070722 Meeting Notes

Seems to me that we've got a much better idea about form and structure after Monday's meeting. I will add that Mindala and I made lots of headway in the selection and ordering of triptychs. Here are David's notes:

Major Movements in a Service

1. Ingathering

Prelude, Introit, Call to Worship, Greeting, Announcements

2. Participating

hymns, prayers, offertory

3. Listening

prayers, readings, sermon, benediction

4. Transformation

all of above, culminating in sermon and benediction

Or can see it in terms of maintaining the order:

1. Ingathering

2. Hymn

3. Prayer

4. Reading

5. Sermon

6. Outflowing

7/20/07

G: Movements as neighborhoods we walk through

D: oil corporation meeting?

N: deliverables, actionables

using more explicit businessy stuff: bullet points, power point presentations, back to the filmstrip idea, agendas—but on a very subtle, quick level

Edward Tufty

G: Sermon as combining all the different elements of other movements, playing them in variation. Long and dense.

Hymns:

Prayer:

Reading:

1. Ingathering

for now, stick w/ our earlier chart of Prelude-Introit-Call (We are artists). “Innovation of Commercial” might work too.

2. Hymn

music is predominant. Stick with “Oil Derrick” idea from first hymn; deforms sonically and fades into parts of “Innovation of the Commercial,” that should be played with for a while, comes back into “Goodbyes” from “Oil Derrick.” Segue into field sound—train or oil derrick, birds and other outdoor sounds. Section ends w/ “Sherri stopped next to the tanker”, as last lines are heard the front (and other?) screens fade to white—the transitional cue is thus in the visual more than sonic elements. The visual fade is accompanied by a sonic fade to field sounds, no “music.” Leads to bringing text back onto the screen?

3. Prayer

field sounds verging on silence, image-heavy. Main text: Modernity of Est. Use words as water, which then solidify into the water/river animation. Preacher: “Heavenly faucet.” Segue poem: “When We Entered the Four Religion Items.”

4. Reading

all is textualized—images use more text (signs, etc), sound composed entirely of text, text in front is stripped down, less flashiness. “When we entered” connects to the “peak oil—oil fuels human progress—graphoilogy” trio—more cerebral, academic, focus on text. Lucky Mojo on front screen in bullet point/power point form toward end, but accompanied by soundscape that’s very lush and emotional. “In Bed” comes out of that, or is a part of that logic? Using the table idea, etc.

5. Sermon

By now, media are thoroughly intermixed, starting to use texts that are about the relationship of image, sound, text. Less about oil and religion, more about art. Foregrounding media issues—the meta-quality helps us explore the alienation/community dialectic. Repetition of motifs from other movements, coming back here in culminating ways.

Major texts: Begin with “Now 1920s,” which feels very anecdotal, sermonic. morph into are we writing? N8’s riff on that? “Sherri stopped next to the tanker” reprise. Use our Sherri texts here. “Women of Maynot” has relevance to this too. “Holy Spring Water”—use this both as strong visual tryptich element, and as part of the sound-text field. The third stanza is the key for this—put up the whole piece as a visual element but use N8’s reading of the last stanza.

Sound: the preachers should come in here and get played around with. Very few preacher elements beforehand, so that we save it for development until here.

“Interesting Facts”: strong poem, but not entirely connected to piece—strong on oil and fire, strong on Indian issues (connects to “rail of tears”), light on religion. Can be trimmed and faded in w/ Mindy’s “deeplong” or preacher (“dot dot dot”) which N has already done in a sound file. Has a benedictory quality (end), but also a historical framing (beginning), and a sort of preacherly ethos (sermon).

[At some point, have the floating heads from the back be played also up front?]

6. Outflowing

N8 reading “Still.” music continues long after text and image have faded

Keep in mind the use of the front screen to prompt, as if a prayer leader is up there. Page numbers? Filmstrip? Use the river animation w/ words floating by as if it were a ticker? “Oi” floats by, etc.

Hymn vs prayer:

hymn: music, rhythm, repetition.

Fractal structure:

The whole piece is organized like a fractal: each part engages in the themes of the whole, but each part also emphasizes a different aspect of the whole, giving the piece an arc to itself. This solves our concern about whether we’re doing an endless loop or a discrete linear performance. No matter where the audience enters, they get a version of the whole structure, but if they stay they experience the larger-scale structure. G: It is the loop and the line. It’s organic but yet formally structured.

070703 Wakow Notes

In Bed animation:

Maybe bouncing ball would better indicate reading by audience, though there might not be room for it on the screen. Could take some time technically, too, though it is doable. At any rate, G definitely wants to get the audience participation, if possible. Being in the gallery during the opening, we could start the reading in hopes others would join.

Nathan thought the animation rhythm might dictate a certain rhythm in the sound, and I assured him it didn’t. Perhaps slowing the text down, or at least the ball, would better indicate the liturgical rhythm.

N was concerned that audience might not know this is the same poem. Have the text stay the same while the ball bounces, or some other animation (ie words to be read get brighter, etc), might better show that.

Images:

Juxtapose burning refinery smoke stack with flag shot of Mindy’s. That is a must-have in this thing.

G showed N a few of the 200 some photos he shot over the weekend focusing on capturing movement through still shots. The flag series were particularly interesting, he thought.

What effects/movement can we add to photos or elements within photos? La Jettee imposes narrative on images, but every once in awhile there is a motion or effect (like shimmer). For example, cut the flag out of the church shot using Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks and have it move like a bouy in water while sound of water issues from soundtrack.

We went over the order of service to see where we might need sounds, animation, etc. Nathan said he would work on 3-5 “hymns,” including the sermon, of 2-5 min (15min in case of the climactic sermon).

I said I would have some animated “chunks” designed especially for the side screens but could also serve as elements for something up front. Also, thinking about using all three screens panoramically—holding three similar/complementary images on three screens for a sustained period of time would encourage viewer to look around—we would thereby be creating an experience for the audience, not just relation experience or message.

070613 Meeting

Despite the Skype sound problems, I thought that last night's meeting was productive. As I understand it, we each left with a task or set of tasks to work on for next time:

I will continue to experiment with flash to find new ways to combine our media and to use them in interesting ways, while at the same time keeping it simple minimal in large part. I will also begin processing combinations of text and images, as well as ideas for effects and animation, as they come in from you guys.

Nathan says he will plow ahead creating sounds and sound combination. He will also begin preparing to film all of us for the back wall.

David wants to continue working on the filmstrip idea and will flesh out his current ideas about Track 8 of Nathan's sound and also ponder ways to caption images.

Mindy promised to go through images as best she can and come up with pairs or tryptichs that create interesting juxtapositions.

Am I mistaking or leaving anything out? If so, post corrections below as comments.

As you saw, I sent Steve an email about changing the opening date, and I also sent All Souls an email about using their pews. I'll let you know what I hear. Finally, I email Chuck Tomlins about meeting with Nathan and me. He might have some input to offer as we solidify what we are doing.

Speaking of which, I'm starting to like the churchy idea more and more. The set up has so many possibilities. The placement of lighted videos on all sides evokes traditional stain glass, as well as the modern reliance of churches on media to promote their messages. The "altar" provides a natural focal point for our viewers used to such a seating/political configuration that allows us to play with it. The three forward screens (from the perspective of the viewer) also evoke so many relevant triplets: the triptych of medieval religious painting, the trinity of course, and our media of text, image, and sound (in fact, I would like to evoke that trio at some point in the installation).

Below are some ideas I've jotted down in my notebook about using flash, and I want to record them here not only for posterity but for your perusal:

• Embed short film clips within projected text or images, in a YouTube type of frame. We could use not only the movies we've taken ourselves but also found films--from the Tulsa Films documentary (there are 2 or 3 clips that are must have's for me), Oklahoma, Tulsa, oil industry promotional films, televangelists from TV, etc.
• One movement could have only films juxtaposed in a series of jumpcuts. We'd just have to make sure the resolution of these films can handle wall-sized projection. Most of them are too small.
  
