User:Golubjevaite/ppr
PROJECT PROPOSAL
what do you want to make?
> when originally writing from a vocal position how could a writer's voice be preserved within a stand alone publication ?
> new ways of performing poetics ? what else could potentially be there apart from traditional spoken word in front of an audience on stage in an awfully quiet room?
> writing without the need to organize and arrange a poem in a specific order. giving freedom to a reader to navigate through a narrative in their own paste and direction.
> collaborative writing in order to challenge the traditional writer - reader relationship.
> composing chaotic poetics. how could we read without it being spelled out to us and if it could in fact communicate anything?
> how could computation help to develop new ways of telling a narrative?
These are a few questions I want to address in my practice based research.
For my project I want to produce a series of prototypes (tools) that would focus on alternative ways of writing , reading, publishing and performing poetics. I see these tools as poetic narrative devices, that could potentially run independently on their own but also could be run by one or multiple users simultaneously.
why do you want to make it ?
"the type of experiences you can have from books, do not have to be delivered by books" - John Cayley
> I miss more urban and novel ways of working with literature, something that would authentically represent the current time and my own generation as well as people with different cognitive capabilities. Big motivation for this project comes from a personal frustration dealing with traditional literature, specifically in academic circumstances. From a young age i struggled with reading as well as communicating what I needed/wanted through linear paragraphs of text. Nonetheless I have been interested in telling narratives and speaking my mind and sharing my voice through writing, my own way. Through learning about and working with computation I see potential to develop my practice in a more efficiant direction, I see potential to bring in elements into my work that would not be possible in print.
relation to previous practice
My first attempt to experiment with a form of a publication: [> WEBLEEDLIKEG.com <]
After 4 years of bachelor studies I ended up with a collection of poems that I wanted to publish and I naturally printed and binded it into a book at first. However very rapidly I felt dissatisfied with the result, it felt somewhat inappropriate to use print as the format. The poems lost that [a]live element and voice that I had while drafting them in the first place. I really wanted to bring them back to that raw state. I did not want my writing to end up in a dusty and perhaps unreachable place. Apart from that my writing process was influenced a lot by the apps and software I was using at the time, which settled my decision to (re)publish it in a digital format instead - I made a website. By working with HTML and Javascript I could add dynamic content and functionalities to my publication + i could let readers to interact with the poetics more independently.
working on the website had futher led me to developing a performance - WEBLEEDLIKEG live act. website - performing online, live act - performing IRL. again the desire to bring the work to the outside world and for it to exist in multiple life forms.
performance description/ audio
me as an operator rather than a person on spot, rather than my personality, persona as an artist. i like to be present in the work , not my work be present in alongside my artist personality.
Special Issue 10 / SEVEN['7'] / link
I wanted to experiment with a different notion of reading in a sense of giving a reader bits and impulses of a narrative rather than a fully arranged and linear story. One of the reasons was because in the past whenever I was making my poems I had to adjust them in a certain order to submit or publish it in print. That did not make sense to me because it was not the way I wrote them in a first place. The making (writing process) happened in a performative way, in an oral way even when it was inside my head, so "how do I publish it in the same way?" was the question i wanted to tackle
The prototypes that I want to make this year are a continuation of these past explorations I did with WEBLEEDLIKEG.com & SEVEN['7'].
> Recent years my works have often been process-based. I believe a different day calls for a different result and a version. Frequent recycling, remixing, modifying, updating of my projects has been an important part of my artistic practice. I often build up my projects by shifting between mediums while focused on specific topics. I am interested in how by taking a different form the language of the form is affected . How a deformed original shape deforms its speech with it and if it does ? How the first shape influence the further one and so on . A certain phase of a constant metamorphosis - hybrid - merge. The fragile aspect of relevance is important to me, to feel that the work is living its proper time.
prototype idea/s
> I would describe myself as a maker first of all and I usually think and come to conclusions through a making process / that is why I cannot give you a full and concrete description of what the end result exactly will be / what I have now is a goal (idea) and an interest (topic) and a starting point ( current process) / I like to work this way because it helps me to discover more as I go along the way, which is also how I want users to experience my work
> The prototype I am currently working on is text to web-content device
> Basically a device that will take text as an input and will output an ongoing story on a webpage, where a reader will be able to further configure/manipulate the content of the story
> So far I am dividing the current idea into 3 main parts: input/ output / input2
(input) |-------------------output-------------------| (input2)
TEXT | POEM | CONFIGURATION
| (img, sound, txt, video) |
WRITER --->---->---->----> | DATABASE ---> ----> -----> ---> WEBPAGE |<--<--<--->-->--> READER is a WRITER2
| |
| |
|--------------------------------------------|
|
|
|
(input 3?)
READER/WRITER
(???)
[input]
> How could computation help to develop new ways of telling a narrative?
> The idea is that any type of text can be the input / it can be something similar to a poem, a caption, a tweet, a code, a conversation, depends how a user or multiple users (writers) want to use it and what story they want to tell and/or what language they are comfortable using / the input text could be 1500 words and the output may be just 1 image / the other way around as well / the content on the webpage will update as long as there will be new text coming in
[output]
> I am interested in what it means to read in post-digital and what I mean by reading is perceiving information / since we already are practicing new behaviors of reading when we scan the content browsing the internet, I am interested in these new habits and how our cognitive abilities like memory are effected by it
> I am curious about how it influences our sense of intuition and how could we read without it being spelled out to us? How far could we push the poetic abstraction (within computation) and in fact if it could communicate anything?
