The Scream

Broken Photo

Here is my broken picture:

Broken Image

Here is Jimmy Page looking trippy

Red Ridinghood

This week we looked at Red Ridinghood, a piece by Donna Leishman. This is the second piece of electronic literature by Leishman that we looked at this semester. The first one that we looked at was in the second week of class, Deviant. Leishman uses these two stories and modifies them to give the readers a different perspective of two stories, one more known then the other. The graphics in both Leishman’s pieces, though, are very similar in the make-up and design as you can see from the images below.

  

Red Ridinghood   Deviant

Deviant had a more complicated way of reaching the ending, the reader had to actually search the piece to get there. While the piece, Red Ridinghood, leads readers through it, almost like following along in a book, to get to the ending. In Deviant it was fun going through piece by piece trying to get to the end and it gave the reader a more interactive experience. Where in Red Ridinghood there were not as many interactive pieces or options given.

Red Ridinghood was Leishman’s retelling of the classic children’s story, "Little Red Riding Hood".  She reconstructs the original story with a more modern plot. In this version Red ,the little girl, starts out from her home in a modern city before she travels to her grandmother’s house in the woods, very different then the original story where she resides in a little cottage. The wolf in this version is portrayed as a man riding on an electric scooter with hairy arms, instead of the creepy prowler we know in the other story who is a real wolf. In this version Red is not afraid of the wolf eating her, she is madly in love with him. In one part if you click her basket it will open up Red’s diary where she writes how she loves the wolf but he just simply will not notice her back.  

Another thing that Leishman did for the piece was give it some major twists. The ending in her version was the girl being shot, unlike in the original version where the woodsman saves Little Red. Instead of being eaten, she is impregnated by the wolf. Also Leishman offers alternate paths that the reader can choose to alter the story. Overall this piece was very enjoyable, it takes you through Little Red Riding Hood but with the wolf being a different type of predator. It was a great piece of electronic literature and would be a great recommendation for people outside of our class.

Coding and Digital Literacy

Code, a system of signals used to represent letters or numbers in transmitting messages is used as the instructions in a computer program.  Most people do not understand coding and are often discouraged from learning or talking about it due to its complexity.  To the untrained eye many see it only as a cluster of random numbers and letters, however when read correctly words, letters and a general infrastructure are created.   

Which leads to a discussion regarding digital literacy. Tasneem Raja’s article We Can Code It!  Why computer literacy is key to winning the 21st Century examines that the way that computer science is taught in high schools as well as the projected need for more computer science related jobs.  Often studying how to read and write code is discouraged towards students who are not in the computer sciences.   Raja explains that there are benefits for students from all academic backgrounds within the realm of learning computational thinking and along the lines of being “computer savvy” serving as a career boost.

Coding can be seen in various forms and is used in multiple ways.  Coding is used to in operating systems, scripts, and video games. Some of the most wealthy companies in the world were started on code. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are some of the most well known companies around the globe, and they were founded on coding. Apple for instance, uses what is known as ‘secure coding’. Which is coding that “guards against the accidental introduction of security vulnerabilities.” Some of the primary causes for these vulnerabilities is consistently found to be: defects, bugs, and logic flaws. These errors are usually very small, but common software programming errors.

Similar to the English language, Coding has specific rules that that need to be followed, and similarly to the English language has its own syntax and grammar.  Proper usage determines if the code created will be considered good or bad code.   This is important when considering the security of a program or operating system.   

Hackers are people that generally enjoy learning about code at advanced levels, and are very digitally literate. A hacker generally will find flaw in the code, but they don’t use it to harm or manipulate the system. They usually will tell the company what is wrong and how to fix it. If that company chooses not to fix it, that’s when they will exploit the flaws to the public. The people who exploit the code for their own personal gains are known by a couple names: crackers, attackers, or black hats. Most of these people aren’t incredibly skilled, but they do use the flaws that a hacker has posted for their own personal gains.

Google Maps Essay

Joshua Calandrella - "Belize" - A short retelling of the trip I took my senior year to Belize.
Steven Kish - "A Summers Trip"- A story about me and my friends on a summer adventure that we'll never forget.
Chris Weber- "An Awesome Working Vacation"- A description of my journey to New Orleans for the Junior Olympics.
Amber Whistler- "We're going on a Trip" - A fictional story based on true events about a girl's first synthetic acid trip.

Repurposing

This week we looked at works of electronic literature that encouraged a discussion on the concept of “repurposing”.  Poet and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Kenneth Goldsmith discusses repurposing in response to what conceptual artist  Douglas Huebler wrote in 1969: "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."

Goldsmith views this concept while considering new works of literature, writing, art, etc. while noting that “themes from older works form the basis for new ones.” Goldsmith himself in an course he teaches in Uncreative Writing pushes students to reshape, reuse, and even recycle works that they did not create.  This method of producing can be viewed as perhaps a form of recycling and repurposing, but definitely not cheating or steeling. .  

Two particular works expressed the concept of repurposing in a creative and interesting manner.  The first is The Sweet Old Etcetera, created by Alison Clifford. Clifford describes The Sweet Old Etcetera as “an interactive web project based on the poetry of e. e. Cummings.” This interactive work plays with the visual aesthetic that Cumming’s poetry is well known for by using motion, graphics, sound and programming to adapt his poetry in a digital landscape.  The viewer interacts with Cumming’s poetry by clicking on  images and selected words within a poem causing the words to spin and branch off, creating a visual landscape made of text.  

Girl Talk's album All Day is composed by using overlapping samples of 372 songs performed by other artists.  The album is intended to be listened too as on piece from start to finish.  When viewing the album from the above link, the viewer not only is exposed to the audio of the album, but is given a visual component, by seeing what songs are sampled, where they are layered and even what year they were original released.  This work makes use of the technology provided by soundcloud.  

When listening to the album on this platform, one can click on a song sampled and will be taken to a Wikipedia page, providing information about the song, artist and album it was originally featured on.

Works like All Day and The Sweet Old Etcetera are  viewed as  creative mashups that use previously produced works as the structure for their own independent work.  What makes these pieces unique is their use of previously produced pieces as the content/structure for their own creative work.  It can be compared to a musician who does not create the sounds that their instrument necessarily makes, but arranges already known sounds into something new.  Or even a writer.  A writer does not create the English language, however uses already “made” words and they “repurpose” them to create fiction, essays etc.

These pieces demonstrate how we should never fear that creativity will be lost.  New and creative works can always come from new arrangements of what has already been made.  Some might say this is almost a discouragement to creating your own individual work. But in reality, are not  all original thoughts and ideas just repurposed and recycled from other people. It’s fascinating to think about.