The thirteenth Dr Hairy instalment, concluding the first series of short videos about the adventures and frustrations of an ordinary (but rather hirsute) General Practitioner. In this one, Dr Hairy reaches a crisis in his career and decides to seek the help of a mentor – with hilarious results!

To view the video on my site, go to http://www.edwardpicot.com/drhairy/mentoring.mov ; or you can see it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs4O9SuYfto ; or it should be on DVblog (http://dvblog.org) in the near future.

The whole Dr Hairy series is now available in DVD form at http://drhairy.org – perfect for that late late late Christmas present! Or a very early one for next time around!

At last! A layman’s guide to the Government’s healthcare reforms, explaining them in terms so simple they might have been written by a complete idiot, and charting the development of health care from the good old days to the present and beyond – with hilarious results! In fabulous stickman-o-vision, with bits of colour. Kind of a Dr Hairy spinoff, but the Dr Hairy episode it span off from hasn’t been made yet.

To see it on YouTube go to http://youtu.be/k-heGn8QzGg ; or to download it from my site right-click http://drhairy.org/problemofhealthcare.mov and select “Save as…”

- Edward Picot

“Psychedelic Pie” is a psychedelic video with a psychedelic sound-track, created from materials found on the Web. You can see the video on YouTube  at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS4Wpx5QKXc, or on my site at http://edwardpicot.com/psychedelicpie.mov. Attributions: backward guitar and psychedelic viola by Robinhood76; psychedelic percussion by Satoration; sitar by Kaiho – all from www.freesound.org. Morning traffic timelapse by MegaTokkie, YouTube. Blackrock Sunrise (community video); London Underground (community video); and Haleakala Sunset by Mike McCabe – www.archive.org.

Also new: my review of “The Last Collaboration” by Martha Deed and Millie Niss. The review can be seen on the Furtherfield site at http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/last-collaboration, and the book itself can be seen at http://www.furtherfield.org/friendsofspork/lastcollaboration.html. Millie Niss was a writer and new media artist who died in November 2010. Martha Deed is a poet and psychologist, also Millie’s mother and long-time collaborator. “The Last Collaboration” is about Millie’s last days in hospital. It’s acutely insightful, and it’s also a significant work of art.

In her editorial introducing the issue, Jill Jones rightly points to the issue’s presumptive focus on electronica and electronic music, specifically “the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound.” The poetry in this issue runs the gamut from highly experimental works to extended meditations on musical memories and forms. It’s absorbing, intriguing and puzzling – and this is just as it should be.

The spoken word tracks selected by our audio editor Emilie Zoey Baker are similarly pre-occupied with the bleeps, hisses and clicks we associate nowadays with electronic music. From Philip Norton’s bizarro Yes I Dream of Electric Sheep to Sean M. Whelan and Isnod’s Dream Machines, the works selected here paint an aural kaleidoscope that fizzes and pops, echoing electronic art from the works of Phillip K. Dick through to Kraftwerk. Check out the individual tracks or stream the hour-plus mix of electronica as one. Headphones highly recommended!

When it comes to the selected works of multimedia or ‘electronic literature’, however, we are faced with a series of disruptions that more often than not question rather than reflect the theme of the issue. Benjamin Laird’s Sound-less-scape and nothing left in, for example, present the reader (viewer? player?) with opportunities for interaction but remain stubbornly mute, like a silent rave. Joshua Mei Ling Dubrau’s Et Tu demonstrates the jump-cut nature of screen-capture technology when applied to text, while Konrad McCarthy’s TV Life strips bare the artifice of the audio-visual in a montage of movements.

The publication of these pieces – some HTML-based, others video – inevitably raises the question of genre and form. Is this literature? Is it even e-literature? As Tim Wrights asks in his review of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2, ‘What literature today isn’t electronic?’ I’d like to think, instead, of overlapping spaces – some of which may be electronic, others organic. Beverliey Braune’s Supra-text Sequences essay offers one glimpse into such a world.

