The electronic campfire
Subjective thoughts, ideas, and news from the daily zeitgeist. An "ongoing literature" project . . .

#111: Laptop Orchestra

Friday, 20 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Students in DTC 452 Electronic Music gave their first public laptop orchestra performance tonight as part of the month-long Loud & Clear: Sound & Image exhibition featuring student and faculty video and sound art. Students wrote the 15-minute composition, "The Mental State of Silence," as a class project and performed it tonight on their laptops, each student taking a different part. The performance was sublime, even haunting; a beautiful piece of music created by students, many of whom had never before created a musical composition or given a public performance.

Each year, in the spring, The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) sponsors 1-3 artists-in-residence to bring their digital art practices to the classroom where they work with students to research potential projects and then put them into practice through building and showcasing experimental solutions. The laptop orchestra stems from the month-long residency of Rob Melton who taught students composition theory and electronic music practice.

#110: Research showcase winner

Thursday, 19 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Nicole Buckner, a senior in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) won an undergraduate research award at the 2012 Research Showcase today, for her project "Occupy Global Map" in which she attempted to map and provide information about every known Occupy movement around the world. Her project, part of her coursework for the social media course last fall, quickly became a resource for the global Occupy movement generating 40,000 hits in ten days. This is the third year in a row that a CMDC student has earned the undergraduate research award at Research Showcase and we all are very proud of Nicole.

#109: Research showcase preparations

Wednesday, 18 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Members of the Research Showcase committee prepared the Firstenberg Student Commons this afternoon for tomorrow morning's Research Showcase. We arranged tables, signs, and electrical power for over one hundred student and faculty demonstrations of research projects throughout the University. We are all excited about tomorrow's event.

#108: Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Tuesday, 17 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
At our weekly meeting today, faculty members of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) discussed the upcoming Digital Humanities Summer Institute, 4-8 June 2012, at the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where we have been invited to teach a week-long course titled Creating Digital Humanities Projects for the Mobile Environment." We developed a course outline and began thinking about resources and projects to offer our students, many of whom have little or no experience with building apps. We are all quite excited about spending a week in Victoria and teaching an interesting course.

#107: NEH called

Monday, 16 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The National Endowment for the Humanities called today, wanting The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) to develop mobile apps. NEH is currently funding CMDC for its work on The Fort Vancouver Mobile Project where we are developing a series of apps playable on various mobile devices that help portray the history at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Verizon has donated hundreds of tablets to local schools and is working with teachers developing ways to use them for education. Educational apps are needed for these tablets and NEH called today, asking whether we could build them. We said yes.

#106: 2-year anniversary

Sunday, 15 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Two years ago today The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) achieved independence. When the program was first conceived, very few academics had heard of, or even considered, digital technology or digital culture. Forward thinking individuals started the program, providing the independence to grant its own degree, but, because of its small size (only two faculty) were forced to tether the new program to one larger, and more traditional. The English Department was chosen but the marriage turned sour. CMDC sued for divorce and after a two-year battle won independence on this day in 2010. With independence came the opportunity to determine our own future, create our own classes, hire our own faculty. I was at the Research Showcase, working with student exhibits of research projects when the news was announced. I remember the room going silent for a moment and then erupting in cheering and applause. It was a moment of sweet relief. CMDC has grown since then. We are now the second largest program in the College of Liberal Arts with nearly two hundred students and eight faculty. We are considered a signature program at the university. Local partners are investing in the CMDC, allowing us to provide tuition reimbursement for students who take the classes in which they build cutting edge digital media projects like "Autovation," the augmented reality installation for the Oregon Museum for Science and Industry (OMSI) (see #33, below); "Dick Hannah Customer Care" app for iPhone and Android; and IMPACT//backlash," the sensor-based drum interface for live multimedia performance.. It has been hard work, and a long time coming, but it is fulfilling to reflect on this success today.

#105: Spring day

Saturday, 14 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
A beautiful spring day with sunshine and warmth. I worked in the yard most of the day and literally watched the azalea and rhododendron buds swelling toward their grand openings.

#104: Loud & Clear

Friday, 13 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Four student dj/vjs performed tonight at the North Bank Artists Gallery as part of the month-long Loud & Clear: Sound & Image exhibition featuring student and faculty video and sound art. Their performances ranged from introspective to house shaking and each noted a concerted striving toward using digital technologies for creative expression. It was a pleasure to stand in the crowd experiencing their performances and know that each one was part of the The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC).

#103: ProCaliber, part 3 (the delivery)

Thursday, 12 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The ProCaliber Fellows, all students in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) presented their ideas for the redesign of the ProCaliber.com website to owners and major stakeholders today. Their proposal was unanimously accepted and approved, clearing the way for the students to proceed with the actual building of the new and improved eCommerce website.

#102: New courses

Wednesday, 11 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today we learned that four new courses had been approved for The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC), moving it more solidly into full and free-standing status as an independent program within the university system. The courses approved are a freshperson introduction to the world of digital technology and culture; a capstone seminar course to be taken by all graduating seniors; a directed/independent study course; and a student internship course. Each course provides unique teaching and learning opportunities for students and the opportunity to build the program by providing courses at all levels of the university experience. Four new courses in one year. This is a big success!

#101: Research showcase—Vancouver

Tuesday, 10 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Last month, fifteen students from The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) traveled to Pullman, Washington, to participate in the annual Research Showcase. They attracted a lot of positive attention, both to themselves and the CMDC program.

Next week, these students, and others, will have a chance to share their work at our own Research Showcase. I am a member of the Research Showcase Committee and we met today to discuss the final plans for the event. Set up will take place Wednesday afternoon; the event itself will happen Thursday morning, followed in the afternoon by a reception and awards ceremony. For the past few years CMDC has earned top honors for student projects. I am hoping we can do the same this year.

#100: The Brautigan Library

Monday, 9 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I have struggled with The Brautigan Library website since the fall of 2010. This website is intended to provide access to information about a unique collection of nearly 300 unpublished manuscripts collected from international authors in the early 1990s. But, the database behind the library catalog has been broken for most of this time, frustrating all attempts to open the library for further submissions. With no operating funds I have had to rely on the kindness of volunteers, who have come and gone without fixing the problems.

Today I signed on a student who has expressed interest several times to help build the library. He reconfirmed that interest today, and added a promise to build the database anew, addressing current problems and providing the necessary infrastructure for future expansions. The idea is to collect unpublished manuscripts from authors interested to place them in The Brautigan Library and then, through the Library interface, share those manuscripts with anyone interested to read them. I am feeling pretty good about moving forward.

#99: Easter

Sunday, 8 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
No special celebration, but a nice day nonetheless. Dene and I moved the lawn furniture out of winter storage and enjoyed an afternoon of reading and napping in the yard surrounded by our cats who were also outside to enjoy the beautiful weather.

#98: Clean up and return

Saturday, 7 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Students and faculty cleanup up North Bank Artists Gallery after last night's hugely successful opening of the month-long Loud & Clear: Sound & Image show. We disassembled the sound gear used for the performances and got it ready for return to the rental company. We rearranged the exhibits of student-built electronic oscillators, built for the experimental digital music class, and the numerous monitors playing digital videos pieces, giving everything a bit of breathing room. Everything was crammed together last night to facilitate the crowds visiting the gallery. We carried out the trash and swept the floors, making way for a week of gallery visits. The next student performances will be next Friday evening.

The speakers and turntables were loaded into my car for return. At the rental company I discovered we were missing two cables. I returned to the gallery, found the cables, and returned to the rental company. One cable was fine; one was missing its connector covers at both ends. I returned to the gallery, found the covers, and then returned again to the rental agency: all items now returned.

It was a lot of back and forth, but once I had returned the speakers and turntables, I switched to my motorcycle and enjoyed the miles back and forth in the fine spring weather. It seemed fair enough reward for the time and trouble it took to return everything.

#97: Loud & Clear

Friday, 6 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Students from The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) opened their Loud & Clear: Sound & Image gallery show tonight at North Bank Artists Gallery in downtown Vancouver. More than 600 people attended the event, making it the largest ever opening at the gallery. Tonight's launch party featured performances by two of the 2012 CMDC artists in residence, Matt Brizlawn and Jackson 2Bears. CMDC students were deservedly proud of the attention paid to their work. The month-long show features electronic music, sound art, and digital visual art.

#96: Arrangements

Thursday, 5 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Each spring The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) hosts visiting digital media artists for a class and a series of shows and presentations. Jackson 2Bears, a Mohawk multimedia artist, is the third artist to teach this semester in the experimental digital music and sound class. Immediately before 2Bears was Matt Brizlawn, a well-respected local noise artist who taught students how to build their own contact microphones and tone oscillators which can be used to create interesting sounds for either solo recordings or group compositions. At the beginning of the semester students worked with Rob Melton, a local music educator to compose and perform a multiple laptop-synthesizer performance. Today we rented speakers and turntables for 2Bear's performance tomorrow night at the opening of Loud & Clear: Sound & Image gallery show.

#95: Student power

Wednesday, 4 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
In January, during the return trip from The Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Seattle, two students said they wanted to curate an art show for students in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC). These students had worked as docents for the electronic literature exhibit the CMDC program hosted at the MLA convention and wanted more experience. So, they developed a focus on digital sound and video art produced as part of the experimental music and sound art class scheduled for the spring semester. They made all the arrangements for use of the North Bank Artists Gallery in downtown Vancouver for a month-long show. They developed the call for submissions. They solicited the peer review jury and volunteers to work as docents during the month. They developed and launched a website and social media promotional events. And they distributed press releases to the traditional regional media outlets. It has taken a lot of time and effort, and lesser students might have shirked from the expectations and requirements, but these two ladies, Setareh Alizadeh and Nicole Buckner, have proved themselves more than capable of achieving their original vision and inspiring a number of people to join them along the way. Opening night is Friday and their time and effort will be on display, along with the work of the CMDC students participating in the gallery show.

#94: Film festival decisions

Tuesday, 3 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Throughout the semester I have worked with a group of colleagues to develop the 2012 Diversity Film Festival. The festival is part of the ongoing efforts by the Diversity Council to promote diversity at Washington State University Vancouver.

We decided early in the process to focus on two themes, elections and Native Americans, and to select two films for each theme speaking to diversity issues. We each researched, nominated, and watched potential films. Through discussion we ended with what we believe are four good choices: Please Vote for Me, The Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian, and Two Spirits.

Please Vote for Me follows a mock election in a Chinese mainland grade school classroom where the parents will do whatever they can behind the scenes to assure their children win. Boogie Man follows the rise and fall of Lee Atwater, the Machiavellian godfather of modern take-no-prisoners Republican political campaigns. Together, these two films provide a context for controversial (some would say underhanded) tactics of current-day elections in two very different countries, one where democracy is not allowed, the other where it is taken too much for granted.

Reel Injun is a provocative look at Hollywood's depiction of Native Americans, focusing on how Native Americans have been portrayed and how this has shaped the world's conception and (mis)understanding of them. Two Spirits examines tradition, controversy, sex and spirit, civil rights, gender issues, and the freedom to be yourself through its focus on Fred Martinez, a Navajo "two-spirt" with both masculine and feminine traits who became one of the youngest hate-crime victims in history when he was murdered at age sixteen.

We will announce these films at the Diversity Council meeting on Friday.

#93: Sun day break

Monday, 2 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
For the past several months we have had occasional breaks in the winter rains, sometimes lasting for a few hours. Today was the first full day, seemingly forever, without rain. After school I mowed the lawn and took a spin around the block on my motorcycle for the first time in four months. The break was short lived, however, as rain returned this evening, thumbing softly on the roof and dripping from the trees.

#92: Days go by

Sunday, 1 April 2012, Vancouver, Washington
As soon as I write the title for this post the chorus to the The Talking Heads song "Once in a Lifetime" starts looping in my head: "Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Letting the days go by, water flowing underground." Some fans argue this song is about reflection, and so it is natural that it comes to mind this morning. For the first time in days, I have a moment to simply sit and reflect. No classes to teach or meetings to attend. No need to rush. Instead, an opportunity to sit and reflect.

