IRB
Finally, I scheduled an appointment with the IRB folks to talk about "human-subject" matters. I think i started this process because I am a bit worn out of spinning my wheels on other areas of my dissertation, like "writing." So I figured if I focus on different aspects of it for a while it might be more fruitful use of my time, and who knows, maybe i stumble upon something interesting. Maybe make a breakthrough… Or whatever… Change is good.
When I looked at the research proposal submitted by one of our assistant profs several years back, I was quite disheartened. It seemed to be too much work, too many hoops to jump through, almost an impossible task.
But the lady I talked to was really helpful, nice, and encouraging. She had already printed out the forms that I am supposed to fill out, the relevant places all highlighted. She patiently explained everything and answered my questions. Presented as such, It didn’t seem like too much of a work. Everything started falling into the parameters of "doable." A weight is lifted of my shoulders.
Perform.Media
The Perform.Media festival began with a big bang today. Just got back from the reception and I was quite impressed with some of the projects I saw at the exhibition. These projects brought together diverse disciplines all tied in by technology. By now, I realized that i have a very soft spot for technology.
Here are some of the highlights from the exhibition:
Yuk-Yiu Ip $ ST made a very impressive movie mixing two versions of Psycho, the original one made by Hitchcock and Gus Van Sant’s remake of the original version.
Psycho(s), runs on custom software that edits the films in real-time, forming a live remix from the two version. It was stunning to see it work. Seamless transitions between the two versions, almost like juxtaposing two images, except it is the movies being juxtaposed, totally in sync with one another.
While this was interesting, it isn’t related to my own work. But there were two projects that i found very useful in terms of my dissertation relating to the idea of hacking and poaching.
Robert Spahr’s project called the Cruft blew my mind. He borrows the term "cruft" to describe imagesthat are created by a program he has written. This program is an automated system that writes ‘recipes’ (also known as an algorithm), that allows the system to first harvest
selected source material from the Internet, and then process that
information into a CRUFT, generating images 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He defines it as such:
"These images are snapshots of the computer process, byproducts of a particular action at a specific moment in time.
CRUFT processes are ongoing, always in a state of becoming, while the images are a document of what we have been."
So these images are constantly rebuilt and ever changing. Talk about textual poaching! The definition of "cruft" could be highly useful in terms of my project:
"/kruhft/ [very common; back-formation from crufty]
1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is
cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a
broom only produces more.
2. n. The results of shoddy construction.
3. vt. [from `hand cruft', pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler
code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see
hand-hacking).
4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code.
5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to geese; that is, at UW one properly
says "a cruft of hackers"."
If what griefers create in SL isn’t cruft, i don’t know what else is. So I think that this concept can be especially useful in terms of contextualization of my project.
Another project that i found exceptionally useful is Jaka Zeleznikar’s changer extension. Jaka wrote an extension to Firefox browser that adds a series of dysfunctionalities. He explains it as such:
"Changer is an extension, i.e. an additional toolbar for the Firefox Internet browser, which
adds a series of dysfunctionalities. Changer enables text and graphic
interventions of web pages through the introduction, repositioning,
changing, deleting and any possible combination of the four. It also
enables autonomous, unsolicited browsing of the web (with the added
possibility of self-applied interventions) and the deletion of session
cookies."
Meaning when you install it and run it, your pages constantly change in total chaos… What concept, what creativity, what hacking!!! I am totally enchanted with this notion. When I got home, the first thing i did was to install this sucker and test it. And voila! Sure enough, under my very own eyes, I watched my home page metamorphose into something else that I never created. Stunning.
I actually think once I get my research approved by the IRB I could interview these guys and come up with something really interesting. I am beside myself. If working on new media is going to give me this much pleasure, my suffering is well worth it.
Textual poaching
In my rethinking of my dissertation, I came to the understanding that I really find the griefers in SL intriguing. I keep going back to those stories of avatars upsetting the regular order of things and changing the actual text.