When it comes to the work of Jason Nelson, one might instead ask where the electronic world actually stops. I’m really excited to be able to publish three of Jason’s work in this issue, because in many respects his work attempts to break through the imposition imposed by the computer screen to offer a neural landscape that is deeply textured and interactive. Depth: Text and Playthings addresses this tension directly, by stating bluntly ‘Your screen is horribly flat’.

Elsewhere, Nelson’s work is playful and self-referential. Branching: branch branch is a work where the traditional branching structure of file folders clashes comically with a goofy soundtrack that is perhaps more amenable to a 1980s computer game. Meanwhile, With love, from a failed planet presents a phantasmagoria of late-capitalist logos. In addition to these pieces, I’m pleased to present an interview with Jason in which he reflects on his creative practices as an electronic literature artist.

Nelson’s work offers one possible ‘entry-point’ into the world of e-lit. The work of Mez Breeze offers another. Sally Evans’ essay entitled ‘The Anti-Logos Weapon’: Excesses of Meaning and Subjectivity in Mezangelle Poetry demonstrates that electronic literature can be just as much about ‘texts’ as traditional literature. Mez’s work is justifiably renowned in e-lit circles as innovative and highly complex. In an online world where more and more of us are exposed to the vagaries of computer code, Mezangelle chews up that code, parses it with human language and spits out art. Adam Fieled’s essay on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (a work that is itself highly amenable to remediation as a hypertext) shows that the worlds of literary practise and literary criticism remain inextricably entwined.

In terms of my own personal experience of electronic literature, Mez’s work was amongst the first that I viewed (scanned? played?). Over the course of this year, working as a post-doctoral researcher on the ELMCIP project, I’ve also been met a wide range of scholars and practitioners working in the field of e-lit. For this reason, I’ve included in this issue two interviews with my colleagues at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Karlskrona, Sweden. Both Talan Memmott and Maria Engberg have inspired me to re-think my attitudes to the digital realm.

This brings me back to the question of Cordite’s place within that realm. As Benjamin Laird demonstrates in his overview entitled Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social, Cordite is by no means alone in its attempts to engage with online communities. In fact, pretty much every Australian literature journal is undergoing a process of morphing and reinvention. I’d like to think that, in the future, Cordite will evolve to include more works of electronic literature that actually engage with the medium in which the journal ‘lives’.

This is not to suggest that the thousand-odd poems we have published on the site over the past decade or not ‘alive’, or that text-based works are somehow inferior to HTML, Flash-based or interactive works. Nevertheless, I hope that these tiny steps we have taken towards the electr(on)ification of Cordite will inspire others to create engaging, accessible art that takes advantage of the multitude of possibilities made available when viewing (reading? parsing?) information using a networked computer.”

- David Prater, Cordite’s Managing Editor

After a long hiatus, here are two new digital stories from webyarns.com…

“Pangram (The Quick Brown Fox)” plays with the concept of a pangram and provides a hypothetical back-story to the most widely-known example of the form.

The second story, the “ABCs of UFOs,” is the purported website of a UFO investigation team. I hope (at a time when laughs are sorely needed) that you find it humorous. Explore and enjoy.

You can find both these stories, and others, at webyarns.com

“A tall thin old man comes backwards slowly and carefully through the glass door, carrying a metal stepladder in one hand, and in the other a small pot of paint and a small brush. With an air of methodical tidiness, he leans the stepladder against the front of a left-hand stall, stands the pot of paint next to it, places the small brush sideways across the exact centre of the top of the pot.”

The fifth part of a hyperfiction based on visits to churches in the City of London. Part 5 takes in the following:

St Andrew Holborn
Christchurch, Newgate Street
St Vedast-alias-Foster
St Anne and St Agnes

To view the London Churches project, go to www.londonchurches.org .

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com – personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk – The Hyperliterature Exchange

[I've completed my Third Hand Plays run at the SFMoma Blog Open Space. I curated 11 new works of digital literature for the series and wrote 12 illustrated blog posts outlining my idea of the "comedies of separation." I've been asked to contribute a piece to the series of new e-lit but just haven't had time to make anything. Anyway, below is my earlier post about the series and a chronological ordering of the posts themselves.]

