Gimlé

What you make, what you make it of, how you do it are all comparatively unimportant when compared with why you make it, your reason for action. The final cause is the first cause, and the end is the beginning.
Eric Gill—A Holy Tradition of Working.

It was excellent. My mind is still overloaded with ideas, new thoughts and discussions.

Me and Tom Abba arrived a bit late on Thursday. Missed the first presentations and were about as attentive as roadkill as Satinder Gill presented her research on something related to bodies and how we bodily interact with computers (I apologize, I was rather knackered).

The lunch was in the Hall at Wadham College, which looked like something right out of a Harry Potter novel (haven’t seen the movies).

The official theme for the first day was “What Computers are Good For” and, sadly enough, judging by some of the presentations on the first day, the answer would be one word:

Toys.

We saw a mass of interesting projects presented. Colin Holgate from Funny Garbage demonstrated some of the amazing things he could make the stumbling beast called Director do.

Brendan Dawes, author of “Drag, Slide, Fade” told us how he first, at the beginning of the internet boom, inflicted utter rubbish on the net (and being paid to do so, the clearest evidence yet for the theory that capitalism hates the internet) but also described to us how his work and his company grew up and began doing interesting work.

A quibble about Brendan’s presentation: His dismissal of the usability issues Jacob Nielsen raised is a bit hasty, though understandable seeing as how much of an inflexible robot personality that mechanical Danish guy seems to have.

The attitude difference between the usability guys and flash designers seems to be that the usability group wants people to say things as clearly and simply as possible even though things might not look as good that way while the latter group seems to want to look as good as possible while saying the stuff they have to say.

I do think that Brendan Dawes’ assessment of usability issues in flash and his refutal of the points made by “Uncle Filbert” are a kneejerk reaction to the writings of a very boring Danish guy. Although the problem might have more to do with Nielsen’s insulting writings than anything else.

It is time to consider whether Jacob’s condescending Useit’s are doing more harm than good.

This is a minor quibble, to be honest. Brendan Dawes’ presentation was a long one and a good overview of the history of commercial usage of Flash as well as its possibilities.

If only the Flash 6 format didn’t suffer from patent issues (the movie codec is a proprietary one). Macromedia only has to add even the slightest of Digital Rights Management support to the player to make the reverse engineering of that codec immediately illegal. Throw the patent issue into the mix and you have a file format that is closed tighter than a grannie’s arse.

Issues like these prevent comprehensive Open Source flash support which in turn prevents computers like mine (a PPC running Gentoo Linux) from having flash support (yes, I am annoyed by this and yes I am severely biased against flash as a result, adjust your readings accordingly).

Toys.

The feeling of the latter half of the day was that of watching master craftsmen demonstrating their skills, which is a good thing. The let-down came when I saw what they were working on.

The dissapointment was akin to realising that the master craftsmen eked out a living by making He-Man action figures for eccentric collectors who wanted historically accurate plasticine twinks to be used as sex toys at the dog pound.

And the craftsmen saying: “It pays the bills so it must be good.”

Eating and having a roof over your heads has to be your first priority, I know. But it is a bit depressing, nonetheless.

Maybe the reason why the multimedia industry (or what remains of it) seems to churn out doodahs with wiggly bits that go blong when you bling is that interactivity seems to be fundamentally about play. Click, something happens “Oooooooh!”

If you’re not careful, the play takes over the work’s structure and your project turns into a toy. The nonfunctional equivalent of a game without gameplay.

I’ve seen dozens of projects here at the University like that, and it seems to plague the commercial world as well.

Ask yourself this: If your project is not a representation of some sort of narrative structure but provides some sort of functionality, shouldn’t it be written as a normal application and integrated into the user’s desktop environment?

And if it isn’t a narrative or a game, and doesn’t provide some sort of functionality, doesn’t that mean you’ve just made a toy, a non-functional game?

Maybe it was the toy aspect of multimedia that made the last presentation by Scot Osterweil of TERCworks so good. After all, if it really is a toy then why not try and make it the best damn toy ever?

A functional toy being a game.

