In this quick week at home between vacations, I've thrown together the start of my new sound theory blog, with the idea that it's better to just start writing than to get finicky over every little detail (see: this blog). The new blog is going to be a mix of short-form media link posts, tumblr-style (with a little commentary sometimes), and longer-form sound theory stuff on historical examples and contemporary things. I'm going to use it to try out ideas for the thesis, and hopefully it will be interesting even to those who aren't into sound theory per se.

I'm going to try to keep metablogging to a minimum over there, so I have to focus on content (for another example of me messing that up, see this blog again). So, go visit www.noiseforairports.com, comment, and subscribe to a new RSS feed!

I'm not necessarily ending this blog; I'll keep it on life support in case I can use its organs some day (or some other terrible metaphor). I am, however, moving on to yet another blog. It's not entirely set up yet, and may not be until the end of June (I'll be traveling for a while and still need to figure out how to make my website style into a legitimate Movable Type style).

The new blog is going to focus not on me, but on the sound-related stuff I am encountering in the course of researching for my thesis. It turns out that people are often curious about this stuff, and I want to be able to share it. For all my searching, I haven't been able to find a blog that addresses experimental music/noise/indeterminacy/etc. from my perspective (or at all), and it seems like this might actually be useful not only for collecting things for my thesis, but for sharing them with the anonymous smiling faces of the internet.

So just a teaser for now. New blog coming. Will be about sound and so on. But probably not until the end of June.

For a class last term, I found an artistic practice that played with what I called “the aesthetics of disintegration,” but might better be called “recursive remediation,” or something along those lines. For the benefit of the Internet (and mostly me), I’ve collected a bunch of examples of this kind of work, and interspersed my own comments on why I think they’re interesting. (RSS folks may have to click through for the second part until I get my full feed set up.)

I finally got around to uploading the Processing project I completed a while ago in my Workshop class. My project goal was to create a navigable landscape, randomizing as many parameters as possible. You can play with the interactive version here.

At Project New Media Literacies, we’re collaborating with Harvard’s GoodPlay Project on an ethics casebook to address the special ethical issues that arise in the online world. GoodPlay has identified five different ethical areas, but at the moment, we are working on activities that explore credibility and how it is assessed and developed online.

Drawing by Marc Ngui

So far, we’ve done some work in Processing, creating computational art (which I will put up here once I get it working on my new computer), made a personal page in html (you’re on it), and for our most recent project, we worked as a class to make an online version of a book.

The book chosen for us was Des Imagistes, a collection of imagist poems edited by Ezra Pound that rarely circulates, and wasn’t online! We made a pretty neat online version that just we just finished up this morning. So check it out, and read some poems!

(My favorites are the short images from Allen Upward.)

Glass has a reputation for sort-of cheesy, new-agey stuff, so focusing on Gandhi as a topic doesn’t do much to reduce the overall corniness of his oeuvre. My cynicism requires me to ignore the silliness of the “message” and the overarching themes Glass tries so earnestly to get to by focusing each act on Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King, major literary figures with ties to Gandhi’s life. Luckily, the best part of the opera is not the story. (If you could even say it has a “story.”)

It’s an egotist/javascript dream, and pulls stuff from all the online places I regularly put content, including my tumblr, twitter, delicious, and blog feeds. Everything should work, with the exception of the “Other Work” link up at the top, which has no page to link to yet. Everything will probably break as soon as one of these javascripts stops working. Expect incessant tweaking (If you, for some reason, were compelled to look at my personal site more than once).

In terms of real blog stuff, I do actually have some things to write about, and I am going to work on writing stuff here on a regular basis. That is, as soon as I’m done with the current crunch time of schoolwork.

So yeah, enjoy, if you needed to know everything I was doing on the internet at the same time, now you can.

Lucky you, getting to see all my layout drafts. If this was a real website, I'd be making all these edits secretly and unveil them on some special day. But this isn't a real website, yet, so you get all this stuff. And two posts in a row about being under construction.

Sweet.

(yeah, I realize a site-wide redesign doesn't make sense until there is a wide site to redesign. That's part of the redesign. Making a real site.)

Here at Project NML, we are very interested in how new creative works often spread across a variety of media types. The new media landscape is full of stories that exist in books, TV, and social networking sites. We call the ability to deal with these changing modes of communication "Transmedia Navigation." But even before widespread digital communication made the nearly effortless flow of information across media possible, artists were experimenting with ways to break out of the limits of traditional media.

Tonight, at 9, a classmate of mine has set up a Talkshoe show for the classmates to chat about whatever we feel like, hoping that we are interesting enough to engage more than moms. In any case, you can download the thing when it's done as a real podcast. For the real details, I just copied her blog post for you:

While poking around the intraweb to find phone-post blogging applications, I came across TalkShoe, which is a new community podcasting site that basically lets you set up an online radio talkshow, except you could also use it to live audio blog with a bunch of other people, record a conference or class, or vent your frustrations about Governor Palin with a group of strangers (or friends) on the internet immediately after her latest TV interview (ahem).

To test it out, I have set up a weekly "talkshow" for Sunday nights at 9p called "MIT Media Nerds". The first "episode" will be 30 minutes, and I've recruited some fellow CMS nerd compatriots to call in, so I won't be talking to myself...although any TalkShoe users presently on the site can also choose to call in when the episode is live. How can I participate, you ask?

On Sunday at 9p, you can either call 724-444-7444 (call ID 26622) and start talking, or go to http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/26622 and start writing in the chatroom, or talking from your computer mic, either as a guest or registered user. Friends abroad, you can also call in via Skype (but in order to use Skype, you have to download TalkShoe's voice app for free, so you might as well just go online). If you're too busy to call in, fear not! Each episode will be archived as a podcast on this and other sites.

What will we be talking about? I dunno. Odysseus, video games, politics on YouTube, the latest George Clooney film, whatever. Call and find out!

Ta-da!

There's not a whole lot to add about what filled out the rest of the summer; it was more of the same, and some of the different (first trip to Cape Cod, other assorted excitements). School technically started three weeks ago, although real classes and so on have only been on for half that. Classes have been great (thanks for asking), and my work as a research assistant with Project New Media Literacies has been engaging.

So, this isn't intended to be a post-mortem analysis of how well I did what I set out to do in my first post, but rather a change of gears. Grad school is astronomically more work than bumming around for the summer with a blog, so it is possible that post volume might go down, if that were even possible. However! Thanks to all the work I'm doing, I'll have more frequent things to share, including blog posts written for other blogs (they should have looked into my blogging track record before asking me), and various reflections and announcements related to my busy and soon-to-be-more-busy life.

I need to sit down and figure out what I want this space to be, and that should hopefully happen soon enough for me to start yakking about all the wonderful things (and presumably some less than wonderful things) that the school year brings. At the very least, I'll clean up the dead links and broken formatting in the sidebar and maybe even toss in a CSS redesign (which will be refreshed as a result of our Workshop class, where we will learn such things as Processing and CSS and Final Cut Express).

That's it for now, stay tuned for more exciting tidbits, hopefully.