Tuesday, July 02, 2002
i wonder if most people feel alone in the network?
or if most are comforted by personalities, graphics, texts, images and sounds..... ?
Friday, June 28, 2002
it's late. my thoughts are splattered over the canvas-cum-interface that the afternoon has been operating within. and im hungry.
as the deadline approaches .. a streaming, transponding and fully-immersive hypertextual consciousness is waking this networked environment.
Like role playing some mutant.
what's all this stuff about quicktime being 'grungy'?
what's all this about, isn't grunge a bit too 90s for cyberspace? or maybe all cyberspace is too grungy and stuck in the 90s? i don't really know, and i'm not sure if i care. however, i do care about spelling mistackes.
where is markblog? there is a hint that it will be here but where did it go to? maybe it's being posted to somewhere else, and you can only read it in completion... but is blog ever completed? mark says in his excerpt of ozblog that 'blog is more a kind of progressive codework (as lived reality) than manifested outcome'.
progressive and not manifested outcome
Thursday, June 27, 2002
digital screenwriting a small example of
the question of the day (on the waking life site) is: what role does coincidence play in life's path? if you were FBI Agent Dale Cooper, coincidences play the most important role.... and here in my computer space, thinking about twin peaks and agent cooper, on another page i have coincidentally found the rather clunky anagram server.
(a coincidence because it's commonly known that the entire narrative plot of the second series of twin peaks was created by an anagram machine)
(as part of my nomadic Life Style Practice)
is this like when you googlewhack, then no one ever can googlewhack those two words - effectively breaking them as a googlewhack? manipulating the results of googlewhack.
mark creates words that mean several things - independently - but together, the words pin point particular practices or feelings, without having to go into too much detail. i'm interested in Life Style Practice, as iI'm guessing everyone of us has this. mark says that 'the true language of new media has been with us for quite awhile', in that us people/dudes/pretty ladies (cyborgs all) have been writing code into interactive states of being, which allows us to behave in a society of networked consciousness. now, is the networked consciousness something like what julie delpy & ethan hawke talked about in Waking Life and is the true language of new media simply writing code? i don't know....
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
blah blah. i have to get home, i have to get home. why do i keep on blogging?
blogger is the sneeze-barrier which i brain-sneeze on. brain-sneezing = jumbled, ecclectic, random thoughts which are provoked/set-off by brainwork (thinking about my thesis for instance). i do some of my best blogging/thinking/brain-sneezing whilst taking short breaks from research/study (e.g. going for a walk).
a blog a day keeps insanity (whilst doing thesis research) away.
so, i was looking round, to see what narratologists have to say about blogs. is blog your voice, thinks i? (as i move from web site to web site - jumping around and clicking around - sounds a bit froggie, or cricket-like) or is it your virtual voice? am i feeling braver, as i write, because i'm writing through my virtual-voice, which is tougher than the actual me?
one blogger who has a 'voice' in a different ways has created voxblog. an actual voice blog recording of daily happenings ...
what does blog mean to narratologists?
Saturday, June 22, 2002
found this re: blogging
http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/items/00036.shtml
Friday, June 21, 2002
with regard to being both a private and a public (non)place, or <place>, could a blog be something akin to the inner walls of a public toilet. on these walls is an ecclectic collection of comments, arguments, jokes, quotes, some of which are connected into a chain of conversation, others not.
could ozblog be renamed "oz(?)blog". ozblog suggestes a definite geographical place you are writing about or from, rather than in the non-place of the Network. it might do just to call the Network blogger.com.
blog as research journal. i place a considerable amount of importance on keeping a research blog/journal. it acts as a beacon which helps me keep focus whilst being swamped with research data. who am i talking to/with? initially, and predominantly, i think i am talking to myself. it is means of clarifying my research project, finding and maintaining direction/motivation, and more importantly, an opportunity to identify problems i am having and developing strategies with which to combat these obstacles. but this blog is public. my voice is not confined to my head or the pages of my personal diary. there is an invisible audience - web researchers, fellow students, co-workers. a blog is not a diary, but rather a center of discussion - an online forum.
and the ozblog search revealed these two blogs......
thinking with my fingers
World Of Chig
...hmmmmm
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,330,000. Search took 0.10 seconds.
That's a search in google.com for blog
Results 1 - 4 of about 6. Search took 0.14 seconds.
