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.

time to Echo? yes, because art

I worry that if I get an Echo, I'll become even more Narcissus-istic than I already am.

Carrie, that one was for you. I'll keep working on my one liners.

The moment the Echo came out, people started making art with Alexa. Here's The Listeners, the first Alexa project I was ever aware of, from John Cayley and collaborators, which has now been updated multiple times.

Here's an opinionated and informative overview of the space by Jessi Hempel. 

In 2017 I will get one, because I also want to design for voice on these new platforms.  

While I'm thinking of pioneers who have passed away, I highly recommend Wired For Speech by Cliff Nass and Scott Brave. (Cliff is the deceased pioneer. The book's subtitle: "how voice activates and advances the human-computer relationship.") Their findings can be weaponized now. Is that a good or bad development? To be continued!

 

PS: I hung a poster of this painting by Waterhouse in my college dorm, and earlier this year I temporarily resurrected it, along with an early Yes album cover, to decorate the upstairs hall while Valerie and I were downsizing. Narcissus also has a cameo in a discussion of this art project: When I Think About You I Text Myself.

Prophet check-in

To quote prophet Shelley McLendon, "Don't wait for someone to put you in something! Put yourself in something."

I can check all of these boxes. I've posted the unmarked version of the list so you can check your own score.

After chatting with Val about this, I would like to clarify that I'm not planning to start my own religion; that would be a Messiah check-in. 

Hat tip to the long-ago WHRB rock djs who answered their phone lines with, "Mutant check-in, what's your mutation?"

Emotional impact: life goes on, and it's precious

This week, in one 24 hour period, two works of art made me cry. They did it by reminding me: of people I have lost, and to cherish each day I have with people who are still alive. And in a very small way I helped support these works of art that made me cry, so that crying felt like hitting myself with a tiny hammer.

In 2012 I wrote about Kickstarter campaigns organized by Rich Burlew and Amanda Palmer. (Links are to my writeups on this blog, which have links to their work. Direct links to the works that made me cry are below.) In crowdfunding terms, 2012 was an aeon ago; for their era, both of these campaigns were over the top: they had dramatic (then-unusual) features, and created unique rewards. Oh, and both creators spent years obsessively creating the rewards and delivering even more than they promised. 

The campaigns broke records because the artists had earned devoted fans for their ultra-niche works, and knew what we wanted, and gave it to us. A Kickstarter that can draw on an existing fan base can be very different from a Kickstarter that has to create a fan base. (Lookin' at you, Quantum Chess, entangling new fans with 3 days to go! A great team with actor Leah Cevoli as its crowdfunding campaign manager, which is a thing now.)

What has not changed since 2012: Kickstarters are hard work before and after the funding window closes. According to Rich's latest update, he still has crayon drawings and electronic stories to create, and he's spent all the Kickstarter postage fund (because lots of the fulfillment was international and postage rates skyrocketed), but he's supporting the final mailings by selling the remainders of the print runs of books that the Kickstarter funded. Amanda is now funding her projects partly through Patreon and sharing the ups and downs and lessons learned. (Example: Patreon lets her "do projects lightening-fast and molasses-slow, because NOT ALL ART IS THE SAME.") And because I'm a fan of both, I'm still following their sagas.

Having said that, Rich is famously private and Amanda is famously let-it-all-hang-out and in other ways they couldn't be more different ... 

So, I wept when I read episode 1025 of Rich's epic webcomic, Order of the Stick.

If you've never read the comic (or played D&D - read Rich's super-funny FAQ page here) you can still get the subtext of #1025 once you read Rich's news item from 18 May 2015, which to spare you scrolling I will excerpt:

Mark Monack, who went by the screen name "Wrecan," was a pillar of the message board community for many years. He was, among his other roles, the founder of one of the forum's odder traditions: counting the number of strips each character appears in, a project that continues many years after he began it. When he passed in 2013, I asked his wife Jodie if there was anything I could do to help out. She told me he would have loved nothing more than to have a walk-on character named Wrecan in OOTS. Now, there is one.

