juliannechat

Feelings from Laura Hyunjhee Kim's workshop (ELO2021 - 2)

Among Laura Hyunjhee Kim's many roles is that of feelosopher.

As described on her website, "a Living Lab focuses on the body as a feelosophical medium and a somatic laboratory for art-in-the-making." And so her workshop "Feeling without Touching" included remote-friendly versions of her practices, which involve "attending to the everyday with a sense of critical wonderment," by means of "spontaneous and improvisational perspective-shifting experiments."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE ALL DID. (I looked up these words afterwards. In the moment I just experienced her suggested activities to the deepest extent possible.) 

Part of the documentation is an image of all of us dancing. I'm waving my large arms and also (it's probably not possible to discern) using my electronic recliner to fold and unfold at the same time. 

Laura asked us to choose an object. This was mine: an extra-large D20 for tabletop gaming. (With pencil for scale, and a view out my office window.) 

(Due to climate change there is thermal film on that window, and I'm featuring the number 17 because Stephanie Strickland has turned me on to prime numbers. You can see this same ledge in my Palm Sunday posting.) 

Up close, the die has glitter embedded in it ...

... which reminded me of the glitter we had played with in Katie Schaag's workshop the previous day. 

My most surprising encounter with the die was when I closed my eyes and simply felt. The hard edges and corners felt "safe"; they were not going to hurt me. 

And finally, when Laura asked us to drink water (all together), I didn't expect to have a flash of worry about the water molecules and their health and our health and the health of Gaia.

I'm now realizing that on a deep level this connection to water is always with me, and I have to ignore or tune it out for some daily activities, but when Laura asked us to be present, there it was!

THIS NEXT BIT IS OPTIONAL and involves "visions" /warning

In the 90s I "captured" some text from the point of view of the water molecules in my morning wash water. It turns out (I was surprised to "discover") that they were keeping an inventory of all living creatures and reporting back to a vibrating database (in the Sargasso Sea at the time; they might since have moved it). 

"Apparently," back in the day, water molecules pushed atoms and molecules together into chlorophyll and proteins and all manner of shapes, so that the (the water) could flow through these shapes and have varied and interesting embodied experiences. But the human-shaped creatures have been harmful to the biosphere generally, and (I was saddened, but not surprised, to further "discover") now water is conducting a referendum on whether to pull their creations apart.

Here are the sort-of-poems. 

Of course, rather than leave well enough alone, I buried them at the center of a hypertext called Murmur of Water. Depending on how you answer a question at the beginning, the reader is either stuck at MIT with some computers wondering where the humans have gone, or maybe it's not too late but this situation is tense. 

The hypertext was an artistic failure, which I analyzed last year in this infographic.

Thank you, Laura and everyone in the workshop!

 

Here's my self-intro for the conference overall. I hope it'll link to more notes soon.

ELO 2021: session report links, self-intro, & 2 stories from the 90s

The conference team is doing a great job! Wit and wonder abound. Links to my session reports:

• GIF from Katie Schaag's workshop "Queer/Femme Internet Aesthetics"
• Notes from Laura Hyunjhee Kim's workshop "Feeling Without Touching" 

[the following were awesome
and I hope to write about them later this year]

Wednesday Keynote by Lai-Tze Fan:
"Unseen Hands: On the Gendered Design of Virtual Assistants and the Limits of Creative AI"

Thursday Keynote by Archana Prasad (and many collaborators):
"RadBots: AI Augmented Writing towards Radical Video Bots"

Friday Keynote by Olga Goriunova:
"Subject-making and aesthetics of data practices"

Since 1998 these conferences have been respites from my career (LinkedIn) and regular life. This week I am on PTO (=paid time off, vacation) from my day job but my regular life is fraught, so I decided with a heavy heart to witness the tools and art sessions via video "later" (as a treat for myself throughout the summer) and actually attend: 

• One precious workshop each day
• All the keynotes
• Events I'm doing with Deena (WRITEPODs being the one I worked on most fiercely) 

The New Work is usually my favorite part, which means when I meet artists I have just seen their work and am able to react/enthuse. Missing that. 

 

A partial self-intro

This blog subtitle "let's play follow the reader" references my career-long obsession with how people read online. My other obsessions include games and collaboration, summed up by this text from inside the early Frisbee:

Flat flip flies straight. Tilted flip curves. Play catch; invent games!