[input2]
> I want to challenge the relationship between a writer and a reader
> As you can see from the diagram sketch above, I want a user on the browser side (a reader) to have the power to affect the story that he/she is reading and therefore become what I call a WRITER2
////
> At the moment I am working on this for my own purposes, but I would be happy to share my (final) project results and perhaps collaborate further with people who are interested in similar topics and questions after my graduation
how do you plan to make it?
TO DO
- Make an IRC_bot & make it "listen" to the input text
- Research on different data storages (Wikidata, archive.org, etc.)
- Explore web search engines & possibility to download web-content with a help of a bot (Python / bash)
- Look into other Python/ Bash tools to grab/download content (youtube-dl/videogrep/pytube etc.)
- other Python libraries for manipulating and editing img, sound, video, txt (imagemagick, pillow, ffmpeg, nltk, webvtt, etc.)
- Install a MediaWiki and upload the personally collected AV material on it + connect it to the bot
- Look into live editing the webpage/ content manipulation tools/ RGB split etc.
- Test the prototypes with a help of other people and gather some feedback / XPUB & friends, and using Mastodon perhaps to find people outside my circle (as Marloes suggested).
////
A more detailed description:
> A single or multiple users will have the possibility to join an IRC chatroom and contribute (to write) some text (narrative). An IRC_bot / link joins a dedicated IRC channel and "listens" - collects the text.
> Then I want to try out 2 ways of providing AV content for the website:
a. After the bot gets some input it runs a search on the web for some content material and downloads it to a folder, dedicated to the webpage. For now I worked with DuckDuckGo / link for images, which worked pretty well, but I want to explore other possibilities for other type of content.
b. I want to install a MediaWiki and create a personal database with my own collection of AV material. Then connect the bot to the API, so it retrieves the content from the Wiki, whenever needed.
> There will be other Python scripts that will help to manipulate the downloaded material in between the process, into a final visible content, that will then finally appear on a webpage (to read).
> Apart from that I want there to be some additional tools (probably made with Javascript) on the webpage itself that would let a visitor (a reader) to manipulate (to write) the content (narrative) further. I want a single or multiple users have the possibility to browse the website and manipulate the content live together.
> The final presentation of this project as I imagine it now would be in a performative & interactive way - showcasing the prototypes live. People will be able to visit the webpage as well as to join inside a dedicated IRC chat room.
what is your timetable?
oct - nov:
1 . find a topic of interest
2. first hackpacts
3. write the project proposal + thesis outline
4. begin IRC_bot making
5. looking into Python libraries/ basics
6. search engines (DuckDuckGo, Google) & mediadatabases (WikiData, archive.org)
7. look into ppl that could help me with my project
dec - jan
1. thesis first chapter + continue research/reading
2. pyratechnic workshop
3. continue with bot experiments
4. continue with Python libraries
5. start with webpage development
feb
1. thesis writing
2. install MediaWiki + upload personal collection
3. MediaWiki API
4. look into javascript possibilities for the webpage/ basics
5. have some test & feedback sessions with ppl
march - april
1. Finish writing thesis
2. Make further decisions/ changes/ improvements / remix on the prototypes according to the feedback & personal observations
3. Further webpage development/ configuration options / javascript
4. Test again
may
1. Wrap it up & make it presentable for the graduation
2. Share on Git(?)
relation to a larger context
>> John Cayley: The Future of Language / video link
A few interesting points from this talk, that I connect with:
> our relationship with language is changed not only by photography and film (as stated by Flusser) but also by computation (as added by Cayley himself).
> the relationship of language and symbolic practice to images has changed
> there is always a relationship with orality for humans as you read
> memory is non linear
>> Electronic Literature and Future Books / video link
Presentations and a discussion between Katherine Hayles, Rita Raley & Nick Montfort
A few questions and points that have been addressed in this talk, that are of the same interest as mine:
> how the process of writing have been affected by computation & networks?
> "Distracted reading is now becoming not just a reading practice but cultural practice to which writers are responding." - K. Hayles
> " Talan Memmott / LEXIA TO PERPLEXIA link which makes normative, makes the standard, the state of perplexity so in other words rather than thinking about a kind of deviation from long forms of narrative, deviation from sustained practices of attention, it makes disorientation the standard from which one would have to imagine that a shift back to what we now regard as traditional forms of reading would be the deviation" - R. Raley
> Electronic Literature Collection / link
>> Death Grips - I've Seen Footage (Official Video) / link
Absolutely accidentally I remembered this Death Grips video - composed completely out of images, which I think relates a lot to my project and the questions I have related to human cognitive skills.
>> Mira Gonzalez & Tao Lin - Selected Tweets
The book is a compendium of tweets written over the course of ten years, sometimes under their own names, sometimes using assumed names. Mira and Tao both approach tweets as a viable potential literary form. I have been writing similartly.
>> Critical Making / link
Matt Ratto coined the term in 2008. I cannot directly relate to the works of Ratto or other makers in the movement, but I can certainly connect with some of its ideology:
"The quality of a critical making lab is evaluated based on the physical "making" process, regardless of quality of the final material production. Prior studies have noted the separation between critical thinking and physical "making". Specifically, experts in technology lack a knowledge of art, and vice versa."
who can help you and how?
not sure yet, but will research asap.
bibliography
Nancy Katherine Hayles. Electronic Literature : New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, Ind, University Of Notre Dame, 2010.
2015. Writing And Unwriting (Media) Art History. Cambridge (Massachusetts): The MIT Press, pp.97-107.
Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ludovico, A. (2013). Post-Digital Print: The mutation of publishing since 1894. Onomatopee.
Cramer, F., 2005. Words Made Flesh. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute.