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...