To Keep these Dark Spirits at Bay (rough)

Antarctic Quest (rough)

Above is an opening sequence I am working on for a Rutgers documentary. This is just a rough draft. Lower thirds and ending sequence soon to come.

HYPERTEXT

somewhere

Here is a little labyrinth I am working on; to be viewed in the full screen mode of your browser.

IN WATERMELON SUGAR

Pictured here is a dust jacket that I made in my typography class this week for the book In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan.

annotation: The Language of New Media

Manovich’s ideas about new media having discrete levels as an aftereffect of industrial society, and “the separation of the production process into a set of repetitive, sequential, and simple activities that could be executed by workers who did not have to master the entire process and could be easily replaced” (51) contains the implication of the modularity of the modern artist, or, the implication that the artisan is defunct. The artist is still a character but new media has caused many classic skills of the artist to become obsolete, and we must interact with art in a different way now, with respect to modularity, modularity of everything.

Andy Warhol was famous for employing the factory system in his art, which described modern culture. New Media, however, builds upon and is a move away from the factory system; it is media based around individuality and customization. While the television allowed us to switch between preexisting channels, new media allows us to create our own channel, choose our own forking path. “In a post-industrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and ‘select’ her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices”(60). As would naturally follow: advertisements are now built to target individuals, and to keep track of individual decisions.

This is all suggestive of the fundamental variability of the computer, of the disintegration of constants; and while industrial times had society forming itself into factories with countless identical parts, we are now reforming under the model of the computer. With this change, tradition is lost and we are thrust into a world revolving around constant morally-loaded decision-making and anxiety. Continuity and linearity are a thing of the past. Information has been separated into teeny tiny pieces that can be arranged and rearranged however we see fit, to serve whatever purpose and fill any space we need it to.

And everything is modular; there is no actual hierarchy between the objects that make up a website, they are in fact all just separate entities that exist on the web, linking to each other and thus causing the illusion that they are part of a whole.

I’m glad we read this after the Hypertext project, all of us tearing our hairs out trying to link all of these little pieces together.

ALSO: I want Netomat! Where did Netomat go?

good, great, wonderful, and nice, beautiful, thank you

Little Earthquake

So we meet again
and you make me anxious
to be working on the 21st floor.

So I come outside
to meet the strange scene
you’ve caused:

Thousands of New Yorkers
not hurrying from place to place
but standing around confused
awkwardly shying away from buildings.

Thousands of cells phones in
thousands of hands with
loved ones on the other end,
and they’re all talking about you.

No Time for Sleep

Another Dream Entirely

Cat bites and claws my hand
it is first a pain but then
I realize its not like that
at all and I go with it but
when a cat tires i find I
just want more so I knock
the cat over and she tries
to rip the guts out of my
hand but its just funny and
I smile as the claws swiftly
and mechanically scrape the
soft parts of my wrists.

Later that day, I stood beneath the awning of a convenient store slowly burning a Pall Mall cigarette between my middle and index fingers. The air was colder then I had anticipated. I wore shorts that exposed the bottoms of my thighs and a thin T-shirt, low top converses with no socks. The air was full of water; some of it formed droplets that fell and the rest floated softly upwards and around, meandering. The droplets that silently grew along the edge of the awning shivered just as I began to do the same. I would silently grow and then I would let it all out at once.

Softly, silently, slowly, shivering.

The air was colder than I had anticipated, but it was not very cold. I waited there for a while with no aim until, finally, I was able to fall peacefully into another dream entirely.

Hot Supper Waiting

We had figured out that
the problem lied within
the structure of the
house itself: the door
was okay so we decided
to mess up and destroy
the door so that it would
fit into this stupid little house.

We shaved the edges of
the door to an approximate
parallelogram so that it
would fit into the sinking
house (not a very good house).

I walked outside in time
to see a plane in the
sky doing tricks, sparkling
like a dancer with a
tight fitting sequined dress
doing flips, making loops
leaving trails behind
coming back around
flying through its own
loops, diving low,
impressive and daring.

A dive took it below the
treeline and out of sight
and the sky lit up as if
from lightning, but
with a lingering orange
glow: one minute later
a slow, hot explosion
had its way with my
ear drums and I laughed
and then we finished up
the planing of the door.

We went home in our
big dirty truck to
hot supper waiting.