By now halfway the third day of Sonic Acts XII, if you can’t be (t)here, follow the livestreams and the blogs of our team of bloggers: http://www.sonicacts.com/wordpress/?cat=184/.

One of the reasons for not blogging too much is that I’ve been working on Sonic Acts XII The Cinematic Experience. The festival takes place from 21 – 24 February. Most of my time went into editing the book. Yesterday the book was delivered at the Sonic Acts office – I have not even seen it myself (will pick up a copy later today).

The book will be available during the festival, and can also already be ordered online at: http://www.sim-central.nl/detail.php?id=5757.

More info on the book and the festival at the Sonic Acts XII site: http://www.sonicacts.com/.

Is the ‘quality’ of what you are doing reflected in the sites that Google sends you to, acting on your queries?

http://1010.co.uk/index.html
http://www.lfmc.org/
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/index.html

Such a pleasure to come across a good homepage. Here’s Douglas Kahn’s: http://www.douglaskahn.com. He is of course, the author of Noise, Water, Meat, probably one of the best books on sound in the arts.

He’s also editor now of an academic magazine on Sensory Studies: The Senses and Society, behind the academic firewall, but the first issue is available for free: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/tsas/numberandsomesessioninfo.

Haven’t read any of this yet, but I’ve collected the links:

The American NEA has published a study on reading: http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html.

Critiques from Matthew Kirschenbaum: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=fgprwfnh32l7d3thj18vh3jz79k9f6fw

And discussion on if:book: http://www.futureofthebook.org/archives/2007/11/the_neas_misreading_of_reading.html.

All this via Jill Walker: http://jilltxt.net/?p=2184.

Collaborative blog about 18th-century literature, with 2 excellent collaborative readings: http://long18th.wordpress.com/. The critical discussion of The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson, a book by Blanford Parke, made me almost buy the book immediately…

Have I not been reading the informed blogs? This is already old: there is apparently a working version of Xanadu – Windows only. Huh? Ted Nelson (yes, the one-and-only Ted Nelson) presents it in a video here, in a Google-talk: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8329031368429444452. Via http://www.futureofthebook.org/archives/2007/10/ted_nelsons_still_on_the_job.html.

Privacy. Just one of these things that has me thinking a lot. Take for instance the new OV-chipcard (public transport card for the Netherlands). When the system will be operative, your travels are logged and identified. Hardly any public discussion on this. It’s just regarded as ‘handy for the customers”. TLS will own that data – why shouldn’t we get access to it too? We’re past the stage in history, it seems, where we can go back to an absolute notion of privacy. We leave too many traces. It will be about ownership and access to data. “I also own my Google-logs”. We have to start to reimagine our world, radically. A world where all your movements will be out in the open. Not only yours, but everybody’s movements – that of your boss, your friends, the prime-minister. Everybody will be a spook, a spy. Everybody will be surveilled. What will that mean? How would we behave in such a world? It will not be funny. (Or sometimes it might). And the new policy in the United States is not funny either with its “prior government permission” even for citizens of the US, even for domestic flights. Well, anyway.

Flusser Studies
http://www.flusserstudies.net/.

Sean Cubitt’s blog
http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/.

Pretty interesting symposium in Paris on programmed art: http://creca.univ-paris1.fr/?p=35#more-35.