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A new Flash poem by Thom "with an H" Swiss and George "not Bernard" Shaw...
I like the concept and the varieties of interactivity, all of which are pretty witty, surprising, and "humanized" by the use of gravity effects and natural sounds. You have to play around with it to get through -- pull things, click and hold, or just move the mouse around, etc. After you are done with the piece -- only 6 or so sections -- there is some nice interactivity in the navigation that suddenly appears.
The text has that self-referential "let me tell you about myself" (i.e. about digital art) feel to it that I generally discourage, and the graphics are slightly "designy," like those shaved-head cuts that have now gone out of fashion. But for the most part the piece is spare and unpretentious, and as it is a part of the new issue of Postmodern Culture, it is supposed to be didactic and illustrative of techno-po principles, at which it is quite successful.
One of the best pieces in this mode -- the self-referential graphic new media essay -- is still Charles Bernstein's and Dante Piombino's Mosaic for a Convergence, which doesn't use any Flash etc. and is quite ugly to look at. Worth spending a few minutes of your work-time noodling through it's doodles (indeed, it makes the act of clicking feel like "doodling" itself -- rare).
I'm still losing sleep over the fact that my piece, The Truth Interview, with Kim Rosenfield, has not received a whole lot of attention, though, indeed, one part of TheLanguageofNewMedia -- the bit with the words moving up on elevated lines -- seems some sort of reference to the make-your-own-poem game of the Truth Interview (click the red button that says "vote" on the left column).
Thom's been doing lots of nice work with designers and programmers -- a writer working with other artisans, in the tradition of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Kenneth Goldsmith (in his web work) -- which I think is a good way to go for "cyberpoets" and whatnot who don't have the time to really make the plunge into a new trade. Not that the do-it-yourself line is all that bad either.
Posted by Brian Stefans at August 6, 2003 11:37 AM | TrackBackThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Etheldreda at January 18, 2004 10:12 PMBut variables get one benefit people do not
Posted by: Gilbert at January 18, 2004 10:12 PMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Daniel at January 18, 2004 10:13 PMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Hansse at January 18, 2004 10:13 PMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Lucy at January 18, 2004 10:13 PM