In short, composing an assemblage involves thinking and writing with your entire “three-dimensional” or “360°” perspective: personal / autobio.; career/discipline; community; entertainment / culture. (prompt: Try specifying and noticing which dimension emerges most prominent in your thinking and writing at first, through your entries.)

— “Praxis” (10-Jan entry)

 
 
“Assemblage Expression” Final Project

 
» Due:               Sat 24-Apr (11pm deadline)

» update:         Reflection page can be posted on Sunday (if necessary; penalty-free)

 
 
“Resource Directory”

• Assignment Page (updated)
   

• Tech Support (layout guide)
   

• Blog Discussion (new comments, useful to review)
   

• Strongly suggest reviewing all instructions and criteria.
  Deadline for email, to guarantee reply in time to revise/apply: Sat 24-Apr 6 pm.

 
 
Vaka (live)
 
 

» Tuning / Warm-up (checkpoint):

• emblem: selections finalized (one’s “ingredients” for “recipe”);
  “sketches” in progress (online) and/or finalized.

• tentative topic for project — Career or Community dimensions
• Praxis: more direct/explicit than last week, implicit in our review of Chapters 9-11.
  cf. Chp. 1-2, “General Project,” “Attunement,” “Stimmung” etc.; plus “Mystory” (Chp 3).

• examples below.

 
Due:          Extra Credit Response (optional Exercise)

 
 
W 21-Apr (last class)          “Studio” Praxis: poetics for final project (design)

» Soundcheck (checkpoint):

• emblem revised (if necessary); final version online
• topic (“target” concept) revised / finalized (post in brief blog entry)
• “raw materials” (sources) selected; refine during/after class
• poetics / “blueprint” for assemblage; refine during/after class.

 
» Blog Entry (optional / e.c.):

Spring term “Playlist” or “Mash-up” (multimedia suggested; perhaps also test Tagxedo?)

 
 
R 22-Apr          No Class—Complete Project 3

 
F 23-Apr          Due: Project 3 Progress checkpoint/update (website shows “work in progress” )

 
S 24-Apr          Update:    Due: Project 3 (11pm deadline)

 
 
 »  “What Happens When MONUMENTALITY becomes electrate?”

• from “Consultation (postponed)” → MEmorial (Electronic Monuments, 2005)
  • Example: Death Penalty—Personal Best
• MEmorials (page)
• “Florida Rushmore” — the MYSEUM

 
 
 »  What if historiography had been invented in the 20th century
—like avant-garde art—rather than in the 19th century? (Teletheory, 1989) → Mystory

• MYSTORIOGRAPHY
• Noon Star (Ulmer’s mystory)

• My Own Private Oklahoma (student’s mystory)

 

• Contrast (“how not to compose a mystory”)

 
 
Graduate Seminars
 

 
 
 
ghink: Novel Experience/Expression course (AML 2410-8974, Fall 2009)

• Task:
  Develop a new mode of academic discourse (thought + expression) to express the lived affect of someone else’s specific historical experience — as we imagine or intuit it, without judgment, while taking responsibility as producers (not passive consumers) of knowledge.

 
 » Problem  (for humanities “research” or “experiment”):

“People do not understand each other. The incomprehensible part of each of us makes up the entire basis of life.
Perhaps by reading these texts, we can work toward an effort of mediation on the incomprehensible. I do not say that we are going to understand the incomprehensible, but we have to accept it” (131).
— Hélène Cixous, “Poetry, Passion, and History” (1985)

 » Group Prep.  (for presentations): Discussion on blogs, over weekend.

 
 
M 22-Mar          Jeremy Bushnell, The Imaginary Year (2004)

Presentation: Group 3

 
 
W 24-Mar          Jason Nelson, Dreamaphage — note: might require Flash update

Presentation: Group 2

 
Note: Weekly Blog Entry: optional (for e.c.)
 

R 26-Mar         “Studio”: Workshop (praxis, “tech-support”) — Project 2

♦ Prep.: in addition to  reviewing  assignment and online discussion (groups’ + my Qs):
 
         — post tech/design Qs to “troubleshoot” (partic. e.c. for “tech support” to classmates!)
         —  prepare text  (“rough draft”) to work with in “Studio”
        » to re-organize into collage, non-linear threads, hypertext layout, multimedia assemblage (electracy)

 
 
F 27-Mar        Workshop / Studio (independent design time)

 
 » update «        Project 2 — Due: S 27-Mar (deadline: 11pm)

— Note: 8pm email deadline to guarantee response in time
(still send “emergency” notes after, if necess.)
FYI: several replies to Qs in comments below.

 » Note:  revised schedule (as announced 25-Feb).

 
 
M 01-Mar         Internet Invention Chapter 7 (180-209): “History (School)”

 » key topics: 
Narrative, “Donor,” Sender, Receiver, focalization; “Value,” “interpellation” (190);
“Ficelle,” “quilting,” conductive inference/logic, Syncretism, fragment;
“secondary encounter” (“untimeliness”), retroaction, insight/attunement/endocept, Stimmung (& Voice)
 
→ closely read: Office, “On the Premises” (191), & all “Comment” sub-sections.
 
