“Calvinball. Right. You were made for this”.(410)

In a past program at Evergreen we would seminar extensively, using the game “calvinball” as a model for our conversations. Calvinball is a game borrowed from Calvin and Hobbes in which the players decide on the rules as they go along. It became more than just a cute way to think about seminar, as it produced some of the best conversations we had in that class. The temptation was to go off on relevant tangents,  creating an environment where any anecdote or query could turn back to one of our texts.

How do we play Calvinball with a 3d printer? It is reaching the end of the quarter, and I am most likely staying in for Winter quarter. What steps can be taken to revitalize ourselves? I know that I have been dragged down creatively after all the times I have tried to print my poetry. Each time I make a model, it “horribly fails,” according to the CAL spreadsheet. I am not trying to sound dismal, by the way…sometimes being honest can sound that way. So, back to Calvinball. What I need to enhance my creative zone is a 3d printing feedback loop. By that, I mean a conversation with the various projects I am entertaining. I am into 3d printing poetry, and 3d printing block prints, both of which are somewhat unconventional things to print… What do I need to create a salient game in which I am constantly bouncing the “Calvinball?”

The mind croggling Ponzi scheme is the closest thing to a business model we’ve heard yet from the chip-addled techno-hippies of the New Work and its post-boom incarnation.” Makers, 243

“He’s the king of the trolls.” Makers, 244

It’s worth noting that at the end of his nasty article, Freddy leaves the email “honestfred,” so at least on some level he thinks or pretends to think that he’s just being honest. How would it affect us if we added to our CST observations 1 person who conspired against everyone else?

If someone pointed out all the folly of a young college kid like me trying to explore meaning by 3-d printing poetry, maybe a little too idealistic about it, I think it might just make me want to do it better. I don’t know if we need someone who is blatantly mean, because it would kind of hurt my feelings if I got a Freddy-like critique. But I feel like people just kind of accept other peoples’ projects without getting to know the intricacies that well and just say “wow that’s cool.” I’d like to teach other people about my project just so I can learn more about it.

How does Suzanne’s work as a journalist compare and contrast to Perry an Lester’s work as inventors and tinkerers?

Suzanne writes stories for the movement Perry and Lester have kept alive since the new work era, and the people she writes about create pieces of mechanical genius and the forum in which these machines are displayed. The big similarity, however, is the fact that these two types of professions are both very creativity-heavy by definition, but the actual work is comprised primarily of anything but. We barely hear about Suzanne struggling with the headline of her work, or losing sleep over whether she portrayed a certain project the right way. Similarly, we don’t hear very often about Lester or Perry needing to put the final touches on the inner workings of their machines. As we get later into the quarter, I am realizing that the blue rabbit project has so deceivingly little to do with the creative process and more to do with a series of research steps processed through a series of programs and iterations.

*****DIsclaimer: My bibliography did not copy and paste. I will fix it soon, but note that I do have one on the printed form at the moment.

Cameron Ball

Confront the problems with language I have been having.

“Poetry enacts and tells the open secret”

“What is the answer?,” asked Gertrude Stein as she was being wheeled into a surgery room where she would later die. Upon getting no response, she responded: “in that case, what is the question?”

What is it that I have been trying to say?

How can the combination of two extremes of linguistic expression be put forth in a 3d format to make the creative process more intuitive?

What are the implications of making something that you do not know the meaning of into matter?

Zaum: “A language which does not have any definite meaning, a transrational language” that “allows for fuller expression.

+

Descriptive, rational language using the binds of language that Zaum is trying to disrupt

+

3 dimensional text

Bonus points:

• “display and juxtapose elements at the same time”, like paintings
• create a Tralfamadorian text
• put this new mode of deliberative creative choices balanced with liberative practices “into conversation with an interrogative dynamic” in order to figure out what words to omit and which ones to keep

The terms on which I have been asked to justify my project are all oriented towards a utilitarian pragmatism. Is it worthy to print? Why is it meaningful to print? How does it help you progress from a to b? These questions are in direct opposition to the thesis of Zaum, which is itself an antithetic thesis. I can work with convoluted contradictions, but it is necessary to note that this will, in fact, “make nothing happen.”

Let’s call the part of the brain that produces meaning, or in this case, words, a word extruder. If my creative process was a Makerbot, the temperature of the extruder would constantly be off. The ideological filament that started out solid is either overheated into mush or undercooked so that it won’t stick to the previous layer. Also, my word extruder doesn’t know how to decide how much infill to put inside of the model. Whatever shell I create might be too dense, or too light and airy to support itself. My own mental makerbot doesn’t even extrude the sweet smell of expired pancake syrup when it creates things.(smell the makerbots while they print, trust me.) It isn’t my fault, just the fact that humans aren’t as precise as computers, and sometimes they have no idea what or how to extrude.

Maybe my word extruder isn’t an extruder per se, but the word “extruder’s” odd cousin, “nozzle.” It derives from the word nose, “small spout.” The muse hits my nozzle with sneezes of creativity, inspiring me with a breath big enough to blow mnemosyne’s boogers out into a transrational tissue. And I get embarrassed when I sneeze in public. When I don’t have any tissue to write on. This isn’t the extruder’s determined, straight-lined, and confident process. This is my personal language disorder.