Today, I began reading Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers. I figured what he has to say about textual poaching vis a vis fans could very well apply to hackers, who indeed, hi-jack other people’s texts.
Now here is a very important difference I found between the fans he talks about and the hackers and griefers that I would like to talk about:
While fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness vis a vis the creator of the text, who ultimately imposes/defends the dominant readings of the text, hackers or griefers, though marginal, have a very powerful position because of their ability to manipulate the source code. They possess the unique ability to read, understand, and speak this very obscure language that creates the text. Some of them are even hired by Linden Lab for their ability to work with the code and improve Second Life.
The second point that Jenkins makes that would be very useful for me is that, readers are not always resistant; and all resistant readings are not necessarily progressive readings. This could establish the difference between hackers in the true sense of the term, who can manipulate the source code, but don’t want to create resistant meanings that contradict with Linden Lab’s agenda, and griefers, who downright want to make everything unpleasant for everyone by slowing down sims and sending out self-replicating objects that clutter. There are other users who are not hackers per se, but use Second Life as a platform to create their own fictions. For example, sims that are created specifically for role playing purposes (Star Wars, spaceships in which you can act out your sexual fantasies, sword fighting sims, gor sims…) So, with these examples, these two types of poaching can be made very clear. It is not always about the resistant meanings, it is about creating alternative meanings.
Another useful idea that Jenkins pulls out of de Certeau is the notion that readers are ultimately nomads. De Certeau, and Jenkins, argues that poachers are always in movement, not here or there, not constrained by permanent property ownership but rather constantly advancing upon another text, appropriating new materials, making new meanings. I think Star Wars is a good example. Or the mafia boss Marcellus. Apparently, he and his gang used to be in Sims Online terrorizing the place (or at least staging terror). But they migrated to SL and started mischief here. I am not saying Marcellus is a hacker, he is probably a 14-year-old kid with having more time on his hands than he knows what to do with, but hackers too migrate from one text to another.
Still, the arguments remains a mistery. Deep breath… You never know what the tide will bring. Hopefully a life jacket.
So what of the new lover?
OK, I’ve been considerably rethinking my dissertation yet another time. By now, it is obvious that it needs a major makeover. I keep thinking to myself "What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger." My general topic will be this:
A
text, I contend, is a form that emerges in, or with the help of, one or
multiple platforms as a result of the reader’s interaction with the present
signification systems in her quest for a meaningful outcome. In addition to
traditional print texts, this definition accounts for texts that experiment
with the print medium and electronic texts that are presented in the digital
platform, such as hypertexts, interactive fiction, and virtual worlds, as well
as textualities that emerge in different media.
The text, as I define it, elicits spatial narratives in which the reader’s exploration of both the textual space and the story world is essential for her to successfully form the text. Spatial narratives elicit performative readings in which the reader performs the work through her navigations within the textual space and the story world. User performitivity allows the reader to become a textual poacher on a more substantial level where the reader appropriates the text by imposing on it intended or unintended meanings. In digital texts textual poaching is more substantial where hackers can alter the source code and change the text significantly. Griefers, for example, the hackers in Second Life, perform unintended, or rather unsanctified meanings, by hacking the source code and thus altering how the world behaves significantly.
My lover
OK, here’s something really interesting that one of our
group members said in our dissertation meeting. And I am gradually getting to
this point.
She said that she had heard from someone who writes
regularly that she treats her scheduled times of writing as dates with her
lover. She’d never miss a date with her lover, so it doesn’t make sense for her
to miss a date with her writing. How true! I feel like I spend way too much
time with my dissertation—and even more time online—than I ever did with any of
my lovers.
So after I got tackled and my forty-four pages crumbled down
to a piece of paper that my chair diligently scribbled down as I was telling
what I really wanted to write in a stream of consciousness manner, I mumbled to
myself “I guess I will have to put version numbers on my new drafts…”
And my friend who mentioned the lover analogy said “I put
dates on them, it is a sure way to organize the versions.”