• I'd like to do a sequence like the one in Fight Club where text pops out of the shot, labeling the furniture in the narrator's apartment like an IKEA catalog. We could do this with our photos of refineries or churches using lines from our texts. This will be easy to do and will resemble the animation in the fourth poem of Tulsita.
• Run text down side or margin of photos as if it were being typed, pipelined, or transmitted. Again, this draws off effects I mastered in the first animation of Tulsita.
• I also want to do more with the effects we used in Tulsita in the interludes attempting to combine text and image (eg and image turning to text, text arranged to form and image, etc).
  
• Since we are doing a church set-up, why not have some of our texts in a bulletin order of service type thing?
  

DG's listening notes, 5/16/07

Listening to sound 5.16.07

Contrails—processed sound from Tulsita

Flatlander High—processed sound from Tulsita—same chords as above but higher

Canal on Crack/ Canals Rending—processed guitar sound, sinister, cavelike

Rabelais Guitar—guitar but processed so it sounds a bit like Biber violin—vaguely medieval, hymnal, as if bowed; then twittering, flipping in and out

Overload Guitar: watery, mostly monotonic, sonic equivalent of watching sonar blips on a screen

trickle: field sound of water gurgling
oil pump: um, oil pump

After fires: Grant reading w/ ember sound beneath

More Light or Not: Church on the Move sermon in which OK driver’s manual is compared to Bible: rules of the road
google search rhymes with Christian church
DOT DOT DOT

Canals Rendered: like oil transformed into a cicada

Slowpump Fizzy: oil pump filter: like a sound buried inside a sound

“our culture is berift”




homework: N gives us 3-5 min sound files, we work with them in some way.

Notes 5/27/07

N8: set up tension in the space (Binod)—competing screens?
set up as if church? Something in front, with pews, and then something behind that unnerves somehow—us reading the poems?
nice to use the space somehow. use the corner? If so, and if there’s emptiness in the middle of the space, will that be active somehow?

Or two things in back, one in front

how to suggest church? 1 pew, folding chairs w/ numbers, book on each chair, altar, chalice, cross, bowl for (holy) water, stage? risers?, books on chairs are bibles/coloring books/oil texts

DG: how can we signify the emptiness/soulessness of contemporary Tulsa churches? defamiliarize this sort of architecture/design, thus calling attention to industrialization of modern churchgoing? Aluminum siding, Starbucks coffee, ugly cheap tables, carpeting, fake flower urns, altarpieces, the driller on the altar—make our own iconography?

M: chairs in diagonal toward corner?

N8: what is our true subject matter? Not so much oil and religion, but the sense of isolation/alienation that we feel, living in/leaving Tulsa.

DG: Oil vs religion—regarding fundamentalist Chr, I’m entirely antagonistic, contemptuous, must struggle w/ living in that environment; w/ oil, I’m agonistic, must register how rooted I am in an oil culture no matter what my intellectual relation to it.

GJ feels implicated in Christianity the way DG feels implicated in oil

Hanson’s debut album: The Middle of Nowhere

DG: in a sense what we’re doing is mapping the emptiness at the geographical, symbolic, economic, and spiritual center of America

Susan Howe: narrative as implied, fragmented narrative, full of fleeting details that may or may not be true, w/ sources pulled in from all over the place—kernels of information

Mojo Curio Company: rich poem for grounding some of these issues

Wakow as an artistic refinery

do we want to generate alienation in people? Brechtian…
N8: television is the opposite of alienation; comfortable. We need to do something other than recreating the feeling of watching PBS on your couch.

MS: might be interesting to have the chairs right up against the short wall, but still projecting onto it, so that your perspective is thrown off, or so that the chairs become part of the perspective

DG: I still like the idea of creating a niche within the space—dropping black curtains, having a sound inside (the oil/water sound from Tulsa, the preacher, etc)

if we do a church, we can do a bulletin using our materials, etc

if we invoke a space (church, movie house), then we can push against it in some way.

Notes 5/20/07

Structure:
tie altogether w/ DG reading all or several of the poems straight? Balanced out w/ other voices mixing, etc, to avoid sense of poetry reading

use filmstrip as recurring motifs—bookends? every other one?
GJ imagines using Grapes of Wrath as a model, interchapters, narration, etc.

poem as machine, form as machinery

homework due Sun

Notes, 5/16/07

Wakow 5/16/07

themes in our photography:

sky—indirectly spiritual, beauty of sky as opposed to landscape
natural vs industrial
ironic harmony of industrial and evangelical
signs: words reorganized, fragmented
advertising transformed into something silly or sinister
windows: blocked-up (DG), broken, reflective, transparent
water manholes, gas meters
connectives: wires, pipes, roads, railroads
debris: detritus of the modern
journey, movement in stasis (our evangelical salesman selling holy oil)
commerce: religion and oil are both businesses. Connects back to advertising, and to writing about commodities (snake oil, holy spring water)

oil as energy dredged from the earth, used to move
vs
religion as attempt to escape earthboundness
but really two sides of the same coin

G: the threat of the downfall of modernity is what has electrified evangelicalism

first well drilled in 1859; American Theocracy: the rise of America is predicated upon the rise of oil
empire’s inability to adapt to the new energy source is the cause of their decline, the stubborn clinging to what worked

images: take bunch more pictures in Catoosa, Guts Church, Church on the Move

text: continue to develop characters, do more writing

sound: need to listen to stuff together, but we can skype it out in a conference call

one session before we leave to bang out a clearer picture of the project

G: chapters—narrative—characters—filmstrips. need more text.
M: exercise: storyboard a few chapters, using text, images, etc?
N: we need the text to emerge improvisationally from the materials we’ve got already

our initials: GDMN (god/man? goddamn?)

some narrative will come out of our current text, some will emerge from photos and sound. That’s how we’ll really integrate the media in this one.

let’s meet regularly from a distance and see how it goes

go to Living Arts again before we leave

technical issues:
M: 3 projectors, while one is going, the other two are frozen, then it switches. The soundtrack keeps going, though it may shift sonically across projectors. Similar to the installation about auctioneers we saw in Dallas.
Could do only one or two projectors, but the idea of a triptych has a long religious history

If we’re working w/ a triptych, it might be interesting to start w/ an oil derrick (maybe an old one?) that also somehow evokes religion and/or commodity (remember the oil derrick repurposed as advertisement for a hotel on the way back from Bartlesville

sound: I want the sermon to be broken down in parts until you can tell it’s a sermon but can’t make out words

our salesman is a lot like the preacher, both searching for meaning in the world

dip into my church, my washbasin—use image of sinks and tubs

Texas is a real place. Oklahoma is not a real place. It doesn’t exist, is out of joint, there’s no here here.
How is OK defined in the national imagination?
—the musical
—Grapes of Wrath
—oil
—evangelicals
the first is a Hollywood set, the second is a novel, the third has gone dry, the fourth is a story told endlessly and incompletely
We’re creating a sort of lost travel guide to OK
How does OK promote itself now? Route 66, a way to get through, a memory that does not exist.
How else?: pioneer woman, Indian pipe, oil derrick, scissortail (when our senator doesn’t believe in global warming)—all of these are myths, all are nostalgic memories of something that doesn’t and didn’t ever exist
the fact that guidebooks always leave out OK
the fact that no one in NY could remember where we were going

Notes 4/29/07

Notes 4/29/07

W/ tulsita, text was the backbone
here, sound is the backbone. Voiceover more important.

Development of a narrative—connections between the poems that develop a story, weave a narrative

Think Cardiff, Robertson

come up w/ a loose but specific narrative structure? List of characters, etc?

Lonely Soul Oil: use as a kind of word from our sponsor?