My Third Hand Plays column at the SFMoma blog Open Space is chugging along. I’ve been granted an extension, which means two new works in addition to the nine already posted. I’ll cap it with a new piece by yours truly if I ever find time to create it.

The artists so far, from something like six countries: Daniel C. Howe, Alan Bigelow, joerg piringer, Alison Clifford, Erik Loyer, Benjamin Moreno Ortiz, Jhave, Christine Wilks and a certain sleepless dynamo named Jason Nelson. Forthcoming are new works by J.R. Carpenter and David Clark. It’s a great, eclectic bunch and it’s been great to work with them! I think this method of doing “career recaps” could be a model for future writing about e-lit artists, especially as there are so many now with large bodies of work.

The texts that I post on Tuesdays concerns something I call the “Comedies of Separation,” which are basically varieties of text/code interaction that I see as the “simples” underlying much of what we do in electronic literature. You’ll have to read my introduction to get a better idea of what I mean. I’m basically looking for a rudimentary vocabulary with which to discuss properties that exist in larger, “cumulative” works (such as Stuart Moulthrop’s “Pax: An Instrument,” which has many components).

Underlying the series is an attempt to link works of e-lit to art and literature that either predated the explosion of new media art in the past decade or that respond to the ubiquity of digitization in our culture. I’m hoping that these writings, along with a longish essay that will appear somewhere if the editor ever gets back to me, will form the outline of a sexy book project that I will propose, oh, somewhere, maybe MIT or your mama. It would be much expanded, less chatty, more based on theory and philosophy, but accessible and, I hope, illustrated in color.

The Posts

1. An Introduction to the Comedies of Separation
2. The Comedy of Subjection
3. The Comedy of Dysfunction
4. The Comedy of Reduction
5. The Comedy of Exhaustion
6. The Comedy of Recursion
7. The Comedy of Simulation
8. The Comedy of Duplication
9. The Comedy of Association
10. The Comedy of Automation
11. The Comedy of Encryption
12. Putting It All Together: The Comedies of Separation

The Works

1. “Scrape Scraperteeth” by Jason Nelson
2. “Repeat After Me” by joerg piringer
3. “Something” and “Telescopio” by Benjamin R. Moreno Ortiz
4. “Out of Touch” by Christine Wilks
5. “TYPEOMS” by Jhave
6. “Big Cradle” by Erik Loyer
7. “Palimpsest” by Alison Clifford
8. “The Quick Brown Fox …” by Alan Bigelow
9. “automatype” by Daniel C. Howe
10. “Struts” by J.R. Carpenter
11. “Bodies of Water” by David Clark

“The elements of the dinner-parties which Mrs Lennox gave, were beauty, men, and pedantic conversation. They talked in a sensuous way outside, lashed themselves when they were alone, and squandered their capabilities in the drawing-room.”

Concluding the abridged version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South – abridged on the principle of leaving out all the important bits. Margaret spends some time in Cromer. Dixon is either dead or blue. We finally learn what happened to Frederick; Mr Thornton is in difficulties; and his mother has had wind.

http://edwardpicot.com/and/

- Edward Picot

http://extraordinarydiscourse.blogspot.com/

The Unprintable

(August 8-16, 2011)

Alan Sondheim

“A lur is a long natural blowing horn [...] The word lur is still very much alive in the Swedish language, indicating any funnel-shaped implement used for producing or receiving sound. [...]” Wikipedia.

So blowing might be a kind of scattering or a calling, might be a kind of signal. And I think of Lurid Numbers as a kind of calling, calling-forth both readerly and writerly textuality, but also an interpenetrating and entangled intermediary, the catatonic machine which might or might not open itself to the distending of symbols, graphemes. The machine reads itself; it doesn’t like to be bothered. It doesn’t like to read Lurid Numbers, because what is lurid, sleazy, is a bone in the works, can’t be read. And apparently the publishing machine of Blaze-Vox, Blaze-Lur, couldn’t read, broke down over, returned to catatonia (for what bureaucracy likes to be bothered), over what should have been a simple reproduction from code to paper – which did not, could not, occur? What do you say to this, to the insertion, beyond the readerly and writerly text, of the text which breaks the machine, which refuses purity?

Sandy Baldwin

Yes, I agree. You provoke me to think and respond. I see the lur as producing a signal, one that problematizes signaling behaviors. I see this in the phrase “very much alive in the Swedish language”: the word as “alive” is the problematization of signaling behaviors, where such behaviors as part of our modern understanding of communications that necessarily contain / are contained by systematization and closure. For modernity, to signal is to invoke an institutional culture that handles the call. (The lur problematizes any final response to your provocation as well, and instead leads me to a more “funnel-shaped” answer.) The blowing lur, the funnel-shaped implement (I read it as impediment, which already is the bone in the throat, the marrow in the grapheme), is a problematic signal. Lur also makes me hear a broken lure. Lure is a decoy, but also allurement and enticement. The lure is camouflaged and does not yet reveal the spoilage of the lurid. The breakage from lure to lur is the object escaping, the rotting out of the object. The kernel of matter that presupposes a machine – there is a machine threshing every “grain” of the real; the machine that makes everything itself, that ensures all is systematic and well-formed (machined) – is lost, leaving only an echo. In all this, the orphic song, the stirring of animal spirits, the original poem, the return from the dead. It is here that the where the machinic is not machinic.

You lead me to think that Lurid Numbers can’t be read or printed because the writing did not occur – which would require the iterability of closed world of the machine – it is not authored. I admit to be radically uncertain of the “author-function” of this text with my name on it. I recall that I did not intend for it to be unprintable or unreadable, at least not in any straightforward sense, though I do think I intended it to be undigestable. It remains in a lurid- or sleaze-world, so thin, flimsy, barely lit.

I wonder, in terms of the end of your provocation, is such a text still a text? I think of text as requiring reading and writing as advanced, modern processes; machinic processes, I suppose. I do not know if I can claim this for myself – not to have written a text – but I do wonder how far “text” can bear a lack of purity. I think more in terms such as “wryting” (which you coined), which suggests to me a kind of intensive, non-textual investment …

Alan

Wryting is of and in the midst of the body; Lurid Numbers skitters across the body, but drags, scrapes the escarpment of the body as well. “Text” is like “nice” – it can bear anything, it is not that smooth, but the family of usages containing it are smoothed out – in the case of Lurid Numbers, perhaps dilapidated as well. I’d think of you as an author for the simple reason – the text wouldn’t otherwise exist.

This might be the result of a crisis. To paraphrase L. Apostel, “The Justification of Set Theories” (in Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science, 1965), substituting texts for classes (the original is based on the comprehension axiom), “At the beginning of a textual procedure, when nothing whatever is known about sources or filters, complete freedom is given as to the construction of texts (1). When the textual procedure is already established, and when the results of earlier operations are stable, the construction proceeds without rearrangement: texts now are embedded in a formal and canonic history, which is taken for granted and is machine-decomposable; the roots are there, in a very classical sense (2). However, when a crisis is reached and the procedures hitherto followed must be altered, textuality returns to the original sources, accompanied by new procedures and filters (3). When the procedures operate without crisis, but when it is imperative that procedures at one level should be strongly distinguished from and yet completely determined by the procedures applied on the earlier level, we have (4).” Let’s think of (4) as conservation, and the third as permanent crisis, under the signs of capital and the fast-forward simulacra of signs. Then we’re in the skitters and jitters, aren’t we? Sufficient crisis, and the market breaks down, the machine breaks down, your self-identification as author breaks down. And that’s when things get interesting, when the machine reaches a state of indigestion.

What causes the crisis? On one hand the formal condition that upper and lower ASCII don’t exhaust the pixel-by-pixel gridwork of inscriptions; there’s always the glitsch, the fury beyond acceptable bandwidth. Most of our lives – in fact the phenomenology of our being-in-the-world – is conditioned by filtering-out, not only so the clean and proper body of the signifier may make itself felt against our skin, but also because anything else creates an ontological shift where the matrix of communication, community, disappears altogether. The crisis is of course the implosion. It’s that. It’s those. It’s when “a” replaces “the” down to the rootlessness. Lurid Numbers unroots numbers, signs, and symbols, replacing “a” itself with an unknowable little-object-a beyond the spectrum, smothering the spectrum. It rests, remains, sleeps there. So you do a pdf!

