Calendars:Networked Media Calendar/Networked Media Calendar/24-01-2018 -Event 1
XPUB1 R&W Steve
11:00 = START PROMPT
Outcome.
The provisional reader = synopses, discussion and texts: we will produce a publication comprising the texts you have read and the synopses you have written with a record of our discussions during today's seminar.
a) gather together material (synopses, texts and notes on discussion)
b) record (as in write) discussion = rotating stenographers (which sounds like a line from exquisite corpse)
c) edit all together in consequent, readable form
d) deadline 17:30 Wed 24 Jan 2018. We do it all in a day
Content: Combinational literature; writing machines, synopses of texts read; texts from Delphine's class introduced into the discourse
UPLOAD SYNOPSIS HERE
Timetable:
AM:
11:00-11:30 intro and plan
11:30- 13:30 present synopsis and discuss them – make notes on discussion.
PM:
14:30- 17:30
Gather and edit material and make a provisional reader as pdf (or suggest other form)
Tasks: editors and designers
11:30
INTRO:
Steve introduces the session:
1) Trump and combinational literature (2:30).
A bit of Fry and Laurie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij1pZvv9m0g
2) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
This sentence appears in Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957).
The sentence is interesting in several respects
It is structurally coherent and yet it makes no sense to an English speaker.
Each word in the sentence is a place holder for a particular type of word
colourless (Adjective) green (adjective) ideas (noun) sleep (verb) furiously (adverb)
The same set of rules could return another result: “numberless pink digits jump sadly”
If I said “furiously sleep ideas green colorless ” it just sounds like a random collection of words.
To achieve syntactic order (if not semantic sense) one type of word must follow another.
This means that each word can be understood as a unit of probability in relation to another; the construction “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is more statistically probable than “furiously sleep ideas green colorless ”. Chomsky did not think this, but recent work seems to indicate that the first is more probable:
“Fernando Pereira [,,,] has fitted a simple statistical Markov model to a body of newspaper text, and shown that under this model, Furiously sleep ideas green colorless is about 200,000 times less probable than Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” (from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously)
You can follow the issue from the point of view of computational linguistics here: http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/358/1769/1239
But, setting these differences aside, Chomsky argued for the existence of "universal grammar" or "mental grammar" which held that there are a set of structural rules innate to human beings which structure language over and above any outside stimulus or environmental influences.
3)
In the last session you played exquisite corps and you generated the following poem:
The mechanical treasure slowly stalking peculiar tampons
Huge strip dancer suddenly singing creepily
Shy doctor quickly salutes
Pervasive luckily exploding
Outrageous cheese deadly falls
Nice flowerbuds contineously scream
Terrifying Fox Terrier dogs quickly envelop
Colourful Egg yolks miraclelously bite
New sparks mainly attract
Exquisite corps was named after the first sentence generated in the game “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” = “the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine” . This was in 1925, if the game had been invented in January 2018 it could have been called “peculiar tampons” or "outrageous cheese".
4) We discuss what you have been doing for the last few weeks:
5) read synopsis 1 and discussion
6) read synopsis 2 and discussion
7) read synopsis 3 and discussion
...&c
13:30 LUNCH
14:30- 17:30 Gather and edit material and make a provisional reader as pdf (or suggest other form)
17:30 Publish provisional reader, recap and plan next stage
see also: