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