Outside the window the first azalea blooms are starting to swell. Soon they will burst into bright neon orange and yellow flowers. I do not know the variety of these azaleas, but I love the way they were planted by former owners of this house so as to be framed by the window, even when looking from across the house. The bark of the bushes, once covered in shaggy green draping moss, is now smooth, clean, and strangely bright after I spent several hours removing the moss with a scrub brush. The moss now lies like a skirt, surrounding the base of each bush. Birds stop in the azaleas, on their way to the feeder, filled during a recent break in the rain. I sit and think, and the days go by (and that seems like a conflation of The Rolling Stones and The Talking Heads).

The days do indeed go by, and with supersonic speed, one melding into the next, the continuous line of experience broken only by brief periods of sleep, during which, the days go by without me. I am not lamenting, or feeling morbid, certainly not that water (literally or figuratively) is holding me down. In fact, I have now a rare moment to savor the success achieved during these days going by: new students enrolling in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) daily, interesting projects and partnerships in which they can engage their creativity and problem solving skills, and always, the satisfaction of experiencing success resulting from hard work.

Six years ago I came here to work within the CMDC program. Since then it has been hard work, made even more so by the mean spirits and discriminatory practices of some faculty members. Despite these hurdles, I have seen the CMDC program become independent, develop a solid curriculum, add faculty, attract students, and garner awards and kudos. This is more than sufficient reward for the time and effort I have invested, and the lack of opportunity to sit and watch days go by.

#91: Research showcase success

Saturday, 31 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Students, faculty, and staff returned today from the Research Showcase in Pullman eager to share their stories of success. As they tell it, their projects were well received by a steady stream of visitors. Some of the students were interviewed by the university news service and will soon see themselves in University videos and magazines. Everyone felt that had done of great job of impressing folks in Pullman with the work being done by students here in Vancouver—there is often the distinct feeling that the main campus ("The Mother Ship") looks upon the urban campuses as less than stellar. But this time, students in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) were indeed stellar and I am proud to be associated with them.

#90: College merger, Part 3

Friday, 30 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The three candidates for dean of the newly combined College of Arts and Sciences gave brief presentations today, and then stood for questions from faculty. Each offered desirable experience and important skills for the position. No one, however, offered a clearly articulated vision. Instead, each said faculty would have to talk, get to know one another, and then determine how to work together. I was disappointed with this lack of vision. The combined colleges of arts and sciences will become the largest academic unit on the campus from which much will be expected and for which a great deal is at stake. This merger will define how the University moves forward in the future. Given the fact that many faculty are busy with their research and teaching, and do not desire to make time to talk about how to proceed with the merger, I was disappointed that these potential administrators lacked the foresight and vision to be better prepared for what lies ahead.

I was also disappointed by the discussion led by faculty from History and English following the formal presentations in which they attempted to derail the appeal of one candidate by manipulating the discussion into an opportunity to provide disparaging remarks and opinions. Clearly they saw potential to further their own agendas under new leadership, especially one they saw as less resistant to their demands.

#89: Research showcase—Pullman

Thursday, 29 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Fifteen students, two faculty, and one staff from The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) left today for Pullman, Washington, where they will attend and exhibit three projects at the annual Research Showcase. The three projects are "Autovation," the augmented reality installation for the Oregon Museum for Science and Industry (OMSI) (see #33, below); "Dick Hannah Customer Care" app for iPhone and Android; and IMPACT//backlash," the sensor-based drum interface for live multimedia performance.

The CMDC Program emphasizes undergraduate research expressed through creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving and aims to educate the next generation of digital media leaders and entrepreneurs. The Research Showcase in Pullman, the main campus for Washington State University, and the upcoming Showcase here in Vancouver later this month provide our students the opportunity to present and discuss their research work. Despite the long drive to Pullman and back (six hours each way) the group enjoys the opportunity each year.

#88: Real world project

Wednesday, 28 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
My Usability and Interface Design class is working to develop prototypes for the various sections of The Brautigan Library website. This is one of my research projects and I am leery ask students to focus their time and effort here as they may feel that my assessment of their success with the endeavor will not be unbiased. I was pleased today when, after offered the choice to proceed or not, students separated into self-established groups to work on this project and later told me that they appreciated the opportunity to work on a real world project, complete with client. The current website is badly in need of a makeover, and the infrastructure for the future version needs to be developed. I am pleased that these students want to take on and in fact enjoy the challenges associated with these endeavors.

#87: Student advising

Tuesday, 27 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Advising students regarding the choices for courses both this summer and next fall has begun. Each faculty member has a number of the total students in the program we are responsible for contacting and advising. I have appointments to see a few students this week, but have no response from many others. These advising sessions are not required, and students know that they can pick their own courses and register themselves online next month when course registration opens. For those it is an opportunity to review their plans, make suggestions, and remove the advising hold that otherwise will prevent them from registering. Those you do not attend advising appointments find religion quickly when they cannot register.

#86: Mixer repairs, part 6

Monday, 26 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The saga ended today, curiously. Apparently, my mixer works just fine, and does not seem to need repairs after all! The mixer purchased on eBay arrived last week and over the weekend, my Korean friend tested it, and my old mixer, and one owned by a friend. "All same. All fine," he said. There was no explanation for why my mixer did not work when I brought it in, or why, when he took it apart and tested each component, found one not working. Perhaps the reassembly addressed a loose connection? "Don't know. All fine now." I took my mixer home and reconnected my sound gear. It worked fine. No problem. But, I am thinking of returning to the repair shop and buying the newly arrived mixer. This would lessen the loss for my friend, and give me an insurance policy should my mixer once again stop working.

#85: Mad Men was Bad

Sunday, 25 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The fifth season premiere of Mad Men tonight was bad, and that is not good. It has been eighteen months since we last watched the (mis)adventures of Don, Peggy, Pete, Betty, Joan, Roger, and others at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, but I have to say, knowing full well the unpopularity of my sentiments, that this episode did not set up any interesting stories to anticipate throughout the rest of the season. Everyone is still bored, cynical, petty, self-absorbed, looking for a spark of adventure, thinking it will come from new partners, business or otherwise. So, we can anticipate infidelities, adultery, divorces among these mad men and their women. Ho hum. From the set dressings we can look forward to more reminders of the unique decor of the 1960s, and how, for this crew, it means nothing more than a way to show their hipness or willingness to allow partners to have what they desire. These are cold people and I look for no warmth from their stories. But, the context is the 1960s, a period of intense political, social, and political change which, as it did so many others, will probably threaten the status quo and comfort levels of the show's characters. This has potential for good storytelling and I hope future episodes follow this theme. Speaking of characters, the strongest ones, again in my opinion, were the civil rights protesters who confronted their hecklers with a determined response, and those individuals applying for a fictional job, ironically a petty, self-conscious dig at a rival agency gone bad, at the mad men agency.

#84: Fred N. Wright (1940-2012)

Saturday, 24 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Scott Young, editor of Rusty Truck wrote tonight to say that our mutual friend Fred Wright died recently. When we last talked together, Fred knew his various aliments would lead to his demise, but as a writer and a painter and a dreamer and a raconteur, he never let anything get in the way of his breathing fully each breath of his life. Scott said Fred was working on his painting and writing right up to the end. From this, I believe he died happily and peacefully, and that is the best ending for which anyone can ask.

I never met Fred in person, although we talked long hours on the telephone over the several years we knew each other. It was soon after the launch of my website focusing on the life and works of Richard Brautigan, Brautigan.NET, that Fred first contacted me via email. He complimented me on work well done and provided some details about Brautigan's relationship with poet, short story writer, and novelist Charles Bukowski. In a subsequent email message Fred talked about his relationship with Kenneth Patchen and his wife, Miriam. I think it was then that Fred revealed his artwork, noting that he was working on some paintings for Miriam Patchen. A bit later, Fred noted, casually, that he was a published author with three novels to his credit, now involved with writing poetry.

Email messages were replaced by telephone calls, each one exposing another layer of the obviously talented and hard-working Fred Wright. In one call he spoke about a telephone conversation with Richard Brautigan years earlier. This led to an essay, "Talking with Richard Brautigan," I was proud to include in my edited volume, Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life.

In another conversation, Fred mentioned that he was trying to collect and show all his artwork in an online gallery, but had no idea how to build one. I volunteered and created the Artwork by F. N. Wright website. When he sent me the digital images of his paintings, I was astounded by the elegant simplicity and colorful, whimsical playfulness of Fred's art. I am honored to have a handful of his original work in my house.

Fred had a myriad of other interests and inspirations, but our conversations remained focused on Brautigan, Fred's own writing and art, and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. He had owned several; still had one or two parked at his house that he rode occasionally to the Rock House, apparently just up the road, where he would meet friends. Fred kept me updated on the restoration of a military Servi-Car that he undertook with his son, even sent me a picture of a ride in the snow during a visit to the family home in Illinois.

As his health declined, Fred called less frequently, but when he did, he always apologized for not being in touch. He then talked with pleasure about the success he was enjoying from his poetry, his painting, and his life. That is a good memory to have of a good man, and a good friend, Fred N. Wright.

#83: New faculty approved

Friday, 23 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Requests for two new faculty positions in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) were approved today. Each is a one year appointment, with no promise of continuation, but each is very much needed as the program continues to grow, and for this reason we are all very happy. These new positions will focus on our new freshperson-level introduction to digital media, upper-division animation courses, and the communications minor. The folks who will be hired for these positions have long taught for the program in adjunct positions. This will give them increased stability, and support the program's growth. We are fortunate, and quite pleased, to have our funding requests approved.

#82: Student struggles

Thursday, 22 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
We are back now from spring break and already students are feeling the pressure of finishing projects and completing coursework in a timely fashion. Several are starting to buckle. They are dropping courses in which they are not doing well. They are seeking extensions of project due dates. They are negotiating what they will submit to demonstrate their command of a body of knowledge. Some will be successful. Others will not. I will try to help everyone, and we will arrive at the end of the semester exhausted, relieved, but wondering what we learned from the experience.

#81: Diversity Film Festival

Wednesday, 21 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I chair the Diversity Film Festival Committee, part of the university Diversity Council. Throughout this semester, I have worked with three colleagues to select four films representing multiple aspects of diversity which will be shown next September, at the start of the fall semester.

We have decided to show two films each week for two weeks. The theme for one week will be, in keeping with the presidential election, diversity of elections. As a committee we are homing in on the final film for this theme and our homework over the weekend will be to research documentary films (ideally around one hour in length) about elections, or some aspect of elections that speak to their surrounding diversity of issues, thought, and effort.

#80: First day of spring

Tuesday, 20 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
First day of spring, pouring down rain, cold temperatures, snow forecasted. The weather aces say this weather is one for the record books. "I've lived here all my life," said the man at the lawn and garden equipment store where I took my mower and clippers for sharpening, "and I don't ever remember weather like this. Usually we get some nice, warm days about now. But this weather doesn't seem like it wants to stop."

The weather is disheartening, that is true. The low-pressure storms continue to roll inland from the North Pacific Ocean, one after another, like a succession of keno balls, each bearing the same promise: rain. The rest of the country seems snow in about three days. I understand there is a lot in the midwest just now.

Here in Vancouver, we are waiting for the high pressure system that will park itself offshore and divert the storms either to the north or south, giving us, at last, some clear skies and spring sunshine.

#79: Information architecture

Monday, 19 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
More thoughts about the information architecture course I am developing for next semester. Specifically, that it has a history that, arguably, parallels that of humanity. We might suggest that prehistorical cave paintings were attempts to understand and/or portray pre-verbal world knowledge. With the advent of spoken language, orality, we saw storytellers who served as collective memories, organizing and communicating the histories of their tribe or society. This reached a pinnacle with the ancient Greek rhetor, arm raised in the agora, signaling a desire to speak for or against a particular topic. The development of writing technologies affixed the spoken word to some permanent surface, allowing it to transcend temporality, time, and geography. The multimedia Internet provided structures to increase the organization / findability of information. Now, ever-evolving digital technologies allow us to produce increasingly more and more content for publication on the Internet. Social networking technologies increase the opportunity for sharing and discussing this content we produce, thus creating, as Clay Shirkey argues, user generated content. As a result, we must think about information organization as we create information portals that lead to our public and private content / communications. Somehow, the tons of information we create and publish online must be easily accessible to our readers / viewers, who will, through their conversation about this content, often with the creators, determine what is best. As Cory Doctorow says, "Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about."

