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!

konsonant is my new app (for iOS and Mac) as well as a free mp3 release.

check it out at my site

Play with letters and sounds, build acoustic machines, control morphing clouds and experiment with the alphabet!

Enjoy the sounds and shapes of letters by line drawing, physics simulations or acoustic networks in the four sound games included in the app.

But maybe that is part of the “problem.” Elit is well-known and practiced every place we look, but we can lay little claim to it. It is well beyond its adolescence, and within a few years (if not already), except for its stand-out practitioners, it will be so common as to not be worthy of any special note.

That is our tipping point, and the moment is now. We can lay claim to electronic literature, but we need to do it (as some of us have pointed out) in an all-inclusive and democratic way. It must be presented in our classrooms in all its forms, not just random-generated poetry or game narrative, but in every way we see it appearing online or off. Our students must know that elit is not all poetry but fiction, too, and drama, and every genre in between. They must know it is not just in the classroom, it is in front of them every day on the web, although they may not recognize it. We can show them where to look, and what to look for. We can tell them how the current elit community offers an aesthetic core around which the rest can adhere.

If we have any hope of encouraging our students to read electronic literature outside the classroom, or our young creative writers to try their hand at this kind of “writing,” they must see it has a broader audience, with both an aesthetic future and (for the writers) at least some potential for financial gain, either outright or through jobs in related industries. They can not see it primarily as an art practiced, and favored, by those of us in academia: for a new form struggling to gain its larger identity, readership, and practitioners, the academic world, while a necessary part of the overall strategy, is too small.

For the original source of this post, and the previous (and ongoing) conversation, visit http://www.newmediawritingforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=156

Click here to view the embedded video.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX - selected works (screenshot - detail)

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX (remixworx) is a space for the remixing of digital media, including visual poetry (vispo), electronic poetry (flashpo), playable media, animation, music, spoken word, texts and more. In New Directions in Digital Poetry, Chris Funkhouser describes the project as “a particularly impressive display of cannibalism-by-design.” He goes on to say:

Beyond the high quality of the artworks, the collaborative axis of Remixworx commands respect, and the sheer variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically) embraced by the collective – usually involving kinetic visual poems in combination with graphical animation and sound – is remarkable.

It began as a blog in November 2006 and has grown to number over 500 individual works of media. The front page only displays the latest pieces so, recently, we created a new gallery page of selected works to open out the remixworx collection. Now there’s a browsable interface of thumbnails where you can see, at a glance, relationships between remixes and have access to the works at your fingertips.

On the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX blog, the source material is made available and all media is freely given to be remixed. Each new work is remixed, literally or conceptually, from other works on the blog. Then, the new work is linked to the blog post(s) that contain the component parts, thus the blog ‘talks to itself’ – “I link therefore I am” (Mark Amerika). The project promotes no single ‘author’, and we keep dogma chained outside the gate. It is not a tame place, though, and artful innuendo is evident.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is also a playful environment – as with much ‘creative discourse’ – and we are always surprised and delighted by the remixes. We respond to each other, to newsworthy events, and to trends in politics or art. Some works have been remixed several times and represent a creative dialogue that utilizes social software to explore ‘open source’, “a philosophy … that promotes free redistribution” (Wikipedia). We sometimes post completely new work because R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX needs to be fed. In regards artistic practice, R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is unabashedly new media – ‘born digital’ – but the project has roots in photography, literature, audio technology, film, animation, poetry, computer programming, dada and outsider art.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a creative micro-community. Most R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX members work or have worked professionally, in one capacity or another, with social software and/or digital media – most members were brought together, initially, by the trAce Online Writing Community. R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX continues in a spirit of learning and sharing – in the original spirit of the World Wide Web. Some members have won awards of one kind or another for digital art and writing. Often, in the heat of working on a complex project, a person needs to let off steam – R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a place for that, as well.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is an accumulation of spontaneous ideas that spawn at random intervals, a flexible community, an adaptable entity that has been shown in a variety of ways – performed live at festivals and conferences, or remixed live as part of DJ/VJ events. The present page of ‘selected works’ has been created to ‘open the project up’, so to speak, with a visual interface, separate from the blog. It is presented as an online journal of digital art and writing that spans 2006 to 2012.

Many thanks to Randy Adams (runran), who initiated the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX project, for pulling together the selected works page, currently containing 183 pieces. Also, a shout out for Chris Joseph (babel) – check out the blog for his latest remixes.

Call for papers

Technical submissions are invited across the broad range of areas covered by Computational Aesthetics. Specific technical areas include, but are not limited to:
- computational analysis and modeling of creative behavior (AI, A life);
- artistic image transformation techniques (colors, edges, patterns, dithering);
- image style and salience analysis (paintings, photographs, others);
- visualization (perceptual or aesthetics based);
- sketching, simplification techniques (artistic, cognitive);
- composition, visual balance, layout;
- non-photorealistic and illustrative rendering addressing computational aesthetics;
- empirically based metrics of aesthetical attributes;
- applied visual perception (color appearance, spatial vision, and other aspects);
- measuring and describing aesthetics; and
- computational tools for artists.

Deadlines
Submission deadline: March 14, 2012
Short track (new review for SIGGRAPH declines): April 3, 2012
Acceptance notification: April 23, 2012
Camera-ready deadline: May 1, 2012
Conference: June 4-6, 2012

Call for Artworks :The Aesthetics of Code as Material

As a special supplement to the general conference call, the Art track for CAe 2012 seeks works by artists exploring the relations between code, form and image. This call for artworks is specifically interested in works that have contributed to the shift in focus from static to dynamic models and toward systems of processuality.
Papers and Posters exploring this art track theme in critical, cultural and philosophical terms are also welcome. These should follow the submission requirements and deadlines of the general conference call. Proposals in the following areas are encouraged:
- Generative systems, image, form and audiovisuality,
- Digital fabrication and Parameterisation,
- Kinetic behaviors, Interactive and adaptive architectures,
- Interfaces, instruments and improvisation.
- The list is indicative, not exhaustive.

Deadlines
Expression of Interest and outline of art works: March 29th, 2012
Acceptance notification: April 23, 2012
Camera-ready deadline: May 1, 2012
Conference: June 4-6, 2012

More on http://cae-sbim-npar-2012.inrialpes.fr/cae/

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

From January 5th through the 7th at the Washington State Convention Center in Room 609, visitors will have the opportunity to view/read/interact with: e-literature from the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One and Two; historically significant works such as those by bpNichol and those published by Eastgate; locative works such as Kate Armstrong’s “Ping;” formally experimental works such as David Jhave Johnson’s “softies;” multimodal narratives such as Christine Wilks’ “Underbelly;” literary games such as Ian Bogost’s “A Slow Year“; and mobile works such as Mark Amerika’s “Immobilité.” These are just some of many different modes of e-literature that will be on display. The complete list of works is available on the exhibit website.

Also, on Friday January 6th from 8pm to 10.30pm, there will be an MLA off-site reading of electronic literature at Richard Hugo House (1634 11th Ave  Seattle, WA 98122-2419). If you are in Seattle in early January, please make sure you stop by as it’s a rare treat indeed to have the opportunity to hear these extraordinarily innovative writers read together: Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Marjorie Luesebrink, Jim Andrews, Erin Costello and Aaron Angello, Mark Marino, Talan Memmott, John Cayley, Ian Bogost, Brian Kim Stefans, and Kate Armstrong.