Uncanny Valleygirl

Just wanted to post briefly about a new project I started this weekend, Uncanny Valley Girl: an exploration of the uncanny valley via Hannah Montana fanart I found on the internet.

The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The name captures the idea that a facsimile which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction [Wikipedia].

Here is an article about it from the late, great Damn Interesting. Some YouTube examples of robots that might evoke the response are here, here, and especially here and here.

--Ryan

Robert Grenier

I promised a while ago I would post about Robert Grenier (specifically, a link to his scrawls, also referred to as his "illuminated poems" or "holographs"), and here I am fulfilling that promise.

Silly as they look at first, I was initially skeptical about the scrawl poems (though having loved for a while Sentences, probably his masterpiece, a series of Saroyan-esque micropoems written on index cards, a digital version of which appears here), though I think one begins to understand in a new and immediate way, if only intuitively, the difficulties of written language seen at its near-ultimate extension.

Silliman sez:

What seems to interest Grenier most [in the scrawl poems] is the making explicit of the “coming to recognition” process of reading. He is really fascinated at the idea of identifying the instant a word “pops” into consciousness & poem after poem functions to locate precisely this moment.

Which feels right to me, although I have maybe a half-sense that there's a fair amount more to it that I can't put my finger on, whether about language as a kind of AI that's become more intelligent or pregnant with possibility than its inventors, or about written language's ability to replace the world, or at least spoken language (after all, Grenier is famous for "I HATE SPEECH", which, me too), or both –– or something.

About the above holograph, Grenier writes:

Whether drawing poem texts like 'the one about crickets' (no. 39) accomplish (or help accomplish) whatever it is they are otherwise 'saying'—so that seeing/reading "crickets" a reader may hear 'crickets themselves' (& even be able to literally go ('by ear') "across/the/road"?)—remains an animating question.

I'd love to hear what you guys think. A correspondence interview between Grenier and Charles Bernstein is here.

--Ryan

We so excited

Important:

Arms So Freezy: Rebecca Black's "Friday" As Radical Text



Also:

Vanessa Place - The Poetics of Radical Evil



--Ryan

[citation needed]

Just found this, one of the best ideas for a tumblr on the internet --

Citation Needed

Collecting Wikipedia's finest ^{[citation needed]} prose

Examples:

Sussudio ("The song was received mostly positively, and has been mentioned in numerous moments in pop culture.[citation needed]")

Islamic toilet etiquette ("When defecating together, two men cannot converse, nor look at each other’s private parts, and especially not handle each other’s private parts.[citation needed]")

Waterbed ("Homes with many occupants may be bothered by noise pollution coming from the bed, due to sexual intercourse.[citation needed]")

Risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth ("Some threats for humanity come from humanity itself.[citation needed]")

Also, for the love of god please read the talk page for Unrequited love.

--Ryan

Against Bullshit (2)

Copyright law: getting stupider and more outdated every day.

Craig Venter, whose research team created the first synthetic life form last year by replacing the genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma capricolum with one composed on a computer, just gave a talk at SXSW where he related the mind-boggling story of being sent a cease and desist and threat of lawsuit by the estate of James Joyce, for encoding the line "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” (from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in said bacteria. Venter claims fair use.

--Ryan

Phantom Time Hypothesis

image from this amazing Flickr

"When Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz introduces his paper on the “phantom time hypothesis”, he kindly asks his readers to be patient, benevolent, and open to radically new ideas, because his claims are highly unconventional. This is because his paper is suggesting three difficult-to-believe propositions: 1) Hundreds of years ago, our calendar was polluted with 297 years which never occurred; 2) this is not the year 2010, but rather 1713; and 3) The purveyors of this hypothesis are not crackpots.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis suggests that the early Middle Ages (614-911 A.D.) never happened, but were added to the calendar long ago either by accident, by misinterpretation of documents, or by deliberate falsification by calendar conspirators. This would mean that all artifacts ascribed to those three centuries belong to other periods, and that all events thought to have occurred during that same period occurred at other times, or are outright fabrications."

[Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz - Did the Early Middle Ages Really Exist?]

nbsp;

I was looking at Jen Bervin's website the other day, and it's heartening to see that she's posted full scans of some of her chapbooks, erasures, and artist books (along with excerpts and photographs of others).

They're not downloadable, unfortunately, but I did collect screenshots of one of them (A Non-Breaking Space*, Ugly Duckling 2005) and reformatted it into an easily navigable PDF. Link to download is below.

[Jen Bervin - A Non-Breaking Space (5.7mb)]

––Ryan

*The title comes from the HTML source code for a character, “ ” that preserves a blank space between words and simultaneously prevents a line break.

"Average Joe" Variants in Other Languages

on Wikipedia

Bosnia and Herzegovina –– Marko Marković, Petar Petrović, Sima Simić

Bulgaria –– Иван Иванов (Ivan Ivanov), лицето Х (Person X)

Faroe Islands –– Miðalhampamaður

Germany –– Otto Normalverbraucher

Malta –– Joe Borg

etc.

––Ryan

The Queen Stripped Bare By Her Bishops, Even

As part of a bid for self-improvement, I have recently made a (very likely doomed) effort to improve my chess game. In my research I came across this gem: a record of all the public chess games played by Marcel Duchamp.

"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

–––––

"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."

––Marcel Duchamp

(PS - if anyone plays Words With Friends or Chess With Friends, my nom de plume is "Raptor St. Cannon" ––R)

The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a kind of authentic Codex Seraphinianus –– a 232-page illuminated manuscript entirely written in a secret script. It is filled with copious drawings of unidentified plants, herbal recipes of some sort, astrological diagrams, and many small human figures in strange plumbing-like contraptions. The script is unlike anything else in existence, but is written in a confident style, seemingly by someone who was very comfortable with it. Recent radio carbon dating has shown the document to be from the 15th century, making the book a century older than scholars had previously thought.

The first known owner was the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II during the late 1500s, eventually making its way to the rare book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, who publicized the manuscript and leant it his name. A full history of the book's impressive ownership is here.

Is it an elaborate cypher? A medieval Henry Darger? A record of contact –– with extraterrestrials or a parallel universe? A hoax?

A PDF (not the best quality, but the best I have) is available for download below.

[The Voynich Manuscript (64MB)]

How Not To Save As: .DOCX

.docx was a format developed for Microsoft Word 2007/Word for Mac 2008 that hoped to replace the standard .doc format. Unfortunately, it proved to be a huge pain for users, as .docx files cannot be opened in earlier or later versions of Word (Microsoft abandoned the format after its poor reception). For those of us that don't use Microsoft Office at all, it can be a huge pain to open .docx files -- and even after a lengthy conversion process to a more usable file structure, some formatting of the document (especially in poetry) can be lost. Below are some guides to saving as the more standard .doc in Word.

• Change the default files save format from .docx to .doc in Word for Mac 2008 (Mac)
• Change the default files save format from .docx to .doc in Word 2007 (PC)

If you're looking for an alternative to Word, check out: Mellel (OSX, $29), OpenOffice (OSX/Windows, free), Pages (OSX/iOS, $20), or WriteRoom (OSX/iOS, $25). All of these can save as and read .doc files.

8-Bit Translations

Two literary NES recreations - Basho's Frogger (a translation of Basho's famous haiku based on Derek Beaulieu's ((plop))), and The Great Gatsby, both playable online.

––Ryan

Tuesdays with Miley

[click to enlarge]

Ryan's Title Poems

[ Happily : We Meet: The Shores of Death : In the American Grain ]

[ To and From : Several Gravities : "I Am" : Citizen Of : The Atom ]

[ Transparent Things :: Noise Water Meat : The Anatomy of Time : Unoriginal Genius ::: Darkness Visible :: Bears : Human Smoke : Pleasure : The Weather ::: Things are Disappearing Here ]

The Hannah Complex

A response to Robin's response to my Miley project ––

This is a performance written by a couple of friends of mine (both, coincidentally, KnowYourMeme scientists) that sparked my interest in the philosophical/metaphysical/'pataphysical ramifications of Hannah Montana. From the program notes:

The Hannah Complex is a lecture in one act for two vocalists, chamber orchestra (or pre-recorded music), and slide-show.