Sandy

Yes, I agree. It would be possible – maybe? I think? – to map the text as crossing thresholds or crisis points. Can we think of all texts in relation to their procedure and whether or not there is a crisis, an alteration? The quote from Apostel also situates crisis in a relation to origins, or pathology of the text, keeping in mind that these are inscriptive origins and symptoms, origins in the topography of transcriptions.

I was speaking to the poet and critic Chris Funkhouser about the problem of printing Lurid Numbers. He brought up the possibility of an unpublishable book. He saw this as the future of increasing information interlinking, where all possible sentences are linked into the net already; all possible texts already generated in some way; no “new” text possible without being plagiarism from the first. This is, of course, a version of Borges’ “Library of Babel,” and also the nightmare aspect of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, where the density of hypertextual transclusion shuts down any new utterance. In practice, it is already being implemented with plagiarism detection systems such as Turnitin (my university purchased this software and wants it to be used on student papers). I found myself agreeing with Chris that this is a potential both for contemporary forms of writing, flarf being the example he used, and for the inseparability of the practice of writing from the apparatus of word processing software, in the largest sense. However, Lurid Numbers is unprintable rather than unpublishable. We could say that these are two forms of crisis. Unpublishability is a problem with the institution of authorship, and the confusion between economies of creativity and capital. Unprintability is a problem with the technical production of scriptive materialities, and a confusion between the conceptual potential of digital simulations and the institution that anchors these to a machinery of materialization, or more precisely, to a machine of printing out and handling. The confusion is already there in the simulation: MS Word and other software continue to simulate a page, while at the same time offering something else entirely. Lurid Numbers does have its own unpublishable pretexts, and unpublishability does relate to a materialization of the text – it is reasonable to see the legal institution of authorship in this way – but, whereas publishing involves a materiality of expression – creative expression capitalized through the author’s name – we could see the unprintability as a materiality of phenomena and the body. Is this the crisis and implosion (or explosion)? Of the book as object, as in my hand and before me, as technical product … The crisis of unprintability is worth studying on its own, and in relation to other crisis taking place in institutions of the book.

Finally, thinking of what you say of the cause of the crisis: you set the glit(s)ch as the “fury beyond acceptable bandwidth.” Perhaps “fury” is the correlate of crisis? A passion, a vehemence, beyond any law – and therefore in relation to the laws and institution of print and authorship – a fury that seeks the work, and – why not – seeks justice for the writer. Why justice? If unpublishability and unprintability involve the writer as name and capital (the writer’s head), then the fury of writing unpublishes and unwrites, leaving nothing but the body and the roiling of its interior. The work, the writing, the scriptive orgins – all these come from and go to this fury.

Alan

Just a couple of points here. No matter how much interlinking occurs, statistically, fantasy notwithstanding, all possible sentences etc. really constitute such an inaccessibly high number, that all the processing power of the universe would never complete the task, even given the 13+ billion years we’ve been around, even given incredibly high-speed processing. As you know, n-furcations quickly spin out of control. The second point relates to pain, and the inexpressibility of severe pain, and I want to end my contribution here, in relation to what might be foregone, the McGill Pain Questionnaire notwithstanding. So a few brief words left behind in lieu of an other text.

Inexpressibility occurs because of the difficulty of expressing interior states that might not have a clearcut symptomology (as thirst does, for example) – and also because severe pain derails speech and language and thought, as the internalized horizon of the flesh is muted or screams in abeyance. All of this touches on the pain of the signifier and its inexpressible relation to death – and all of this touches, as well, on the unprintable. The unprintable then is returned, as if by media mail, to the body that produced it. And from this moment, your text, as pdf, opens up and opens, as pain disperses, is dispersed, as the symbolic ultimately collapses, as is its wont…