Brian Kerr

Screen captures from one of today’s projects, adapting Seashore for easier use with a SmartNav head-mounted mouse. Seashore is a free software Macintosh derivative of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Since Seashore uses nib files for its interface resources, it’s a piece of cake to open up Interface Builder and resize, realign, remove, and re-bind keyboard shortcuts for user interface elements throughout the application. Here’s a simple example, options for the paintbrush tool:

(A full-size version of this image.)

The original, on the left, uses small control sizes and presents options for a pressure-sensitive devices. The modified version, on the right, uses regular control sizes, and we’ve added tick marks to the slider and hidden controls irrelevant to the human interface devices we happen to be working with. These are small changes, but it’s enough of a difference to make a difference.

Slider controls are tricky because they ask you to first move a tiny target over a continuous range and then stop moving it in order to make a precise selection. In almost all cases, we’ve turned on between 8 and 12 markers, and checked Stop on tick marks only so that sliders snap to markers. You lose a lot of precision that way, but this doesn’t matter if you’ve chosen a strategic number of markers. This approach for slider controls is inspired by the way a similar user interface element responds to stylus or finger control in Animal Crossing.

(tags: design mac process umsi)

• IMDB: Towers Open Fire (1963)

From Those crazy “cut-ups” Burroughs, Gysin, and Balch restored to their rightful place in avant-garde film history in Bright Lights:

Towers Open Fire is a collage of the main themes and situations or “routines” that appear in Burroughs cut-up novels of the period. The soundtrack accompaniment is a mixture of recordings made by Burroughs on a cheap Grundig tape recorder and resembles many of the cut-up tape experiments achieved in collaboration with Ian Somerville. The rest was done in a studio, with some Arab music used. The film depicts society as crumbling in the form of a stock exchange crash, shots of which were purchased from Pathé news. Members of “a board” are dematerialized, and Burroughs plays an omnipresent role in the film (not least as the victim of an “orgasm attack” in which he leaps through a window and shoots family photos with a ping-pong gun).

(tags: collective movies narratives politics process writing)

One of today’s activities:

Collage of two images from RecentChangesCamp 2007: 1 and 2; a higher-quality image of the result.

Made in Seashore using a SmartNav plus a few labor-saving voice commands. This means, no hands. You move the cursor by moving your head. You click by saying “click” or triggering a button or puffing into a tube. The little tiny hotspots and buttons in Seashore are hard to select; slider controls are the hardest.

OS X is pretty easy to wrangle with this kit, after a learning curve. Some applications are better than others, with Quicksilver (not too surprisingly) coming in dead last. It’s a shame because Quicksilver really helps to cut down on mousing and typing, both at a premium when you’re not using your hands.

See grad student bkerr a4a project for more like this.

(tags: design mac media process self umsi wiki)

Eugenio kindly sends a couple projects in response to How to be a poet.

• Computer Aided Poetry. Be sure to make a poem, so you can see the cool picture of Rimbaud’s CAP.
• J B Wock: “I am a PHP script, and (almost) every night I write a short phrase about whatever comes to my mind.”
• about machine poetry. a manifesto for the destruction of poets:

machine poetry is imperfect from many linguistic viewpoints, but it is precisely in this imperfection where its richness lies. the suppression of grammar leads to the suppression of god, someone said. machine poetry, dismantled and fragmented, seeks to be built within the mind and the soul of each reader. if the world is now unintelligible, machine poetry is, at first, a user’s manual for re-reading the world. however, machine poetry aspires to be read exclusively by machines in an urgently near future. liberation will come also for the human reader.

Thanks, Eugenio!

(tags: media narratives process web writing)

Here is a poem that you and I and whomever else wrote together by writing and reading this weblog, so why don’t you read it, out loud:

Photos of tulips in snow
by you and me and whomever else

quicksilver cube
ftff
anakin skywalker “you can try”
“paul ford” sitekit
quicksilver cube
frieze building
slicehost
    slicehost
        slicehost
animal crossing keep trees alive
ann arbor aerial photos
left behind at the fishbowl
brian
the possibility love is not enough

Certainly I’m being disingenuous — or at least strategic — with this poem. I made the poem from the most recent search queries that brought people to this weblog, in chronological order as reported by 103bees. But when I did this, I made some poetic decisions. For example, since my poem is a sonnet, I couldn’t include the evocative fifteenth query, which was “photos of tulips in snow.” That’s how it became the poem’s title.

How to be a poet

1. Write things
2. Let others find those things while you go live your life for a bit
3. Decide how long your poem should be — if you are brave, try a sestina, six six-line stanzas and one little three-line appendage at the end
4. Open your whatever analytics software
5. Copy out the right number of lines
6. Punctuate and line-break your poem as needed
7. Title, if desired

Objections

Objection my poem doesn’t rhyme. So what? You wrote, or hinted at, the word lines of your poem in whatever you wrote about in the first place. And the merry brigade of googlers or jeeves-inquirers or what have you related the word lines to each other.

Objection intentionality. :P (alternate: intentionality is a cargo cult.)

Objection there is no demand for my poem. Your poem is a creative + generative activity. By imposing an order and sequence to the word lines in your poem, you can see new relationships between the things you have written about and others have searched for.

(tags: analytics feedback-loop media narratives process web weblogs writing)

A recent change: daily posting of del.icio.us links to this weblog, in their own category, but excluded from RSS feed(s). There was trouble with the feed exclusion the other day, but should be smooth sailing from here on out.

Del.icio.us has a nice tagging trellis: just the right amount of structure. Each little set of tags tells a tagset word-line nano-narrative, but you always have the to hell with it shift linguals option of clicking through a tag and seeing where it takes you. Del.icio.us is a toxic stinging jellyfish: grab a tag or tentacle or feeler or what have you and you can pull up a great glistening jellyfish chunk of the network from there with all kinds of other strands hanging off. All this to say that del.icio.us, 36 months and 4800+ links later, has become the most telegraphic software I use. I like the idea that each word is connected to a bunch of other words, each person to a bunch of other people. I like the cut-up adjacency that comes out of everybody else’s attention in the (my) network; whenever I refresh it, it’s like somebody chucked the system of the world into a hat, shook it up, and pulled out a few random crumpled pages for me to look at. I like to think that if WS Burroughs were here, he’d say this is a little sneak preview image of the unspecified whatever state that comes after the end of the war game.

(tags: media metacrap process web)