It has been hard going in my search for interesting literature in the realm of Second Life. There are seemingly endless resources to look through, but few ever pay off, and the world itself is very difficult to navigate through to find interesting things. I am coming to realize that finding out about things that no one I know knows anything about, in a place I know little about is very daunting. I feel like a spy who doesn't know Russian.
I have joined a few new groups, all of them now being - Just Poets, Oyster Bay Sculpture & Aquarium, Penguin Readers, Poetry Guild, Shakespeare & Company, sLiterary, The Blue Angel VIP, and Writers of SL, but a good part of the messages I have been sent are not worth mentioning and not very helpful.
Online I did find an interesting description of a novel that Penguin had made a 3-D representation of in SL. Apparently they took the story of "Snow Crash" and made a 3-D world of the action in SL, which is very interesting, but I can not find a link or location on the internet and I can not find it in SL or using it's search function. But, I do feel that such an examle is very interesting for writers of electronic literature. A reader could literally travel through a 3-D narrative in SL meeting characters and actions and places and scripts along the way. This is perhaps close to what Matt asked me to find: "Poetry dependant on the 3-D world of Second Life."
I did get an in-world copy of sLiterary Magazine, but I found it more difficult to read than it was worth. It was very touch to manage the scrolling and fit the pages into my screen - the online version is much easier, but not really a SL experience.
This week Trish and I will be working on the structure of our presentation and report and will begin working on it also. By Wednesday we should have a decent outline of our project to share.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Poetry and a Play in SL
Second Life is starting to get a little more enjoyable. And I have my preliminary position for the presentation in May. On Sunday I attended a country music concert for Relay for Life, an open-mic poetry night, and a one act play. As well as make a few friends and join some groups.
On New World Notes' Rik's Picks there was a link:
2-4PM - Country Music Concert for Relay for Life
The Dixie Rebels invite you to throw on your cowboy boots and ten gallon and head over to Dixie Land Estates (130, 132) for a benefit concert by Jeff Tully with all proceeds going to Relay for Life.
When I arrived I had a difficult time being able to listen to the music being performed. Finally after a few technical, which resembled RL concert problems, they gave a link which downloaded an iTunes file of streaming audio. I listened to a country singer perform and speak to the crowd, using their SL names, while his avatar stood on stage. The performance was more audio than visual; the singer didn't move much or even strum the guitar, but the fans were dancing and making out on the dance floor. It was more interesting to watch the fans than the performer. The costumes and custom dance moves are eternally interesting and art in themselves. But, overall it was a less than exciting event, but I could see the potential of something more interesting.
Later I went to the Blue Angel Open Mic at 5pm slt in Windemerer 232, 186, 34. I arrived early and spoke to Siobhan Flanagan for a few minutes. It felt more or less like a real conversation - i tried not to speak over her and was civil - and I learned she is a teacher in Toronto very into the music scene. She too is a newbie, but I think she'll lead me to interesting things. The poetry which was presented was decent. Everyone sits in chairs while in the chat box the speaker enters in each line of the work. It's not very impressive presentation - just an aim conversation with a live background. There are often typos, but the poetry was interesting and there is a library of work I will check out.
I then went to a One Act play called The Box, written by Rich Smolen. I arrived late, not having received the message from the group Writers of SL and I could never catch up with the story. The Avatars move around a little, but stop to type their speech. It is delivered very slow and therefore wasn't very good. But, they promised it would be better next time - every Saturday at 2 pm slt they will perform at Nimue 239 169 81.
Although I still have not seen anything as interesting (literature wise) as the ELC, I do feel SL is a good place for electronic literature artists to get involved in. It is an open source program, so the power is in the user's hands. It is also developing fast, though still relatively new. I believe that all a new creation takes is computer skill and I have already seen great evidence of that in the hands of artists.
I look forward to knew discoveries and now I have more resources to learn from.
On New World Notes' Rik's Picks there was a link:
2-4PM - Country Music Concert for Relay for Life
The Dixie Rebels invite you to throw on your cowboy boots and ten gallon and head over to Dixie Land Estates (130, 132) for a benefit concert by Jeff Tully with all proceeds going to Relay for Life.
When I arrived I had a difficult time being able to listen to the music being performed. Finally after a few technical, which resembled RL concert problems, they gave a link which downloaded an iTunes file of streaming audio. I listened to a country singer perform and speak to the crowd, using their SL names, while his avatar stood on stage. The performance was more audio than visual; the singer didn't move much or even strum the guitar, but the fans were dancing and making out on the dance floor. It was more interesting to watch the fans than the performer. The costumes and custom dance moves are eternally interesting and art in themselves. But, overall it was a less than exciting event, but I could see the potential of something more interesting.
Later I went to the Blue Angel Open Mic at 5pm slt in Windemerer 232, 186, 34. I arrived early and spoke to Siobhan Flanagan for a few minutes. It felt more or less like a real conversation - i tried not to speak over her and was civil - and I learned she is a teacher in Toronto very into the music scene. She too is a newbie, but I think she'll lead me to interesting things. The poetry which was presented was decent. Everyone sits in chairs while in the chat box the speaker enters in each line of the work. It's not very impressive presentation - just an aim conversation with a live background. There are often typos, but the poetry was interesting and there is a library of work I will check out.