What is reality? And how does it work? How are we able to make sense of the differences between it and fiction? But wait… what is sense? We all share it – there is a “common sense” – but how did it develop? Can there be more than one common sense?

The Hannah Complex is about reality, and the ways in which we, as members of it, are able to interact with and even control it. It sounds complicated and lofty, we know, but don’t worry we start small. Two vocalists begin with an explanation of common sense, and a straight forward comparison of fiction and non-fiction, and approach some interesting ideas about evolutionary theory, multiple personalities and the secret lives of pop stars. The Hannah Complex explains why it is certain images seek to replicate themselves endlessly, and why some of us are capable of being at once ourselves and also … well … anyone else.

The link below has a video of the full performance and a PDF of the score.

[The Hannah Complex]

--Ryan

Codex Seraphinianus

I'm pretty sure that if I could take one book with me to a desert island, it would be this one - and all the writing in it is completely unintelligible. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing.

A copy of the physical book costs a small fortune, but luckily we have the interwebs at our disposal. My much-loved PDF copy of the book is available below.

[Luigi Serafini - Codex Seraphinianus (53.24mb)]

––Ryan

Camp Printing

Not long ago I was fortunate enough to finally come upon a copy of Rosemarie Waldrop's gorgeous Camp Printing (1970). I'd heard of the book a few times before (it's mentioned at length in Craig Dworkin's study Reading the Illegible) but was surprised to find almost no mention of it on the internets, and only a single grainy image. To rectify this, I've scanned and uploaded the entire book to my server. The link, in addition to a few notable pages, appears below.

[ Rosmarie Waldrop - Camp Printing (33.3mb) ]

––Ryan

Battle Game

Michelle Gay - Battle Game
detail, digitally printed tapestry, 1999-2000

Quake source code and C++ dictionary printed as 10 point courier type in form of Bayeaux Tapestry.
2.5 feet x 50 feet, ongoing length

Takes the two representations of war - 1000 years apart - the online multi-user game Quake (circa 1996-99) and the representation of the 'Battle of 1006', Bayeaux Tapestry as a merger point

––Ryan

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)

The great avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt died today at 94. I've uploaded two of my favorite pieces –– The Head of the Bed for soprano and four instruments (1982) and Concerto for piano and orchestra (1985) –– to my server [link].

His contentious and brilliant 1958 essay Who Cares If You Listen? is impressively relevant, especially if you find-and-replace music with poetry and composer with author. An interview is here.

(Bonus track –– replace concert hall with poetry reading in the following:

“I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it.” –– Milton Babbit)

–– Ryan

The Necropastoral

Fellow poets/poetesses of the intarwebs ––

I'm sorry I missed you all on Wednesday afternoon –– though at least the virtual (preferable) me can surf alongside you through these series of tubes. My girlfriend's father passed away early Wednesday morning (precipitating my absence) –– and weirdly enough it's in this climate I find myself preparing some poems from Ariel for my undergrad students for Monday. I've been following (as maybe some of you have) the discussion of Plath's "necropastoral" that's been taking place across the poetry blogonets the past few weeks. Below are the more significant posts on the subject, which I find extremely interesting, especially when applied, as Corey suggests, to some of the recent mutations of the avant-pastoral like Goldsmith's The Weather.

Joyelle McSweeney, Citizens of the Necropastoral: Lady Lazarus and Kubla Kahn

Danielle Pafunda, Annotated Mash-Up Plath, Jones, Necropastoral, WOUND WOUND WOUND

Johannes Goransson, Media Bleeds Through Apertures: Necropastoral, Pornography and Insectoid Psychosis

Joyelle McSweeney, 13 Necropastorals

Monica Mody, Necropastorals and Counterfeit Hindus

Joshua Corey, Joyelle McSweeney's Necropastoral

(I've also uploaded a PDF of Joshua Corey's dissertation, The American Avant-Pastoral: Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Ronald Johnson, to my server if you want to read more on the subject.)

–– Ryan