#78: Blank

Sunday, 18 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Kidnapped by aliens . . . can't remember a thing.

#77: Jubilee Hitchhiker

Saturday, 17 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
William "Gatz" Hjortsberg read from and talked about his new biography of Richard Brautigan, Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan (CounterPoint, 2012) at the Clark County Historical Museum, in downtown Vancouver, Washington, home to The Brautigan Library. Hjortsberg has been working on this biography for the past twenty years, and its release is much anticipated by fans and admirers of Richard Brautigan. The first local review appeared last week in The Sunday Oregonian (Portland, Oregon): "Brautigan biography is vivid, ambitious and very, very big."

Approximately 85 people attended the reading today, including Barbara Fitzhugh, Brautigan's half-sister, whom I had never met. There were many memories of Brautigan shared, lots of buzz about The Brautigan Library and its future plans, and Gatz I think enjoyed the attention immensely. All available copies of his book sold and he spent over an hour signing and personalizing each one.

#76: Talking about Richard Brautigan

Friday, 16 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I spent the afternoon with William "Gatz" Hjortsberg, author of the newly-released Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan. This book, at 852 pages, is massive as a dictionary, but worthy of the time it will take to read for the information it provides about Washington-born author Richard Brautigan.

It was a pleasure to meet and talk with Gatz, whom I have met only once before, and then only briefly. We sat in the living room, watching the sun break shadows move across the garden outside the window, talking about Richard Brautigan and our often parallel projects to provide definitive information about the man, his life, and his works.

While Gatz was writing his biography of Brautigan, I was creating and maintaining a website, Brautigan.NET, often cited as the preeminent resource for all things Brautigan. But, while my work has been available longer, Gatz's project has been eagerly anticipated for years. As I explained to him today, my website provides solid information about Brautigan, his life, and his works, but it is meant to be a scholarly resource accessible to anyone. Gatz's biography, a sprawling narrative, provides answers to the questions about Brautigan's life so long unanswered that they have morphed into mythology.

It was my opportunity today, and I took advantage, asking the questions that have eluded my ability to find answers for years. I see many updates and additions to my website in the future as I work my way through Gatz's wonderful biography.

#75: Equal or more opportunity?

Thursday, 15 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I overhead a discussion today about whether the Internet provided equal opportunity for expression to all. One person argued yes, the other no. The negative stance is common on my campus, as it probably is on many others, where people argue that we should not rush toward embracing technology in efforts to increase teaching and learning opportunities because not all our students will have equal opportunity. Unstated in this stance is that the classroom, with a teacher in front, is the great equalizer.

I was reminded of a more interesting way to approach this question from my reading in David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Weinberger cites Yale economist Yochai Benkler (in The Wealth of Networks) who argues that the right question, rather than whether the Internet provides equal opportunity, is whether it provides more equality than the traditional structure of commercial mass media. Typically, Benkler says, low traffic, interest-based websites talk among themselves based on their shared interest(s). If a topic develops of interest to a larger group, it may be picked up, thus generating more traffic, more conversation. This brings the topic to other local groups that share interests with the larger, regional, group. Again, more interest develops. As a result, several groups (nodes) of the Internet might cluster around a topic of mutual interest. This affords more access to the topic of conversation, from many more different directions, based on many different perspectives, and including much more information than is the case through a single channel mass media outlet. (Weinberger 202)

#74: Mixer repairs, part 5

Wednesday, 14 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
. . . the story continues . . . and the mixer, purchased on eBay has not yet arrived from Canada. Money has been paid by my Korean friend (he invites me now regularly into his office) but, as he demonstrates on the eBay website, there is no tracking number to indicate the mixer has been sent. "I must call eBay," he says. The story continues . . .

#73: Six answers

Tuesday, 13 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today I read and reviewed the fiftieth anniversary edition of Silence, a collection of twenty three articles, essays, and lectures written by John Cage from 1939 to 1961. Cage is often regarded as the most influential American composer of the twentieth century and it was this book, his first, the first of six that is his best-known, translated into more than forty languages. The many challenges Cage presents in this book to assumptions regarding music, the role of the musician, and the musical experience continue to influence our understanding of how we make and appreciate art and performance.

Working against what he felt as a tradition that all music compositions, to be great, must be profound, Cage sought to make musical composition fun, risky, and humble. Artists, composers, designers, and performers have adapted or drawn from Cage's thoughts and ideas for the last fifty years.

For Cage, entertainment was not out of consideration, and in fact formed the basis for some of the lectures included in Silence. At the end of one, "Lecture on Nothing," Cage notes how he prepared six answers for the first six questions asked at the end of his lecture, regardless of what they were. I drew inspiration from these six answers, imagining using them in the petty discussions often engaged in by academics where the only desired outcome seems one-upmanship. The six answers are:

#72: Autovation project revving up

Monday, 12 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Students in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) continue their collaboration with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) and Dick Hannah Automobile Dealerships to build and install an interactive display in OMSI using augmented reality to focus on innovations in automobile technology. The next in a continuing series of articles appeared in The Columbian yesterday. As the article notes, the pressure is on, but students remain confident.

#71: Spring break

Sunday, 11 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today is the second day of spring break and I dove right into my list of projects I hope to accomplish during this week off from university teaching. I finished a new sound narrative I plan to submit to framework radio. I updated my research/archival project Brautigan.NET. I caught up on long outstanding email. I transplanted ferns and clematis in the yard. I organized materials for a class I will teach in the fall (developing lectures for this course is also on my spring break to do list). And, this evening, while enjoying good beer, I watched the two-part HBO documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, directed by Martin Scorsese. I thought it well done and inspiring. Ever since, the George Harrison produced "Hare Krishna Mantra" is running through my head.

#70: Eulogy for my father

Saturday, 10 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
My father died on this day in 2005. He was 88. This is the eulogy I delivered at his funeral.
Several of you have consoled me following the death of my father. Each has said what a fine man he was and how he left his mark with the successes in his life.

Yes, it is true that my father was successful. He was a successful physician. He provided well for his patients, and for his family. He participated in community endeavors through the Asheville Rotary Club, even serving as President from 1958-1959. He was Chief of Staff at St. Joseph's Hospital.

These alone are the mark of a great, and good, man. But I would like to speak of something more essential.

For example, I was thinking just before the start of this service how much my father loved the mountains of Western North Carolina. He saw the Rocky Mountains—we spent some weeks one summer traveling through them together. We also traveled together to see the majestic mass of Mount McKinley, in Alaska. On his own he saw the snowcapped mountains on the South Island of New Zealand, said to rival the Swiss Alps. None compared, he always said, to the mountains right here around Asheville, his home.

My father was not born here, in Asheville, but he got here quickly enough to qualify for native status. He grew up hunting, and fishing, and hiking in these mountains and never wanted to leave.

Duty to his country during World War II took him about as far away as one can get from Western North Carolina, but he returned just as quickly as he could.

When he did return, he brought his bride and together they raised a family, myself and my sister, Jane, here in Asheville.

As an Obstetrician-Gynecologist, my father literally touched the lives of thousands of individuals here in Asheville and the surrounding mountain counties. His practice was not specialized with regard to patients. He accepted anyone who asked for his help, and he treated each of his patients with dignity, respect, and compassion.

And he would do this outside his practice as well. Many people have told me of how my father had just the right words, or wisdom, for them in their time of need or guidance. They credit my father with giving them something special in their lives.

In return, my father never asked for fame, or recognition, or any physical rewards. It was enough that he was the first person to touch each new individual he brought into this world. It was enough that he could help in some way to set people on their individual paths.

And people were grateful. For example, one nurse caring for my father during his final days came to me and said, "Your father delivered me. He brought me into this life. It is a real honor for me to care for him as he leaves his."

Here is another example. Many times, during our evening meal, a rusty truck coasted to a stop in front of our house. The driver, usually a man clad in worn denim overalls and an old fedora, walked down our driveway carrying a burlap sack, which he left at the back door. Inside were fresh vegetables with the dirt of some mountainside farm still clinging to them. This was his way of thanking my father for helping his wife and child.

My father never got up from the table. He never tried to speak to these men. Instead, he sat quietly, allowing them the dignity of their only way of expressing their thanks.

My father was equally at home with the people who lived in the mountains he loved and was always eager to trade his coat and tie for wool shirts, thick pants, and sturdy boots and join them for fishing, hunting, and yarning.

On one such occasion, a bear hunt in the Smoky Mountains, writer Michael Frome joined a group of men around a campfire and later described them in his book, Strangers in High Places. Frome described the men as "roughhewn" and as a "vanishing breed of mountain men." The only "'furriner'," he wrote, "was an Asheville physician, a splendid man who had been with them before and earned their respect: he was 'stout'."

My father earned respect as "stout" because he loved to hike the mountains of Western North Carolina. He was well known up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway by the Park Rangers who routinely found, and ignored, his car parked at the side of the road waiting for my father's return from his rambles.

From these rambles my father brought back many wonderful, beautiful, photographs of the mountain wildflowers he loved so much. I am proud that these photographs are now archived in university Botany departments around the state.

Also from these rambles my father brought back a sense of peace, of spirituality. He embraced John Muir's invitation to "Climb the Mountains and get their glad tidings." Like Muir, my father felt by climbing the mountains
Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
The winds will blow their own freshness into you,
And the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

My father certainly had his cares and worries. A medical practice, a family, and a son, who growing up during the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s felt the necessity to experiment with rebellion.

My father and I did not always agree on how one should live one's life, but I am happy, and proud, to stand before you today and say that my father, in his last days, held my hand, told me that he loved me, and that he was proud of what I had done with my life so far. "Keep going," he said, "don't stop now." When he said that, cares, for both of us, dropped off like autumn leaves.

That was my father's way, to quietly reassure, but at the same time offer a challenge for continued striving. My father understood people and how to relate to them. His demeanor was calm and friendly, and assuring. He had a smile, a twinkle in his eye, a set to his jaw, that meant everything was going to be just fine.

In a memorable final moment, he reassured us all when he sat on the edge of his bed and entertained his immediate family with jokes, songs, advice, and comfort.

He kissed my Mother, Susann, and thanked her for a wonderful life together. "I love you very much," he said.

With my sister Jane he joked about how his obituary would read if he had died choking on a piece of ice he was often given to moisten his mouth.

With Nancy, his sister, he sang all the verses of "Clementine."

To his granddaughter Amelia, who is starting to think about colleges, he offered advice: "never be late for work and keep your burgers square."

To his grandson, Jackson, he wished continued success at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, his own alma mater.

And then to everyone gathered round, he recited the poem "When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted," by Rudyard Kipling.

When Earth’s last picture is painted,
and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours are faded,
and the youngest critic has died;
We shall rest, and faith we shall
need it, - and lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of all Good Workmen
shall put us to work anew.

And only the Master shall praise us
and only the Master shall blame
and no-one shall work for money
and no-one shall work for fame,
but each for the joy of the working,
and each, in his separate star,
shall draw the thing as he sees it,
for the God of "things as they are."

Soon after reciting this poem my father laid down, went to sleep, and never woke again.

I like to think that he felt he needed to rest, to lie down for an aeon or two, until the Master of all Good Workmen would put him to work anew.

I also like to think that like Kipling, my father, was dreaming of a future when people will do things not for money, fame, recognition, or greed, but because they want to, and perhaps more importantly, because it is something they love to do.

My father loved what he did. He loved being a physician. He loved being a husband, a father, a friend, a "stout" man. He worked hard at what he loved and the fact that we gather today in his honor and memory is testament to his success.

My father also loved the ways of these mountains and in closing, I can think of no better way to wish him well on his current ramble among them than to quote from the old mountain song, "Go Rest High on that Mountain."

Oh how we cried the day you left us
We gathered at your grave to grieve
Wish I could see the angel's faces
When they hear your sweet voice sing.

Go rest high on that mountain
'Cause son your work on Earth is done
Go to heaven a shoutin'
Love for the Father and the son

Go rest high on that mountain, Dad. You deserve the rest. And rest assured that in an aeon or two, the Master of all Good Workmen WILL put you to work anew.

#69: Mixer repairs, part 4

Friday, 9 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
When I last checked (18 February) my audio mixer needed a new central processing unit. The Korean proprietor at the local repair shop told me he would order one. Today, when I stopped to inquire about progress, he replied that he had bid on the part through an eBay auction, had won the auction, and was waiting for the item to arrive from Canada. "Much cheaper this way," he said.

When I asked about the cost, he said, "about $152.00."

"That's more than I paid for the mixer originally," I replied.

"Yes, mixer cost $152.00." So, rather than a single part, he had bought an entire mixer, which made sense since my audio mixer is a discontinued model, but also made me wonder.

"Will you replace the bad part in my mixer with one from the mixer you bought, or will I pay you for the entire new mixer?"

"Yes, new mixer . . .." I did not register the rest of his response as I reflected on the interesting twists of this undertaking. I purchased this audio mixer at a local pawn shop for a price that I could walk away from if it broke. It did, but I elected to inquire about whether it might be repaired. A part needed to be ordered and there was some question about its source. The solution was to buy another mixer (same or similar, new or newer?) Would my mixer receive a part transplant, or would I get the second mixer? It was a mystery.

"Mixer come soon. You come back." I agreed that I would. The story continues . . .

#68: Pulse Emitter

Thursday, 8 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Every spring semester The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) offers a special topics course taught by visiting local, national, and international digital media artists. Each year presents a different topic. This year (semester) the topic is electronic music.

During the first four weeks of the semester, students learned to compose and create electronic music. Their final project was an amazing computer and keyboard-based group composition, performed live in our classroom.

The final segment will be taught by Jackson 2bears, a Canadian Mohawk multimedia artist working in the area of sound performance/installations informed by his first nation background.

In between, students are working with Matt Brizlawn, a local sound artist noted for his work with Brizbomb: real time experimental visual audio. He is teaching students to prototype and build their own sound emitting devices. Again, the upshot will be a group concert.

Today, the class hosted Pulse Emitter (Daryl Groetsch), a Portland, Oregon, based sound artist who creates, on hand-made equipment, synthesizer patterns evocative of cosmic and natural settings. The experience was etherial and I have since become a fan and follower of Pulse Emitter on Soundcloud.com and YouTube.

#67: Telecommunications commission

Wednesday, 7 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I was invited last year to serve on the Telecommunications Commission, a city-county government advisory organization charged with oversight of the public, education, and government (PEG) television programming carried by the county-wide cable provider.

In return for preferred opportunities to offer their cable programming, along with digital telephone service and Internet access, the cable provider collects PEG fees from each subscriber each month. Three separate organizations, one for each branch of PEG, request funding from these fees annually for their programming. The telecommunications commission oversees the awarding of these funds, and at monthly meetings, receives updates from each PEG provider about their success providing public programming.

At our meeting this afternoon, two of the PEG providers shared great success stories with the commission. The third did not, spending its time instead fending off complaints about its lack of content, an outdated programming schedule on its website, and its failure at customer service.

At times the discussion was contentious, but mostly it was frustrating as the telecommunications commission has no ability to require any PEG provider to operate in specific ways. Each provider is free to determine and move in its own direction. I believe there was agreement, however, among the members of the commission, that an opportunity was being missed with regard to the production and provision of public access television. No doubt this will come up again when it comes time to review renewal of PEG programming agreements.

#66: White papers

Tuesday, 6 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Perhaps disappointed with the lack of vision in yesterday's meeting between the faculty of the college of liberal arts and the college of science, the faculty of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) talked in our faculty meeting today about how to best sustain our program in a potentially hostile environment spawned by the consolidation of the two colleges where our program would be lumped with the traditional humanities, long and loud in their dislike of a program focusing on technology and student preparation for employment after graduation.

Our solution: we decided to become thought leaders. Assuming that the merger of the two colleges would not force us to change our program, we became excited with the prospect of publishing our collaborative research and our success at building new digital media objects as a series of white papers, distributed widely and freely with the intention of leading other programs in similar ventures.

For our platform we chose Apple's iBook. Using this software program we can easily publish and distribute a series of documents focusing on our individual and collaborative research areas, complete with multimodal content. We have proven to ourselves that we can do this type of work through our successful production of an essay for The Journal of the International Media and Arts Association.

We can take this same approach and produce small, succinct books about particular topics in digital media, publish them using iBooks, and distribute them through iTunes. The emphasis will be on the development and distribution of leading-edge thought rather than economic success. Each faculty will take the lead on publications focusing on their research interests. Everyone will contribute. We will move ahead into the future, despite being weighted down by medieval thinking and practices.

#65: College merger, Part 2

Monday, 5 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I have mentioned earlier (Thursday, 19 January) that the colleges of science and liberal arts are being combined into one College of Arts and Sciences. This is a big move for the University and just as many people resist the idea as support it. Today was the second meeting between the faculties of these two colleges, a mixer, with food and wine, where we were to meet each other and discuss ways that we might collaborate to build academic units outside traditional disciplines. It was a doomed process from the start.

First, very few faculty from the sciences attended. And the faculty attending from liberal arts were not, in my opinion, known for their interest or willingness to embrace change or think outside their disciplinary contexts. Most folks were there, again in my opinion, to protect their disciplinary turf, tenure, and sense of control.

There were a few folks there who sensed a window of opportunity, a way to evolve their programs, research opportunities, and pedagogical models to better match the changing and demanding contexts of teaching and learning in the 21st Century. After the socializing I was lucky enough to sit at the table with these folks and we developed some interesting ideas for how to move forward.

We talked about a trans-disciplinary school where faculty, trained in one discipline could follow their interests to learn from or work with others, or, as one colleague put it, "learn to move across worlds with grace." Such a school would be a bridge between traditional divisions and programatic themes based on new ideas or combinations of interests. These groupings might be small, but they could bolster each other and their opportunities for growth. For example, research assistants might cross from one project to another, bringing new and different ideas and research strategies. Fostered by technology, such a school could determine and implement new and more effective techniques for conducting, communicating, and visualizing research. For example, say there is a health problem that is not well communicated and therefore, not well understood. Through trans-disciplinary efforts, this problem could be situated in a context/environment/simulation that could help learners better understand its opportunities and ramifications.

As an upshot of this proposed college we discussed a data repository, searchable, available for anyone to use under a creative commons license. Other than a contextual statement, there would be no interpretation of the data. It would be, essentially, raw data and could be used to foster new research, inform ongoing research, used or remixed in other disciplines, even turned into art.

My colleagues were from biology, psychology, environmental science, and creative media and digital culture. We were well pleased with our vision and suggested that such a unit might be called the college of bio-psycho-social-cultural sciences, with an emphasis in technology, writing, and communication.

Unfortunately, our enthusiasm was not shared by other colleagues who were still debating the process of the merger, or what it would mean to their abilities to continue their personal research interests. Even more disappointing was that the administration, when asked, "Now that we have completed this exercise, what is the next step?" had no answer. The party fell apart after that, folks walking away wondering why they wasted their time.

#64: Catch up

Sunday, 4 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
With both Friday and Saturday given over to TECH 101 workshops, today was my first chance to catch up on other projects. The following all received check marks indicating their completion: laundry (three loads), a book review, usability quiz graded, research course notes updated and collated, continued work on a sound narrative, transplanted several sword ferns, mowed the grass, and general yard cleanup.

#63: TECH 101

Saturday, 3 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I spent today and yesterday participating in the TECH 101 workshops offered by The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) at Washington State University Vancouver. My workshop was entitled "How to read and tweek your CMS's HTML & CSS," a brief introduction to the HyperText Markup Langauge (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) behind any webpage. Each day the multiple workshops were fully attended by individuals from the community hungry to learn how to build websites for best search engine optimization, how to use content management systems, how to create google maps, youtube channels, use social media, all with an eye toward the future horizon. Workshops ran from 9:00 AM -5:00 PM both days, and we could have run more all night both days, driven by the interest of the attendees.

#62: Graphic novels: good content

Friday, 2 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I am scheduled to teach a course on digital graphic novels this summer, a reprise of a course I taught previously (you can watch the course trailer and learn more about the course here) and so, in the back of my mind, I am thinking about form and content. The traditional graphic novel is an analogue, offline experience, comprised of static text and images. Digital media promotes online experiences that are different and unusual, especially when the text and images respond to or encourage the reader/interactor in ways that are immersive and interactive. For this reason, it will be tempting in the digital graphic novel class to focus on the affordances of form, but we need to focus primarily on content, and by this I mean narrative. Stories based on good narrative resonate. Stories driven by the affordances, the aesthetics, relationships, and meanings of form directly reinforces the meaning made of narrative by the interactors/readers who need to have/see a bigger picture.

#61: The Brautigan Library: online narratives

Thursday, 1 March 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The Brautigan Library seeks to provide an online home for unpublished manuscripts of authors keen to share their narratives. Digitization of these manuscripts promotes many opportunities for sharing, and trouble. I am thinking that if we do not edit or moderate the content of submitted manuscripts, we are not liable. Rather than control over publishing, I can let users/patrons promote good content. Bad content will be pushed to the background. Engaged readers will decide the focus of the content.

Other thoughts and questions: See the book Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Jane Singer, et. al., Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

#60: Social collaborative storytelling: questions

Wednesday, 29 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Social media promotes collaboration/sharing for the purpose of storytelling. As a result, multiple voices of ambient storytellers / journalists can create, shape, and share stories. Diverse participants can collaborate/participate without a central structure. The result: a conversation where the storyteller is one voice in the process of telling the story. Diverse narrators decide how they will shape and use the collaborative spaces afforded by the social network(s). This collective narrative is all around us all the time. It is always being created without our awareness, or even direct participation. This prompts some interesting questions:

#59: Places and meanings

Tuesday, 28 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I found these notes on the whiteboard in my classroom this morning, left from the previous digital storytelling class. They were so thought provoking I had to record them before starting class.
Can meanings be detached from places?
Place is powerful
Places are icons or windows to meanings
The power of places is in their capacity to focus meaning
Places have meanings and possess relevance
Everyone seeks something of value to themselves
How do you use place
The visitor is sovereign
Facilitate a connection to provoke care about a resource
Tangible resource promotes intangible meaning

#58: Sun

Monday, 27 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Sunshine today, most of the day, and this is rare in the winter. Rain is a part of winter life here in the Pacific Northwest. Anyone using an umbrella is probably a tourist. We wear our parkas, or not, nodding to each other on street corners waiting in the rain for the light to change. When the temperature gets above 50 we wear hiking shorts, and our parkas. Above 60 we exchange our hiking boots for sandals, but we keep our socks on.

If the rain gets a bit heavy we visit a restaurant, coffee shop, or brew pub. We can order coffee or beer in multiple varieties and appreciate the flavors of each. We can differentiate between Japanese, Chinese, and Thai food. We know the difference between Chinook, Coho, and Sockeye salmon and how the taste of each is accentuated by slow alder wood smoking.

Despite the cloud cover we can point to at least two snow-covered volcanoes. In fact, if it is not snow-covered and has not erupted, it is not a real mountain.

When someone says, "Sun break!", we know exactly what she means and drop everything.

And on those days, like today, when the weather is clear, the sun is shining, and the "mountains" (the volcanoes) are visible right there in front of you, snow-covered and gleaming white, popping out from behind buildings or holding down the far horizon, our hearts ache with the beauty and diversity of living in the Pacific Northwest.

In the meantime, we wear our parkas and nod to each other . . .

#57: IDMAA journal article

Sunday, 26 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Last October, my colleagues from The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) travelled to Savannah, Georgia, to present our research at the International Digital Media and Arts Association (IDMAA) conference. Specifically, we spoke about our efforts with The Mobile Tech Research Initiative, a partnership between the university and the region aimed at rebuilding the region’s economy by introducing a new, creative, green industry—the development of mobile apps for smart phones.

Our presentation was well received, and resulted in an invitation to recast our conference presentation as a scholarly paper for publication in the IDMAA journal.

We collaborated online to write the article, some more so than others, just like out students tell us is the case when they work on projects for us. Today I gave the article a final read through, making a few tweaks here and there, before it was sent to the journal editor.