Those of you who have a taste for epics, while you're waiting for Homestuck to resume, might enjoy reading OOTS from the beginning, and/or buying the print books at your local gaming store (hint: they have lots of extra material that's not online). It's quite a ride! To avoid spoilers, do NOT jump directly to episode #991, which has a cameo by a D&D character created by my current wife.

[I am now being less private than Rich but more private than Amanda would be:] Back in the day Valerie joined a campaign of Rich's playing a "dwarven bard" - not allowed by the rules of the day - which made Squeaky the best dwarven bard in the universe. He appears for just a few episodes of OOTS, but don't look now, start with episode #1, which picks up when D&D version 3.5 came out.... 

I have not forgotten that Amanda Palmer also made me cry, with the part of her latest song A Mother's Confession about Helen, "who always says 'i love you'" because "you never know." And I don't have to say any more about that project because Amanda has said it all herself, and more.

puts hammer down

clicks "Post"

Fanfiction for XO: "League Volunteer"

I'm proud to back the Kickstarter for Jumpdrive Studios' XO: a retro sci-fi strategy game. You know I love Kickstarters where the fans can level up. XO's backer missions are great. And one of them involves creating fanfic.

Caveat: I haven't played the game yet, so this is a personal vignette (risking a touch of Mary Sue). Once I've played XO I'll do one that's big picture. Jumpdrive, thanks for letting us play along!

+++

League Volunteer

You've seen some derby?

I volunteer, I mean I used to volunteer, with the Skyport Roller Girls. Thanks for taking us in! Temporarily.

…

I want the biggest one you can spare. You tell me!

…

Sure. I can type that myself, if I can just lean against -- oh, thank you. That's better.

This will go into the record? I mean, for as long as this ship…? That's great.

 

It's for my wife, Kyra.

Standing still, she looked ordinary. Corn fed, freckles.

But when she moved, her grace and power turned heads. On the track? Sheer bloody poetry, sliding an opposing jammer out of bounds. The way she watched the whole pack helped us score points. And her jokes...

Last season she was elected captain. This year she got injured, but she was coming back. The steel plate in her ankle was all healed up.

 

Then the evacuation.

We used our connections, got the team onto a ship. Families and friends, all listed as "league volunteers" whether they were or not. But really, they all had been. You can't do derby without support off the track. 

 

Just dizzy. I shouldn't have doubled down on the morphine, it's making me ramble.

 

Then the explosion.

I threw my body in front of Kyra's but I couldn't stop her from getting a second steel plate, this time in her head.

 

Triage took one look at me. Too much of my body is burned. 

 

Ha! That's lymph, these are tears. Both clear, easy to get 'em confused.

Almost done.

 

If your officer here releases one and shows me how to work it, I will take our team's old barge and drift it right into one of those … not the harvesters that maybe have live humans still on them, but the others, the ones shaped like lobsters. Plenty of those to choose from.

I'll try to time it as Kyra would have. Detonate before they can stop me. Score one more for the league.

 

Thank you so much for, um, escalating my request. I'll stay here, dripping on the keyboard, until you let me know.

+++

JC Chatelain 
July 2015

Speaking of fanfiction: I also support the Organization for Transformative Works, an international resource and archive for all kinds of works created by and for fans. 

My name(s) in Rose Language

Are you familiar with the communication innovations of Deena Larsen? New ways of writing, linking, and gesturing seem to fly from her brain and fingers. 

Since her childhood Deena has experimented with adding additional meaning to characters in handwritten English. (Valences? Inflections? Here's her explanation.) These characters are sprinkled throughout her forthcoming work Chronic, and for one magical summer I used them in my own writing, to see what effect they had on my brain. 

Now Deena is sharing her characters, and the ideas behind them, through The Rose Project. There is a related Kickstarter that could be described as its own evolving literary work, perhaps a new genre; see for yourself. Read the updates (in order, earliest at the bottom) for a new story, "The Thorn of the Rose", in which characters communicate using the characters. 