Those sentences used to be my Twitter intro, but now they're just on Medium. My read | play list (to the right), last updated in 2010, was a mix of people I had worked with and people I wanted to work with as of that date. My own works (some in the list on the left) have suffered from my "create one per platform and move on" approach but I learned something from each one. As part of facilitating the work of inventor/creators, my best skills are editing, facilitating collaboration, and continuous process improvement.    

My first full time job was with an interactive TV startup, then I moved to tech writing and usability, then to working on interface "personality." For awhile I gave conference talks on online help and what I then called "object-oriented documentation." I was a fan of early hypertext (multiple platforms) and wrote erotica in Storyspace. In the 90s I was doing tech writing and usability at a CD-ROM division of Lotus and assigned myself to keep track of the early internet on top of that ... 

Career highlights: the infographic

I met "this community" when Dan Bricklin sent me to ACM-HYPERTEXT (now SIGWEB) in 1998 to demonstrate Trellix. Since I'd been tracking pre-web-HT I knew well how most works invented their own user interfaces. Discovering how each one worked was part of the adventure. But many creators chose to sit with each reader to help them discover their work, so I started sharing basic UX observation techniques (including "sit quietly, on your hands, and watch") and I helped Deena Larsen organize the conference | house | party that was the CyberMountain Colloquium. Now we have page metrics and eye tracking, but low budget "fresh reaction" techniques still work and have informed my work with this year's WRITEPODs; I'm still joyfully collaborating with Deena!

I've also had the honor of working with (and learning a great deal from) Stephanie Strickland. Projects have included a non-standard Tumblr in honor of Dragon Logic and coordinating the work of two programmers for her "code project for print," Ringing the Changes. 

And in order to work with Markku Eskelinen I learned enough Finnish to say, "Puhutko Suomea? En puhu." (Do I speak Finnish? Nope!) But it was Raine Koskimaa who laughed. I was glad to discover that word-magicians as featured in Kalevala are still with us.

Nowadays, as a small part of my current day job, I help two colleagues manage a dozen customer support chatbots. As of April 2021 this link goes to the chatbot for Sage Fixed Assets. Naturally I'm watching all the machine learning content with great interest.

 

Note re embodiment and archiving

A former therapist told me there are three ways to think about one's body: what it can do, what it "looks" like, and how it feels to inhabit it. 

I've always been grateful for what my body can do (dance, row, hike) but have disliked how it looked and "felt". Cross-dressing helped a bit. I have brain chemicals that allowed me to talk easily with strangers (I recently did some coaching on how to talk to strangers at conferences, and here's the flyer) and a big voice, and for much of my career I weighed over 300 pounds. Being loud and large made me feel less specifically gendered.

Now that societal changes are making it easier, I'm using Jules and they/them pronouns, and I chose the nonbinary X on my drivers' license, and Deena used Rose Language to help me engage with the change. Of course I haven't gotten around to rebranding any of my web content, partly because I value the history. My first web site was at the nation's first public ISP, and it's still there! Not forever of course; I'm in the process of archiving and saving just the good stuff.

 

Two old stories (that I think are funny) about presenting Trellix to the eliterature community

At ACM-HYPERTEXT 1998, Doug Engelbart looked at Trellix, and asked tough questions such as, "If you change the name of the link there, does it propagate to the actual node (=lexia)," and fortunately the answer to that was yes. I chatted with him for awhile and got some of the pioneers' history confused ...

The next day I came up to him and said, "I wanted to apologize for something I said yesterday. I think I mistakenly attributed one of your ideas to Ted Nelson." 

And he looked at me completely deadpan and replied, "It kept me up all night." 

 

The other story is from TP21CL 1999, during the era in which large groups of people sat and watched as each presenter came up with their own laptop, connected to a projector, and rebooted. (Pretty soon after that, events started requiring you to give them your slides way in advance. But this was partly a tools/tech conference and most of the tech was new enough to require its own machines.)

Anyway, we were all in a lovely, steeply banked, wood-paneled auditorium at Brown, and I was presenting head-to-head against a hyperbolic text (viewer? or something) tool called The Brain. I'd created a work that showed off the Trellix features that were most useful for eliterature, but I failed to fully connect my laptop to all the pins of the projector so everything onscreen was too orange and white. (Afterwards Jim Rosenberg said kindly, "At least you engaged with the community.") 

Then the guy representing The Brain took the stage, looking Matrixy (The Matrix had just come out), with glossy black hair edgily cut, wearing black jeans and a short sleeved black t-shirt, moving around the stage athletically.   

He said, "I hear you people are into books so I decided to make a Brain using my favorite novel of all time!"

And much of the audience leaned forward a bit.