We hope to see it in print, and in the online version of the journal as well, very soon.

#56: Action research

Saturday, 25 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Ever since meeting with the Vice President of Marketing for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) last week I have been thinking about action research: a systematic inquiry conducted via practical action, calculated to devise or test new information and communicate knowledge. Action research offers three different approaches: research into/about design, research for design, and research through design. Action research thus allows us to position design at the center of our research endeavors and suggests that digital media, for example, is not merely something that we study but rather the reason for our exploration.

This focus comes from the product of specific material, social, and historical circumstances that produced the practices, and by which they are regularly reproduced through social interaction in the particular setting. From such in situ situations, knowledge can be created. If open to construction, then the same efforts must be open to reconstruction and extend beyond the realm of traditional solutions, including the potential for borrowing and remixing. From this perspective, the action researcher is an insider, part of the fabric of the inquiry in which everything and everyone is interacting. Historically, researchers have tended to distance themselves from their work, as if to distinguish their results as more plausible, credible, scientific. But action researchers contend that the researcher stands at the center of his or her life space and that any understanding of that space can only come from understanding the perspective of the individual involved in the practice, the making of that space. The researcher must then attempt to do something, to make something, learning from the effects of this doing on the solving of real world problems.

#55: Robots

Friday, 24 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today I agreed to deliver a lecture to a group of students visiting the campus from Wy'east Middle School. The admissions office has long brought middle school students to campus for a tour and a taste of college life. The idea is to encourage their thinking about attending university. In a county where many of my students are the first in their family ever to attend university, I think this a good idea and fully support their efforts. I'm known as a "go to" faculty for such events since I always say "yes" when asked to deliver a lecture.

I always talk about robots, and the students seem to enjoy the choice of subject. That might be because I salt my lecture with videos of robots acting like humans and humans acting like robots. It helps to illustrate my point that we (humans) have uneasy feelings about our created artifacts (especially robots). On one hand we revel in the idea of creating things in our likeness and having them do as we wish. On the other hand, we revile the idea that these same created artifacts may take over our lives. Robots run amok has been a popular theme ever since they were introduced in the 1921 theatrical production of R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Capek.

The students today seemed to have no such fears. They were excited to be out of school, taking part in an adventure that involved talking about robots. I hope to see some of them in my future university classes. That would make my lecture today well worth the effort.

#54: V-day activist

Thursday, 23 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today I participated in V-Day, a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls. Begun in 1998, V-Day uses creative events to increase awareness and raise the spirits of anti-violence organizations. For the first ever V-Day on the WSUV campus, organizers chose performative readings from A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant, and A Prayer, an anthology of writing by men and women speaking to violence in their lives. My reading was "The Closet" by Howard Zinn in which he uses personal experience to make a plea for the cessation of violence perpetrated by angry people against others. I was pleased to make this donation of my time, effort, and support in a room filled with people willing to make the same contribution.

#53: WordPress

Wednesday, 22 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I have long prided myself on the hand coding behind the various websites that I have built and continue to maintain. It is no small feat to maintain competency with technologies and coding languages for their production that seem to change weekly.

But, the endeavor is getting overly complicated. For example, I shun updating my Brautigan.NET website, an archival resource for Richard Brautigan, his life, and his works, because even the most simple changes involve protracted restructuring and regression testing.

I have long thought a more useful approach would be to utilize a content management system, but which one, and how to move content, as well as affordances and interactivity fostered by my present online environments into a new context?

Setting aside those questions, I selected WordPress as my solution today. The decision was sealed over beers and later jazz music at a local wine bar. I have downloaded the latest version of WordPress and printed out the codex for its installation. Soon, I hope to launch a WordPress website. Hello world!

#52: Opportunity knocks

Tuesday, 21 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
During our CMDC faculty meeting today we met with the vice president for marketing from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). He came with a baker's dozen of ideas for collaboration between the museum and our students, all of which he felt were good opportunities for students to showcase their skills and work. From usability to the development of interactive installations there are projects that students can take on in classes throughout The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC). We have worked to develop partnerships like this where our pedagogical efforts can include practical and applied perspectives, where students can focus on situated material and particular practices of particular people in particular places, the "here and now," where learning comes from clear awareness of social and educational practices in situ. Our students will create exhibits and other interactive opportunities that will become part of the OMSI permanent collection. Opportunity knocks loud and clear.

#51: President's day

Monday, 20 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
President's day holiday; no university classes, although staff still has to report for work. It's ironic, off putting really, that some of us have this holiday from work to celebrate the greatness of past presidents while watching grown men fight with each other like children, professing their desire to be the next president. I used to think that I would like to be president, or even a senator, but dropped that dream when I realized I did not have the lack of character the pursuit, judging from today's candidates, seems to be required. I know I am not alone in this feeling.

#50: Moss on trees

Sunday, 19 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I recently visited with an arborist who came to visit regarding "sucking insects" on the azaleas in my yard. He can spray for them, but not until the rains stop. That could be July and in the meantime I am concerned for their health. He did not do much to alleviate my fears and sensing so he changed the subject saying, "I can tell you are the kind of person that likes to do things in your yard . . ." and proceeded to tell me that I should brush off the moss growing on the trunks and limbs of several trees and bushes in the yard. I was skeptical because he had just told me how plants had learned to adapt and live for over two million years and who were we to come along at this late date and attempt to train them to our desires? Would not, I wondered, trees and bushes learned, after two million years, to live with the moss that grows on their bark? Apparently not, as the arborist suggested I should brush off this moss so that the plants could breath more freely through their bark.

Today afforded the first respite from rain in quite awhile. I pondered what the arborist had told me while I brushed moss from the dogwoods, cherry trees, and one azalea in the yard. Whether or not they can breath any better I do not know, but I surely like the look of their bark, long unseen under thick coats of moss.

#49: Mixer repairs, part 3

Saturday, 18 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
After trying all week to visit the shop where I left my audio mixer for repairs Monday, I have to admit total failure. Everyday I planned to visit, but everyday something came up and prevented me from going, either on my way to the university, or on my way home. Today I intended to visit while out accomplishing some other errands but in the end, I guess being so anxious to be home after a week of running from place to place, I just simply forgot. Now I am having second thoughts: what if the Korean man was telling me that he could not fix my mixer? What if his elaborate and deep final bow was a way of saying, "sorry, and goodbye"? How can I rest with these uncertainties? I am already making plans to visit his shop next week.

#48: Last PHP workshop

Friday, 17 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today we concluded six weeks of PHP workshops designed to provide students a better understanding of this programming language and its abilities to facilitate interaction with information collected in databases. I was not able to attend every workshop because of other meetings on some of the previous Fridays when they were offered, but today it was clear that students were pleased with what they learned and were able to accomplish. Next we will offer a series of workshops in advanced features for WordPress and students will be able to put their newly-learned skills into practice.

#47: Filet of soul

Thursday, 16 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
After more than a year in mothballs, I reprised Dr. Shark Barbetz and The Filet of Soul Show today. I developed this radio show while a student at Montana State University in the early 1980s. The college radio station had a large library of record albums, a generous amount of which fell into the rhythm and blues and soul categories. The name "Shark" was inspired by my reading of Hunter S. Thompson. "Barbetz" came from the frequent misspelling of my sloppily-written last name. The "Dr." was an attempt to denote some expertise in subject matter. It also had a nice ring.

Once a week I would broadcast "prime cuts from the filet of soul" (get the pun? That inspiration came from a record album I found in the station library) throughout the Gallatin Valley. The stereo equipment store on Main Street would call frequently to say they were listening to the program in their speaker demo room, and could I play a request for them. I was always happy to oblige.

I left Montana in 1984 and all that remained of The Filet of Soul Show were a series of cassette tape recordings I carried in my glovebox for entertainment on long drives. I still have them in my car, even though my cassette player has long been broken.

I became faculty advisor for KOUGradio.com, the student radio station at Washington State University Vancouver in 2009 and decided, in 2010, to produce and announce a regular program in order to be more connected with the day-to-day station operations. I was amazed how easy it was to slide back into the role of Dr. Shark Barbetz, even though the idea of a 1980s loud-mouthed dj was not so welcome more than twenty years later. After one semester I shelved the filet of soul and produced shows focusing on jazz, electronica, and most recently, transmission arts.

These shows were fun, but perhaps not the best for the college station context. And folks were asking for an encore. So today we are back, Dr. Shark Barbetz and The Filet of Soul Show, more mellow, voice relaxed. The program content is still the same, however, a lavish spread of jazz, funk, rhythm and blues, folk with a beat, and a whole lot of old school soul, prime cuts from the filet of soul.

#46: Out of the cave

Wednesday, 15 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Call me hopelessly out of touch, non-social, and I will not protest. After all, I have avoided all forms of social media, having no desire to hang my daily thoughts and activities out there for anyone to share. This daily zeitgeist is an attempt, however, to come out of my cave.

Today I discovered SoundCloud.com and was attracted to its opportunities for creating and sharing original sounds. Further movement out of the cave. The SoundCloud premise is interesting: create sounds, share them with the world, connect with other people doing the same by following and commenting on their sounds as they do for yours. It's the commenting feature that most attracts me, strangely. Perhaps this is because rather than repartee, specific comments can be placed in the sound files, at the very point where the aural context evokes response from the listener. Where I have never found it in other forms of social media, I do sense opportunities for immersion, perhaps even embodiment, in the sound narratives, soundscapes, sonic art, and aural histories produced by others and shared on SoundCloud. I like this idea of creating something and sharing it with others, communicating through creative output rather than reporting every passing thought or reaction. I have not signed on as a member yet, but I am thinking about which of my own sound files I would share, interested to know what others might think of them. Still moving out of the cave.

#45: Mixer repairs, part 2

Tuesday, 14 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I returned to the electronics repair-spy equipment store with $50.00. The Korean proprietor invited me into his office, in the back of the building. There, on his workbench, lit by high intensity lights, splayed open like a double lung transplant operation, was my mixer. The inside of the chassis was surprisingly empty, just three circuit boards, each green, speckled with silver solder and the tracings of microscopic electronic pathways. A thin cable (life support system?) connected one of the circuit boards to a laptop computer displaying a table of numbers.

Pointing to one circuit board, the Japanese electronics surgeon said, "This one good."

"Great!", I responded, immediately feeling stupid as I had no idea what he was pointing out, what it did, nothing.

"This one good, also," he said, pointing to the second circuit board.

"Good. Yes." Again, I felt stupid and fearful that the bad news was just ahead, in the third and final circuit board.

"This one, do not know . . . ."

The rest of his explanation was difficult to understand. I took that he was going to continue testing and if possible, fix the ailing circuit board. If not, he would call with bad news.

We parted after repeated bowing to each other (he got the last one in as I exited the door) and I am waiting for the telephone call. Happy Valentines Day.

#44: Mixer repairs

Monday, 13 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
My audio mixer died yesterday, fortunately toward the end of my research and editing of primary sound files. It was a surprise: suddenly a hum, and then silence, power on, but no sound passing through any of the channels. Today I located a hole-in-the wall electronics repair and spy equipment store in a strip mall all but invisible behind its tired, dated facade, even though it sits just at the edge of downtown Vancouver. Inside, a Korean man sat smoking in the back gazing at me over the tops of what appeared a warehouse of electronic flotsam. In tortured English he agreed to open the mixer case and diagnose the problem, for $50.00, and then, if I agreed, repair it for some unintelligible cost. I had to agree; there is no where else to have such work done. He wanted the initial payment in cash, of which I had none. I left my mixer, with the other detritus in his shop, and promised to return. In this time when electronic payment is expected, I was pleasantly put aback by someone asking for cash. It will mean an inconvenience, but I respect his business approach, and will comply.

#43: Researching sounds of the 1950s

Sunday, 12 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Boosted by yesterday's acceptance of my work for inclusion in the "Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints" media arts gallery exhibition, I spent the day researching and editing sounds. I see the work accepted for this exhibition as part of a larger project to chronicle each decade of my life in a similar fashion. Today, I focused on the decade of the 1950s, researching major events and finding appropriate sound files archived in newsreels and television and radio broadcasts. From these I extracted the essential/central narratives and began developing the production files that I will use to produce the final narrative, "Sounds of My Life: 1950s."

This was the decade of my birth, and so I remember very little, and that toward the end of the decade, specifically, the launching of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 and the premiere of The Twilight Zone television show in 1959. Prior to that was the Korean War (1951); Alan Freed coining and using the term "rock and roll" on his Tuesday night Cleveland, Ohio, radio program, "Moondog Rock and Roll Party" (1951); the first computer-generated music (1951); the first use of the Wilhelm Scream, a now famous cult sound effect (1951); and Allen Ginsberg reading his poem "Howl," which soon became one of the two defining works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. I added each of these to the evolving mix.

Still to add are Dwight D. Eisenhower's election as President of the United States (along with Richard Nixon as Vice President; more about him in subsequent decades) (1952); Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunt (1953); Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climb Mt. Everest, the world's tallest mountain (1953); the Civil Rights movement begins, X Minus One, a half-hour science fiction radio drama begins broadcast on NBC radio, and Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" rocks the world (all 1955); Elvis Presley gyrates on the Ed Sullivan Show and Eisenhower and Nixon are elected to second terms (1956).

#42: Sound art accepted

Saturday, 11 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
My sound art installation, "Sounds of My Life: 1960s," was selected for inclusion in the juried media arts gallery exhibit themed, "Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints," 13-23 June 2012, The Monongalia Arts Center, Morgantown, West Virginia, as part of the upcoming Electronic Literature Organization Conference. This work consists of a 1960s table top transister radio which plays a 9' 04" lopped work combining oral history, field recordings, soundscapes, found sounds, appropriation, cut ups, and historical recordings to provide a personal narrative of "The Sixties," a time of intense social, political, and cultural change. Sound effects signify the changing of radio stations or the turning of chapters in the narrative. The work provides listeners / participants an immersive, acousmatic, digital narrative context in which to consider the literary relevance of historical, political, rhetorical, and cultural pronouncements seemingly, at first glance, far removed from traditionally accepted aspects / definition(s) of literature, but, upon closer examination / listening / reading, quite evocative of a multivalent, emerging electronic literature.

#41: Unidentified Textual Objects

Friday, 10 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I noted last Saturday the lack of a general definition of electronic literature. Today I received notice of a conference in Paris focusing on "Translating E-Literature." The conference is organized by UTO (Unidentified Textual Objects), a name I like much better than "electronic literature" for the evolution of textuality in the digital age.

From the call, there is this language that I think moves toward a useful framework for UTO: "It involves criteria that are visual (screen display, graphics, color), dynamic (screen animations) or kinetic (readers'/players' actions and movements). These dimensions extend far beyond the competences traditionally required of readers of literary works on paper. They are often highly culture-specific. A new semiotics, a new rhetoric and a new poetics are needed if the analysis of these aspects of E-literature is to progress properly. It is impossible to translate works of E-literature without paying attention to them. Thus, translation does not simply provide materials for research into E-literature. It is a research activity in itself—a form of theoretical practice."

#40: Autovision

Thursday, 9 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The second article about the OMSI Fellows and their exhibit-building project, tenetively titled "Autovision," with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) appeared in The Columbian today. Ten students in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC), the OMSI Fellows, are working to produce an interactive augmented reality display for OMSI focusing on automobile technology. Not that it makes the article better, but I appear in the photograph and am quoted twice. Read the article here

#39: DJ Duet

Wednesday, 8 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
One of my students, calling himself DJ Acid Rick, recently decided that he wanted to explore digital radio by producing and hosting his own program on KOUGradio.com, the student-run Internet radio station at Washington State University Vancouver. He approached me, as the faculty advisor for the radio station, about his decision and I encouraged him to proceed. He did, and now hosts a regular live radio show, "Through Being Cool."

As we talked, a new idea developed: a live program called "DJ Duet" featuring two djs, each answering/extending the other's music/sound selection with another selection that carries forward the theme, genre, tempo, or imagery. Each selection, by each dj, is a surprise to the other, unknown until the selection begins. The responding dj has only the length of the selection, or less, to program a response. The show goes on thus, spontaneously evolving.

Today we produced our second show for only one known listener, Rick's sister, in Nilbog, Ohio. Our high point was the transition between Kraftwerk and Chaka Khan.

We are still developing how to best chatter about our selections, how to explain the connections we see (or hear) between them. Listen to what happens: Wednesdays, 4:30-5:30 PM Pacific coast time, on KOUGradio.com

#38: Research showcase

Tuesday, 7 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I was asked to serve on the 2012 Research Showcase committee and participate in the planning for this annual event highlighting student and faculty research at Washington State University Vancouver. Today we met to finalize the call for abstracts and other details. In the past, this event has centered around table-top poster displays but this year we decided to include computer-based displays and personalized book or essay displays. The former will allow those working in digital contexts, like students and faculty in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC), to better display their research. The latter will allow those who have published a book or essay in the last year to present their work in a more personal manner, i.e. they would stand by their work, answer questions and talk with interested others. We hope these changes increase the relevance of Research Showcase for faculty and students across the University.

#37: Reviews published

Monday, 6 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Last month I submitted a review of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life by Brandon LaBelle to Leonardo Reviews. The reviews for February were announced today and mine was among them. In fact, I ended up with four published reviews! Apparently, there were only a few submissions from the review board and the editors asked me to fill the gaps. These are the reviews published

#36: Sound art submitted

Sunday, 5 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I submitted "Meditation," a 23 minute sound narrative to framework radio, a program dedicated to field-recording and its use in composition, broadcast on five stations worldwide and via podcasts and streaming at its website. If accepted, my submission will be included in a broadcast mixed from other submissions by sound artists around the world. I'm waiting to hear . . .

With "Meditation" my intent was to develop and sustain an immersive narrative about the diversity of mediation, especially as it might be practiced through thoughtful listening to sonorous objects. The human voices in this piece are used for their sound quality and context, rather than as the origin/focus of a particular sound. Sounds included in this narrative are: frogs and crickets, VLF densefers, swirling chanting, single sound bowl, synthesized choir, chanting monks, Tibetan chanting (reversed), sustained throat singing, "Hare Krishna mantra" (from The Radha Krishna Temple, Apple Records, 1969, produced by George Harrison), church bells, dancing bells, doppler effect, gurgling bells, doorbell, call to prayer at the Blue Mosque, nam myoho chanting, singing bowls, and, a foghorn.

#35: Jury duty

Saturday, 4 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Facing the looming deadline, I spent several hours today viewing documentation associated with submissions for the upcoming Electronic Literature Organization Conference, 13-23 June 2012, in Morgantown, West Virginia. I was invited earlier to review experimental and conceptual multimedia works with regard to their inclusion in a juried Media Arts Gallery exhibit at The Monongalia Arts Center. What struck me most after working through the eleven submissions was how broadly their authors defined "literature." It seems that whatever one might want it to be, then that is literature. As I was interested in narrative, the story, I was more drawn to those submissions I felt provided an immersive narrative experience. But, other judges will have their own methodologies for ranking the submissions. It will be interesting to learn the final selections.

#34: ProCaliber, part 2 (the field trip)

Friday, 3 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Another field trip today. This time our destination was ProCaliber Sports in Longview, Washington, physical headquarters for ProCaliber.com for whom the ProCaliber Fellows are building a new eCommerce website/portal. We wanted to learn how they handle orders submitted online. Comparing the physical parts in the stock room with the virtual orders was an interesting experience for the students, and gave them an insight into the customer service affordances they will have to design into their interface. On the way back to campus we talked about punk music, future courses for The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC), and individual future plans. I enjoyed the camaraderie and focus on common goals.

#33: Augmented reality car

Thursday, 2 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I visited the Collision Center at Dick Hannah Dealerships today with the OMSI Fellows and members from the exhibit design and building department at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. We were looking for an automobile skeletal frame, full or partial, skinned or not, to use as the centerpiece for the "Augmented Reality Car" project we are building. The idea the students pitched to OMSI was a car body on the exhibit hall floor. iPads on moveable armatures would provide portals for augmented reality videos explaining the technology underlying the car's engine and transmission, exhaust, and braking systems.

The OMSI design team wants the frame displayed on a pedestal, soaring above the exhibit hall floor as a piece of modern art sculpture. The AR portals would be fixed rather than moveable, a series of kiosks surrounding the car body sculpture, each providing static content.

There is a big gap between these two visions and it no doubt will prove a learning experience for the OMSI Fellows regarding how to negotiate differing visions regarding an artifact they are tasked to conceive and develop.

But today, politics were set aside as we looked at uniframe and body-on-frame cars and trucks, assured by the manager of the collision center that he could build whatever sort of body was needed, either as a skeletal frame or partially skinned with cosmetic body panels. The newspaper report stood at the edges of the group, taking notes. The photographer climbed on the lifts and into the various car bodies taking hundreds of photographs. Despite the diverging creative visions for the project, we all are excited to have our efforts documented and communicated in this way.

#32: Program read

Wednesday, 1 February 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The faculty of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC) are considering a "program read" where all students in the program read the same book, which is incorporated into all our classes through discussions and projects. In our faculty meeting today we agreed that this book should be general, but applicable across the range of issues deal with in our classes, and deal with the very nature of digital media: its constant state of evolution and change. Recommendations include Design Thinking (Nigel Cross), You Are Not A Gadget (Jaron Lanier), Little Brother (Cory Doctrow), and Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life (Anne Lamott).

I suggested Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (Douglas Rushkoff, OR Press, New York, 2010). Only 148 pages, it would not be daunting for first-year students, nor faculty who already have a full plate. And, its message of careful analysis and evaluation seems to speak directly to the underlying "think, learn, build" philosophical and pedagogical structures of the CMDC program.

Rushkoff posits ten biases of digital technologies, each stemming from the tendency to promote one set of behaviors over another. He devotes a chapter to each bias, and discusses how to turn these liabilities into opportunities, suggesting how to balance each bias with the needs of real people using that technology to live and work in both physical and virtual spaces, sometimes simultaneously.

Rushkoff argues that we need to understand how digital technologies are programmed, and for what purposes. In short, learn to program our digital technologies or be programmed by them. "[Digital technologies] are not just objects, but systems embedded with purpose. They act with intention, If we don't now how they work, we won't even know what they want. The less involved and aware we are of the way our technologies are programmed and program themselves, the more narrow our choices will become; the less we will be able to envision alternatives to the pathways described by our programs; and the more our lives and experiences will be dictated by their biases. On the other hand, the more humans become involved in their design, the more humanely inspired these tools will end up behaving" (142-143).

#31: Airport dream

Tuesday, 31 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I awoke this morning from a disturbing dream. The memories have lingered with me all day. I dreamed I was in a room in the transit hotel at the Gimpo International Airport in Seoul, Korea. The room seemed like a conference room, with private areas along its sides and in the corners. Unknown people were working there, reading or writing. With me were several other people, each talking and trying to get me to do something upon which I was not keen. On waking, I was trying to get these people to leave the room, or at least be quiet so as not to disturb those working.

Later, it occurred to me that the dream reflected my thoughts about the upcoming merger of the colleges of liberal arts and sciences. Preliminary plans for this merger have the college of liberal arts programs grouped by common focus. My program, The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC), is to be grouped with the English, Fine Arts, History, and Foreign Language programs. The CMDC program does not fit well with these programs, mostly because of our emphasis on action research with its focus on digital technologies. Although we think it a natural progression, the fact that our scholarship deals with creating solutions to problems does not jive well with the traditional humanities who would rather intellectualize or politicize the problem(s), and certainly do not appreciate the ascendency of digital technologies.

Understanding this context, I realize that in my dream I was actually in the shared CMDC office space, which used to be a conference room. The other people there, clamoring for my attention and adherence to their demands, were the faculty of the other humanities programs. This is a shared fear: that the merger of the colleges will result in the loss of autonomy, and worse, the administration of programs by someone who does not understand, or appreciate, the particular focus or history associated with individual programs. We have been assured by university administrators that they do not intend to replace individual program directors. At the same time, they have left the details of how such a merger will work up to the faculty, so it is understandable that we would be nervous about the outcome.

#30: Caring for cats

Monday, 30 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I had to take one of our cats to the veterinarian today. We adopted Gracie three years ago and discovered recently that he suffers from hyperthyrodism. This visit was for a checkup and blood test; to evaluate the success of daily medication.