Grapes of Wrath: vignettes that separate the parts—turtle crossing road, used car salesman

N’s problem w/ getting a sense of structure, what’s fair game for sound

M: if we come up w/ a narrative structure, it gives a jumping off point for N’s and M’s work process

G: let’s say 7 sections, each with voiceover, separated by interludes, given to N to work with

N: runs the risk of me creating soundtrack for a text

M: much looser than that. Last time, the only thing that tied it together was process. This time we’re trying to focus it by giving it a sense of travel, movement

N: my process is based around sounds I think are interesting. If I think oil pump sound is boring, do we use it, how do we use it, do we process it? Do we use only sounds that come from oil and religion? Could be boring as piss.

G: constraints are going to be productive. N: I’m questioning that.

M: constraints are a starting point, should be a factor in at least one of our modes (text)—but we should be able to open out, not have to take pictures of gas pumps all the time.

D: I’m a little mystified by this: if it becomes less interesting, switch to something else; if it doesn’t end up fitting in, we’ll use it for another project.

N: but if I’m working on something I become attached, and if someone says “this isn’t about O and R,” I’ll wanna punch them. Let’s review sounds as they get made, as we do texts and images.

M: that’s about working in isolation. We need to be more collaborative with the sound as with everything else

G: pictures sound and voices blending a lot, as they did in Tulsita

N: not that hard to soundtrack the voices; not enough. How to go beyond that and bring in a variety of sounds we’re all interested in.

M: likes idea of chapters and vignettes. Combination of soundtrack and other things involving the interludes, other stuff. The soundtrack could be a totally sonic piece. How do we incorporate image w/out competing w/ each other? What if we did do chaps w/ interludes? Have a chap that’s meant to go w/ an image, like a slide show; then the interlude w/out image, just sound.

G: or varying approaches, like one that parodies Ken Burns…

N: in favor of having text in small portions, at least on the wall, maybe quoted as if it’s someone’s philosophical sayings

D: I agree; that’s what we accomplished in Tulsita; collaboration of text and visual is part of the point of our process, and we should evolve that in the next project

G: 2 models: 1) chaps loosely related, connected by sonic interludes; 2) frame narrative into which chaps ostensibly fit—frame is intro and conclusion, and interludes

[fight and argument—blah blah blah]

then we start reading the texts:

“Here are artists”: first part of it, M and I imagine a filmstrip style, with the sound and the same border—can we photoshop this? Nathan wants one to melt. Filmstrips also usually have text—high five! Also, one of the fun things about filmstrips was that the sound and image always went out of whack.

Here are artists, yuppies, and Baptists
Here is a block in the America of heart
Here is manifest wind coursing through oil derrick park
tfos
ykcits
drah
who work for oral.

Images: Tulsa parks, Glenpool, oil parks, derricks, refineries (through oil derrick park)
flag sticking up (manifest wind)
who work for oral—janitors at ORU

get some brown recluses jumping

If I experienced a wave of oil notions, it would sound like this:
first the rusty doublewide door opening into the empty warehouse
then the skyscraper scraping steel
then the motorcycle of advance warning, the apostle
higher, then training my sights lower,
ticking off the paperthin railings as they melt by

images: ticks, melting

skyscrapers/ scrapes/ sorrel/ scapes

“then we then” trying to find sonic equivalents for Nathan’s d.j.ing

“Deep Long”:
two characters: 1) doctor in graphoilogy, “Dr. Cocktail” 2) ape-man

http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/
contains a diagram that describes our process: cumulative production/proven reserves/future discoveries

“Resale the Copious”
Jesus is a doctor like Dr Cocktail—Cocktail as reincarnation of Jesus?

“film strip” or “filmstrip” on youtube

“DavidGrantMindyNathan”: the way G reads it, sounds exactly like a filmstrip

Maybe 2 filmstrips that comment on each other—start and end w/ filmstrips? In the first, the sound and image get out of whack; in the second, the image itself becomes deformed, transformed into a different kind of media.

use the graphoilogy graph, modifying it in various ways over time

6/8/2007 Meeting notes

Nathan and I met in his studio to work on sound. I also showed him the beginnings of a chapter draft in flash.

Nathan’s idea of fourth screen in back with video of us as viewers/hecker—has a big brother, self-reflexive feel; with only occasionally saying something, sometimes just standing there, sometimes speaking without sound; in fact, sounds don’t even have to by synched.

The way LA was set up when we visted is just closed enough to suggest the box, the room, the sanctuary. Our installation is a sanctuary within the sanctuary of Living Arts.

Instead of ch, G says, we could work in modules, little riffs of time in images, motion, and sound. Then, we divide the sound modules in a kind of Chinese recipe—noodles/rice, meat, sauce, veggies—that always go together—that might solve the synch problem.

David read in most of the remaining texts, so we have lots of poetry.

Pick out certain lines and phrases and sounds from poems and have Nathan find the recordings. Use those little chunks in animations.

Reverse the process—give Nathan a flash animation and have him accompany it.

During this installation, we should have every combination of text/sound/image, including dead silence with images moving, still images with sound, etc etc.

We need to take advantage of the space and time that LA affords us without succumbing to the impulse to be too complicated. Spread sound, images, texts, and silence over the space and the time.

Without four sound systems, I’m afraid that it will just be another movie soundtrack.. Nathan says he doesn’t want this either.

We can use other sound systems, on side perhaps, to draw people’s attention to a certain event.

Check out video cameras from TU>

Nathan slowed down some video from Catoosa using Final Cut that is really great.

WE NEED A TRIPOD!

Part of an installation is recognizing the viewers perception within the space of the gallery, in addition to our perception of the material/place.

Figure out how to make a DVD run automatically.

Notes on Nathan's sound homework

Track 1 & 2
Short clip of preacher

Track 3
David reading (The modernity of est lubricates est)
I’d like to see some of the photos from Catoosa here—sandpipers, river, etc.

Track 4
rechanneling of sexual mores

Track 5
similar to track 4—could be the same?

Track 6
Grant reading dig down deeper along with Mindy reading new text (“Deep long rolling”), rain in background.
I see how Nathan is drawing parallels between the two “deep” poems.

Track 7
sermon, Tulsa movie, rig sounds
Too much of the sermon??
marriage (reminds me of the “Interesting Facts you may already know”)

Track 8
“Dot dot dot”
Grant reading from “DavidNathanGrantMindy”. The long chords from Tulsita (taken from Tulsa movie I believe)
Mindy reading from “Deep long rolling”.
cellos?
Great use of sermon in this one, though I’d like to hear more of David’s voice reading our texts than repeats of the sermon stuff from Track 7
7:07-Indians singing Jesus song (more of this)
7:30-David reading “The modernity of est lubricates”—I think we could use other texts rather than repeating


Notes:
I’d like to hear more of the “music” you were making when we were writing
I do think we need to read more of the poetry we’ve written
More oil derrick sounds?

Notes on sounds

070515 Wakow Listening Notes

New processing of some old Tulsita sounds, from Tulsa movie. Nathan feels strong about using this. (Flatlander high)

One track he played while we were writing, Nathan produced from an acoustic guitar (canal’s rending)

Nathan suggested that each chapter have a real broad conception of how we are using sound, not just as soundtrack or layers or background music.

Original key of Tulsita chords in original key (contrails)

Acoustic guitar, sounds at first like violin picsicado (Rabelais guitar); vaguely religious sounding,

Nathan suggested giving us each homework, a 3-5 min sound that we have to put image and text to.

Fluid sounds, low register morphs into high metallic sounds (overload guitars)

Sound of water (trickle)

Oil pump (oil pump)

Nathan reading and grant over embers sound (after fires)

sermon in downtown Tulsa, culled references to books ie OK divers manual (more light or not)
Tulsa clips interspersed in Presby sermon (canal rendered)

long track, beginning with metallic buzz then fading into filtered oil pump sounds (slow pump fizzy)

salt water sound with some other old Tulsita sounds and Presby sermon

“sermonicity” –Nathan

The part with David reading on several tracks is already what I imagine the sound track to this movie to be.

The tryptich is very enticing to me because of the long religious history to the form.

