um-kay
12:46 AM

 
silicon.de news: German managers are unhappy with websites of other companies, regard them as mere advertising and do not use them for information. 4 out of 5 managers claim that this has to do with quality: they'd search for information online more if the sites were better. Their own site, however, each thinks is ok.
silicon.de concludes that industry does not understand users' needs and uses the web not for information but only for self-display.

Maybe that's a user error, though. Suppose managers visit their own website pretty often, have even seen the concepts (if only to clear them for publication) and know where to look for things. Maybe (rare case), from inside the company, their website looks like an extension of their intranet. They are at home in this environment and have learnt to use it often to look for information.
All other websites they view just like any other surfer. In my exprience, except for webdesigners, people do not take in the whole of a site (or even a homepage) but dive immediately for that piece of information they are looking for and see glinting just under the surface. And on to the next or a related transaction button. And on. Any sort of navigation aid that relies on the whole to work is simply lost on most visitors. Simply, one would need an adaptive system that guesses where I want to go next on a site and dims the rest.

The managers from silicon.de probably know where to find what on their own sites and in the information media they are used to using. The TV-mag I usually buy has changed its layout a few weeks ago and moved one channel from the left to the right page. Since then, I keep missing the MDR - which is no great loss, but still ...
The web is a place for speedy research but most sites have to be learnt in order to read them.

The problem, as I see it, lies less with the companies who offer websites or their webdesigners (most commercial sites look pretty much the same, anyway), but sits in front of the monitor. I know how to read the front page of a newspaper and I also know how to read the start-page of a website - because I do it a lot. The internet, used as a tool, requires an effort - like learning to read or doing maths - stuff you learn at school. But managers are adults how have their study-days behind them. The problem will go away when today's schoolkids become managers.
12:17 AM

Tuesday, December 11, 2001  
Mark Bernstein's blog has an anecdote (not really ...) about open source and web standards (brought it up again a pro pos of my comment on F. Cramer see below): a web-artist who requires all her work be displayble with a browser's view source command. Mark points out that this means not open source but Microsoft-compatible. Sad & true. (Apart from the fact that Microsoft will disclose their code to your company to customize and develop further MS products you bought if you're willing just to dole out a big enough sum.)

But even "real" open source stuff. -- Does it make your work more democratic when the program you wrote it with is open to all (... who belong to the IT elite of programmers)? Pen & paper are quite easily accessible, but does that make (random pick) T.S. Eliot easily accessible as well?
The real point about open source is not only that it's cheap; it's all about developing a piece of software to fit you needs and reenter your findings about this software into the pool for others to use. But you can still turn a piece of open source into a proprietary software. And if your piece of art runs exclusively on your software, then everybody who wants to see it needs to get & install your software. Even if it's free of charge - how free is the reader?

And how free does it make you to be able to control not only your piece of art but the tools you use to create it as well (what about the tools you use to modify those tools ...)? No matter how deep you go into the process -- art is always determined by the tools and the materials. Think cave-paintings. Wood-cuts. van Gogh and acrylic colors. Remember the novel, this ancient genre that brought forth quite a few specimen of considerable (and, considering its limitations, surprising) quality? Think of the effects created by writers who realized intricate temporalities despite the limitations imposed by the printed and bound page ...
6:08 AM

Saturday, December 08, 2001  
Trivia. Remember the advert for Danish newspaper Extrabladet that was set in a sauna: "Extrabladet covers all the important parts"? - Director was Lars von Trier of The Kingdom fame.
Marion Müller has written a book about Trier's work till before Dancer in the Dark - pointed studies of the different films & overview over their respective critiques. Müller's main claim is that Trier is not the dark pessimist he is generally known as but always reconciles dark and light, good and evil forces (unlike e.g. the German dubbing of his epilogue in Kingdom) and that he is postmodern in his presentation of multiple, seemingly exclusive sides of each issue.

Marion Müller, Vexierbilder: Die Filmwelten des Lars von Trier, Gardez! Verlag 2001.
11:29 AM

Friday, December 07, 2001  
If computers can be built from broomsticks and if any digital data, including executable algorithms, can be printed in books, there is no reason why computer network poetry couldn't or shouldn't be printed as well in books.

In his paper presented at poesis symposium in Erfurt this year (and published in Dichtung Digital), Florian Cramer falls into the same trap he warns the reader about a few paragraphs earlier: he confuses the text with the storage- or carrier-medium.