Amazingly enough that's a search in google.com for ozblog
see look, now i'm here , at another terminal (computer) in another place (computer labs). now, it seems that the terminal can be quite important here. we have the airport terminal, and the bus terminal. all places of change, and movement. they represent the link between the old life and the new. holly golightly, or audrey hepburn, has a thing for the bus station. although i actually can't remember what happens at the bus station, but i know she was headed for the airport terminal at the end. nevertheless, for her, she has and old life and a new life. signified through the 'greyhound to new york'. the terminal offers movement from the old to the new, or from the new to the old. different terminals allow different experiences - from the actual environment you sit in - and virtual environment you are navigating or exploring through. i am here, with a bjork cd playing on someone else's computer, the airconditioning filling un-real air around me..... there are so many hummmmms. in my virtual space, the web browser is clean, and smooth, and my writing looks real and professional. oh no, someone's computer has crashed. i'm glad mine is ok.
Thursday, June 20, 2002
“The state of problematized being is erupting. Behind the scenes, I have been creating a document that essentially outlines the new practice-based research initiative I'm developing at the University of Colorado. In so doing, I have come up with an alpha-version of what amounts to an "objective of the study" as well as a "conceptual framework" that will hopefully lead to a more focused research agenda to be pursued within the context of the new "digital art curriculum" I am developing here (but where is here?).”
how does mark write ozblog if he's not in australia? i ask, because i wonder if it's finished, completed. how do you write about a place, if you are not there?
are blogs like a neverending story?
i'll be back later to finish , too hungry to keep blogging right now.
i wonder why call it ozblogozblogozblog? if you can become the network-you from anywhere, if the network is a 'non-place' and 'borderless', then why are we still fascinated by geography? mark says that a change of scenery helped develop his idea - so evidently it is important. bloggers form groups based on the city they write from - new york, melbourne, no doubt there are others.
on one level place is irrelevant inside the network yet we are never really detatched from the 'real world'.
it would be nice to think that location is of no importance. the rhetoric tells us that the network will flatten things out, transcend traditional barriers, democratise and give everyone an equal voice. do we really believe it? i think we would like to believe it.
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
but here is another: the whole actual / virtual presence thing is no different then suggesting when you are writing a conventional diary it is a 'writerly you' or when you record something on a dictaphone it is a 'aural you' - maybe i am always 'me' regardless of the medium - presence on a blog is the same as presence in the real world - in my head it is all one me...
but I am having problems with this: if i take those post-it notes off my bedroom wall and put them in a public place (say, on a wall on the street) - i was still 'me' when you wrote them - the fact that they remain in one place while i travel elsewhere doesn't somehow turn them into another 'me' - or does it? The 'me' that the passing foot-traffic is entirely based on the content of the notes, the handwriting, the colour, the position etc - and is all subjective. or is this no different to the 'real world', as everyone 'reads' each other all the time - if i go back to the notes they are still 'me'.. is the 'virtual me' actually a readerly me, not to do with 'writing cyerspace' but with reading it? or am I reading too much into this?
I am now wondering if his blog is nothing more than a critique of the style of writing employed in the blog form. Without a consideration of the implications of its online nature which move any further than the use of psudo-academic-poetic soundbytes such as "progressive codework", "collective unconsciousness" or "real-time telepresence."
Which is fine, as long as it is seen as such.
A tempermental dreamwork tuned to the color of television?
lately i've been feeling very time-based than place-based. i think it's an ongoing thing (the feeling and the time), and it's always going to be complicated. there's a 'real-time telepresence'.... what could this be? do i have presence in television, or actual presence, in technology? it is a 'real-time' presence, which could be happening right-now. and which might only happen which the telepresence is performing.... what happens to the 'virtual-you' when the computer is turned off? are you filed away, suspended in time? or do you follow your self around like a shadow until you sit down at a terminal, to blog your life away. in that sense perhaps the virtual-you does live/perform all the time. you are not filed away (but can be - once the presence is old - or boring), you are existing in the network, until you log in as the virtual you, at any given time, at any given place. then you are both in the one place at the one time.... rrrrrrrrrrrr (getting gruff), so i feel very timely at present.
what is the color of television?
Friday, June 14, 2002
dogblogdogblogdogblogdogblogdogblogdogblogdogblogdogblog
dogblogdogblog
<woof><woof>
<rrrufff>
<grrrrr>
another thought: I read on kottke.org a concept of blogging that uses barthes - and i love a bit of barthes. nick says 'what blogging initiates is a set of practices which fits the bill of Barthes' writerly text: practices that are much closer to Barthes's ideals -- 'to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text' -- than the hypertextual 'choose your own media adventure' that was first regarded as its archetype.' What he's describing is the facility to comment on blog posts and add your own writing to the text.
on second thoughts, perhaps this too has all been said before.
