[-empyre-] various posts

[hazel smith <hazel.smith@canberra.edu.au>]

First of all many thanks to Barrie for all those magnificent URLs : I will
certainly get down to them when I have a spare moment! I like the idea of
the alphabet you can  push about.

I also like your idea of a war memorial, Barry: there are certainly museum
installations like this, aren't there, but the context is a bit different.

Similarly thanks to Steve: I'll follow up those leads too ! As you say,
biofeedback isn't the same as affect.

geni -your post which brought  many things together. Yes I didn't mention
the Montford/Moulthrop  paper but it was very interesting I agree,  and I
suppose was the most literary paper of the conference, based as it was on
close analysis of the text. The main argument, if I remember rightly,  was
that Varicella  brought together configuration as game and interpretation
as literary text.   It was a good paper, but Varicella did seem, at least
on the face of it, a bit conservative, both in content and form. I would be
more nterested in a more generative narrative approach rather than one
operating within such interactive constraints  (I'd also prefer less stress
on royal matters!! )

Will be interested to see read/play your generative poem as that kind of
approach interests me a lot. Noah mentioned Cage and Jackson Mac Low  in
conjunction with his n-gram work presumably because of the  the balance
they set up between control and freedom in their work : do you feel your
recent work has any affinity with theirs, or that it moves in an entirely
other direction (I presume the latter!).

Yes a lot of the iinnovative work seems to be going on in the visual arts,
and that was noticeable in the experimedia exhibition which accompanied
DAC.   But there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in sound/music as
well, and has been for years.  The computer music composers, however,
don't seem to go much to conferences like DAC, although Jeremy Yuile and
Caleb  gave short papers in a lively session, there wasn't a lot on sound.
Which is quite curious really, but composers mainly seem to go to computer
music conferences! Maybe they think that non-musicians won't really get
what they are on about: in academica it seems many people who are very
literate in the visual arts, and /or the verbal  are  less interested in,
and involved with  music.

In response to Lloyd,  personally I think you really don't need to know a
lot about the technical aspect to appreciate an artwork, thank goodness,
though it may give you an added perspective if you do!! And I think we
would all agree that technique doesn't in itself make a good artwork,
though novel forms can often generate interesting /novel content, so I
would always feel technique was  important.

Hazel




Dr. Hazel Smith
Senior Research Fellow
School of Creative Communication
Deputy Director
University of Canberra Centre for Writing
http://www.ce.canberra.edu.au/writing
Editor of Inflect http://www.ce.canberra.edu.au/inflect
University of Canberra
ACT 2601
phone 6201 5940
More about my creative work at
www.australysis.com