Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0902241553530.14933@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Notes on e-poetry for an online seminar at De Montfort University
2/23
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:54:12 -0500 (EST)
Notes on e-poetry for an online seminar at De Montfort University 2/23 If you go to http://www.alansondheim.org/howard/ you'll see the materials I used - the talk was on e-poetry and virtual worlds. (Please note there are references to the Odyssey show; again, it's only up for a few more days - please check out http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22 .) the virtual, writing, inscription: intertwined dynamics, presencing, virtual and material strata the linearity of writing melds with the passing of time, constructs the diegesis and the inhabiting of a text. hypertext jumps you in and out of choice / reading and I think as a result is problematic - you're making choices within a production of the text, but you're taken out of the text to make the choices. in virtual worlds, moving creates the dynamics of choice so that you're seeing or hearing signposts and signs, as if within the word, within the world, not within / without / within / etc. in virtual worlds, languaging appears always dynamic and in any number of modes - it's the pleasure of the living text (to the extent that anything lives or survives in the virtual). so there's a power and an incredible simplicity in working in Second Life for example - the database and software does almost all the work for you. the next steps are portals - productions between virtual worlds or sectors of virtual worlds or real worlds; eventually all sorts of intrusions will be possible. there are also behavioral signs. if you look at sprayed1 or swirl or vortices or writingmachine or kanji in the /howard/ directory, you'll see all sorts of ways for writing in the sky. these use either intrinsic motions scripted for objects, or extrinsic animation files scripted for avatars. the animation files come from altered motion capture files. most of the image files in the /howard/ directory contain texts attached to objects. if you look at slscript.txt you'll see how these are done. For the most recent texts, look in /howard/ at recent.txt - this contains my 'pertinent' writings from the last 2-3 weeks; for some of them I used the chat at DMU or chat within Second Life, as a compositional structure.