When I read a printed book, I don't care how the ink was mixed and the type was set. I do not set out to decode the patterns made by the inky atoms on the page (might be fun, though ...). When I read a digital text, I don't care to look at the code (might be fun though ...). And when I write for print publication, I don't really care about the printing process either, my publishers takes care of this. Basically, I should be able to put toggether a storyboard for a cool piece of digital literature and hand it over to my publishers who'd then take care it gets coded and put on a suitable carrier. (Currently, this is all about money. Publishers don't do that, and artists don't do that because programmers are expensive. So writers in the digital medium usually have to writer their own code, as well.) (The market for CD-ROMs is just not big enough - which fact I'd put down the the exorbitant prices of CD-ROM. I pay 20 DEM for a paper-back - and about 100 DEM for a CD-ROM. They say CD-ROM often costs as much as a movie to produce. Give me a CD for the price of a movie, or, as I can keep the CD, for the price of a paper-back, and I'd buy a lot more CDs than I currently do. I also might be willing to pay the price of a hardcover for an special edition box every now and again ... As far as I see right now, this is the only way the CD-ROM market could take hold and more artists could dare produce digital texts.)

Still, I wouldn't agree that the above "fact" makes for the codedness of a text to be its formative property. Cramer tries to prove his claim by
proving that there is no digital text, just digital information and that the computer privileges the alphanumeric over the pictoreal because the translation into code is loss free from alphanumerical text and lossy from image and sound: "We may automatically search a collection of text files for all occurences of the word "bird", but doing the same with birds in a collection of image files or bird songs in a collection of audio files is incomparably tricky, nasty and error-prone ..." This is apples and pears again .... The computer can recognize patterns in any sort of information but meaning in none. "bird" is a pattern, but "a bird" is a concept. I cannot throw my computer 150 photos and tell it to find one where Peter has his cute smile. I can only tell it to look for oval shapes in a specific pinkish tint. Similarly, I can tell my computer to generate a text file from the (scanned) image of a printed text, but I cannot tell it to abstract and translate my thesis so I can send it to a publisher in the States.

Digital text has properties that only digital text has and that printed text hasn't. Conceptually, alphanumerical digital text should have more in common with pictoreal digital text than with alphanumerical printed text. Codedness is one of these properties, but not the only one and, I'd say, not its most characteristic one, either.

Approaching digital text in terms of code may indeed be an interesting journey. imho Cramer is right to suggest that "computers and digital poetry might teach us to pay more attention to codes and control structures coded into language in general". What I don not like is the exclusiveness of his approach: the (digital) text is the code and the code is the (digital) text. All other concepts of digital text are gratuitious. ,,,
Look for the unified world formula that comes free with every seventh copy of this paper ...

When Cramer claims that there is no digital text or digital medium even, only analog output generated from code and that the preferable kind of digital writing is "codework" in ASCII or Peal or ... that's an aesthetic postulate - but also a political one. Cramer cites hacker-ethics. But in one half-paragraph he also allows a glimpse at his agenda:
"Much digital art and literature became testbed applications for new commercial browser features and multimedia plugins like QuickTime, ShockWave and Flash, but by this locked itself into industry-controlled closed code formats, thereby assuming an uncritical, after all affirmative role in the proprietary reformatting of the Internet."
It's true and it's sad that much well-programmed entertainment on the web is just that: entertainment. Or advertainment, created with the sole purpose of penetrating a company's message or to establish a certain technology as a standard. But this general condemnation of all that is not text-only, made by and for the pale and lonely graduate-student-of-literature-with-programming-skills that I have seen so often in the German scene is so limiting and counterproductive.

10:18 AM

Thursday, December 06, 2001  
Torill's blog today contains a link to The Art Test - if you were a picture, which one would you be? At first, I came out as Piet Mondrian's Composition A (as did Torill), but as always in multiple choice, I was torn about some answers, so I did the test again and came out as Escher's Lizzards - which pleases me more.

If I were a work of art, I would be M. C. Escher's Lizards. I am a bizarre juxtaposition of the real and the unreal. Based in the realm of mathematics, my two-dimensional appearance belies a complex and free-willed behaviour which both delights and confuses people. Which work of art would you be? The Art Test

Incidentally, this seems to be the better description of someone who cannot decide what to check in a multiple choise test.
5:18 AM

Monday, December 03, 2001  
Zürich revisited
The first thing I saw, stepping off the train in Zurich station on my way to a workshop on time, space and games, was a vending machine. Common enough, but this one didn't display sweets or drinks. Instead, there were dice, cards, and pokemon trading cards.
Kind of an omen ... from what I've seen so far, Switzerland is pretty active in "unorthodox" literatures ....

Thank you Mela Kocher for taking the photo & Judith Mathez for mailing it!
11:09 AM

 
Ok, so I don't have an archive (and no "permalinks", sez Mark). And now there's an empty table which blogger doesn't let me edit & fill. "§%"$%§$$%
I'll be on vacation soon & I promise to fix this. 'kay. Let's see ....
11:02 AM

 






10:55 AM