Notes from meeting 4/20/07

Frames juxtaposing still photos with short movies along a wall. Maybe even giving it a “stations of the cross” type effect. Other frames might have just subtly changing images. when you walk in, it feels like a normal gallery show.

We could still do this in a large scale, with projectors doing the images. Most of the gallery would be dark.

Could have a box-type situation where the projectors were on the outside and the images could be seen from the inside or outside while still retaining clarity of resolution.

maybe we could have five projectors projected into five frames along the two major walls

Next we need to:
Text from sound
Image from sound
and image from text

links to gas stations and Alexandre Hogue

Gas station sounds

weird OK Centennial website

Oil in the Sandhills

essay on Hogue

Crucified Land

Hogue Bio

TU's holdings in Hogue's papers

Wakow minutes 4/14/07

Shazzam, 'kowers:

Sound ideas:
local news and media?
church/religion sounds
oil: the physical sound, sounds and lines from movies

oil/water
lack of water—drought, landlocked (ties up to dust bowl)
relation entre oil/religion and water? Holy water, transportation
unspoken third term in a triangle
sound of the explosion at the OKC memorial: the hearing is about drilling for water, then interrupted by an explosion caused by ingredients for petroleum-based fertilizer

baptism vs transportation of goods; both industrial

2007 is the 100th birthday of the gas station

Do we know what happened between two days before the oil boom in OK and 2 weeks after? Like Saudi Arabia, in which enormous amounts of money cause a drastic rift? Or a surge in population? etc

all the churches are built in the 20s and 30s—they are literally coming out of the ground at the same time as oil

what were they using to get oil out of the ground? water?

is there a causal relationship between the oil boom and dust bowl? For instance, when did wide-scale damming begin in the state? What kind of power did it provide? I’ve heard that damming changed the climate here, making it more humid in summer—is there some correlation between the dust bowl and damming?

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/RADIO/c_w/guthrie.html
In 1926 after returning briefly to Okemah, Woody set out for Pampa, TX to join his father. There he began painting signs, but an uncle bought him a guitar and taught him to play.
"And there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about. . . . I never did make up any songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs or songs about what all's wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in the country was thinking. And this has held me ever since."

reading: have someone w/ strong OK accent read some of our source texts? But we ourselves should read our poems.

the OK book section M read from was about missionaries

what about more testimonial, site specific, or process specific readings?

dry, technical readings that link up, perhaps drawn from TU library

write some connective sentences? write in church signs? (M says no)

deal w/ the original Oral Roberts building on Boulder and 18th?

our own sort of testimonials, specifically detailed observations of sites that we record? Photos do that well, but the voice description may add

“rooms and brains and ear canals” –description of psycho-acoustics, but a great title for something

Wakow notes 3/28/07

Wakow notes 3/28/07

Use Tulsita as a separate computer screen as you come in, that you can play through it, in addition to the main exhibit? Unless the main event is so awesome.

Tulsita still doesn’t manage to produce true integration between sound and the other elements. N8 wants more of an organic development in the way sound emerges in the work.

M: as an aficionado of This American Life, she’s interested in stories—incorporating those, sound-wise?

N8: voice overs, narration, that explains something about the process.

M: or recording our conversations, or using sermons, etc. Then can we learn something about sound processing, use our computers, make it more of a group concept?

Copy the sounds of oil and religion, integrate them into some kind of soundtrack for the project?

Some sort of photo project where the images are created by sound vibration?

Create computer programs like the itunes one that incorporates photos to a soundtrack?

what about visual elements of sound in terms of the files themselves? The way the sound looks vs what we expect them to sound like.

taking the sound of an oil derrick, seeing what it looks like visually, then abstracting it and making it beautiful—cyanotypes, etc. (Somebody did that, says N8, with a spoken alphabet or something)

or use as layering—the spikes in the wave echo the spikes of the prayer tower or of flowers

our great achievement shall be to make art out of Tulsa. Larry Clark showed the dark side of this model Midwestern city; can we reverse it, showing a postmodern beauty in a strip mall wasteland?

figure out ways to work from sound to text. Transcription software? What would that do to a kind of crazy set of sounds?

for next week: get a collection of sounds, build a text based on it?

Put an archive of sounds on our computer, then somehow wire them together and do an improv in which we play the sounds off each other and record the product.

Our City of Manifest Destiny

Who Knew Tulsa?

We reach for it, famished
an approximation
this kind desert
with insides blunted for the fast of will

it exists
ignited in the rising
buildings of clay
a city manifest

We did not know a thing in Tulsa.
But worthy elegance has treated our drainage.

Here, under the earth, which are memories?
Which art-treated?
Hipness and pit, which good taste?
We have found our city of opportunity.

It is said they damage their house in order to remain.
Opinion E: Undeniable aesthetics.

We have the goal of more elasticity
In order to give the impression of progress

The gift of the article is revolution
We cut ethical
It is the accumulation of demand we attempt to deny

We began to come with hunger
but close ourselves as soon as we think we will make it.

Tulsa. Who knew?




We were getting hungry and approaching Tulsa, Oklahoma so we thought we'd stop off for a quick bite at Subway or the like. We didn't know a thing about Tulsa, except that it existed. What we found was a town clearly on the rise; industrial-chic brick buildings encased galleries, shops and restaurants worthy of any major arts-concerned metropolis. But the vibe here, hipness and good taste notwithstanding, is unmistakably small-town. Tulsans could easily qualify as our nation's friendliest people.
By chance, we parked next to a store, Dwelling Spaces, that was having its grand opening party. The loftlike shop was smartly stocked with eclectic-modern doodads, whimsical Alessi kitchenware and T-shirts silk-screened "I'm down with T-town." The owner, Mary Beth Babcock, was living out a dream ("It was just time for this," she said) and provided tasty hors d'oeuvres from adjacent restaurants Tsunami Sushi and Blue Dome Diner. Jen and I bought some trinkets since we didn't think we'd easily be able to find stuff like this elsewhere.
We walked out to find a restaurant and passed the May Rooms Gallery, which seduced us in. The feel was the same as the rest of the neighborhood: industrial, lofty and undeniably aesthetic. The current exhibit, called Cuba 06, featured revolutionary propaganda posters, ethnic sculpture and moody black-and-whites of Castro. It's the collection of Milly Moorhead West, who was there regaling us with tales of her 20 trips to Cuba. She asked us where we were from; we told her.She asked us what we were doing here; we told her. She asked us where we were sleeping; we said good question. She said we should stay the night at her house. We were humbled by the offer -- here was that Southern hospitality we've all heard about -- but after thanking her, we told her that we were aiming to make more headway toward Texas.
Dinner, rather than Subway, was at James E. McNellie's, a happening neighborhood joint with all-American food, a pamphlet-length list of worldwide beers (Jen was excited to order her rarely found favorite, a Belgian brew called Leffe Blonde) and a talented band playing upstairs. We left full, happy and marveling at our good fortune for having stumbled upon Tulsa. Who knew?

Full 2nd draft ready for view

Click on the Tulsita (2nd draft) link above to see the whole thing, with four buttons on each poem, elongated interludes, cleaned-up animation on "Big Box Block", and no pop-up photos.

Tulsita 1&2 ready for review

After staying up til 4am Mon and then working all morning, I think I finally have all the bugs worked out on the photo pop-ups. Click this link to see Big Box Block in your browser. Roll the mouse over the screen to open photos. There should be seven.

OK, now it's Wed, and I finished Modest, OK with pop-up photos. There should be three in this file. Check them both out and let me know what you think.

Things to consider:

1. Do we need the preloader graphic that lets viewer know file is downloading?
2. Should the photo files be preloaded for too for speed--did you notice a delay before they popped up?

A non-photo related question concerns the use of texts. So far, we have decided to use images as pop-ups on text that refers to sound and to use sound on text that is imagery. Should we have texts pop up when we refer to writing? For example, I still have some texts you sent me, like Mindy's nets, that I haven't used and would like to, so we could link those to places in either Dig Down Deeper or other poems. What do you think?

