“To me, book is a tool for marketing the online writer, not the other way round.” Sez Finnish writer Leevi Lehto at http://nypoesi.net/?id=tekst&no=33. [Via http://jilltxt.net.]

“An author who is writing specifically for a public is not really writing; it is the public that is writing, and for this reason the public can no longer be a reader; reading only appears to exist, actually it is nothing. This is why works created to be read are meaningless: no one reads them. This is why it is dangerous to write for other people, in order to evoke the speech of others and reveal them to themselves: the fact is that other people do not want to hear their own voices; they want to hear someone else’s voice, a voice that is real, profound, troubling like the truth.” p. 365

Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Barrytown, Station Hill, 1999, p. 359-399.

Sometimes I can read Blanchot, and what he writes I find beautiful and deeply true. Sometimes I cannot read Blanchot, and what he writes is to me as words from an ideal, transcendental realm, unconnected to lived reality.

I’ve put a pdf of my presentation at the RFID-workshop online, for download. In my talk I dealt with the development of blogging-software as an example of the co-development of software and uses/users, using both Latour and Andrew Liu’s ‘Discourse Network 2000’ as an inspiration. Showing how a genre is constituted both by needs of users/writers and by software that is developed in response to those needs. Well, this goes through stages — for instance at one point it is blogging software that actually defines the genre. Next stage — where we are now — is when blogposts can & are used and re-used in different contexts, aggregation/syndication, when one is blogging without ever looking at the back-end of the blogsoftware, or even ‘blogging’ automatically. (Et cetera — hope you catch my drift). I’m trying to formulate what this means for the concept of ‘publishing’.

This is also what I will be discussing next week in my lecture in Groningen (15.00, Radesingel 6, Frank Mohr Institute).

Anyway, the pdf is for download here: http://www.ariealt.net/mediamatic_rfid/.
The first half is the actual presentation I did, what follows is a recap, and it ends with a collection of reserve ‘sheets’ that cover issues that I expected Julian Bleecker to talk about (but that I wanted to have handy, in case someone would ask me about it).

And then at the RFID workshop: short runthrough of different technologies and available stuff to work with, amongst which Mediamatic’s own Symbolic Table: http://www.mediamatic.net/article-11344-en.html.

Works at http://www.chrisoshea.org/ & blog at http://www.pixelsumo.com/. Where Rob was looking at all the political & privacy issues, he looks at RFID for artistic & playful use. References Peter Anders (2001) idea of ‘cybrids’. And then shows a lot of his work, with interactive works for musea and sound, works that incorporate RFID & games that uses RFID-playing cards…

Is starting with RFID in China… where they are working on their own frequencies and softwares. His background in literary theory (Rob used to be big into Walter Benjamin for instance), pops up too: a nice quote of McLuhan :-)

Again: stressing that RFID is a very simple technology… 2 Years ago he handed over his RFID report to all Dutch political parties & the only party that voiced interest and asked questions in parliament was the SGP (etremely conservative, orthodox protestant party).

“No more public. No more memory loss. No more people, just data clouds.” We have become fragmented in dataspace. There is no (political) general public with whom to discuss problems around RFID. With total tagging & tracing there will be no memory loss. Ambient intelligence & smart things instead of a laptop plus mouse.

Explains the set-up of an Internet of Things:
RFID – reader – EPC network – PML (physical mark-up-language) – ONS (object name server — built on top of DNS). Hmm: to google a bottle of beer in the Mediamatic fridge from a room in Tokyo.

Problem: convergence to just one company (Verisign) who’s in charge..

But: users have the possibilities to use the system for their own use, if you have a reader…

New word (for me): “glue code”. Code to tie everything together.

More Rieback: “RFID software is pretty complex and will turn in to bloatware as everything else”. “Security is designed inside the system. It is not something like a band-aid that you strap on later.”

Now listening at http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11944-en.html, to the talk of Melanie Rieback — a technologist connected to http://www.rfidguardian.org/ –. I came in late, but here are some of what I heard her saying:

“the RFID-technology is in a young enough state for artist & designers still to have an impact on the development of it.”

“performance art can be as effective as technology demonstrations….”

She gives a lot of examples of lo-tech, well, let’s say activist art-stuff, of ‘hacking’ RFID… which are possible because some (a lot) of RFID-tags are pretty unprotected, or, even because of the simple fact that RFID-tags can’t be read when inside foil.

Haven’t been blogging so much lately — at least not here. So I sort of feel that I have to update you (invisible readers) on my activities. Thing is that I’m feeling the pressure of the nearing end of my stay at the Jan van Eyck Academy. I’d like to leave here with 2 nice finished articles and, well, a some sort of ‘grouping’ of all the other stuff I’ve done/published here. (Like, for instance the bits & pieces on this blog, the many quotes I’ve gathered et cetera).

