Tag Archives: marylhurst university

Digital Academics

88 Constellations by David Clark

88 Constellations

I want to say that this work, though cinematic, does not have that feel to me. I do not want to call it a novel either. It feels like avant-garde creative non-fiction, if there is even such a thing (also, I know that this classification may represent an overly academic need to categorize accurately the things that I read or consume). What is literary about this to me is the linking of words, or symbols, to broader expositions, showing that a symbol encapsulates a great deal, meaning that no one word is really just one word but is really a connection of a great number of ideas symbolized together in the image of the word on the page. I think that mixing of mediums in this work did a fantastic job of trying to point a person toward the idea that a word is not just a word and as you explore the ideas inside one word, you are lead to explore more and more words and thus to keep exploring an infinite number of ideas. Though the words, symbols, and ideas in this work are not technically infinite, they give the sense that they may be. Because this work explores ideas like this, I feel that it is literary, at least within the confines of what I have grown to think of the idea of literature.

OK. Now I need to go let me head cool down, and marvel at the fact that I just witnessed a work that links Carmen Miranda and Hitler with only a couple clicks of the mouse between them.

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Digital Academics

Hello Twine!

 I am EXTREMELY (yes, I just used caps, bold, italic, underline, comic sans, and purple on an adverb to express my excitement…English majors and designers, please avert your eyes) excited about giving Twine a try. First off, Anna Anthropy should write all how-to’s ever. I loved her introduction to Twine and I felt like it opened my eyes to some potential features and ideas to experiment with using this great tool, and also let me feel like I could hit the ground running without worrying about the technical stuff too much.

Last week I mentioned writing choose your own adventure stories in QBASIC when I was a teenager. This program essentially gives you the same ability and does so in a far more user friendly way. The ability to create the story and then manipulate the markup, css, and javascript makes Twine a very robust platform and I fear that there is not going to be enough time in this class for me to really get as much out of it as I hope to.

I have had time to read a couple examples that Anna Anthropy points us toward at the end of her article. I adore You Will Select a Decision, published by Brendan Patrick Hennessy. I only had time to play with №1 – Small Child In Woods, and I managed to kill the poor child within 4 steps of the story, but the narrative is fantastic, and the history of it being banned by the CIA due to fears involving a communist plot to control the minds of American children is great as well.

I can not stress how excited I am to use this software for this class, and I will try and post a quick test before our Google Hangout tomorrow evening. Do any of you have ideas that you want to try in the Twine format yet?

 

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Digital Academics

Reactions to “And the Robot Horse You Rode In On” & “Party At Woodside”

 Oh! I love A Party in Woodside by Judy Malloy. A friend of mine and myself spent some time trying to create “choose your own adventure” stories in QBASIC when I was in junior high and as underclassmen in high school. My friends and I all spent a great deal of time online playing text based adventure games, which share some similarities to these stories as well. I really enjoy what Judy Malloy has done here. I love the parallel narratives that are taking place. I followed Jenny and Uncle Roger through the story. It was interesting how clicking on one and then back to the other would result in you either making leaps forward or back in time in relation to the other. The whole experience really gave a temporal and connected feel to the experience and I am afraid I am hooked. I am also planning on going to my father’s house this week to see if I can find any of the old 5.25” discs that we saved our adventure books to. If I can, I will try and compile them and share them here on the blog.

I also enjoyed And the Robot Horse You Rode In On by Anna Anthropy as well. I think that this is a great example of an evolution beyond the concept of Malloy’s work, though I feel as though there is a strength in the search terms listed at the bottom of the work in Malloy’s piece. I like that I can double back and see the event from the perspective of another character and then, using the back navigation button on my browser, go back to the original character’s point of view in a more understandable fashion. That said, the “new Wild West” environment and characters in Anthropy’s story are fascinating and I will be revisiting this piece in the future.

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Digital Academics, Short Prose

Concrete Poems

 I have to say that reading and seeing different concrete poems was very eye opening for me this week. Without a doubt, I feel as though I learned the most from Dan Waber’s Strings. I really liked Letter Man by Adam Lisckiewicz, but I could not stop watching the strings. The final flash element, poidog, was fantastic. I feel as though the earlier segments of the work did a good job of preparing me to really watch and understand when Adam showed us that words are strings that he pulls from his mouth. After watching this, and getting to watch the shape of the words as well as the words themselves, I feel like I have been introduced to a great new tool for writing/creating. Moving, animated words, and the meaning making that can happen in this space feels so very freeing. I decided that I would attempt to make a concrete poem of my own. Below, I am including a conversion of an older piece I wrote for one of Jay’s classes. I realized that allowing the words to take on the shape of the poem could lend a different sort of imagery and path for meaning making for the reader. While this is not as dynamic as the works that we saw this week, I feel like the reshaping of the piece has made quite a bit of a difference. I hope you enjoy it.

Concrete Poem

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Digital Academics

4’33”

4’33”

I had a really interesting time making my own sound poem in the style of 4’33” by John Cage. I had a hard time thinking of a place and time in which I am supposed to be surrounded by silence. The two places I can think of are either at the Marylhurt Library, where I go to work on finals and midterms, or during the time in which my son takes his nap during the day. He is three and a half and nap time is starting to evolve into something entirely different. My 4’33” is a recording of the “silence” that I now experience during Aage’s nap time. You can find this poem by going to the World of 4’33” inside of the app and then look for the only poem in the Clackamas/Gladstone/Milwaukie area.

What I really fell in love with when I was listening to other random poems on this app from around the world were all the little sounds that fill up the silence of a “quiet” space. From the ticking of clocks, to the breathing of the person making the recording. There is always something going on, and a range of sounds to explore. I started finding myself trying to interpret the space that was being recorded in the different locations. I was listening to one from Europe and I think I was hearing the sound of the compressor on the refrigerator coming on and off and the drip of a sink faucet. Through this, I started building the image of a run down kitchen in a small apartment in the city. I even slipped into a day dream imagining the color of the faded wall paper and the smell of cheap eastern european cigarettes that had managed to permanently imprint into the walls and floors even though the new, younger tenant had never smoked a single day of his/her life. It is here, in the ability to day dream and bring my own idea of the space into the work that I started thinking that the recording had an advantage over a live performance. The live performance that we watched last week gave me too much detail and I felt trapped within the confines of the images defined in the video. Here, I only have the sound, and because this creates a wide open area for my mind to explore, I found the experience much more enthralling.

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