Scot presented some of the Zoombini series of games he created, talked about some of the issues inherent in gameplay design and the values he and his cocreators tried to imbue the game with.

The conference programme says: “Scot’s computer work is a part of a wider vision of human dignity and empowerment.”

And it’s right.

Scot was also remarkably valuable when it came to the debates at the conference as he frequently brought the two sides of an issue together by pointing out the similar values that lay behind the opposing views.

It does make you hope that the games industry won’t follow the same ‘hell in a handbasket’ route that the comic book industry (led by Marvel Comics) has been following in recent years.

The last productive thing of the day was Christian Wach’s presentation of the project Football’s Leaving Home. Have a look through the website. The idea is remarkably simple and human and well executed.

The evening ended with copious amounts of booze being drunk, incoherent (mostly me) but entertaining (mostly not me) discussions being thrown about and good food eaten.

I probably managed to frighten a lot of people off the very idea of coming within a hundred miles of Iceland with my incessant yapping and my surreal and indecipherable sense of humour. Most of the conference goers are probably under the impression that Icelanders are a nation of drunken loudmouths.

That probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

Baldur Bjarnason,
Clifton, Bristol.

The weather is lovely here in Oxford. Am about to go to a presentation by Bob Stein (of Voyager cd-rom fame) followed by a Mark Bernstein presentation (of Eastgate fame). More later.

Tomorrow I’ll be attending the Dust or Magic conference in Oxford with Tom Abba (another UWE Phd student) and my tutor Judith Aston. If all goes well I’ll be ‘blogging the whole thing. I also plan to take a portable DAT recorder with me.

I’m sitting here munching on Icelandic candies sent by my grandmother. The package arrived on the day War broke out. She has got a sixth sense about these things, sent comfort food to both me and my sister at exactly the time we need it.

She also has a sixth sense regarding fashion and clothes sizes, but that is a different story.

Been teaching, working on my research project and protesting all last week.

Thursday was an odd one. Nobody had heard anything definite. Somebody whispered “Six O’clock, outside the Hippodrome” partly because that’s were the protesters have been every day.

Nothing certain. Nobody was sure. But people were angry and went on impulse.

Three thousand people showed up.

Give or take. Organisers (the people who led the march, got the band, conferred with the police and such) estimate four to five thousand but they always overestimate these things.

The police were overwhelmed but, despite what you’d read at the indymedia website, they handled the situation rather well, considering. Apparently the idiot element took over late in the evening after I left, but that was only after the organisers and the Bristol Samba School band (which was bloody excellent) had all gone home.

Friday, only about four hundred showed up at Six, and what seemed to be almost as many policemen. Apparently they didn’t want to be overwhelmed again.

Met up with my friend Bob Hughes whose conference I plan to show up at next Thursday (by hook or by crook). I’ll ‘blog it if I manage to wrangle out a proper ticket.

Saturday, keep in mind that all this was organised with only a few days notice, 3-10 000 people protested at USAF Fairford, around one hundred thousand people protested in London and I guess around a thousand here in Bristol. Most of the people I know went to Fairford or London.

Everything went really well here for the first couple of hours, but then the idiot element took over and about a hundred people sat in the middle of Park Street by College Green.

I appreciate the gesture. They care and all that. But I see very little use in aggravating drivers and police, especially considering that the police had been especially helpful and cooperative with the organisers earlier that day. Kept their sense of humour, though. Don’t know how long that will last if the daft buggers keep up doing silly and annoying things. Those people are very much in a minority, it’s just as it is with the pro-war movement where a vocal small percentage makes everybody look bad.

The week long silence is the time I needed to decide what to do regarding this weblog. I can’t very well ignore the war. But on the other hand we’re getting overexposed to it, as if it were some sort of game or world tournament.

So I decided only to mention the war when I do something related to the war and report that. Things like protesting or showing up at the Bristol Public Meet on monday (half past Seven, Friends Meeting House, River Street, it’s just off of Bond Street in Broadmead accross the road from Littlewoods and Primark. Anybody can show up.)

So how often the war gets mentioned here depends on my own level of activity.

Quite a few of my students have been showing up to these things, recording and photographing. Several of them intend to do projects on either the war, the war coverage or the protests. I’d really like to see some of that footage posted online.

