books

Have been reading the Timothy Alan Liu book Rob Myers recommended, The Laws of Cool. Especially liked the discussion of the history of typefaces and design as they made the jump from print to the web. The book features a good, if matter-of-fact, discussion of JODI, as well.

This blog confesses it has a hard time finding its place in Liu's scheme for some of the reasons Rob mentioned in his post on the artwork here (thanks--much appreciated): "...it would fail as simple web illustration. It is too interesting and has too much internal complexity. It makes a context for itself. History, problem solving and interiority are anathema to the easy post-historical consumerist cool of Web 2.0."

Alan Liu assumes everything is about "cool" and eventually even the "uncool" gets absorbed into the "cool." That is, the computerized workplace and playplace is an all-encompassing seductive experience measured in "cool," whether it's the Ars Electronica avant garde or designers creating Facebook apps.

I'm interested in seeing software and web tools made problematic through the investment of time and labor all out of proportion to their intended function. Examples would be hand-shading a gradient instead of just writing parameters for it, or hand-rendering animation frames without any use of onion-skinning or digitally generated transition frames. This is an artist stance of "doing the difficult thing" which does not make an easy jump to the web.

The labor and use of "historical" art techniques is not always conspicuous in the finished product (that is, my artwork), so Rob's vouching for it is appreciated.

A post on Rob a few years ago and some examples of his online artwork are here. We have an ongoing disagreement over whether the surf clubs "add anything" to the images they recycle.

Update: Don't know where that "Timothy" came from. Most uncool.

Very sorry to learn of Disch's suicide on July 4.
Other bloggers are sharing their personal reflections (see update below). I had just posted something on him in May, concerning his 1980s computer/interactive fiction text adventure Amnesia.
Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, and The MD grabbed me hardest of his books (have read others but those are my "keepers"). His essay on Philip K. Dick's first novel Solar Lottery* I have read and reread. It is a great piece of criticism. He's totally on throughout, as if writing a brief to the highest court of literary appeal (when in fact it was just a forward to the Gregg Press edition of SL). He never stints on Dick's flaws but strikes the perfect balance of "high" and "low" literary reference to convince you of the man's importance (if not the novel's under scrutiny). Here is the last para:

This is not to say that readers will find no formal pleasure in Dick's novels, that it is all a matter of snuffling about for truffles of Meaning, as I've been doing here. But his commitment to an aesthetic of process means that, by and large, whatever he writes is what we read. There is no turning back to rethink, revise, or erase. He improvises rather than composes, thereby making his experience of the creative process the focus of his art. This is not a novelty, of course. It is the wager of Scheherezade, too, that she can be interesting and authentic absolutely all the time, and this tradition of the novel is as old and as honorable as the more Flaubertian idea of the novel-as-prose-poem that presently holds sway in academia. Within this tradition Dick is one of the immortals by virtue of the sheer fecundity of his invention. Inevitably there are dull patches, days when his typewriter refuses to wake up, but on the whole these are few, and the stretches of song, when they come, are all the more remarkable for being, so visibly, the overflow of a spirit that from Heaven, or near it, pours its full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Like the French, but unlike U.S. snobs such as Gary Indiana, Disch clearly saw something in Dick. Perhaps in death Disch will have advocacy this full-hearted for his own writing. (I can't speak for his poetry but apparently Disch thought the New Yorker was snubbing it because he was a lowbrow science fiction writer. What a world.)

*"Toward the Transcendent: An Introduction to Solar Lottery and Other Works," Disch's 1983 rewrite of a 1976 essay. The rewrite appears in Olander & Greenberg's Writers of the 21st Century: Philip K. Dick (New York: Taplinger Publishing)

Update: Other thoughts on Disch have been compiled by Edward Champion and Enter the Octopus.

Good Wikipedia summary of John Brunner's 1975 sf novel The Shockwave Rider. A back burner project is to list all the things Brunner got right and wrong in that book. It's often cited as the first description of a computer "worm" but the author gave the worm super-cyber abilities for a deus ex machina ending.

The worm is eventually activated, and the details of all the government's dark secrets (clandestine genetic experimentation that produces crippled children, bribes and kickbacks from corporations, concealed crimes of high public officials) now become accessible from anywhere on the network - in fact, those most affected by a particular crime of a government official are emailed the full details.

The rebel gifted child phone phreak hacker main character anticipated cyberpunk's anti-heros but the book also featured utopian communes a la Walden II.

In place of the old system, Nick has designed the worm to enforce a kind of utilitarian socialism, with people's worth being defined by their roles in society, not their connections in high places. In effect, the network becomes the entire government and financial system, policing income for illegal money, freezing the accounts of criminals, while making sure money (or credit) flows to places where people are in need.

Found it disturbing on first reading (the government kidnapping/indoctrination of smart kids as weapons) and somewhat tamer the second; will give it another go soon.

From the science fiction author's Wikipedia entry:

In 1987 Disch collaborated with New Jersey software company Cognetics Corp. and games publisher Electronic Arts to create the interactive fiction text adventure Amnesia, which could be played on the Commodore 64, IBM PC or Apple II computers. The title, based on technology pioneered by Cognetics' Charles Kreitzberg, was produced by Don Daglow and programmed by Kevin Bentley. It showcased Disch's vivid writing, a stark contrast to other game-programmer-written text adventures of the time, and his passion for the energy of the city of New York. Although the text adventure format was dying by the time Amnesia was released and it enjoyed limited success, the game pioneered ideas that would later become popular in game design by modeling the entire Manhattan street map south of 110th St. and allowing the player to visit any street corner in that part of the city in their quest to advance the story. Although the limited floppy disk capacity of the 1980s computers caused much of Disch's original text about the city to be cut, many Manhattan sites and people were described with unique loving distortion through the Disch lens.

This explains (or at least backgrounds) the virtual world "Wyomia" in Disch's 1991 horror novel The MD. From childhood the evil protagonist spends his spare time building a personal world of torture and murder that grows increasingly baroque as he ages. Disch is in cyberspace himself, '00s style--just discovered a LiveJournal where he publishes mostly verse. Disch's sf culturecrit memoir The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of is a great read.