2010 Remix

So this is a remix. It starts with a manifesto point: there is no remix, only mixing. It starts with a genre, the memoir. And it enacts a history from the discipline of computers and writing, a field that blends composition with technology and media studies. I’m bringing in some sound.

Let me adjust this a little bit. I’m thinking about how to arrange these pieces. About scale and movement. Focus. Time. I’m getting a feel for the music. For the mood. Now I'm playing with this image, creating what I want to say with these flows of material. Shapes. Layers. Words that launch me into memory.

When I was about six I went to the Twelve Gates Free School and this was in 1968, hippie school, and the rule was that the teachers couldn't tell you what to do. We wandered downtown, asking delivery drivers for samples. In the park once we buried a dead bird in a matchbox. Discovering life. Learning. But I soon had to go to public school and this was in first grade, public school, and the first thing I did was say shit or some other bad word and had my mouth washed out with soap.

My first question is personal. What one thing would you change about education?

My computers and writing experiences start with 1993.  For that moment there are two memories. One was learning to teach on a network; we used the Daedalus Writing Environment to connect students in the classroom. I was a new face in a program built by writing teachers in a basement, formed in the bubble of what is possible when technology and learning converge.

So I'll toss out an observation: computers and writing is comfortable being led by new faces. And a question:  Who are the new faces and what can they tell us?

So, this is a piece from 1994, a time piece. It takes up the second of my early computers and writing memories, hypertext. This is a hypercard project. Kind of a passing as I write about it on the Web, which leads to an affirmation. Computers and writing is comfortable with emergent technologies, and can tweak first, theorize later.

Looking back we see people talking about decentering authority, new thinking, revolutions in writing.

What should we make of these claims now? And what new claims do we make as we think about computers and culture?

In the 90s we were hacking away at the Web, trying to make it porous, to make it writable, which brings us to another element of computers and writing, its DIY focus. Computers and writing tinkers, adapting software and hardware and teaching into instructional technologies, interested in not just using, but also building tools.

So my introduction to formalized education was rough. But I also had some wonderful teachers. In second grade, on another first day, Mrs. Buchannon told me "stick to your guns" when you think you're right. Looking past the ratty hair and backing the new kid, she showed me that learning is linked to risk and trust.

In computers and writing history, this piece is 2003, and this is multimedia taking root. This piece, this moment might best be seen as a response to programs like iMovie and the lowering of technical hurdles. This is the prosumer push full throttle.

My best class ever was auto shop in high school. My teacher, Erwin Schlaack, taught me to recognize the poetry in mechanical things. Hands-on work. Life lessons. Lots of fixing. So these educational episodes (from soapy mouths to the joys of apprenticeship) lead me to another question: What is the teaching philosophy of computers and writing?

Computers and writing has been a place of experimentation. A place where you can try something out. Who knows what will happen? I'm showing a portfolio of work from a recent class. Every project should be a revelation. It's okay not to know how to do something. It's okay to make mistakes.

When I first went to college I brought my Mexican mesh bag fully stocked for the beach. Frisbee. Sandals. Sundries. Played percussion and sang in a band. When I took a second crack at a university, an English professor, Mike Fischer, taught me to write about ideas. I thought I'd take on deconstruction. Felt like literature didn't dissolve anything but generated being through insights and emotions. Thoughts too deep for tears. Then I found the transcendental in the sounds of Wallace Stevens.

Then I started teaching with computers and found transformation there in the bubble.

Here, my life memories merge with my recollections of the field. I think of John Slatin, who taught me about texts and codes and the joy of working with people. We are the lab discipline of the core humanities. The place where art, music, film, and word can be toyed with, where tools are discovered, reworked, refined, or tossed away. Where new tools are created in response to the material world. "The river is moving." OurField must be flowing.

We come to the connotational space still slick with linguistics. I'm talking about extending the beating in the veins and tracing it all the way through software and symbol and sound and soundboard and keyboard. I'm feeling still the need to push. We find in the connotational space glowing image edge amid desktop under glass. We cast texts and songs and lights and people. I'm rolling toward the final question of the technopoet: O' Do not ask . . . must we always manifesto? The question's rhetorical. This moment is now part of the mix. Should we use this music? The question's rhetorical. How could we not? It's a part of the mix, as well as the mixing.

This is the twenty-third take of a live improvisation. Twenty-three takes among hundreds of unsaved instances coming and going like the folding edge of time. This is me typing into the take. This is you watching. This is me talking over the take. This is us listening. Me clicking. This is me moving sound. Beating. Playing with the band. Me imagining. Me reworking the twenty-third take of a ten-minute moment.

I used to think the prosumer philosophy was important for students. Of course it is, but what I’ve learned is that the prosumer is also about teachers. I realize that now. You don't create the prosumer, you prosume. You don't study computers and writing, you perform it. Must we always manifesto? Yes. The question is how now. 

Will we see the word as akin to image, sound, and movement, all possible channels for streaming ideas? Will we build tools and use materials to have our say? Will we say there are links between our classrooms and its networks, the college, our culture, our own lives? Will we say these links sustain, but also constrain us? Will we push past the links that bind or cause pain? Or will we at least just push? Will we push our thoughts and beliefs forward to say, don't watch your mouth? Watch the bubble. Watch the bubble.