Now I am very very bad at organizing my own research, organizing my ‘findings’, thoughts, everything that comes before actually writing an article. If the preferred outcome is a text of say 1500 words, there’s no problem (I can do that relying on what’s in my head). If the outcome is a presentation, I have no problem at all: I’m not afraid to speaking in public and when speaking the words will roll out of my mouth. I have a scenario in my head, a rough form & direction and I can freely improvise around that. I love to do that.

(I’m afraid this is actually one of my weaknesses, since it enables me to do presentations without ever actually writing down my thoughts and theories beforehand, or for that matter, afterwards. Which means I’m left with, well, nothing definite & if I’m asked to come up with a paper afterwards I have a lot of work to do.) (Whoever cares for exact references in a talk?)

Well, so I have some very nice deadlines coming up:

Coming wednesday I’ll do a presentation at the Mediamatic RFID Workshop. I’m quite excited since Julian Bleecker will be speaking after me: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11944-en.html. (I hope my bio is updated, since it came out scrambled after a translation process — ah, yes, it’s updated). Also I’m looking forward to being in a more media/technology minded environment for a few days.

On wednesday 29th of November I will do a public lecture at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen – that one will basically be an outline/summary of the research of the past year. It’s part of the series “Future’s Past: Re-Imagining Art & Media”: 15.00-17.00 Singelzaal, Radesingel 6, Groningen.

Well, and then there are the texts I’d like to write.

So, I decided to get organized. I gathered everything that I had saved in some form or another since january (webpages, quotes and remarks and sketches in rtf- and voodoopad-files, images, pdfs, print-outs, photocopies, and: the Ubiscribe POD plus this blog), sifted and put everything that I will use in one folder, all the text in one Voodoopad document. Partly this was procrastination, or it felt like it because it took much longer than I had expected. This time I made a point of registering the references; so I’m sort of halfway with a nice bibliography (still have to include some books). It is nice work. It feels like ‘working’. It’s clear what has to be done. (Unlike writing a text [as in: putting sentences in the right order]).

I also gathered all the screenshots (of using various blogging softwares for instance), organized them and made some that I was missing. Again: material to use.

I decided that I wanted to have handy the statistics – how many blogs there are (Sifry’s Technorati-statistics), what softwares are most used, et cetera. There are some good academic papers on that. I have, if I remember well now without looking at my Voodoopadfile, 4 different statistics of blogsoftware-use, and they vary so much that they render each other (almost) meaningless when compared. (And 3 of these researches are conducted in the proper scientific way, and in the same year). The researches do not say much about ‘blogging in general’,. They say something about blogging in the chosen sample, but what they state is quite general… Funny enough that makes my own simple not too proper scientific research (counting 204 blogs from my own environment) more significant. (?)

After looking at statistics for a while I again discovered that I am simply not so interested in those numbers. Although, yes, it is nice to note that many mp3-blogs use Blogger, and amongst philosphy and theory-blogs there is a rather large amount that use Typepad. And yes, it is interesting to look at things like average lenght of posts and frequency of linkage. But well, and then?

How much do the softwares actually differ — and are they used differently? (They do differ, but they also allow for identical use). I’m trying to come up with a bit a good writing there (using screenshots…), but I’m not sure it will lead somewhere….

So now I am preparing my presentation for wednesday – making use of all the organized material (well, sort of organized in any case). To my own surprise I began having fun with Powerpoint, the software I probably hate most. Using Powerpoint to organize my argument. Ough. (Usually I make HTML-sheets, but in this case I thought it would become too cumbersome. I have used Preview for presentations twice, and both times encountered computer problems during the talk (they had nothing to do with Preview, but still, I’m a bit superstitious in that respect). I do not have Keynote; I have Appleworks — but well, were’s the difference?) I know I should use OpenOffice. I probably will regret having a .ppt-file that is not easily reusable in another context, but well, I’m too far now… Actually, I have far too many sheets already and I am not finished with the argument yet…

Henry Jenkins’ whitepaper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, pdf at http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/etc… seems to be (I haven’t read it yet…) a very good outline of what new media literacy is.

Found it via Peter Morville http://www.findability.org/archives/000138.php, who sums it up as follows:

“Henry presents eleven new skills or literacies…

Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving.

Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.

Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.

Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.

Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.

Judgment – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.

Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.

Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.

Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

…and three concerns:

The Participation Gap – the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

The Transparency Problem – the challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.

The Ethics Challenge – the breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.”

[end of quote]

Note: these are “new” literacies. I’d say they add to competencies as knowing how to write –as in: constructing sentences that makes sense and can be understood by others… :-)