize, but assure you that much of my content will still be me deferring to others' ideas. After all, it was Anatole France who said, “When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.”
That said, my dissertation research is, well, just beginning. Or, more specifically, just beginning to begin. I’m worried, and tired already.
So goes life, yes?
Oh yeah, go read this: How to make an Origami Burger (for my friends on the low-cal, high fiber diet).
Does it relate to my dissertation? No, of course not. But it is still entertaining, is it not?

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

I was perusing Amazon tonight and came across Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

I was intrigued by the title, and am hoping to order it (as soon as I get paid). Lehrer's book is doing double-duty, talking about science and art in the same textual breath, pointing us to several artistic big shots who were preempting scientific progeny of later decades in their own, early, artistic works.

One of my favorite sentences out of the reviews?

"...this collection comes close to exemplifying Lehrer's stated goal of creating a unified third culture in which science and literature can co-exist as peaceful, complementary equals."

Imagine that.

Elit 2.0

I was looking on the internet the other day for electronic literature material, and came across Mark Marino's helpful posting "Guide to Elit 2.0." Marino lists a number of web 2.0 tools, and then points us to compelling works that might be considered "elit" using these tools.
Facebook doesn't just have to be for stalking our friends, after all.

Electronic Bookshelf

Perusing the internet, I ran across Deena Larson's "Virtual Bookshelf," which lists several e-lit pieces according to the time they take to read. Lo and behold, the new media piece that I published with Caren Beilin is on the bookshelf.
Very cool find.
Also a very nice intro to some electronic literature that doesn't (necessarily) take a lifetime to read.

Typopoetry

My friend and comrade, Guido Alvarez, has just self-published his first book, Breakthrough_typopoetry.
You should all go check it out.
Then you can go to Lulu.com to buy it here.
Guido describes this project:

Breakthrough is my first experimental book of "typoetry": A hybrid product of typography, photography, and poetry. The ultimate goal of this product is to finance the completion of my Ph.D. studies in Media, Arts and Text at VCU and to start a career in media production using self-publishing technology to achieve it.

It is certainly not your average beach read, though I suppose you could call it a bathroom book.

Pipe Cleaning Fun.

Pipe cleaner + typewriter keys + shake-your-booty music.
A match made in heaven.
Visit David Bressler's creation here.

"Animals Are Placebos" is Up and Running

Good News! My digital rendering of Caren Beilin's "Animals Are Placebos" just got published over at the New River Journal of Digital Writing and Art. The New River Journal is currently being hosted by Virgina Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Art, and is promoted as being one of the first journals devoted exclusively to digital discourse and art.

My piece is a Flash rendering of Caren's text. Caren and I have never met, but I took on the task of giving visual life to her awesome text and am pretty pleased with the result. The editors write of their call for artists and writers:

"When we started this issue, we thought: let’s talk with some writers we enjoy and see if they’d be willing to offer work that’d get re-imagined and digitized by digital artists. It was, we thought, a great idea. What we realized, however, is that to think of digital writing as two interlocking pieces—writing on the one hand, digital magic on the other—is, well, off. Finding writers willing to have their work reimagined was relatively easy: finding digital artists with the time and energy and ability to take good writing and find new ways to present it was much, much more difficult.
The only piece that made it is Jennifer Smith’s presentation of Caren Beilin’s Animals Are Placebos. Both Jennifer and Caren are students—at VCU and the University of Montana, Missoula, respectively—and though they don’t know each other, Jennifer’s original and clever digitizing of Caren’s spare, strange language seems well-matched. In an Alice In Wonderland sort of move, the reader chooses his or her pill and the story moves according to the reader’s decisions."

A Motley Crew

Any news article that sites Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Montana, and superdelegates catches my attention. So, for you reading pleasure, I offer you Andrew Foster Altschul's "Of Sharks in the Water, Superdelegates, and Hannah Montana's Breasts."

Intentional Fallacy

Here's our completed video, Intentional Fallacy. It was a collaborative piece that Melinda, Sean, Kristine, Jenn Figg and myself all worked on together. I think that, for being the first film most of us had worked on, it turned out pretty nicely. We shot it completely in still images, and then animated them together to get the final product. It was a great learning process.



Here's a brief summary of the film:

Intentional Fallacy is a film that questions the notions of authorial intent. Created with more than 2,500 still images and hand-drawn animation, the film follows a young man experiencing an existential crisis. Mistakenly assuming his sketch pad is a reliable guide, the young man loops through time to find his true reality.

Photoshop Disasters

You've probably already seen this, but I've spent a good hour or so perusing the site when I should be working on papers instead. So goes life, right? I call it research on what not to do. Like make mutant third hands. Or fourth or fifth ones.
Photoshop Disasters

What do Pictures Want? What do People Want?