And he unveiled an interesting-looking web of words onscreen and said proudly, "Atlas Shrugged!"

 

[1] Footnote: Lily Zheng's excellent To Dismantle Anti-Asian Racism, We Must Understand Its Roots.

Helen Otterson invites us to celebrate ceramics

Our friend Helen Otterson spoke in Newburg last night. She curated a ceramics show called "Tropes of Nature" at George Fox's Minthorne Gallery.

The exhibit is open all month, in conjunction with the NCECA convention "Future Flux" that will be taking place in Portland in two weeks. (Yes, people will be heading out to George Fox by bus and car to see these intense ceramics, and I hope they will enjoy local wine and produce en route.) For more about George Fox's art programs, contact Professor Tim Timmerman.

All the work was thought (and feeling) provoking. As just one example, a mandala of ceramic flowers on a wall hangs adjacent to a mandala of freshly-cut flowers on the floor. The wall of flowers will remain luminous as the vegetable flowers decay. As an artist's daughter I was always dismayed when a gallery invited her to send work and then requested an "artist's statement". The work is the statement. So I am not going to try to summarize more of these amazing ceramic sculptures in words. 

Helen says the NCECA is "the Comic-Con of ceramics" and there are 70 shows related to the conference (PDF list) we can view for free. The largest outside the convention center will be at Disjecta in North Portland. Lisa Conway, whose work was also featured in "Tropes of Nature", has a solo show at Guardino Gallery that's open right now. 

 

Below are pictures of Otterson's pieces in the show, in ceramic and glass. (While she was an artist in residence here in Portland she also worked with / at Bullseye Glass.) The one you can see well is "Untitled" (2016). 

 Also in photos: my parents chatting with Helen and viewing her work.

quotes & advice from Lizz Winstead's writing workshop

Live Wire brought Lizz Winstead to Portland this weekend, and she led a writing workshop in Curious Comedy Theater's amazing space. Text in quotation marks = Lizz. The rest is her paraphrased advice, grouped roughly by subject. Corrections welcome. Follow Lizz on Twitter: @lizzwinstead.

Lizz on Integrity, Passion, Clarity, Focus

"Your voice matters, so act like it." Believe what you're putting out there. "Own it. Write about the stuff that inspires YOU."

Rather than feel you have to cover topics that bore you, or topics that other people (e.g. David Sedaris) are already doing well, "be consistent and write [only] what you love," so that people know they can "trust you on two or three things." 

"Be critical about your own writing. Sometimes it's not the audience" that doesn't get it, sometimes your stuff is not good. "You're your own obstacle." Write every day and get your "percentages [of good stuff] higher".

Re public performance, sometimes there's just a mismatch. You might be Miles Davis but the audience came to hear country music. "If you love it and you prepared it [properly], you did your job."

"The only ownership you have is the belief in the material." Get "so much under your belt" that you're not defined by any one performance. Quoted Roseanne Cash re "play to the 6% of the audience that are poets."

"Find your clarity." Once you figure out what you're supposed to be doing, "kill the other babies": stop doing the other tangential things so that one thing can grow.

Lizz on Writing A Memoir

"You cannot make an assumption that you can control who you are going to offend." If you are "trying to keep the peace," you get a "crappy memoir." "You can't keep the peace if you're a writer."

Put out "the best product you can and take the lumps." 

"If you have to leave out details, don't even tell the story" at all. Rather than tell a good story with all the best stuff left out and self-censored, choose a different story where you can tell the whole story and get behind it.

Lizz on Co-Founding Things and Paths Into Comedy

She was unemployed (or underemployed) for two years after 9/11 because it was as if there was a moratorium on ... public critique and satire, her kind of thing. Then she got a call asking for her help finding a "Lizz Winstead type" of person to help launch Air America and she said, what's wrong with Lizz herself?

Co-founder's comment on The Daily Show history: In the first stack of 150 submissions (right after founding) only three were from women. To work there, must be news junkie and able to be funny under pressure, which takes a special kind of nerdiness. "It's a nerd club, not a boys' club." [My note: today's Oregonian Q&A said she worked at TDS until 1997, but Lizz confirms it was 1998.]

She said it was great to see today's participants half female. But only one of us was African-American...

"There is no one path to breaking into comedy." She used to "burn Harvard resumes in a Folger's can in my office." She did her first stand-up routine on a dare.

If you want to write for TV, you must submit via an agent. "Understand the tone," of where you're submitting to and/or what you're doing; lots of good material is rejected just because the tone is wrong.