Kicking myself for not booking a camera out of the media centre as my own camera is buggered right now.

About to head out to meet up with a few friends at the Arnolfini.

It’s gorgeous out there.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity.

It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
C.S. Lewis—“The Screwtape Letters – Letters from a senior to a junior devil.”

Life is, of course, too busy. More presentations last week than I would have liked. Busy telling people about things that have already happened. Only one of them was teaching-related and that one ended up being my worst presentation for a long while.

Frustrating.

All in all, though, there is the feeling of forward motion. The teaching part is gelling together. Will be focussing on discussions and seminars in a couple of weeks time, something I’m not that bad at.

Pulling together a few backend scripts for the implementation side of the project. Using Ruby partly because it has an interesting YAML implementation, but mainly because I felt I should learn a new language.

Not that I’m doing anything complicated (altogether short and simple things) but it feels good to be doing something practical alongside the theory.

I will be doing some teaching and support for the Foundations students soon. If all goes well that extra money might end up being used making my computer situation slightly more bearable.

The “Death of the Blogger” essay sparked quite a few interesting discussions.

I did partake in the discussion at Burningbird’s although I do need to do a proper “Blogger Post-Mortem” at some point.

It bears noting that most of the criticisms are valid, although none of them quite address the point of the essay. My simplistic representation of memes is partly based on Godwin’s essay in Wired on Godwin’s Law and its creation.

And I feel that I need to address Dorothea’s critique of academia because I don’t think it has been properly addressed yet. Dorothea is pointing out the flaws she sees in academia. Some of them fundamental problems. Some of them not.

To address that critique I feel that you’d need to present a clear separation between academic principle, academic methodology and the common academic system.

Then, you’d need to look at the problems Dorothea points out, figure out whether they are problems with the principle, the method or the system and analyse them accordingly.

The reason for this separation is that problems with the system and methodology change over time and can generally be overcome by good people.

But if the problems are inherent in the principle then no condemnation will be too harsh, because then the whole kaboosh is unfixable and will bleed into everything else academic.

Most academics know for a fact that the system and methodology are flawed and most of those flaws can be surmounted by good people. They’ve seen it and so they often present that as evidence that academia is fixable.

Fair enough. But it doesn’t answer Dorothea’s questions.

So much to do. So little time.

Baldur Bjarnason
Clifton, Bristol.

How the Long List Became the Short List.

You can’t throw a pebble into a crowd these days without hitting a narrative theorist. This forces any sort of project based on narrative theory to begin by choosing the theories to be used. Narrow down the angles you intend to focus on, do it quickly, and know why you’re dismissing a theory when you do.

In this case, being an interactive media project, there is already a large body of work on hypertext and hypermedia by theoretical luminaries such as Landow, Bolter and Michael Joyce.

But I am not a hypertext theorist and this project is not a hypertext project. The hypertext theories need to be addressed at some point, for sure, but they are not a part of the fundamental nature of this project.

Hypertext is an associative form, it gains its narrative power from its associations, what is being associated with what and the nature of that association. It does not need to be an electronic text, any structure whose main strength is in its associations is a hypertextual structure.

The goal here was not to look at a text and analyse the inherent associations within it but to look at how a structure whose strengths lie in its language and form works within an electronic space.

Deliberate experimentation where we try and find out how traditional narrative structures and traditional narrative theories cope with electronic space.

That criteria quickly narrowed down the number of applicable theories.

M.M. Bakhtin.

Bakhtin’s theories focus on a specific kind of narrative structure, the novel, which he defines as the interplay between various voices and narrative styles.

This novelistic structure does not have to be what we normally consider to be novels, the examples he uses come from poetry and drama as well as prose.

And, although Shakespeare’s work would not be classified as novelistic by Bakhtin as it is too dependent on the dramatic act structure, Shakespeare does provide us with good examples of what Bakhtin means with voices or “linguistic images”.

The contrast and interplay, for example, between the boisterous gravediggers, the joking fool, the serious generals and the whining aristocrats in those plays is fundamentally novelistic. The voices of the gravediggers and the whining of the aristocrats gain meaning from being in context with each other.