Happily, he had gained a pound of weight since our last visit. One of the results of his overactive thyroid is an increased rate of metabolism, and thus, weight loss. But, the not-so-happy news was that now we have to watch for kidney disease. Poor guy. His life as a homeless street cat seems to be catching up with him. There is nothing we can do but keep feeding him and give him a good home.

We intend to do both, for however long we can. Gracie's situation reminds me of how many times we have gone through this scenario previously. We adopt cats that have been abandoned or abused, or who are fighting disease. They need a home, and want to be loved and cared for. It is the least we can do for the pleasure and company they give in return. Two cats are sitting on either side of me as I write this, contributing to the day's zeitgeist.

#29: National Unpublished Writers' Day

Sunday, 29 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today we celebrated National Unpublished Writers' Day (NUWD) with fifteen "creation stations" spread throughout the galleries of the Clark County Historical Museum. Each station was staffed by a volunteer, someone interested enough in some aspect of writing to spend five hours sitting at a table willing to talk with anyone about their interest. One hundred seventy five people attended the event, keeping each creation station busy throughout the event.

This is the second year for NUWD and honestly, it is quite an undertaking to develop the momentum, wrangle volunteers, solicit support, interest the press, and coordinate the event. Some asked me today, "Why do it? What's the purpose? What's the payback?" Easy answers are that NUWD celebrates the legacy of Washington-born author Richard Brautigan, whose 1971 novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 inspired The Brautigan Library, an interactive exhibit of 291 manuscripts from writers around the world on permanent display at the Museum. Brautigan felt that individual voice, and world vision, expressed through writing was important and he envisioned a mechanism for such voices to be preserved.

I have also answered that NUWD celebrates Brautigan's vision by encouraging participants to write and record their thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas regardless of topic or quality of writing. The traditional publication route is not available for this type of writing, but then again, it is not needed. Unpublished writers participating in NUWD do not need a publisher. They need only the assurance that their voice is valuable, and perhaps some tips and techniques on how to make it more effective.

But today, I was struck with the idea that what NUWD, and the library it signifies, is really about is the collection and preservation of knowledge. Each manuscript we encourage someone to write, and then later collect in The Brautigan Library, adds to the body of knowledge available for the future. Each manuscript is an individual time capsule, waiting to be opened, its contents spilled out under the gaze of a reader. Sure, the topics may seem silly, and the writing doggerel, but each represents a personal vision of accumulated wisdom that has no other outlet, anywhere, any way. A library should have a vision and a policy for collecting such wisdom, and then making it available for others. That's the focus of National Unpublished Writers' Day, not to get someone published, but to encourage them to share their wisdom. This happened throughout the day around the various creation stations and it was exciting to be part of the experience.

Nice article in The Columbian today about National Unpublished Writers' Day. Read it here.

#28: The Iron Lady

Saturday, 28 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
This time of the year can be characterized by a mad dash to view all the Oscar-nominated motion pictures. Last night I watched The Iron Lady in which Meryl Streep portrays former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This film has been criticized for its portrayal of Thatcher's dementia while she is still living. My mother suffered from dementia and I can understand the uncomfortableness of seeing it so vividly portrayed. Personally, I think the discomfort comes from the reminder that we all will grow old and deteriorate. THAT'S an uncomfortable reminder, but tangental. I was most struck by Thatcher's statement that everybody wants to be somebody (a celebrity, my addition). Instead, it is more important to DO something with our lives, to change the world in some positive way for the better. That was inspiration worth savoring.

#27: Interviewing a programmer

Friday, 27 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I interviewed a PHP programmer today for some much needed repairs and updating of the database behind The Brautigan Library website. I have long wanted to provide search capabilities for the collection of nearly 300 manuscripts associated with the Library. The original programmer built a robust database, but then decided to tweak some of its structure. He disappeared, literally, before finishing, and left the database broken. A second programmer left to teach a series of PHP workshops. I despaired. Today I met and talked with a local, freelance programmer who says he appreciates the unique nature of this project and wants to join the team. He is keen to fix the current database and then start building the next phase where we will accept digital submissions to the Library and distribute them to interested readers through the website. I have my fingers crossed that this programmer will stick around long enough to do what needs to be done immediately, and then beyond.

#26: ProCaliber, part 1 (the pitch)

Thursday, 26 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Five students in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC), the ProCaliber Fellows, met with their clients, the owners of ProCaliber.com, a regional motorcycle dealership and parts supplier, to discuss the redesign of their content management system and eCommerce capabilities. This is yet another iteration of our evolving model where local businesses sponsor student tuition in return for their multimedia conceptualization and development skills. We are also finding that this arrangement leads to jobs for our graduates. These Fellows showed themselves ready and capable for the challenge. It was a pleasure to sit at the table with them.

#25: Students pitch OMSI

Wednesday, 25 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Ten students in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program (CMDC), the OMSI Fellows, recently pitched the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) two ideas for an interactive exhibit focusing on automotive technology. OMSI officials will pick one and the students will build it before they graduate in May 2012. The exhibit, titled "Autovation," gives these students the opportunity to leverage the theory and practice they have learned in the CMDC program into an undeniable marker of the skills and abilities they will bring to future jobs and careers. The local paper is covering the students' work in a series of articles. The first appeared today and can be read here.

Today we learned that OMSI selected the proposal focusing on the use of augmented reality to provide information about present and future automotive fuel sources/systems, safety, and environment impact. This proposal for the Augmented Reality Car (ARC) was the students' preferred project. Now we are starting research to develop a focus and build out plans.

#24: Five Years of Service

Tuesday, 24 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
This morning I attended a breakfast honoring WSUV faculty and staff who had achieved service milestones. My milestone was five years of service. That did not seem significant, especially as I sat listening to the laudatory comments made about those being recognized for ten or twenty years of service. But, I realized it was more about what one did with those years, not the length of them. In five years at this university, I published a book, book chapters, and several reviews. I spoke at several international digital media conferences. I consistently exceeded the university average in my teaching evaluations. I led the efforts to relocate The Brautigan Library to Vancouver, Washington. I continued to develop and curate Brautigan.NET, the preeminent resource for information about the life and works of Richard Brautigan. I curated an exhibition, had work selected for international juried media arts shows, and mentored a visiting Fulbright scholar from Ukraine. I saw the numbers of students in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program grow from 44 to nearly 200. Graduating students have achieved an 85% job placement and several have gone on to prestigious graduate schools. I helped grow a university program, the university itself, and the community where it is located. That's a lot, I decided, a lot to be proud of after five years of service.

#23: Everything is miscellaneous

Monday, 23 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
In addition to my own teaching, I am sitting in on another course this semester, DTC 356 Electronic Research and the Rhetoric of Information. The current instructor for this course will not teach in the fall. I will take over this class. And so, this semester, I am sitting in, trying to prepare as best possible. The course text is Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger (New York: Henry Holt, 2007). The evolving theme so far is that how we organize information guides how we organize our world. As we invent new principals of organization based on the digitization of information we free ourselves from the physical constraints/problems associated with the physical world. As Weinberger says, information does not just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous, capable of organization in multitudes of way, unlimited by the laws of physics (7).

#22: Book review submitted

Sunday, 22 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Three weeks ago, at the start of the new year, as is the case for many, surely, I set my annual academic goals. One item on the list was to write six book reviews for Leonardo Reviews. I have been writing reviews for this online journal since 2004 and it seemed natural to continue this line of productivity. Today I submitted a review of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life by Brandon LaBelle (New York: Continuum, 2010). LaBelle, an artist and writer working with sound and locational identities, argues that sound provides a significant model for thinking about and experiencing the contemporary condition. In particular, LaBelle is interested in the ways in which sound disintegrates and reconfigures space through a political process, turning them into acoustic territories. To analyze such territories, LaBelle focuses on five everyday spaces: the urban underground subway; home interiors, suburbs, prisons, and gated communities; urban sidewalks and streets; shopping malls and airports; and the sky, filled with television and radio transmissions, both commercial and pirate. In examining each space, LaBelle foregrounds sound as an anxious and restless transfiguration that "might identify a means for occupying and exploring the multiple perspectives of the present" (xxvi). In the end, the dynamic quality of auditory knowledge works to create shared spaces that belong to no single public yet still impart the feeling of intimacy, says LaBelle. Sound then is a network that "teaches us to belong, to find place, as well as how not to belong, to drift. . . . based on empathy and divergence, allowing for careful understanding and deep involvement in the present while connecting to the dynamics of mediation, displacement, and virtuality" (xvii).

#21: Steampunk

Saturday, 21 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
In addition to updating the website for an estate sale company in Dallas, Texas, preparing presentation slides to augment Monday's lecture on requirements/tasks analysis for my usability and interface design class, and half-heartedly beginning to organize my tax records for 2011, I read a lot of steampunk fiction. Steampunk, a sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and speculative fiction, imagines a world where steam power and other Victorian-era technologies display a consciousness of ideology far richer and deeper than what noted science fiction encyclopedist John Clute describes as "gaslight romance." It was a welcome break from the challenge of making learning the why, what, and who of an interface before diving into its design an appealing proposition to students who see themselves as creative designers first and foremost.

#20: The graduate

Friday, 20 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today I met with a recent graduate from my program, a crack coder and designer, now doing web work for a company she started with other members of her graduating class. Where in the past I had wondered about her focus, I was very impressed with her maturity, self-assurance, and professionalism. I sought her help and advice for The Brautigan Library, an ongoing research project of mine that involves not only the collection and distribution of unpublished manuscripts, but, as well, the use of writing to promote civic engagement and social conscious. I left the meeting knowing that while I wish to retain this project for some time longer, when I am ready to pass it along, someone stands capable of giving it the same attention to detail as I. I've not thought much about such a legacy previously, but I am pleased that it will be less an ordeal than I imagined.

#19: College merger, Part 1

Thursday, 19 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
For quite sometime now, faculty in the college of sciences and the college of liberal arts have known that their colleges will merge into a consolidated college of arts and sciences by fall semester 2012. Some resist, some reach out. Today we met, for the first time, as combined faculty, to discuss proposed guidelines for this consolidation. Thinking this would be the occasion for a huge fight, mounted by those who saw a loss of stature and privilege, I was very pleasantly surprised when the first remark was, "this plan is too conservative. It does not go far enough. It lacks imagination. We want more opportunities for collaboration and transdisciplinary partnerships." Instead of seeking to maintain the status-quo, the concensus seemed to be a willingness to explore a world of change that represents education in the 21st century.

#18: Writing Center

Wednesday, 18 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Years ago, in another life, I administered the writing program at The University of Texas at Dallas. I met frequently with graduate students working as tutors in the writing center, discussing strategies for engaging students with their writing. I never felt I was very successful in this endeavor, perhaps because writing, as much as we try to organize its teaching into a series of steps or techniques, is always, in the end, a personal relationship between the writer, her use of language to communicate an idea for pleasure or information, and a great deal of time and effort put into the real work of writing: the continuing revising of that language seeking maximum effectiveness. I was reminded of all this when I met today with several of the tutors in the WSUV Writing Center. In addition to their own courses, lives, jobs, and relationships, these students devote their time and talent to helping others increase their ability to communicate effectively through writing. Most of the students they help are only interested in superficial, cosmetic changes that may bring better grades. Not too many want to delve into the mechanics and imagination that will make their writing exemplary. Yet none of these tutors seemed jaded or disheartened about their efforts. Where I would go home at the end of the day with no desire to write after reading so much disheartening prose throughout the day, these individuals were publishing their prose and poetry, creating and editing zines, running short fiction contests, and writing stand up comedy routines. I was truly impressed.

#17: Resumes

Tuesday, 17 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Back to classes today after the long holiday weekend. This feels like the real start of the semester, not the false start from the previous week, the first, with any momentum broken by the holiday. Today I meet the DTC 476 Digital Literacies class, the so-called "senior seminar." This course is meant to assess students' learning throughout their tenure in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program and prepare them for post graduation job seeking and/or graduate school application. The resume is a big part of the latter and today I introduced it as a snapshot of professional achievement to date as well as an indication of potential future performance. The first draft of each student's resume is due at the start of our next class meeting. Thus begins the semester-long process of revising this personal document. But, with job or graduate school placement running around 80% for our graduates, even in these difficult economic times, I think the effort will be justified.