I will be working with the Cubo-Futurism of the early 20th century Russian avant-garde. My main imports from this school of linguistic experimentation will be Roman Jakobson’s strict descriptions of language and its features, Krucenykh’s idea of Zaum, and Vasily Kamensky’s format, word, choice, and gut feeling of his ferro-concrete transrational poem “Tango with Cows,” while balancing it with a type of poetry oriented towards sense: confessional phrases not unlike Robert Lowell’s very quintessentially poem-ish poems. These confessional, rational, descriptive segments are important  because the contrast between liberated words and deliberated words will deal with the Barthesian notion of the death of the author. Barthesian duality, so to speak.

Kamensky’s ferroconcrete poetry was in reference to the reinforced concrete that had recently been introduced for the building of skyscrapers and other large and futuristic buildings. The specific example I will be using, “Tango with cows,” is called such to point out the clash between the new metropolitan lifestyle, constituents of which were learning the new dance craze called the Tango and living inside these ferroconcrete skyscrapers, and Russia’s vast history as a pastoral culture. Kamensky was one of the earlier Russian pilots until he had a near fatal crash, and returned to a literary career. Indeed, some of the poems in this book/zine/pamphlet resemble a map of land from the point of view of an aviator. The form also experiments with various fonts and typographic inconsistency, furthering the combinatorial play involved with this type of poetry. Also important to note is that it was published 100 years ago, and the first translation is underway, set to be due mid-2014. The half-truth that poetry is by definition untranslatable lets the reader of the english version see a different side of the poem than what Kamensky wrote a hundred years ago. In consequence, the interpretation is further complicated by the fact that Kamensky’s intent is clouded by the intent of the translators, and the fact that Kamensky’s original intent was that of no thetic intent.

Roman Jakobson was a French-Russian linguist who was one of the first to make counter arguments to Sausserean structural linguistics, and made significant achievements in the field of phonology, as well as semantics, poetics, and morphology. For his phonology, he drew primarily on the ideas of his sometimes interlocutor, Nikolai Trubetskoy,  who shared Jakobson’s passion for breaking down units of language to their atomic level. Later he came to America, working at Columbia, Harvard, and MIT, and advanced Charles Sanders Pierce’s semiotics and strongly influenced Claude Levi-Strauss and Barthes. It is important to note that if one spends enough time looking up Jakobsonian linguistics, one will discover that he got his start in his teens writing weird sound poetry under the name Aljagrov, experimenting with transrational language that was being studied by the poets surrounding his Literary Circle. He then went on to make a very descriptive analysis of the distinctive features of language, applying a set of binaries to each of the seven features, giving each a (+) or (-) value. This marriage of a disciplined and descriptive set of binaries to classify sounds and language contrasting with the system of free play at work in his sound poetry is the direction I hope to go with my project. I cannot read pages and pages of pure sound poetry, or pure semiotic freedom. Sound poetry can be put into conversation with confessional, descriptive, rational phrases to highlight the folly of our language and make it much more meaningful. The fact that the seemingly rational looks silly next to pure sounds, and vice versa creates the dissonance and delightful constellation of meaning that is left to be desired when I read something that is on the opposite side of the spectrum from rationality.

I will be weaving these threads from the back side of the tapestry, turning a disorganized mess of thread into an impossible to disentangle constellation of meaning, using sneezes from the muse as my source of inspiration. The typographic experimentation will come later, as will the thinking about the specific form this is going to take. What form is most advantageous to the concept I am trying to convey? How can I use the possibilities of the printing baseplate to make something happen by “making nothing happen?”

“Stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories.” (176)

In the talk that Jed gave on tuesday, he said that “when you are immersed in language, you don’t pay attention to it.” How then, might we apply that to this notion that technology is how we choose our stories? We are arguably very immersed in our technology, and it would be a departure from the norm to step back and look at how those stories are made, or what they are even. Jed talked about language becoming palpable when you are forced to pay attention to it, and I would like to end this thought with a quote from a linguist referenced in both my and Jed’s bibliography: “The artist-innovator must impose a new form on our perceptions, if we are able to detect in a given thing those traits that went unnoticed the day before. He may present the object in an unusual perspective, he may violate the rules of composition canonized by his predecessors.” The key to making meaning palpable is through ostranenie, or defamiliarization-or Ezra Pound’s “make it new”. Why then, does the word “weird” have such a negative connotation?

“I thought we should get you an antique tool, something so well made that it was still usable.” (187)

I was thinking a lot about where the crossroads between wood, metal, 3d printed stuff, and our bodies lie. In order to make the 3d printer a more sustainable and economic tool, we may want to utilize older things to use as parts of tools or instruments. The question is, what is so well made that it is still usable? It would be quite the project to print only what was absolutely necessary and use recycled materials for the rest. You could print the body of  guitar and use strings and parts from an otherwise broken one, or instead of using precious time and filament to print a handle for a tool, you could use a piece of wood.

“I mean, is it safe?” (Doctorow 101)

“What is outside the head may not necessarily be outside the mind” (Malafouris)

A theme I have seen with increasing frequency in Makers is the concern for safety, with the advent of the self-rearranging jungle gym, the fat burning procedure, and the rides through the museums of misfit robots. Suzanne wonders if Lester is the same person, after he goes through the radical procedure, which has given him the means to transform his psychological state through physical transformation. Suzanne wonders about the safety of the procedure, concerned with his physical health, but not the mental repercussions that occur. Lester’s physical transformation was able to transcend his skin and modify Suzanne’s mind. What would it be like to feel what Lester is feeling, having the body he always wanted, and knowing that Suzanne’s attraction to him is, if not decided, swayed by the way his body looks?