Cutups

I made some cut ups using the Cutup Engine 2.0 and the websites below. I'm thinking of combining them into the best one to link to the words "big box block" in Tulsita. What do you think?
http://www.nous.org.uk/oulipo.html
http://www.oerb.com/restoration/environ-index.asp
http://www.churchonthemove.com/about/
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/last.html
http://www.livingarts.org/
http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/larry_clark/
http://www.cityoftulsa.org/
http://www.tulsahistory.org/learn/riot.htm
http://www.urbantulsa.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A15080
http://imdb.com/title/tt0048445/posters
http://www10.toysrus.com/about/
http://www.circuitcity.com
http://sites.target.com/site/en/corporate/page.jsp?contentId=PRD03-001086

Penultimate Tulsita

There are only a few things left to do on Tulsita flash:

1. Add skip and back buttons to the poems
2. Fine-tune Big Box Block animation
3. Add sound to intro

The big question i have for WaKOW is, Should we add interactive pop up sounds, images, and texts to the poems before the animation begins? Not a lot of work but we should probably all contribute to what is linked to what and where.

After we do these things, we'll have an interactive Tulsa extravaganza.

Oil and Religion writing exercies

Idea for animation: Using images to mask text (see the work of John Clark).

We began working at 2:50 using the cut-up and email method. The first step was gathering material from our various sources, in print and online, etc. an pasting them to a Word document. We set out 20-25 minutes for this step (but used 40). We then emailed the file to the person to our right and begin the second step, arranging what we were sent. Deletion counted as arrangement. This step lasted another 30 minutes. We then sent that file on to the same person with the only stricture that we can arrange and not add (unless it was our own), and then again until we ended up with 16 texts. We then read some of them outloud.

COTM

Before the meeting, I listened to the Church on the Move sermon from Mar 4. I was hoping to find the one that Mindy and David listened too (maybe they still have it on their iTunes?). Pastor Willie George gives a brief history of the church (it's 20 yr anniversary) and explains why it has "prospered." He draws comparisons between his church and Jesus's.

Quotes and notes: "One out of every seventy people in the Tulsa metro area goes to this church." "The answer(to why we prosper): we live by a code." "God picks the weak, the less educated, etc because they naturally don't think they have all the answers; they know they can't do this alone." God cannot use the most talented, gifted, most educated because they are smug. "It's the code not the personality that makes the difference." Used story of The Sacketts by Louis L'amour (really, the movie with Tom Selleck) as illustration of how to live by a code. Points out CSN&Y's song ("only the first line, the rest of the lyrics are terrible"): "you, you out on the road, must have a code that you can live by." "We can't compromise our integrity, and there's the difference. We live by a code. And our code is different. It's a code of life. It has the power of God in it." "Resist the Devil and he will flee from you." "We have people here who have built successful businesses because they built them on the Word." "A good name is better to be had than riches (Proverbs), so don't build your business on sand." He is implying that one should stay honest and not over-extended in business. Not to do "what is convenient, easy, and produces the quickest gain." "Can you think of things today that weren't acceptable 40 or 50 years ago?" Today's culture is built on sand. [Makes me think of The Channels.] "The sand, I change, but the rock changes me. That's why I live by a code." [That really makes no sense] There are five essential codes for churches and individuals, and over the next five weeks he'll tell us what that means.

Old and New Notes

I got a new phone yesterday, and I when I went through my old phone to see what was left on it, I found these voice notes:

• I want to bring the ideas of face-lifts, face-transplants etc into what Mindy has been doing with faces in her photos (this is from way back). Tulsa is kinda of a Frankenstein city, a bit monstrous, cobbled together from fragments of other cities, industries, etc.
  
• Dec 26: The anti-environmental aspect of evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity fits hand-in-hand with driving SUVs and burning fossil fuels indiscriminantly. (In fact, I sent Kate a story from the NYT yesterday in which an letter from some major leaders said “that Cizik [National Assoc of Evangelicals] and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.” What? Destorying the environment is not a great moral issue??
• I want to use the comment/track changes features on Word to make a totally annotated/illustrated poem in the vein of the Humament. I also may be able to use Adobe Acrobat (I got the full version last semester) since it has some neat highlighting features.
• Port of Catoosa should be on our list of road trips. I must have industries there having to do with oil.
• Make poems in Tulsita interactive before they are animated. Have some of the words be hotlinked so that photos would pop up. The photos could have little x-boxes on them that would close the photos when clicked. With the Doby Bowl poem, different nets would pop up when certain words were clicked. I still have the ones Mindy sent that I haven't used yet.
• What all of our media (text, photo, sound) have in common is that all of them can be projected. This is why I am so set on a video installation with projector. Just need the projector...
  

Finished Draft

Click on the "Tulsita animation" link above to see a completed draft (yay) of the whole project. If you can, watch it a couple of times and make notes of things you like changed.

I'm not totally happy with it, as there are things I want to improve and alter, but I want to see what you guys have to say first.

Wicked Googly Book Search

Here are my "notes" from the 2/11 intelligence briefing at that undisclosed location by the old oak tree on S. 129th E. St. Ave.

Instead of thinking of the sound as accompaniment, think of it as a “fourth wall.”
Or: sound as core, visuals radiating out from it and devising different solutions to it.
That would mean that sound comes first, image and text are orchestrated in relation to that.
There are programs that can integrate variability into the process, but could we learn them in time?
Do we want something passive as opposed to interactive? Given the constraints of this exhibition space, probably.
Something will have to be
doable
used to working

From Google Books, search on “Tulsa”:

Indeed Tulsa has steadfastly refused to use Federal funds for this purpose, which 
Mayor Inhofe considers a key distinction between Tulsa and some aties to ...

When I left Tulsa I planned on coming back in a month. ... When I was in Tulsa 
next time, there was another guy. 1 split for good." Denver Dave sighed. ...

n 1923 the University of Tulsa, with four brick or stucco buildings and about 
260 students, ... Tulsa was a center of wealth, of energy, and of romance. ...

The client didn't want to hit him in Tulsa, but now there's no choice. ... 
Tulsa, and you'll be met at the airport and somebody will show you around and ...

A Guide to the Study of the Pentecostal Movement - Page 937
by Charles Edwin Jones - 1983 - 1249 pages
The faith adventures of Evangelist TL Osborn. Tulsa, 1950. 285p. ... Tulsa, ? 1953.
299p. 8519 Osborn, Tommy Lee, 1923- . Revival fires sweep Cuba; ...

Our x ray equipment I think was from World War II, so I thank the Senator for 
the visit to Tulsa, and the x ray equipment did come about. ...

Since then, Tulsa has grown far to the east and southeast and the neighborhood 
and its people have aged. Retail, industrial enterprises, and major highways ...

Carry Me Back
by Laura Watt - 1997
The Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Tulsa smelled of diesel fumes, cigarette
smoke, and slightly rank bodies. Not a whiff of Dial soap anywhere. ...

Mr. Cunningham, tell me how in the world Tulsa has a port; I didn't know Tulsa 
... I served as the first chairman of the City of Tulsa-Rogers County Port ...

Third Girl from the Left - Page 109
by Martha Southgate - Fiction - 2005 - 272 pages
The bus ride back to Tulsa was many hours long and many hours uncomfortable. ...
When they pulled up to the bus stop in Tulsa, Angela looked around. ...

But the city fathers of Tulsa had worked more shrewdly. "I was later told," said 
JB, "that about a half-dozen far-sighted men bought much of the downtown ...

Guy, a native of that city, shouted, "Don't ever write Tulsa, Oklahoma! Just say 
Tulsa. Everyone knows there is only one Tulsa in all the world! ...

Reg-ular Sunday services televised from various Tulsa churches. Tulsa Council of 
Churches schedules the appearances. One hour, Sundays, live remote, ...

To Hell in a Handbasket - Page 328
by H Allen Smith - 1962 - 341 pages
She took her ease on a wicker chair and we talked of Tulsa. "I finished high
school," she said, "and one day just walked into the Tribune office and said I ...