#16: Speaking of Richard Brautigan

Monday, 16 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
While in Seattle two weeks ago for the Modern Language Association convention, I met and talked with Allen Frost, a librarian at Western Washington University. Allen contacted me regarding my work with Brautigan.NET. We agreed to meet in Seattle and talk about Brautigan over coffee. Allen recorded the conversation and created a wonderful blog posting, "Speaking of Richard Brautigan."

#15: New appliances

Sunday, 15 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I promised my wife new appliances for the new year and they were delivered today. We now have a new silver refrigerator, less bulky yet far more elegant than our old one, with drawers that work and an array of shelves that we can use productively, and a new washer and dryer, each front-loading with blue-lighted control panels and various signal chimes. They stand in the pantry on their individual pedestals like individual space capsules, quiet and efficient at their jobs. After years of nursing the old and broken appliances we inherited from the former owners of our house, it's a pleasure to have these new companions in our lives.

#14: Faculty workshop

Saturday, 14 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The CMDC faculty, tenure line as well as adjuncts, participated in an all-day workshop focused on moving the program forward. We discussed academic rigor in our classes; fluid, modularized teaching for our courses; and opportunities for individual and collaborative research and creative endeavors. We discussed recruiting: our program is second only to psychology in the college of liberal arts in numbers of students. We talked about future growth: a new freshperson course that will be followed soon by one for sophomores, effectively making us a four year program. It was an exciting day, and I felt proud to be working with such a productive group of individuals, each keen to contribute to the pro-active teaching and learning contexts for which the CMDC program is known. Underlying this sense of pride is the dread that the coming consolidation of the colleges of liberal arts and sciences will group our program with disciplines less cooperative with our approach. But, for the moment, we are engaged in building something new, different, innovative. This is a rare opportunity in the academy as most "new" programs or directions are really unimaginative reconstructions of what has already been done. The zeitgeist for us is good, and I am happy to be a part of this endeavor.

#13: Friday the thirteenth

Friday, 13 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Friday the thirteenth today. To celebrate I bought myself a new pair of glasses. Retro, nerdish, they are a departure from the sleek european style I have worn for so many years. This seems like a good day to create a new persona.

#12: Who has time for zeitgeist?

Thursday, 12 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
The week is going quickly, with demand for my attention and participation spread across a wide spectrum. Today it was classes, a meeting with the student managers of KOUG radio to brainstorm long-range planning ideas, a meeting with the student media board to begin planning for upcoming budget requests, and a meeting with the dean and associate dean of The Murrow College of Communication to discuss the minor from their program that we are offering within the CMDC program. Who has time for zeitgeist? Or, maybe this is the zeitgeist: busy, productive, moving positively forward.

#11: Transmission art: "Airspace"

Wednesday, 11 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
While in Seattle last week I met Joe Milutis, a writer, media artist, and author of Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything. Milutis teaches at The University of Washington Botthel. The meeting was quite by chance, but interestingly, I wondered prior to the trip, whether I might meet him at the Modern Language Association Convention. Sure enough; I did. We talked about his work with sound, radio, and transmission art, brainstorming a bit about how I might construct a special topics course for the CMDC program and invite him to Vancouver as a visiting artist or guest speaker. Today he sent me an email message saying he's still interested in this opportunity. See his website for more information, and to listen to his signature work, "Airspace."

#10: Self-inventory

Tuesday, 10 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
First meeting with my digital literacies ("senior seminar") class today. After a brief overview of the class and its expectations and requirements, I asked each student to create an inventory of his or her hard and soft skills, computer program proficiencies, desired course learning outcomes, and an interesting, but unknown fact about themselves. I will use these inventories to place students in the digital media projects that form a substantial portion of this course. This inventory also serves as a good start for the professional resume and the reflective essay regarding their learning in the course that students will prepare.

#9: First day of classes, spring semester

Monday, 9 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
First day of spring semester classes. I met my usability and interface design class and sat in on the electronic research and rhetoric of information class which I will teach in the fall. In addition, I attended a meeting with a local business wanting a partnership where CMDC program students would redesign and rework their eCommerce website. In return, they will donate sufficient funds to reimburse tuition for each student on the project. Everyone seems happy with the arrangement.

#8: Modern Language Association convention

Sunday, 8 January 2012, Seattle, Washington
Final day for the MLA convention. I'm reflecting today on a presentation I heard yesterday about "interfaces." The presenter argued that interfaces, as the computing technology that drives them, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, invisible, and more and more subservient to the corporate agenda(s) that created them. Is this true? Do interfaces reflect a larger agenda than the effective and efficient access to the data/information to which they provide a portal?

#7: Modern Language Association convention

Saturday, 7 January 2012, Seattle, Washington
183 visitors to the Electronic Literature exhibition Thursday; 133 Friday; 175 today. Students from The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver served as docents, sharing their knowledge and passion for the genre with all these visitors. Standing by the door I talked with many of the visitors. More than about the exhibit itself, these visitors spoke about how impressed they were with our students and program for facilitating their education. I could not be more proud . . .

#6: Modern Language Association convention

Friday, 6 January 2012, Seattle, Washington
The last time I attended an MLA convention was as a newly-minted Ph.D. looking for job interviews. I remember the experience as a "meat market"—standing in hotel hallways outside a room waiting for the previous candidate to exit and knowing that very soon there would be someone in my place, waiting for me to finish my 15 minute question and answer session. Inside the room it is just as awkward, with faculty sitting on beds waiting for some candidate to say something impressive. It is hard to do so when someone else is outside, scratching at the door. Remembering this, I made a point to talk to job candidates I found waiting in my hotel hallways. Each, dressed in a dark business suit, seemed relieved . . .

#5: Invisible rendezvous::cultural activisim

Thursday, 5 January 2012, Seattle, Washington
I finished reading Rob Wittig's Invisible Rendezvous (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), a resource associated with one of the artifacts in the electronic literature exhibition this week at the Modern Language Association convention in Seattle. The book details the Invisible Seattle collaborative novel writing project and discusses writing as a crowdsourced endeavor that might be facilitated by various digital media. I found a number of points directly applicable to our current engagement with digital technologies and culture.
"Cultural activists" — "without pausing to obtain the authorization of the mainstream, these activists simply spend what money and free time they have on the impassioned production of objects, events, and publications. . . . Staying true to a kind of cultural common sense, they engage in activities that seem interesting and funny and right, even though these activities evolve away from rewarded definitions of 'serious art'. . . . Viewed by the mainstream as primal, expressive, and unselfconscious, these activists are, in fact, tireless counterhistorians and scholars" (3).

"Gone are the days when the required books of a basic education could be counted in the hundreds and read in an adolescence. Millions of text clamor for our attention. To make sense of them requires cunning, speed, and multileveled thinking. Sophisticated techniques of irony, punning, speed, and collage are used for their efficiency. Quick acts of selection and linkage are the name of the game. Some cultural activists use computer technology to practice these techniques, others don't. The distinction is unimportant. What is at stake here is not new technologies in themselves but new habits of mind. New technologies are a dime a dozen, ideas are always in short supply" (6).

"The society is programmed to look for the 'next big thing' in literature. . . . What if the next big thing already surrounds us, embedded in small gestures we perform every day? What if the next big thing is the realization that we have changed the way we use culture—remapping, rewiring, renetworking the same old pool of elements in new ways, adding to them with furtive scribbles, seeking pleasures without naming them? What if that new way of using culture remains invisible because we have been taught to look for the wrong things—for authors, works, and readers?" (8).

"Channel flipping, still viewed as a behavioral aberration—a violation of the intentions of filmmakers and programmers—becomes the norm when viewed from the perspective of IN.S.OMINA. Isn't it possible that the singular state an intent channel flipper falls into is not, as it is often described, evidence of "a short attention span," but, rather, of a new kind of attention? The qualities of this new attention would include irreverence, quick decision making, ability to identify the whole from the fragment, and an exquisite taste for juxtaposition. Not a bad starting list of skills if one happened to be faced, on a daily basis, with an overwhelming onslaught of information" (91).

#4: I miss Steve Jobs

Wednesday, 4 January 2012, Seattle, Washington
After setting up the gallery exhibition for the electronic literature exhibition, students and faculty from The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver retired to a restaurant for a well-deserved meal. At one point the conversation turned to usability and interface design and we talked about the historic Apple computers we had just set up to demonstrate the pioneering works of electronic literature featured in the exhibition. In most cases, the works are running on the very genre of machines on which they were written. Talk of design of these computers led to Steve Jobs and his design vision. I've been thinking about some of the many poignant points from his recent, post-humous biography, Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson. 2011): Poetry connected to engineering. . . arts and creativity intersecting with technology . . . design that's bold and simple (393) . . . design simplicity = making things easy to use; intuitively obvious (127) . . . and, it takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenge and come up with an elegant solution (343). I miss Steve Jobs.

#3: Every interface tells a story

Tuesday, 3 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
I'm thinking about usability and interface design as I prepare my course for the coming semester and I am inspired by the essay "Conversations with the Network" by Khoi Vinh (in Antonelli, Paola. Talk to Me: Design and The Communication between People and Objects. New York: The Modern Museum of Art, 2011. 128-131). Vinh notes that in pre-digital days, "design was fundamentally about fashioning messages: ornamenting and embellishing content so that a core idea, product, or service could be more effectively consumed. . . . [T]he designer was something of a storyteller, and the finished design functioned as a kind of narrative." The core product was transformed into a visual story and "the audience was beholden to the designer's grand plan, experiencing the design according to those original intentions." But now, in a world where everything is influenced by digital, "the designer as author, as craftsperson bringing together beginning, middle, and end, becomes redundant in a space in which every participant forges his or her own beginning, middle, and end. And that is exactly what happens in networked media. The narrative recedes, and the behavior of the design solution becomes prominent. What becomes important are questions that concern not the author but the users. How does the system respond to the input of its users? When a user says something to the system, how does the system respond?" The contemporary digital designer is "charged with engaging the user in conversation through the framework itself. Design solutions can no longer be concluded; they're now works in progress, objects that continually evolve and are continually reinvented. A designer creates a framework for experience, the user conducts experiences within that framework, and through feedback—both implicit and implicit—the designer is expected to progressively alter that experience to reflect the user's usage patterns, frustrations, successes, and unexpected by-products. In the language of digital products: iterate, iterate, iterate, and then iterate some more. Each iteration, each new version of the product, each modified or optimized function, each newly added feature set are all parts of the conversation between the designer and the user. When an inveterate user of a digital product encounters a new change, she is listening to the object talk to her." I like these ideas, especially that of the designer as one who facilitates the development of a shared narrative through the interface between users and information.

#2: Early morning soundscape with jet airplanes

Monday, 2 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Woke early this morning. Trying to return to sleep's embrace, I listen to planes departing Portland International Airport, across the river, from 4:30-6:30 AM. There are quite a few. Air Canada, 6:20 AM. Alaska Airlines, 5:30, 6:15, 6:25 AM. Delta Airlines, 6:15 and 6:20 AM. Frontier Airlines, 6:15 AM. Southwest Airlines, every 10-15 minutes starting at 5:55 AM. United Airlines, 5:45, 6:00, and 6:13 AM. US Airways, 5:25 AM. Those are the passenger jets, each rumbling like giant vacuum cleaners, eager to suck up the red sky in the east. The propeller-driven planes sound more like my cats snoring on top of the stove, still warm from last night's fire.

#1: Cows and undocumented workers: a modest proposal

cow Sunday, 1 January 2012, Vancouver, Washington
Today, in several states, new laws take effect designed to help government identify and track undocumented workers. These new laws will, say their advocates, help businesses know anyone they hire is known to and verified by the government. In the past, neither business nor government has excelled in this endeavor. As an alternative solution, consider cows. Government can track a single cow born in Canada three years ago to the stall where it sleeps anywhere in this country. Not only that, her calves can also be tracked to their stalls, again, anywhere. But, government is unable to locate over 13 million people said to be illegal immigrants. Maybe government should give each one a cow . .