November 2011 Delivery

So, I'm going to do two pieces. The first one is a bit of alternative scholarship. And it looks at craft aesthetics and the shifting roles of words, images, and sounds in digital composing. The second piece is also alternative scholarship, but it's a little bit more of a memoir, and it's also a manifesto about digital composing.

So, this is called "Truing."

[Camera moves to show hands moving window on laptops screen. Video then zooms into screen and shows video being composed on screen]

iTunes and multiple browser windows arranged on the screen.

Typing on screen: We’re here to make an idea real, a movie.
It will be a moving thing that brings response.
The bee sting. The bicycle. Guitar string.
The shearsman
strumming into being
the bread and the stone,
which links to craft,
which leads to art,
which brings us to now.

Typing on screen: We need words like water.
We need their circulations
for turning ideas,
for truing them
and bringing them into tune,
the way a wheel might speak
through its spokes.
Thus,
we,
too,
give voice
through the wire.

Typing on screen: We’re shifting like sand and sea
drifting over plates,
like wetlines
changing place
with the tides.
We’re lifting.
Collecting.
Spacing.
And repeating.
Gathering
before coming ashore.

Typing on screen: Light casts movements
like green or blue
or green and blue.
The tracings are
breath or wind
or flowings
like skin turning bubble
and returning wet
with mind sight.
The mixing laps at the overlaps
of image, song, word,
or heard whisper from a front porch.
Shh. . . .
This is important.

Typing on screen: This is the healing of the split.
It’s the organic mechanic
opening a window to see
surfaces, saying
we can change shape,
we can move together
as we do in this moment
through the film.

[Truing video is saved on screen. While screen recorder is saving, "The Bubble" video is brought up on screen. Narration of bubble video begins:]

So this is a story. It’s my story, or one of them. It’s a story about learning to teach. And it’s a statement about digital composing. I’m searching for some sound. There’s serendipity here. I’m going to play a YouTube clip.

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 materials. Layers. Shapes. Words, that launch me into memory.

When I was about six I went to the Twelve Gates free school and this was in the ‘60s. It was a hippie school. The only rule was the teachers couldn't tell you what to do. We wandered downtonw, scouring sidewalks, learning the city. But I soon had to go to public school and this was in first grade, and the first thing I did was say shit or some other word and had my mouth washed out with soap.

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

My digital teaching memories start with 1993.  There are two threads. One: learning to teach in a computer classroom. I erased my syllabus before the first day. Do you want to reformat? Just click okay.  I was a new face in a basement full of teachers told to tinker with writing tools.

So I'll toss out an observation: we need new faces for digital composing. And a question:  where are the new faces and what can they tell us?

The second of my early digital memories, calls up brain-shaping composing with hypertext and networks. We learned to layer ideas with images, sounds, language. Then we walked away from those texts and joined with others to write the Web, which leads to an affirmation. Digital composing is comfortable with ephemera, disappearance, and emergence, with tweak first, theorize later.

And we did make claims in need of truing like “our thinking is shifting,” “here comes the writing revolution,” “this changes everything.”

What should we make of these claims now? And what claims do we make now about digital culture?

In the 90s we were hacking away at the Web, trying to make it writable, which brings me to the do it yourself attitude of the digital, the studio or shop class sensibilities suited for tweaking and turning materials, for making time, for working with hands and minds.

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 about risk and trust.

In digital history, this piece is 2003, and this is multimedia taking root. This moment might 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 mentor, Erwin Schlaack, taught me to recognize poetry in moving things. Life lessons like torque or thickness. Mechanical skills like, listening, caring, and seeing, which leads me to another question: what should be our teaching philosophy?

The digital should be a place for experimentation, a place where you can try something. 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 stocked for the beach. Frisbee. Sandals. 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 the blue guitar.

Then I started teaching with computers and found the bubble.

Here, my life memories merge with my recollections of a field. I think of John Slatin, who taught me about texts and codes and working with those we love. We are the lab discipline of the humanities. The place where art, music, film, and story are cast together. Where beliefs are created in response to the material world. "The river is moving." OurField is mixing.

We come to the connotational space still slick with linguistics. But 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. 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: Oh . . . 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 this story, the mix, 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. Us listening. Clicking. Moving sound. Beating. Playing with the band. Imagining. Us reworking the twenty-third take of a ten-minute moment.

I used to think the prosumer approach was important for students. Of course it is, but what I’ve learned is that the prosumer is about everybody making everything. That means me and you. You don't create the prosumer, you prosume. You don't study digital composing, you perform it. Must we always manifesto? Yes. The question is what to say. Seriously. What do we say, now?

We will say that words crash and sweep and wave, light speaks, and sounds have shape. Do we write these waves and shapes with our machines? Yes. Do we blow them into being like glass? Yes. Look closely—the surface, still liquid and light, refracts. And when we bring the shimmering thing here before us, we will say to beauty, this is truth. And we will say, don't watch your mouth. Watch the bubble.