Virginia Woolf said (paraphrased) that English words had been so over-used and mis-used that writing in English was like playing on a piano with half the keys broken. When I share this I often use the word love as an example of a word that has lost its juice. But Deena is re-charging words such as love with multiple possible meanings. 

How am I using Rose? I have started calling myself "Jules" in certain contexts. (I'm branded online as "juliannechat" and unlikely to change that.) To help me think about the possible implications, Deena wrote both of my current names in Rose characters, as shown below.

What adventures could Rose have in store for you?

... and ... 

Why read Stephanie Strickland?

Because poetry doesn't have to be about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. In Dragon Logic, Stephanie Strickland has taken up Richard Feynman's challenge to poets, grappling with the current situation (and future prospects) of all life enmeshed and intertwined with technology.

Feynman's actual question (in Lectures on Physics) was, "Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?" And what, exactly, did he mean by "it"? If you have time to listen to a podcast, here Strickland and Tony Trigilio discuss how Strickland set to work.

Because you too are a codemaker. The dragon-scales glisten with references to people (and other entities) that Strickland considers "codemakers"; the full list is at the back of the book, just before the final poem, Unsolved Problems. (Just as scientific publications end with suggestions for future work!) Strickland reads at math and science conferences and is a member of The Society for Science Literature and the Arts.

Because you were struck by House of Trust, the generative poem Strickland and Ian Hatcher created in honor of free libraries, harking back to Knowles and Tenney and Gilgamesh. Or one of the (many) pioneering works she has created. For more about each of those, roll over the constellation of dots on her own web site.

Because poetry sizzles through the electronic aether. Much of Strickland's work is "born digital": it could not ever be printed. Where her works (such as Zone : Zero) exist in paper and digital versions, the differences between the versions are illuminating. Because of this and because of her many collaborations, Duke chose to archive her papers and digital work, the first digital writer whose work and correspondence they have collected.

Because Denise Duhamel chose Stephanie as #1 on her list of "advanced women poets" to read if you want to find out where the art of poetry is going. Here's the full list.

Because Dragon Logic is a beautiful artifact. Janet Holmes designed the book with care, and Quemadura created the cover.

The book's elevator pitch:

Dragon Logic wonders…where have we gone…as our face-to-face world threatened from so many directions slips into potentially infinite virtual spaces. The slippage happened suddenly, worldwide, and we don’t know whether it makes us irrelevant, provides an escape from apocalyptic problems, or could be welcomed as a new direction for human life. These poems are where I wrangle this increasingly invisible dragon-in-the-room.

Because you're alive, in this moment. Stephanie is a friend, so I've lost objectivity, and the heck with it. Her work seems to me to arise from the "profound tension of the whole being" that Jacques Ellul once described:

I do not limit myself to describing my feelings with cold objectivity in the manner of a research worker reporting what he sees under a microscope. I am keenly aware that I am myself involved in technological civilization, and that its history is also my own. I may be compared rather with a physician or physicist who is describing a group situation in which he is himself involved. The physician in an epidemic, the physicist exposed to radioactivity: in such situations the mind may remain cold and lucid, and the method objective, but there is inevitably a profound tension of the whole being.

[- Jacques Ellul, from the forward to
Technological Society, revised American Edition]

I have two friends in New York City who are writers named "Stephanie S" - the other is Stephanie Schroeder - and here they are together in September 2012. Venue is the book launch party for Schroeder's memoir, Beautiful Wreck. That's Linda Stein's work in the background.

PS: I first became interested in Stephanie's work because Strickland is one of the best collaborators I've had a chance to observe (and I study collaboration as an a/vocation). Funny/sad: I wanted to help get her work to new readers, so I set up a Tumblr and then lost/forgot the password and had to start over. 

Henry Rollins' 3 tips for artist/entrepreneurs

This article + video at Big Think has been open in my browser for awhile, and I can't seem to close it. Short and to the point.

Best line: "You must be the French Foreign Legion of your own life."

And while we're chatting, this letter writer and Cary Tennis's reply on how to stop world catastrophe are asking the right questions.