If there isn't an entity where you can see your stuff appearing, create an online presence "that feels like an entity where" your work can live. Again, get the tone right, set the tone for that future entity...

Lizz on Context and Perspective

"Have some context about" yourself and your story. Be aware of your context.

"Keep writing [about an event or issue] until you get perspective," and then "share the perspective." That's the best and most useful thing you can offer other people.

Lizz on Criticism and Trolls

"Engage when they say your philosophy is flawed, but not when they attack you personally." Unless you want to joke with them [she gave great examples]. You can use humor to have a moment of connection with people you otherwise profoundly disagree with.

[Question] How does she find the distance, emotionally, to watch what she has to watch to get stories?

"I do it because you can't." Don't want to sift through? Media Matters for America and Crooks and Liars will show the key clips. In terms of how Glenn, Rush, etc work: she studies "the theatre of the thing": emotional people, people crying, even crocodile tears, wake up corresponding emotions in the audience.

Lizz on Other Ways To Improve

Hang out with people who are "smarter than you". "Always ask questions."

Seek out collaborators who do things that you respect but don't do (or want to do) yourself, "that you don't have but embrace."

To get great stories: click on names you don't know, ask questions and answer them. (Yesterday she discovered a good angle that no one else had, by questioning and looking for answers: only four clicks, but too few people dig down.) If there's a national story, go to its hometown and read what the local newspapers (that local newspaper base) are saying about it.

"Listen instead of see." [Me: *ex-radio person pumping fist*] Watching TV news doesn't make you smarter. She recommends the C-SPAN app, so you can listen to hearings while you're driving, etc. She wants a ban on people sitting at desks looking like newscasters when it's really an opinion show using news visual tropes.

Lizz Cares That People Don't Care, and Is Curious Why More People Aren't Curious

It's sad when people aren't curious about anything. "How do you fight people who aren't curious?"

"There's something very boring about not caring." Call those people out! "It's a cop-out to not care."

[Me: Lizz mentioned @elonjames; calling out people who don't care, and are not curious goes well with Elon's point about calling people on facts that are just wrong.]

Caring for our parents as they age: "No one is writing about it."

Thank you, Lizz!

[In the second half we practiced collaborative comedy writing. I didn't do very well and as soon as I have perspective I'll post about it :).]

batting cleanup "On Miracle Ground XVI"

My friend Ken Gammage is presenting a paper at next week's meeting of the International Lawrence Durrell Society in New Orleans, Louisiana. A full conference schedule is now available for download in two formats. 

The way I read the schedule, Ken is batting cleanup for the Avignon Quintet team on Saturday. His talk, "The Significance of 'Real' and 'Imaginary' Characters in The Avignon Quintet", looks thought-provoking, and his literary and poetic prowess may (or may not) be a surprise to the world that knows him best as the guy who made Viper's YouTube video at CES about how to use an iPhone to control your car remotely.

The other talk that I think I would particularly like is "Writing (on) Walls or the Palimpsest of Time in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet" by Corinne Alexandre-Garner (CREA/CREE, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense) and Isabelle Keller-Privat (CREA/CREE, Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail). You can check out these talks and more in the PDF. I know we as a nation have not helped New Orleans fully recover from H.K. so let's have lots of conferences there on every possible subject...just as one of many types of re-engagements...

Everything-is-connected optional section: My former husband R and I kissed for the first time in New Orleans, the town where he spent his childhood (although not totally in Mardi Gras costumes; that's just what the pictorial record suggests). We didn't begin dating until several years later, but I felt like kissing R the moment I heard him say crossly, "I hate little kids who speak Arabic better than I do." R said that when we were up on the levee, in the dark, surrounded by lights floating on the river and ship horns hooting and little kids (some speaking Arabic) running around and bumping into us. It took until I got back down to Chartres and Iberville for me to actually kiss him, because we were only friends then and I worried about crossing that line. It is his birthday today, and I have already wished him a very happy one. His bedroom has recently been graced by the arrival of a small (but thick) African python: "It's a Python regius, in a tank on top of my dresser, where my housemate installed it last night."

R and Ken (hero of this post) last met at my maternal grandfather's funeral in La Jolla CA. The program had one photo of grampa heading out to surf and another of him at the beach, looking out and thinking. R and I were surrounded by people who took their Christianity seriously in a particular way [I'm a Christian myself so I'm not dissing them just explaining], and Ken and I sat on either side of R to protect him from people humming the "far far better place" song. Wishing you a great conference Ken, and encouraging you to visit the absinthe museum, or have a beignet, for me! (But hold the chicory coffee.)