Discuss: Project Two Part II “Community Discourse” (review: pp.191-2)

 
 
W 03-Mar         Clips: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (Dir. Gondry, 2006)

Weekly Blog Entry: optional (due Friday, for e.c.)
— suggest Exercise (p. 191) or prompt from last week.

 
Due: Inventory Update (weeks 7 & 8; 5 new items)

R 04-Mar         Due: Exercise 3 (“High Concept” p. 198) — Guide/Tips below .

F 05-Mar         Spring Break (no class, away at conference)

 
Bordando el Manto Terrestre by Remedios Varo (1961)
(“Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle,” center of triptych here)

book we passed around, which I’d “randomly” grabbed from my office: Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. As we’re not reading Pynchon this term, I’ll postpone the anecdote about his mystory in relation to his novels; more evocative today is the painting on Mattessich’s cover — which is (seemingly) a minor & early reference in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In the narrative, the heroine (Oedipa) identifies in a moment of great sadness — Punctum? — with the seamstresses trapped in the tower, who are sewing the material that comprises the land & seas , the “tapestry” of the earth…

• Relay: we parallel “structural role” of Oedipa, in her engaging with art — feeling as though “I’m charged with making something…?” (rather than “I’ll buy/wear that knitted product!”) Keep in mind responsibility inherent in our method…

   

• Analogy: recall/review Ulmer’s discussion and theoretical musings on making felt (pp.35-6), as a new understanding of “text.” ThreadWork (embroidering / knitting / quilting) works in this same “category” of our experiment — especially to remind us about our recent examinations of
  process, material objects (materiality), and Family dimension
   
  (I’ve added this last part from my popcycle — as my mom has knit a few items after being taught by her grandmother — with the hypothesis that folks’ ancestors might have made quilts in the 19th century. Although this could also shift into the Historical/Disciplinary or Cultural/Myth dimensions for another project.)

   

• Contrast: Narrative “threads” are rarely “sewn up” neatly or nicely in life experiences, unlike the dominant conventions of popular culture (Victorian novel → Hollywood Screenplay → TV dramas → ?).
  Consequently, we will not try to “smooth out” the seams (seems, or semes); nor will we disregard the “needle” (analogy = instrument for composition?) and time/stages. (more on this later)
  More important, we’ll want to recognize the many threads “running” (?) throughout our entire popcycle, if not within every dimension — attentive (“attuned”) to which emerge prominent or secondary/complementary, whether continuous or fragmentary…

• Theory: This book and image provoked my thinking about sewing with a connection to Deleuze & Guattari — rather than painted triptychs (another mini-lecture postponed, Deleuze & painting).
   

• Ulmer references these theorists in the “felt-making” discussion (which I’d forgotten until reviewing now!); he poses a crucial question for the method and project: “is felt homogeneous or not?” (p.36).
  This issue directly concerns, with great import, the concept of “choral category” in chapter 4 — whether one mood/voice can emerge prominent (yes, Stimmung), without our disregarding all of the associations (as Literate Mode would insist).
   
  — crucial lesson: “A choral category gathers and holds heterogeneous information in place by means of a shared mood or atmosphere. The widesite is our personal chora, showing the winnowing system of our identity that sorts the world of our experience into a pattern of coherence” (Ulmer, 101).
   
   

• Deleuze (sometimes with Guattari) is the premier philosopher of heterogeneity and experience; in the same discussion of felt and fabric that Ulmer quotes, they theorize patchwork against the territorial space (structure/domination) of embroidery — as in Varo’s painting.
   
  “Patchwork, for its part, may display equivalents to themes, symmetries, and resonance that approximate it to embroidery.
  But the fact remains that its space is not at all constituted in the same way: there is no center; its basic motif (“block”) is composed of a single element; the recurrence of this element frees uniquely rhythmic values distinct from the harmonies of embroidery (in particular, in “crazy” patchwork, which fits together pieces of varying size, shape, and color, and plays on the texture of the fabrics).
  “She had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying about with her a shapeless bag of dingy, threadbare brocade containing odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never bring herself to trim them to any pattern; so she shifted and fitted and mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient puzzle-picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or create a pattern out of them without using her scissors, smoothing her colored scraps with flaccid, putty-colored fingers.” [— William Faulkner, Sartoris (1956); quoted in Deleuze & Guattari.]

   
  An amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of ways: we see that patchwork is literally a Riemannian space, or vice versa.” (476, A Thousand Plateaus)

  “The smooth space of patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that “smooth” does not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, nonformal space prefiguring op[tical] art.” (477)

   

• lesson for praxis (project composition): assemblage is comprised of heterogeneous elements, with an emergent mood-tone (tune) of Stimmung — potentially, resonance among/between the elements, understood (produced?) through my emblem (discovered by mapping the popcycle).
  More about resonance and assemblage later in the experiment;
  but now, we see the vital role of chora for discovery/invention.