The difference between Shakespeare’s plays and what Bakhtin calls a novel lies in the fact that the plays’ primary motive power and emotional engagement comes from the dramatic monologues and the act structure while a novel’s strength lies in the contrasts and interplay between the voices it represents.

One is a journey, the other is a tapestry, woven. Different things by nature.

It bears pointing out that there is nothing specifically that demands that Bakhtin’s novels be linear. That fact was one of main reasons why specific experimentation with Bakhtin’s structures in electronic space are of interest.

Claude Levi-Strauss.

Levi-Strauss is an anthropologist who has done a lot of work in analysing mythology and the structure of common myths.

His concept of binary oppositions is not really a structure in itself but a quality common in many narrative structures and Levi-Strauss’ theories describe a methodology, a process, for drawing this structural quality out of existing stories.

The idea is that picking out two fundamental oppositions in the text and analysing them will reveal, shed a light on, the other structural components related to the opposites, telling us something about who the story is built up.

One example would be to use this methodology to study a hypertext. You pick out a binary opposition and then analyse the associations that link them. That process will reveal the nature of those associates and the tensions in the structure. You can view this as a way for a theorist to test the structural integrity of a story and find its focal points.

This makes it particularly useful as a tool to find out how narrative structures adapt to their context, what works and doesn’t work when a text is transposed to electronic space. By analysing the binary oppositions before and after the transposition we can get an idea of what has changed in the text’s structure in its new context.

Derrida.

Derrida changed everything. His ideas and theories can be argued about but they changed the way we look at every single idea that preceded him.

I’m saying this mainly to give you an idea of how hard it is to refrain from analysing how his ideas inform and change the use of the other two theories the project is based on. But I’ll try.

In this context Derrida’s main contribution is that he gave us a theoretical tool to observe and analyse ancillary structures, which he calls Parergons. Constructs that are related to other structures, inform them, surround them and define those other structures but are not a part of them.

The specific example Derrida had in mind was the concept of a painting’s frame. It defines where the painting begins and where it ends. It comments on it by nature of association and context (consider for example the case of the gilded frame vs the plain one), it lies on the painting’s edges without being an integral part of it.

But the theoretical concept Derrida was looking at was not only the frame but the frame as a comment, and other ancillary structures that worked as comments on their associated structures. The veil over a statue or a footnote to a text.

So Derrida both gives us an alternative method to analyse relationships in structures, superstructures and substructures, and he gives us a tool to analyse a structure’s context by analysing the satellite structures around the text.

The web-browser interface is a satellite structure, a Parergon, to the browser’s content, and Derrida gives us the tools to analyse their relationship.

The Whys and Wherefores.

Narrative experiments have to have a subject. So I had to pick a narrative, a story, which I could use for this project, preferably a text that made my life easy.

It had to have a multivocal structure as defined by Bakhtin, with fairly clearly defined voices and characters.

It had to lend itself to analysis through its binary oppositions, so it had to have fairly clear polar opposites as a part of the text’s fundamental structure.

It had to lend itself to commenting to enable us to experiment with the use of Derrida’s ideas of ancillary structures.

And on the pragmatic side it had to be in the public domain, or otherwise free to use and distribute. Also, having a text that has been fairly well analysed in the past enables us to focus on analysing how it adapts to experiments in electronic space, giving us a firm foundation to refer to regarding the story’s structure.

Which pretty much ruled out using my own work as a basis, as that would have been a shaky foundation for analysis to say the least.

The public domain issue led me to look at the medieval texts which had been one of my primary focuses in my Comparative Literature Bachelor’s Degree, and being Icelandic I thought of the Icelandic family sagas.

Egill’s Saga stood out immediately.

That Story.

Egill’s Saga is possibly one of the most analysed and researched Old Norse text in history, third after the two Edda’s, the Prose-Edda and the Poetic-Edda. In fact, many believe Snorri Sturluson, the writer of the Prose-Edda, to be the author of Egill’s Saga. A fairly debatable assumption as the writing styles of the two works differ considerably.

