jill/txt

Natasha Barrett’s Adsonore is a sound installation in the highest stairwell of the brand new building for basic biological sciences. I went to explore it today. The building’s only a ten minute walk from my home; it’s where medical and dental students spend their first years at university. Barrett sticks to a biological motif in her sound installation, emcompassing the foreign sounds of people in its musical system.
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Perfectly timed for my article, today’s Net Art News from Rhizome is titled “Jenny Holzer meets Rafael Lozano-Hemmer” and describes a new public installation by Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman, ‘Poetrica‘. Rhizome’s free on Fridays, so make use of it now if you’re not subscribed!

Today I need to finish my article on electronic art in public spaces. I’m procrastinating like mad, so this post is going to be my personal motivator, like I did when I was trying to finish my PhD before last Christmas. The article’s only supposed to be 2000 words long, and it’s an introduction to a booklet presenting twenty electronic artworks in public spaces in Norway, from imported international classics to sound installations to art on state websites. I need to:

• Write brief descriptions of other, non-Norwegian works (e.g. Lozano-Hemmer).
• Paragraph introducing electronic art in general.
• Public art, electronic public art.
• Paragraph on interactivity, follow me, stamping
• Paragraph discussing potential for publically funded art in public digital spaces (like Tegnemaskin 1-12).
• Go to the hospital and experience Adsonore.
• Check dogeared pages in Digital Art for more examples.
• Discuss relationships between works presented. Sound, concept, object.
• Go for a run. Bonus: thought about article!
• Non-related but necessary: Attend meeting, pick up my daughter from school, shopping, dinner, buy sweets in case kids come for Halloween (not a tradition here but they must have been watching television or something because it’s starting), daughter’s friend staying the night, kids in bed, lights out. Then work more.
• Work out how it all fits together. Sequence.
• Write introductory paragraph.
• Proofread.

The 100 by 100 Project: one hundred posts, one hundred words each. (via Hanna)

I’ve just written my first recommendation for a student. She’s a wonderful student, so it’s a pleasure, and it’s just to the faculty so she’ll get a bit of funding to go to a conference she’s impressively enough had a paper accepted at - but I’ve never written a letter of recommendation before! I ran down the corridor searching for colleagues to help me, but they were all teaching - until I found one of my old literature professors, who smilingly dictated the first two formulaic lines of a letter of recommendation: Stud. philol. NN har henvendt seg til meg… Jeg kan med dette bekrefte at jeg er veileder for kandidaten og kjenner henne som en…. I ran back to my office so I could type them in before I forgot them. They sound stiff and unfamiliar, but until I find my own words for such purposes, I’m glad to have hand-me-downs. And who knows, perhaps the faculty would be shocked if I used my own words?

There was a huge explosion on the sun today which means that during the next two or three nights we might get to see spectacular auroras or northern lights here in the northern hemisphere, maybe as far south as France (47-48 degrees south). If the magnetic directions are wrong we’ll see nothing though. In Bergen it seems we statistically have an aurora three or four times a month, but you can only see them if the sky is clear and you look out the window. I obviously don’t look out the window very often at night because I’ve only seen northern lights once. If I could work out what this real time map of auroral activity meant I might be able to figure out when to look out of my window.

My Aurora is seven years old, likes to dress up as a princess or a lion or a bat, thinks Bjørk’s song called Aurora is “too sad”, and is in bed right now, reading for another few minutes before I turn the lights out. If I do see an aurora in the sky I’m going to wake her up and show her her namesake, school night or not.

An index of toilets in videogames. It’s in Russian, but non-Russian-speakers can scroll down to a nice list of game titles, neatly linked to screenshots of their toilets. Few of which actually virtually work, but at least you can look at them. (via Frank)

I’ll be defending my doctorate just a fortnight shy of a hundred years after the first woman in Norway was award her doctoral degree.

The Danish site albinogorilla.dk lets you set up blogs you update from your phone - and claims to be the first service to allow not only text and images but also video, from your phone, of course. Can’t find a blog with video yet, though.

This had me roaring with laughter. The way the seller’s font gets bigger and bigger as his frustration mounts is especially moving: Ebay listing for “Collection of 26 Beanie Babies from Ex-Wife”. I’m glad to see thedrunkensailor got lots of money for his tools and beer. (via Scott)

“If the internet were a sentence, weblogs would be the conjunctions: the ‘ands’, the ‘buts’, the ‘ors’.”

Bookchin and Shulgin’s DIY guide to creating net.art should work pretty well for the aspiring blogger as well. I’d particularly note the Promotional Techniques:

Tomorrow’s class will be about citation techniques. Again. Instead of me doing the standard old-fashioned teaching routine (explain it for 45 minutes using voice and overheads, post examples for them to read and then assume the knowledge was successfully transmitted from brain to brain - big surprise: it wasn’t), tomorrow the students will be doing the work. Small groups, specific problems to solve, suggestions of possible places to look for the necessary information.

One problem will obviously be to figure out how to cite a game, based on Chicago style but perhaps with input from DiGRA’s game reference project and from MobyGames database of infrormation about games, dates, producers, and with a consideration of who or what to put where you’d put the author of a book or the director of a movie. I think the whole class can deal with that problem, each group tackling a different section of it.

We defintely need to practice citing websites too. Sometimes poor citation technique does a student such a disservice: I was really skeptical about the source listed in one student’s bibliography as “Art: history” (http://www.calarts.edu/~line/history.html), which the student proposed using as a basic for understanding the history of net.art. The site is a list of sites with no further information - unless you go up a few levels (just take the last bit of the URL off) and see that it’s actually part of a course web site at Calarts, made by Nathalie Bookchin, who’s one of the absolutely leading net.art theoreticians and practitioners. Figuring out a way of citing that website that actually shows its legitimacy despite its not being published by Routledge or MIT Press or something is an obvious problem students need to solve. I’ll tell you what the students suggest tomorrow.

A final task I’ll be setting will include new ways of searching: Go to amazon.com, search for a word, concept, name or title that’s important in the project you’re researching, find a book that discusses it that you weren’t aware of, assess whether the reference is interesting to you and write a proper citation of that book, with page numbers.

Then discuss whether that’s good enough academically: citing a book when you’ve never actually touched it, only seen an image of a few pages of it at amazon.

I’m also going to have to work out how to help students remember when to use italics, when quotation marks, how to put a citation in the text. I had completely forgotten how mysterious all these things are when they’re new to you.