I then went to a One Act play called The Box, written by Rich Smolen. I arrived late, not having received the message from the group Writers of SL and I could never catch up with the story. The Avatars move around a little, but stop to type their speech. It is delivered very slow and therefore wasn't very good. But, they promised it would be better next time - every Saturday at 2 pm slt they will perform at Nimue 239 169 81.
Although I still have not seen anything as interesting (literature wise) as the ELC, I do feel SL is a good place for electronic literature artists to get involved in. It is an open source program, so the power is in the user's hands. It is also developing fast, though still relatively new. I believe that all a new creation takes is computer skill and I have already seen great evidence of that in the hands of artists.
I look forward to knew discoveries and now I have more resources to learn from.
Brad Paley: "Interaction Design as a Branch of the Humanities: A Healthier Fit than Technology or Computer Science?"
On Wednesday Tricia and I attended the Digital Dialogue featuring Brad Paley and it was very interesting. He presented only one work concerning the humanities, but the point of the lecture was to create thought and discussion about whether or not Human Computer interaction research is a good fit in the arts or not.
The example he presented was the TextArc of Alice in Wonderland. At first it seems like a simple picture but on the computer it becomes an interesting work of electronic literature. As he writes on the web page, www.textarc.org, "TextArc is a tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing." The words which occur more frequently are brighter and layered on top of the others. The viewer/user understands that these are the more important words, like Alice and Queen, and we can see exactly where they occur in the text. He showed that Queen is displaced in three distinct places; by putting the mouse over "Queen" strings spread from that word to where they are mentioned in the text (the outermost arc is the entire text from beginning to end). She is introduced and then not mentioned again until the reader would have forgotten about her. Such a tool as TextArc gives one an easy way to analyze the structure an author has chosen.
This is an interesting concept and program, which allows for many new ways for analysing and creating new ideas about a text and it's author, but I do not feel that it is a great piece of electronic literature. Once the idea and program were made, it becomes the same thing over and over again, just with different texts.
The other things he presented were examples of Human Computer Interactions. Such as keypads for doctors and stock brokers. These have very little to do with the humanities but the concepts behind them would help make electronic literature better. I understand the concept to be using common cultural thought processes to make electronic devices easier to use. Brad studies the thought process of brokers - how they make a stock deal, the steps involved, the most important ideas and distinctions - and creates the best pda possible for them.
Often, electronic literature is difficult for the user. Like myself, many people interested in literature are not "computer-savvy." If artists had a better idea of the way the average reader worked through a text, their work would become easier. But, as I write this I wonder if the difficulty is part of the point. I have no experience with Second Life and I think learning a new skill is part of the experience. Works on the ELC are interactive like nothing I've ever come across and I feel that working through a new medium and finding meaning in the interaction is part of the beauty.
So then Brad Paley's work in HCIL could be useful for artists in the humanities but might be too involved for an artist to use. A collaboration between the fields would be far more effective. If an artist could present her work to a member of HCIL they could work together to make it a more effective work.
Overall, this was a very interesting presentation that brought to light many possibilities in this new mixture of the computer and literature.
The example he presented was the TextArc of Alice in Wonderland. At first it seems like a simple picture but on the computer it becomes an interesting work of electronic literature. As he writes on the web page, www.textarc.org, "TextArc is a tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing." The words which occur more frequently are brighter and layered on top of the others. The viewer/user understands that these are the more important words, like Alice and Queen, and we can see exactly where they occur in the text. He showed that Queen is displaced in three distinct places; by putting the mouse over "Queen" strings spread from that word to where they are mentioned in the text (the outermost arc is the entire text from beginning to end). She is introduced and then not mentioned again until the reader would have forgotten about her. Such a tool as TextArc gives one an easy way to analyze the structure an author has chosen.
This is an interesting concept and program, which allows for many new ways for analysing and creating new ideas about a text and it's author, but I do not feel that it is a great piece of electronic literature. Once the idea and program were made, it becomes the same thing over and over again, just with different texts.
The other things he presented were examples of Human Computer Interactions. Such as keypads for doctors and stock brokers. These have very little to do with the humanities but the concepts behind them would help make electronic literature better. I understand the concept to be using common cultural thought processes to make electronic devices easier to use. Brad studies the thought process of brokers - how they make a stock deal, the steps involved, the most important ideas and distinctions - and creates the best pda possible for them.
Often, electronic literature is difficult for the user. Like myself, many people interested in literature are not "computer-savvy." If artists had a better idea of the way the average reader worked through a text, their work would become easier. But, as I write this I wonder if the difficulty is part of the point. I have no experience with Second Life and I think learning a new skill is part of the experience. Works on the ELC are interactive like nothing I've ever come across and I feel that working through a new medium and finding meaning in the interaction is part of the beauty.
So then Brad Paley's work in HCIL could be useful for artists in the humanities but might be too involved for an artist to use. A collaboration between the fields would be far more effective. If an artist could present her work to a member of HCIL they could work together to make it a more effective work.
Overall, this was a very interesting presentation that brought to light many possibilities in this new mixture of the computer and literature.
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