What do pictures want is a question we've all been asking (and reading about) in our coursework here. How does the question change, however, when we are asking it about pictures of military indencency: photos of others being mentally and phsycialy abused and humilated. You've all seen the pictures. Now Errol Morris is coming out with a movie that looks like it is going to take an approach that is thoughtful and, dare I say it, illuminating, on a topic that's already been covered in numerous other mediums, some good, some bad, and some just sort of inbetween.
If you want to check out the website for the movie Standing Operating Procedure, click here.
From the apple trailer website:

Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? Photographs taken by soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison changed the war in Iraq and changed America’s image of itself. Yet, a central mystery remains. Did the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs constitute evidence of systematic abuse by the American military, or were they documenting the aberrant behavior of a few “bad apples”? We set out to examine the context of these photographs. Why were they taken? What was happening outside the frame? We talked directly to the soldiers who took the photographs and who were in the photographs. Who are these people? What were they thinking? Over two years of investigation, we amassed a million and a half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted reports, and hundreds of photographs. The story of Abu Ghraib is still shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there. The Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an expose and a coverup. An expose, because the photographs offer us a glimpse of the horror of Abu Ghraib; and a coverup because they convinced journalists and readers they had seen everything, that there was no need to look further. In recent news reports, we have learned about the destruction of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation tapes. A coverup. It has been front page news. But the coverup at Abu Ghraib involved thousands of prisoners and hundreds of soldiers. We are still learning about the extent of it. Many journalists have asked about “the smoking gun” of Abu Ghraib. It is the wrong question. As Philip Gourevitch has commented, Abu Ghraib is the smoking gun. The underlying question that we still have not resolved, four years after the scandal: how could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib—and the subsequent coverup—could happen?

Sometimes, even I don't know what to say.

Chopstick Canoe

Here's a man who saw a problem and said, "Hey, I gotta fix that problem." He saw that lots of chopsticks were being thrown out, and, like any normal person would, decided to make a canoe out of them.

You can't see what you are not looking for

A test of your powers of observation. You'll probably have to watch it twice.

Super cool video.

Food Fight

For those of you looking to catch up on your warfare history, I offer this video.

Swastikas and Rape

Last semester, there was a conversation in one of my classes about the use of the term "rape" and the connotations of the word. Then one of my students wrote a paper about the possibility of the swastika ever being a neutral graphic design.
With all this talk about context and content, the new book We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons, by Sam Gross, provides some food for thought.

The Amazon.com page reads:

Swastikas?" you ask. "Funny?"
Well, sometimes funny. Gathered together in this outrageous, rueful, and often poignant collection of cartoons are one artist's extraordinary observations on the range of emotion that the controversial symbol has elicited for more than half a century. These witty, beautifully rendered images gleefully stomp through the darkest moments in history and remind us that humor can diffuse our unspoken fears and deflate an overwrought icon.

You can check the book out here.

Life is Goo.

Life is Goo.

Enjoy.

Found

Found (but not by me)

Six-Word Memoirs

Have you just been itching to get published? Well here is your chance. Use six words to write your memoirs. But only six.

Wal-Mart or High-Art?

In the world of academia, everything is a show. Here's a quiz to let you know if you can fool others into thinking that you know something. Take a moment to figure out if you can spot the pieces that are priceless art in comparasion to the pieces that are cheap Wal-Mart bargain buys.
I'll admit it, I failed.

A new look at marketing. Of course, this site is not in English, but it is still a really cool way to waste time. You can also actually buy the things from this site if you so desire.
http://producten.hema.nl/

Super Tuesday

In honor of Super Tuesday, I send you this: photos of polling places.

You can go here to peruse photos of various polling places around the nation. This site is "a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism" in which everyday people can send in pictures of their polling place. The site hopes to get a photo of every polling place in America. The New York Times is hosting the site, and seems to want to inspire us to keep "a visual record of how voting happens in America: where it occurs, what the process looks like, how people act, and, ultimately, how the voting experience can be designed to be easier, less confusing and more rewarding."

Happy Voting!

The King of Kong!

You can watch documentaries on South African villages, the making of microwave popcorn, and 30-minutes specials on "True Life: I Have Embarrassing Parents" (first aired 11/07/2002, according to Wikipedia). Because so many people out there just can't fathom what it is like to have parents who mortify you. But now you can see a different kind of documentary. In Seth Gordon's film The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, you'll be able to check out the life of gamers in all of its glory. From all accounts, it looks like the film really doesn't suck, and is actually a refreshing look at people who actually care about something other than money and sex. Shocking! I know. I don't game, but I'm probably going to check this movie out anyhow. You can check out the pretty awesome website here, and pre-order a DVD for yourself.

Along those lines, might I also recommend Word Wars, a film about competitive Scrabble players and their loves and losses. This film I have seen, and think that its pretty enjoyable. But everyone knows that I'm a nerd already.

Spying on your neighbors just got easier.

Here's an interesting site to peruse. If you type in your zip, or any other zip in the United States, you can find out all the interesting information that the U.S Government collected on us in 2000. Mark Nash, some guy who likes statistics, launched this website, which gives you a easily-accessible version of all the pertinent stats. In my zip, 0% of people are in the farm/fishing/forestry field, while 39.8% are in the management/professional line of work. Oh, there go my hopes of becoming a sun-loving farm hand.

The neverending story of copyright

Wizards, and elves, and copyright law...
J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers are now suing a fan site about Harry Potter because of the site's plan to put out a book, citing copyright infringement. Tim Wu writes about the specatacle on Slate.com, and does a pretty good job of putting it in perspective. I didn't see any reference to lightening scars, though, so I'm only going to give it a 7 out of 10 points.