[-empyre-] blogs+signals+performance questions

[jake elliott <racter@gmail.com>]

hello, chris+other empyrers.

i've been enjoying this month's discussion very much; i'm very happy
to have been exposed here to chris+tom+abe+jimpunk's blog-practice via
links+dialogue, of which i was less aware before.

i'd like to respond+inquire specifically to the daily practice aspect
of blogging, especially as chris has framed/metaphorized it.  chris,
your metaphors relating this practice to musical training+rehearsal
are very interesting to me because one of the main differences i see
between these two forms is that in musical rehearsal there is no
receiver except the performer (this i say despite your comments like
"i don't want to think about the audience" because i think it is still
a very important componenent of the form you have chosen for this
work).

personally, the most similar practice with which i have engaged at
length has been as a radio disc-jockey.  i suppose this comparison has
more similarities to your blogging practice than has bedroom guitar
rehearsal (maybe you weren't talking about this sort of
"chops"-maintenance, but rather talking about jazz musicians&etc
gigging nightly and staying fresh).  anyway, in the radio-dj practice
as in yours, i think there is a presupposition of a source (dj) and
receiver (radio-listener).

it's natural (and literal) to think of a radio-dj->radio-listener
situation as a signal in the audio, patchable/routable sense.  what
about blogs as a signal?

there was some (contentious) talk earlier about self-centeredness in
blogs.  i could not disagree more with this position, because of the
presupposition of "listenership" that i mentioned above.  i don't
think that any situation in which listeners are supposed can be
self-centered, but maybe that's my ideology as a performer showing
through.  do you [chris+otherbloggers] feel like a performer or is the
blog more like a separate type of distribution for you?  it feels like
performance to me because (i think) the main distinction between
performance and other channels (say, publishing) is time and grounding
in (and privilege of) time.  chris, you have mentioned bending time
when it suits you (changing timezones so that your work appears
daily), however your specificity in this act belies some loyalty to a
framerate or rhythm.

also, i agree with what chris and tom have mentioned about there being
too little discussion about the work in a material(?) sense.  i'm
afraid i've never felt qualified to critique static graphic art (in
public), but i would like at least to note some of my responses to
chris' html-drawings.  i see a very difficult tension present in these
works between the formal, gridded nature of the table (and of print
layout in general, to which the table is a reference) and
painting+drawing, in the very lo-res gradients+misalignments between
cells.  it makes me think of these layout tools and the visual
vocabulary we are granted in html, and the extent to which they
constrain (and don't constrain) graphic expression.

thanks,
jake