It is also in the public domain, both the English translation and the Old-Norse original are freely available in proofread digital form which would make my work quite a bit easier. And it is easily abridged, the title character doesn’t enter the picture until almost halfway through the story, and the reading of the text in Icelandic schools has a history of skipping a large part of the first half.

Multivocality.

The story is also useful in the way that although it has relatively few voices represented in its structure compared to later novels those voices are very distinct.

The primary voices being the almost callously impartial narrator. Egill’s arrogant but intelligent voice, contrasted with his father’s and his grandfather’s less cultured but as arrogant voices. Then we have the voice of Egill’s daughter who helps nurse Egill through his grief after losing his sons.

And finally we have the Poetry, a voice, an entity on its own. This poetry is what you could call the historical voice of Egill Skallagrimson, preserved for years, and most likely composed by a real person named Egill Skallagrimson.

The relationship and contrast between Egill’s poetic voice and Egill’s prose voice is an important one. The story’s focal point lies in the binary opposition between the prose and poetry.

Oppositions.

So the story has a binary opposition at its centre as its main driving force. But it is littered with interesting oppositions throughout: Egill the killer vs Egill the father. Egill as a son vs His father. The young arrogant Egill vs the old, grieving Egill. Almost an embarrasment of riches.

Parergon.

Egill’s Saga is not only conducive to Derrida’s satellite structures, the comments, they are essential to the story’s structure. The structure of Old-Norse poetry is fundamentally based on references and Norse mythology as a superstructure.

They have to be taken apart, commented upon and analysed to be understood (even in the old days, the term “rada i kenningar” often used in the context of understanding a poem implies that you’ve taken the poem apart, figured out what is being said and referred to).

The reading of an old norse poem was a similar sort of process as the English tradition of solving a cryptic crossword puzzle.

Foundation.

Almost every word in Egill’s Saga has been analysed to death. Research has been done on almost every single variation of word occurences, statistical analysis of word use, every phrase has been linguistically analysed many times over. It has been read, reread, referred to, taken apart, analyzed, deconstructed and criticised in almost every concievable way known to man. The letterforms of the original manuscripts have been analysed. The composition of the old hide it was written on has been analysed.

In short, it is a very stable base to work from. Meaning that if it breaks or if something doesn’t work in the electronic context there will be a wealth of data to refer to to compare and contrast it with the original to teach us why it fails in that context and how.

And if something goes wrong it will be entirely my fault.

Post-Mortem.

I am occasionally reminded that I’m the only one around here with a Comparative Literature background.

These notes were used in my presenation yesterday to the rest of the Phd researchers here at UWE along with an assortment of UWE Art, Media and Design staff.

Most of it went alright but the discussion was taken over by one person in the audience who insisted that comparative analysis of works and tests as I proposed was relative, arbitrary, and in the long run impossible.

And he also kept on about asking what the point was, “the burning issue”, essentially wondering why the hell I want to do this.

He kept returning to the point of the arbitrary nature of the research, ignoring my points that

1. I can’t be expected to present anybody’s point but my own and that the reasoning behind my conclusions, the tests I intend to make, as well as the original piece of work will all be freely available so that anybody that’s interested can go over the data and decide to agree or disagree with my conclusions.
2. The methodology behind structural textual analysis is well tested and has a long history. It’s flaws are well known (Derrida pointed out a host of them himself) but it’s the only tool for this sort of work that he have.
3. The flaws being known makes the relatively structuralist approach a more reliable approach for analysing data than the relativistic stance he was taking.

Of course I didn’t manage to make those points that clearly yesterday, instead I, shaken, spewed them out one by one in a broken, rambling fashion because I simply couldn’t believe how contrary that person was being.

I guess we live and learn.

I might simply not have understood what he was talking about. I thought I had presented my idea clearly (judging by the questions I got), what I intend to do and how. He may have simply tried to get me to clarify a point or two about what I am trying to do.

But, unfortunately, he only managed to sound to me, as if he was simply stating that what I was trying to do was impossible, that I shouldn’t even be trying and that I must be trying to do something else and am not telling him.

Sheesh.

Baldur Bjarnson.