They can stay and rot • Tulsa! To this day, in any man who had once been a boy
in a basement, the mere mention of your name suffices to revive the shiver of ...

Tulsa was then a mere collection of wooden shacks on the prairie and just on the
... As Tulsa developed, Hurley developed. He was in on the ground floor. ...

The city of Tulsa lies along the Arkansas River at an elevation of 700 feet above 
sea ... At a latitude of 36°, Tulsa Is far enough north to escape the long ...

News. a story for Sunday's editions of the Tulsa World. "We had Native Americans 
in gangs, ... "In Tulsa that's very unusual. Ours are more multicultural. ...

The Bar Flies, Winners at Tulsa Barder shop harmony has once more become a national 
institution, and in a Big Way. The habit of singing close harmony in ...

I was thinking that we were going to Tulsa, then from Tulsa we'd fly on to Washington. 
When I was airborne about an hour and a half, I called the stewardess ...

"But I've been trying to get Tulsa to give me its sewage sludge for years." 
Volentine owns and operates Tulsa Grass and Sod Farm north of the Arkansas River ...

In my hometown of Tulsa, we are experiencing a situation that 
... Like many other regions, Tulsa has experienced in recent weeks sharp ...

Yet folks around Muskogee have become accustomed to this former underseas raider 
resting docilely in the little park just off the Muskogee-Tulsa Turnpike. ...

"The Little Red House" on the University of Tulsa campus, which she directed, 
provided a library of feminist theoretical texts, a visiting speaker's program ...

Wakow prattlings, 2/18

I made up some stuff and am now claiming that we discussed it on Sunday. Next up: City Council minutes.

Wakow 2/18/07

(present: Mindy, David, Nathan)

how to more closely fuse text and image?

Nathan: if you can do illegibly small text, then do illegibly large text too, so large you can see texture

M: more direct ways to tie in text/image/sound:
write text then illustrate?
Write based on images and sounds we’ve collected?

Go out to sites, collect, then write on what we’ve found later.

M is heading toward the one projector idea.

maybe give Grant some of the wicker deer materials, have him try to work into the photo?

M: I don’t want to be another banal Tulsa artist. I don’t care whether it’s interesting to people or whether people like it, I just want to do something that feels right and organic.

Focusing on integrating the various elements seems like a top priority.

Write 4 line poems? or come up with other techniques (only write 4 words)

we could all write a poem and then the edits could be recorded and incorporated into a flash thing: you actually see poems being crossed out and rearranged.

Could also do more with nets—write much more and then work on creating nets

can also borrow from Tom Phillips, cover words with images (small photos?—kind of a fake rebus?)

sound-integration:
Orson Welles: “The art of film is in the editing.” The issue of how we pick and choose is very interesting.

We can also play sound and sit around the table and write, or generate images somehow.

Oil can be used as a kind of backbone that heightens relevance to geopolitical moment

we should try to bring it back to the themes when and if it feels relevant

we don’t need to go to a church in order to produce something on religion—we just need to figure out what interests about religion and how we can engage with it.

Listened to the Church on the Move Sermon—he’s like a stand-up comic crossed w/ a used car salesman: defensive, hyperconscious of the crowd’s interest, then segues directly into the veiled suggestion that the church can make you money.

For next week let’s do some writing: use some image and sound and maybe google books as well as starting points. Perhaps also recoup material from first writing exercise (wicker deer etc).

Meet in evening, probably, since I’ll be flying in at 5.

Let’s think also about sound more conceptually: what is the “sound” of oil?
Gas station
road building
food creation

food as another issue—number one market for chain restaurants, homogenozation of food culture

Tulsa feels like a weird simulation city: everything middle class feels not real. Lower class feels very real. Upper middle class city feels like an idea of city instead of one that’s grown. As if you need to have one of every chain restaurant to be a real town. People here are happy with a certain standard and just feel like calling it New York or whatever.

Deep class insecurity: people want to believe that they are “people of class” and spend a great deal of time convincing themselves of this fact.

Summary Report for Derrick Operators, Oil and Gas

http://online.onetcenter.org/link/summary/47-5011.00

Scene 4 final touches

I think I've figured out a way to end scene 4, and thus Tulsita as a whole, and I'm just making a note of it here. Let me know what you think:

The sounds at the end of this segment are very subtle, so I thought I would have a few texts (ones that you sent me) accumulate in a faded, barely legible form. These words would slowly fade leaving the page blank as the sounds eerily wind down.

Question of the Day

What if Tulsa itself were conceived of, promoted as, and run like a mega-church??

Better yet, what if mega-churches promoted themselves like OERB, the oil-industry's public and overly made-up face. I'll give anyone $1 who can figure out what it stands for!

Tulsita Animation Update

I've ftp'd the latest versions of the Tulsita animation to Mindy's site--just click the "Tulsita animations" link above, and it should open in your browser.

I'm not sure how I'm going to fix the problem of it opening in the browser instead of a stand-alone player that has the capacity to go full screen.

What do you guys think?

Promotional Tulsa

I just went to the Goodwill today to scavenge, and look for things to photograph (inside!) since it's so friggin' cold out there that the thought of scavenging for images outside is not very appealing.

I found two promotional items about Tulsa. I'll show you what they are when you see the photos.

I want to pick up on Grant's earlier post where he was musing about using a fake promotional Tulsa paradigm to enter into this project. I like that, because it's not as direct, and frankly could be fun. One of my major issues with this place is this tremendous disconnect between the image Tulsa thinks it's putting forth and the actual reality.

I won't know how I feel photographing these types of things until I do it, but right now it's appealing to me. Meanwhile, if everyone could keep a look out for these types of items that would be great.

First Black publisher in OK

Found this on the New York Public Library website--it was the only thing that came up when I searched "photo Oklahoma". Not much, but maybe a future lead. Here are the vitals on the photo:

Image Caption:

S. Douglas Russell, a Black newspaper man at Langston, Cole and Kingfisher, 1895.

Created Date:

1895

Library Division:

NA /

Description:

18 cm. x 13 cm.

Specific Material Type:

Photographs

Item Physical Description:

18 cm. x 13 cm.

Subject(s):

African American men

African American newspapers

African Americans -- Oklahoma

Langston (Okla.)

Publishers

Digital Image ID:

1131162

Digital Record ID:

434483

NYPL Call Number:

Photo # 5494

Church on the Move

OK, you all have to check out churchonthemove.com (note the dot com, not dot org)--it's a very slick site. Most of all, you have to see the pastor's full name to believe it. Here are some non-threatening ways we can capture their discourse:

Hear Pastor George Monday through Friday on KNYD 90.5 FM from 11:00-11:15 a.m. and on KCFO AM 970 from 10:30-10:45 a.m. On Sundays, Pastor George can be heard on KRMG AM 740 from 7:30-8:00 a.m. The Gospel Bill Show airs on KGEB Channel 53. (Check local listings for airtimes.)

How to End It & Nagging Ideas for Living Arts

I’m almost done with scene 4, but I’ve reached the part in the soundtrack where the sounds are very faint and subtle, so I’m thinking I want the animation to match that.

Also, I’ve been thinking that I like the idea of doing a pastiche of a Tulsa promotional film/presentation for our Living Arts installation. It could still have Oil and Religion as it’s two main focuses. In fact, all of the things we included in the mocumentary would tie back to those themes, mimicking the way PR people sometimes will stretch associations to the point of incredulity.

We have discussed, though, how we want to avoid merely parodying Tulsa, which is not hard to do. At the same time, a more abstract or surreal approach to our method and presentation could help us prevent that. For instance, Nathan and Mindy had the idea of including a version of “The Channels,” the new, crazy development idea for the river, in the promotion. However, our version would float above the river in a sort of Gulliver’s Travels type way, above Tulsa but not of Tulsa (in fact, that could be it’s motto). By combining things we’d actually like to see happen in Tulsa along with parody of the plans of The Channels developers, not to mention surreal and highly aestheticized imaginative spaces, we can attain a neutral, if still critical, pastiche. Of course, the issues of oil and religion can tie in in several ways—the floating above can be spun as a way to “get closer to God” and the island could be powered totally by “recycling fumes from the refineries below” etc etc.