Thursday, June 13, 2002
I am here
we are all here. we are all everywhere. everything is everywhere. cybermediated-hyperlocatial-borderless and bored. so?
who's up for a bit of mediocre narcissistic foreplay?
something tells me that there is not nearly as much between those <meta tags>;
as some would have you believe. <ooh look at me> I can write using the <language>
of the <medium>.
a <cybernarrative> developed in the <code-of becoming-cyborg> ???
<techno-babble />
Give me some meaning that's not shrouded by some kind of clever language designed
to confuse the reader into believing that there is something deeper
there and then maybe we can begin a proper discussion.
mark cries 'location, location, location' when thinking about nomadic narrative - because it's more a lack of location, of 'becoming borderless and optimumly free'. how can we place ourselves in a space without borders, without geographical settings? we use metaphors. the computer space is a 'tempermental dreamwork tuned to the colour of television', and when you're here <in computer-mediated cyberspace>, you are 'burning through the sands of time'. when you're in cyberspace (or where-ever you'll begin to call it, once you're there) it's kinda like when you lose a day on an aeroplane flight. the travel time is definetely there, it has been experienced (every painstaking dead leg minute), but you've missed that day (or gained one - congratulations). 'it just doesn't exist' says mark, 'and yet it does'......
this makes markamerika ponder where it is, and what it is, and how this relates to 'writing cyberspace' .
where are we when we are 'on the internet'? we all 'log on', and 'enter' the webspace. the rhetoric of web 'pages' reminds us of 'where' we are all the time. whilst we are physically occupying the space in 'front' of the computer screen, perhaps when we are 'inside' the network, we occupy the threads/paths/rhizome in the links we make, and we're 'sitting' inside the pages we look at. if you open more and more browser windows, does this mean that you are everywhere? as opposed to one browser window being just one place/space? what about frames? are you in two places at the same time? or is this always the case? in many places at the same time....with numerous windows into the web????
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
is the virtual me a digital thoughtographer? or is the actual me a digital thoughtographer?
i think i'm becoming obsessed with mark amerika's meta-tag-isms. digital literacy equals
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Mark says a blog 'is not dated'. This is really getting to me, the more I think about dates in blogs the more i think they're necessary. One of the best things about blogs are that they keep a record for you. So if you're using it for research you can go back and see when you had that idea or found that book. And if it's more of a diary, dates are even more important. I do agree that it isn't just a diary, it can't be because it's public for a start. It's different to any other form of writing and probably shouldn't be compared - see the huge debate over whether blogs are journalism for a start! But back to dates - i guess you don't have to have them but I don't think it's at all right to say you shouldn't.
what is my blog doing? is this simply just a diary website? it does record time, and dates. (although at this typing stage, i am assuming it will publish my posting with the time and date)
there are so many aspects of time. the time i take writing. the process-time. there is time re-reading, and reflecting over what has been written, as it's being written, and after it's written. what does blog do with time? what can it do?
where is the virtual me? does the virtual me (or not-me) live inside the blog? a cyberspace me? a cyberspace home? am i everywhere? or nowhere? (virtually)
here. there. everywhere.
Thursday, June 06, 2002
what is blog? an online journal/diary? unlike a conventional diary this is public (though it can be private), it can be viewed on the web by others. a "pseudo-autobiographical work-in progress"? this Mark Amerikanism relates to firstly the questions of self, or
Tuesday, June 04, 2002
markblog on ozblog. mark amerika fears that the essence or "key" to blogging (whatever the hell that is...sometimesitfeelslikei'mreadingonelonglineoftextwhenitrytoc
omprehendmarkamerika'sarguments/propositions) may be lost when bloggers reduce a blog to "narcissistic foreplay". i'm not sure of his fear here. i think the fundemental thing about blogging is that you can use it however you like (within certain technical parameters, of course). if narcissisms your cup o' tea, then go with it. when i write/blog/think i imagine i'm talking to myself. blog is a mirror. this is where narcissism surges; looking at yourself in a mirror. a problem with narcissism is that since you are studying, admiring your self you become blind to the rest of the world (in a blogs case, and perhaps what amerika is getting at, the Network). not sure where to go from here at this stage...i might return to it later.
Monday, June 03, 2002
Mark asks 'where is here?' Where is that place that we write from/in/to?
'Nomadic narrative is also about location, location, location - or lack thereof' and yet there is still some sense of a 'place'. Perhaps this is because cyberspace, as Jeremy Yuille said in his presentation, is placial but not spatial.
At first this seems a little hard to understand but I think the best way to explain it is that space is quantitative and place is qualitative. So I can be anywhere in space when I write in my blog, but my blog is always my own little place.
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
test 1 2 3 work please. do you work now?
blogging mark amerika's blog