And I replied “Yeah, so do I, except it is no longer the
same lover. I just started a new affair…”
And we giggled at the thought of this exciting prospect. A
new lover… And the thought comes to my mind that I am never able to keep the
same lover for so long, so it is not surprising that I can’t stick to the same
topic more than six months.
The morning after
A day in Louisville in a hot tub, having tequila shots in good company, I am finally over the
shock, frustration, and the sense of misery that I felt the day before as my
chapter started crumbling down in front of my very eyes. Now that all my war is
done, what to salvage from the ruins?
Ideas:
- I still have to talk about textuality in general, print and digital. Really, talking about narrative without having first clarified my understanding of what a text and work is.
- This time I should not start from the invention of the wheel in explaining what a text is. So Barthes and some of the textual critics that I mention gotta go. I think I have to give up on my extensive discussion on materiality. Text and body, no matter how sexy the topic is, will have to go as well. And Hayles is doing such a damn good job of it anyways in dealing with this discourse.
- This chapter and the next one, in which I wanted to talk about spatial narratives, should be condensed and combined. And I should start relating spatial narratives to narratives that elicit a type of reading that requires performance. So this way, I am already showing how this chapter will relate to the next.
- The next chapter will be on reading as performance.
- Don Quixote will take a more significant part in this next chapter where I talk about reading as performance. Textual poaching can start from this text too.
- Also ARG, Alternative Reality Games, would be great to talk about too.
- But the rest still needs to be reorganized.
Tackled in the 40-yard line
I just had my dissertation group meeting this Saturday and
got tackled big-time. I believe the comment and question that torpedoed the
forty-four pages of my second chapter was: “Great historical genealogy of the
text. So what will be the argument of this chapter?” When asked by my chair, I
was like a deer hit by headlights. Ahh, the misery of it… I saw my entire
chapter crumbling right in front of my very eyes. I remember this happening
once again at a time not too long ago when I had to erase two of my chapters
and rewrite a new introduction.
I am beginning to think that I am indeed writing a
postmodern dissertation: a dissertation that shamelessly erases itself. It
doesn’t seem like it is going to end anytime soon. I guess it is a good thing
that I like what I am doing.
So she asks, “Will this information be necessary for the
rest of your dissertation?”
I say “Err, not really, guess it is a foundational chapter.”
I mean, you can’t talk about narrative without defining the text.” But
materiality, is that necessary for later chapters? I ask myself.
Silence…
She asks “Well what do you want to write about?”
I say “Err, uhm, well text, narrative…” and I mumble some
bull shit that I am not so sure about anymore. Then I say “Well from that, I
would like to move to the idea of how spatial narratives elicit a different
type of reading, namely reading as performance. Textual poaching is crucial in
this type of reading.
Reading
in this sense is forming the text, performing the work.” An idea that I got
from Anna Gunder’s article. And I go off with great enthusiasm with how textual
poaching happens in the digital text. Hackers, in a sense, are textual
poachers. Hackers of Agrippa and Second Life intentionally misread the digital
text… This is what I want to write about. Even when you look at my blog
entries, you can see clearly that this has been what I wanted to write all
along.
Why the hell did I delude myself into thinking that I can
transition from my intense genealogy of the text to this exciting topic that I
really want to write? Did I waste my time all along? I don’t think so. It took
me forty-four pages of genealogy of the text and a single question of whether
this is all going to relate to the later chapters to get me to this point.
Code is back
After going back and forth about including a section on the characteristics of the code, I finally decided to include it in my discussion of the nature of the digital text. At first, it didn’t make sense to mention it in terms of the materiality of the text because materiality is not strictly limited to the physical aspects of the text. The code, however, is exclusively a part of the physical aspects of the text. But since I defined physicality and materiality separately (as Hayles does) and indicated that I will first talk about the physical characteristics of the text, and then move on to materiality of the text, I can transition into the discussion of the characteristics of the code without making it feel like a loooong digression. Also I will have to condense the section on the code that I have written already and remove Saussure and Derrida as much as possible. I hope I won’t change my mind again…
