Who are the barbarians?

Denys Arcand’s movie Les Invasions barbares (2003) is a sequel to The Decline of the American Empire that nicely works through the clash of two generations, the 60s book-oriented intellectuals of the left and their 90s/00s children who play computer games and make money with computers.

Some of the same issues are posed by the essay in FrontPage The Magic of Images by Camille Paglia. Paglia believes that knowing images is more important than ever, but our postmodern approach to the visual prevalent in universities doesn’t work. It is a literary approach grounded in the theories of our generation not the practices of our children.

My take is that the humanities lost relevance when we abandoned creation for criticism. As important as criticism is, as a practice it is sold as the practice of the custodians of value. There are the struggling artists and programmers who make and the custodians (think Plato’s guardians) who decide what is good. Well … no one pays attention to our connesseurship, even when grounded in French theory. Popular culture passed us by when we detached creative practices from criticism. Students passed us by when we were no longer teaching people to contribute culture, which is what they want to do. While it is expensive to teach the arts, we need to reincoporate them into the humanities. To some extent Philosophy is the last humanities discipline where to study philosophy is still to do it.

Returning to Arcand’s film – who are the barbarians? Are the game playing ADD students that we complain about the barbarians or are we? (Yes, I do have a beard.)
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Lena and Imaging

Supervising a Ph.D. student in engineering who is working on imaging I came across (again) the Lena image that is used as a standard for image engineering. I must say that I thought the repeated use of that image distasteful, so I did some research and found The Rest of the Lenna Story. I’m not sure now what to think about the ongoing use of this. On the one hand it is now a standard of sorts which allows comparison among techniques. It has also become a part of the culture, for better or worse. On the other hand Playboy still owns copyright and students should be discouraged from using copyrighted materials, even when it is unlikely that they will be sued. Finally, it is distracting to have to look at images meant to titillate.

As with all these things, to complain would probably provoke the community into digging in its heels around censorship. Why doesn’t someone come up with a better image?

Knowledge Dissemination: Rewards

Optimizing the transformation of knowledge dissemination is a SSHRC commissioned study being conducted by a team connected with CARL. I have been asked to address their “consensus panel” (interesting idea) about Control, Creativity and Rewards. The web site has a lot of background information around research and research about research, especially in the Candian context. The question I am working on is around recognition and rewards in the academy, especially for digital research and dissemination. The issue has come up over and over in the SSHRC Transformation process – if SSHRC wants greater impact and dissemination, then universities need to reward activities of that sort like public lectures, essays in lay publications, blogs and so on.

For that matter, how would this blog be assessed if I put it down on my CV next year as a research contribution? Ha!

photoblox: image application

Laszlo PhotoBlox is an internet image viewing toy that lets you have a slide show on a page. Its available for free with instructions on how to integrate into a page or blog giving you a moving show. It is controlled by an XML file and has the capacity to include descriptive texts. I have to try it as an image/text experiment.
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Blue Company; E-mail Fiction

Thanks to Words’ End blog by Vika Zafrin I discovered Blue Company 2002 Archive which was apparently distributed by e-mail. The notes combine text (formatted) and drawings into original mixed media fiction. Another idea for images and text on the net.

The author’s blog is at robwit.net. There are more experiments there. I can’t help wondering if the web has freed writers to be able to work with images cheaply (without having to worry about publication costs.) Its the future of futurism and futurist typographic poetry.

Untitled #4

How to write about the relationship between programming and coding? In the dialogue that Steve Ramsay and I gave at the ACH in Georgia we delivered a dialogue called Untitled Number 4: A Brechto-Socratic Dialgoue. This was actually based on a series of playful experiments at writing code that could be read which led to literary program in Ruby that could be read or run. See the IE web archive of what the print version of the program looked like this – Untitled Number 4. A literary program is written like prose with code fragments woven in the flow of the text (as opposed to comments in the flow of the code.) Software can then generate the documentation or the code to be interpreted.

Some of Matt’s students commented on the dialogue. See Code as Writing as Code.

Media Analysis and Computer Games

How are computer games presented to parents and teachers? The Concerns About Video Games | Excessive Playing is one in a collection of resources available for parents and teachers at the Media Awarness site (search for games and you get more). See especially the work by Stephen Kline from the Media Analysis Lab at SFU, Video Game Culture: Leisure and Play Preferences of B.C. Teens | Study. The study comments on the disparity between the economic importance of games and the amount of research into the effects of computer games. On the whole Kline’s study and the Awareness site seems balanced – they avoid the sort of hyped criticism of “we’ve found another bad thing you didn’t know about” journalism.
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