I’ve been keeping this diary for a while now, but I think making it a blog would not only allow us to share information when it inspires us, but also to use it as a portal to Mindy’s server where we could store larger files, such as flash, jpgs, and mp3s. Even if they don’t like the idea, I’d like to keep it for my own benefit and keep my notes there. I hope they're up for it because I think ultimately that the blog could serve as a supplement to our final project for our audience by documenting and including the process into the final product.

Scene 4 animation and WaKOW meeting minutes

David finally sent me his remix of Death/Metal, but I was unsure of how to animate the new poem. The sound during this part has David’s voice repeating in a sped-up, electronic tone. So, I thought it would be appropriate to put the poem down at the bottom of the page and having each word flicker (like the Doby Bowl) and then drop straight down and turn at a right angle and fly into its position. Question is, should I do it randomly (or semi-randomly to build in new meanings as the poem assembles) or in order. Well, see. Oh, btw, the whole poem will fade, leaving the words of the new poem in place. They will then fall into their new places from there.

In the meeting:

Nathan and David wondered if the “interscenes “shouldn’t be their own thing. And certainly we all agreed that the photos could stand on their own and fit a large scale animation in an installation. For example, the Living Arts space could handle three large projections on the walls—two on the long side wall and one on the long back wall.

Show and Tell:

1. Nathan had photos to show.
2. I have bibliographies and newspaper pdfs.
3. Mindy and David had bubkiss...

Things to think about:

Where to get

• projectors (ask Steve, Glen, Chuck Tomlins, etc)
• speakers (All Souls?)

House Art Show

Applying for grants through

• TU—exhibitions grant
• OK visual arts council
• English Dept/Dean’s office

Podcasts of supplementary sound

Could we program it so that the images would change depending on the sound or vice versa?

(We could if we learn the software and buy the hardware)

I said that I think we are making a movie

but we also could include related projects (photos, books, texts)

Having two projectors would allow us to present the duality of Oil/Religion but also to deconstruct the binary.

Question: how much of the Tulsita materials will we use in the new project?

I assumed that it was going to be all new stuff…unless, as David said, the old stuff is relevant

Nathan wondered how the House Show stuff would relate to the Living Arts stuff—would it be the same—we don’t want to tip our hand.

Interscenes and Death/Metal progressing

Been working late nights this week to finish this project at least to a point where we could submit it to an online journal. Nathan finally got me phrases for Death/Metal, but I’m still waiting on the other two. Mindy did finally get me two nets that she made out of Dig Down.

Mindy was also able to get me some “posterized” versions of some of the photos we submitted to Living Arts. She had the idea, above, to gradually animate them in a sort of paint-by-numbers scheme, which gave me tons of ideas as to how to show the language that undergirds the places and images we see every day.

At any rate, I thought this short animation would serve great as “interscenes,” transitions between the various poems. They could have sound or not (I don’t think the Green Door short will work with sound—it’s too slow a file because of all the text animation). I did the first interscene with the wicker deer photo mindy sent according to the paint-by-numbers idea, but I thought it would reverse it wit hteh green door, moving the animation in the opposite direction. Fading into text then fading into text that resembles the shape of the objects in the photo, then fading into and stopping at the photo. One more should do it, but I haven’t given thought to what it will be yet.

Instead, I’ve been tweaking the interscenes and in Scene 4 adding Nathan’s texts to Death/Metal. I hope to finish Scene 4 this weekend to show to WaKOW and to get approval to add the interscenes to the full project. Another idea I’ll run by them is to add hyperlinks to keywords in the texts that pop up photos when clicked. The photos would in turn have little x-boxes to click to close them. I think these pop-ups would work best when the poem is not in motion. This interactivity would be idea for an online zine environment even if it would be useless in an installation.

Thoughts on the Tulsita Flash

It will probably be necessary to create a downloading bar graph to show viewer how much has downloaded.

The fla file I created using the 15 photos we submitted to Living Arts might make for a nice intro page (I think I’ve decided against a title page like with Action, Yes. I want it to run as one movie). I need to ask Nathan to come up with a sound file that might accompany it. It’s now 17.5 seconds, but I could stretch it out. I also could combine it with Tulsita-intro.

Yesterday, I was looking at Beehive online mag—it seems like a good venue for this piece. Arras.net is not—it’s Brian Kim Stephan’s home page, basically, and does not accept submissions. I need to look at some of my other links and start contacting them.

N8 coming through...

Nathan had some interesting ideas for animation for the Oil project:

At some point it might be cool to bring in huge -

takes up the whole screen - font that shinks or bleeds

back so you can read it. Varying textures and colors

on the fonts. Black font - like oil - w/ liquid

effects would be good, I think. Crumbling-to-dust

and/or wind effects....

WaKOW meeting minutes

Meeting with WaKOW

Mindy: slowly dissolve photo into a paint-by-numbers with text instead of numbers

Nathan: make images out of smaller images—each photo standing for a pixel in larger image. Viewer could control zooming in and out.

See www.photomontage.com

Tasks:

• Write Missy about money theology (what is the name of the term?)
• Go to Christian Bookstore
• Shoot abortion billboards
• Attending megachurch services
• Architecture is interesting too
• Shoot refineries
• Oral Roberts trip
• Record TV shows
• Look online for sermons
• Research history of Tulsa: relation of oil to building of churches in Tulsa
• Would Pet Eng dept be a resource?
• Snuggs lecture guy—book on religion and environmentalism
• Visit Glenpool

Deadline:

Have something to share by Feb 11 at 2 pm.

Flash Scene 3 and problems putting it all together

Today I took a step toward making the text an image, in the vein of Charles Olson and Susan Howe, by arranging the words and letters on the stage (interesting semantics from Flash) and then splitting them, rotating them and scattering them.

….Or not….Maybe I won’t be able to import the movies into each other. When I tried it, it just put the movie in its separate layer without sound. I guess I’ll go back to the idea of combining the scenes under the umbrella of a master file, probably the Tulsita title page that I made as one of my first attempts at Flash, and have them linked with buttons that move to the next poem. Each poem will also then need a play button that the viewer will push to start the sound and animation. I will begin working on that while I am waiting for the “homework” to come in from the rest of the Wakowites.

I was able to get a simple push button to work so that it loaded a movie when I pressed it. This is probably the solution to follow. I think it would make it easier if I broke up the scenes into separate files.

Animating Death

One of the things I considered today was the speed of the animation on Death. I’m not sure I want to leave lines static long enough for people to read them completely because that would imply that the line are somehow aesthetic objects worthy of consideration. Part of keeping a fragment a fragment is not just text in space but also in time. A glance at a line is a way of making a fragment, since the sense can’t be fully garnered in the time given.

Messing around with the program after I had gotten to the ¼ mark on Death, I tried the “Import” command to see what would happen. Like publishing, it took a long time, which probably means it imports all the symbols, frames, tweens, and other data from the movie complete. So I now think that it won’t be a problem to have it run as a single movie without the need for actionscripts, etc.

Integrating images--the big questions

While meditating today, I got some ideas for integrating photos into this movie. Although I think I want to submit it somewhere without photos, I’d like to continue working on integrating the photos we took at the time we were writing these poem and making the sound.

There are several possibilities:

1. The photos could appear in simple slide shows between the poems
2. The photos could appear in a slide show during the animation of the text
3. The photos could be activated by clicking on key words (we might alert viewers to this in an intro or on title page)
4. The photos could be animated during the text animation

At any rate, I could create a master movie in which the photo animation appears concurrently next to the text animation in a larger window (esp for #2 above). Or, the slide shows could be linked to the text animations within a master movie if they ran sequentially. However, I really like the idea of combining both #3 and one of the other options because it would make the piece more interactive and allow us to utilize more of the photos we took.

In the meantime, I should ask Mindy to convert all the photos we used in the Art Show slide show to PNG files (I think). Check on that.

Oh, that reminds me—I promised to host the next House Art Show, so I better get on that—we should hold it on the anniversary of that last in my house.

Knowing Nathan, he’ll ask me how this animation or the principles I’m using to animate the poem, relate to Tulsa or the project as a whole. One of the justifications has to be, especially for Dig and Death, that when first writing these poems using “musical chairs” and four computers, we often drew upon the words and images from the passage written before ours. In a sense, we were recombining words much like I am doing in my animations. The animations just make that method visible and explicitly part of the text. In this way, the animations act as meta-commentary on the process that produced the poems.

To go over it again: The questions we are asking again and again in this project are

How do you put text into time like sound?

How do you represent music as an image?

How do you convert sound into text?

How does an image become musical?

How do you blend text and image?

How is an image translated into words?

Of course, the last one is how can all three—text, image, sound—work together seamlessly?

Don’t forget movies: Fantastic Tulsa Films, Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Outsiders, etc. and stock images from Tulsa (check the library website for pictures of campus as well as of the Tula riots).

Rearranging Death

I’m now thinking that using only the words from Death/Metal would be too limiting and too much like the previous poem. Outside of the animation, the idea is the same—there are other poems ‘trapped’ inside this one. If I used words/letters from all the other poems too, it might give me some more leeway. Words from other poems could come from outside the text.

To make new combinations of the words from the entire quartet, I made a list of all the words in a Word file, separated by commas, and then pasted them into Excel, where I could sort them alphabetically, each word to a cell. The procedure created an interested array of words across rows and down columns. I got some pretty amazing results, like this:

Nihilists fiat about the crap, if in thing of Hoppin truck then rising:

Oh Year’s is skin and can in my Oklahoma, in Days, into nothing

it believes is townswept, find The and know Midwest, a more

sun, as they believes, hoped water need not the oneself, the it—

Day wonderful steel lawn, believe and make it old, kind loving

you dry of believe, the above, about skin can, if crazy, think

New warm, Lower watered oil of—of Death—away, over and

within gin, scarfing everything, waiting days, hands, and for one say.

Canals my how But here when doesn’t riff-raff That city—by any

Then metal—know born The Tulsa in the one think severed.

Do shakes which the shake Satanic Model They else up bounds off

the you, dirt biggest sense—it—something—death severely of newly

the mainstream canal in You type tolerate of be, must like go, one in

outside Venice, Middle killing then how from love righteous it, Ford,

submerged a you, one’s, if dirt, you, my difference on Satan, the End.

Dip it, middle Caboose, honestly, that they little toe scarification

from the Dig doesn’t matter more sand, chokes it, wings it.

And that poem I simply transcribed from the Death/Metal column, which got cast in that arrangement when I sorted the first (or first two) columns alphabetically. Anyway, the concordance really makes it easier to take the words out of their original contexts and create new, interesting combinations.

Hauling in the Nets

The guys got their nets to me today, so I decided to start working on Dig Down instead of Death/Metal. It shouldn’t take me long, I don’t think.

As for Death/Metal, I was thinking that some of the alignments of words could be scattered like a Howe poem, not always in prose lines. Each of the poems is linear, so some scattering might be nice.

Tulsita Schism

I’m running into some problems with the size of the file, I think. As I was trying to animate the beginning of scene 3, Dig Down Deeper, it was taking a few seconds to turn each word into a symbol. I soon discovered that this was because there were already so many symbols in the library. So, I decided to put scene three in its own movie, but I’m not sure how I will link it to the other two yet. I might make each poem its own movie and link them together within a larger “parent movie” (see Ch 12, Flash 5! pp 358-383). If I do this, I may have to have a button that would bring up the next movie, rather than them playing successively. I think it important, however, to retain the idea of the poem staying static without sound until the view pushes a “play” button. We may just have to add an extra step. In some ways, this could be a good thing, making the movie a bit more interactive, allowing the viewer to go in any order she chooses, as will the Action Yes html version. But it may not be good for an installation where it has to play successively.

2/3 through fading Modest, OK

Worked late last night and am 2/3 finished.

I found out this morning that Roy Clark is from Tulsa. It reminded me that for the next step in our project toward a possible movie installation that I wanted to get clips/images from some of the films we are working with—Oklahoma, Tulsa, etc—and we can add Hee Haw to that list too.

The animation on Modest has been basically a four-step process: 1) insert a keyframe in each layer/letter where I want the dissolve to begin and then one frame later in the layer below, 2) placing keyframes at the end of the fade (approx 20 frames or 1 sec. away), 3) changing each character into a symbol at the end keyframe and then changing the tint to white, and 4) putting motion tween the two keyframes. For some of the fade, I timed it with the voice-over, but that ends basically in the middle of the piece, with the remainder fading at a very steady, mechanical rate.

I’m hoping that the mechanistic fade will draw attention and enact the reverse of the kind of electronic mail composition referred to in the poem. We use computers so often to generate and disseminate texts, not to erase them.

Can we go over this again?--justifying animation

As I’ve been working on the flash animation, I’ve been trying to figure out how the animation fits with the (Tulsa) theme. First of all, we’re trying to say something about poetry and reading/writing/creating in general, such as suggestion that reading is a type of erasure (Modest). The animation on that poem, that looks as if the poem is draining away, fits with the themes of washing away, baptism, etc. The real story in Modest, OK? is the way the sound interrupts and displaces the narrative of the poem, which as it describes a nightmare itself has the syntax of a nightmare. The linear flow of the text mimics the temporal flow of that makes sound possible.

The movement in Big Box Block not only reinforces that but is less liquid and more airy, like the blowing wind that haunts that poem.

Death/Metal will work a little more like light or fire, flickering into new arrangments as the poem itself is consumed. The Dig poem, dwelling on the earth, will shudder and shift like a quake.

Although I hate it, I think I’m going for the four elements concept quite heavily….should find a way to deconstruct that expectation that since there are four, it must be a (seasonal) cycle like many other poetic quartets.

At this point, I’ve animated half of the poem.

Fun with Flash

I’ve been learning Flash over the Winter Break and have learned enough to animate “the big box block” like I want it. Instead of trying to duplicate my animation from ppt, I used a more reactive approach, focusing on the music and on the composition that was emerging (both in terms of shape of the poem and meaning).

I found that I was able to use animation to mimic, emphasize, and contradict the soundtrack. First, I could make animations that corresponded in some direct way to the meaning of the sound. Second, the animation could enact representationally the meaning of the words. And third, the animation could be used to draw attention to the sounds by happening both in synch with the sounds or not (I found that the sounds stood out more sometimes when there was no animation happening concurrently).

The goal of this experiment is to start with the “traditional poem” (whatever that might mean: left justified margins, jagged right margins, stanzas, use of fragment, etc) and to “undo” or deconstruct that construct using the sound and animation. The ultimate goal of this project is the same as our Wakow problem—how to integrate sound, text and image. Although this particular manifestation lacks images, it attempts to make an image of the poem itself using animation. The words become the ‘actors’ in the movie, calling attention to the materiality of language and the relation of text to sound.

Each poem will have the following animation scheme:

1. Big box block: disappearing letters/words along with occasional movement
2. Modest, OK? : slow dissolve in concert with reading of poem
3. Dig down deeper: Christmas tree lighting effect with various words appearing at certain times. Start by having Doby Bowl sign flickering, as if it were a neon light going out. Then have the rest
   of the poem flicker out, with certain combinations soon appearing after that. One combinations could be letters spelling out “Tulsa spelled backwards is a slut.” Need to give rest of WaKOW some homework to create various combinations of the poem in the vein of Jen Bervin’s Nets.
4. Death/metal: words rearrange in motion. This should be the last poem because of the way it and the soundtrack ends.