Final Prezi Presentation

Prezi Project Ideas

I spent a considerable amount of time thinking of how to approach creating a Prezi presentation. My main problem, I learned, was that I was trying to figure out how to tell a story related to the issues surrounding my accident space. I think that the zoom in and zoom out features and the ability to create paths from image to image in Prezi were suggesting to me that I had to link my ideas as a sequential narrative. My attempts to tell an underlying story in this manner was overwhelming the trope space--and in my mental Prezi presentations, the end results were too obvious, dogmatic, or simply cheesy. I kept reverting back to Kovitz's book and the way he uses structure. Kovitz finally made me see that I needed to choose subjects that had nothing to do with cancer or the accident space--this helped me to move out the sequential narrative space that seemed to be prohibiting my creative choices. The structure that I chose, I knew, had to have some relation to the notions of routine and repetition; it had to be something mundane so that I could diffuse the preachy-type approach of the ideas that I was coming up with.

I thought back to why Kovitz’s focus on architecture in the book kept making me think about information exchange on servers and in database systems. Kovitz, as we discussed in class, articulates a problem with logic-based mechanized (and efficient) systems by writing from within them, with them, and letting the information that comes through create a meaning that identifies a different logic or reality--a sort of secret embedded in the human response to practical (or otherwise) routine processes. Kovitz sharply critiques utopian socialism in his book, but I also took from his book the related idea that he was conveying the notion of a loss of meaning in society through the mechanisms that allow and establish order. It occurred to me in class two weeks ago that his book is about a mass slaughter of meaning. But mechanization and repetition are also positive; they relate to well-being. This led to the idea that I could experiment with database and database design in my Prezi presentation to say something about the accident space and policy decision-making issues surrounding cancer. I spent many years learning how to design databases and connect them to web interfaces using SQL queries on the job. I think that I can do something with the structure versus content relationship in databases and the way that people use them that might--if done correctly--give me the electrate turn that charges the accident space into revealing the subtleties of its composition as well as its extremes.

I don’t know quite how I am going to do it yet, but I want to try to use tables and cells in a database, where information is routinely processed and disseminated to different users through web interfaces or reports using database queries, to get at the logic of my accident in an unexpected way. In my mind, I am making the conductive associations, but I still need to figure out how to use Prezi to make it work. I find it fascinating that I will be able to use something as logical as a database to make a broader statement of import about accident logic. I’m not sure if I am on the right track, but I, personally, will draw much from this if I can get it to work. One of my biggest problems is going to be coming up with the content for the database structure screenshots I will create. I want to design my Prezi around a theme like “How to Create Relational Databases” and then provide a manual-like guide that subordinates the content that I will place in the database cells to the instructional aspects of the “How to” presentation.

Life in the modern world (thoughts and ideas), at least to me, seems somewhat parenthetical, so I want to embody that beside-the-point tone or attitude in my presentation somehow. But the whole idea of my presentation needs to convey the idea of an unstoppable growth or a defect in an orderly system that can be understood like the term apoptosis. I have a lot of work (and thinking) to do, but this blog post represents my preliminary ideas for the final presentation.

Prezi Software: "Zooming Presentation Editor"

Prezi is an online software program where registered users create presentations by moving through images and texts on one large infinite canvas. It replaces conventional page by page or slide by slide presentations and offers a new, dynamic, seemingly interactive experience for viewers--significantly extending the interactive features of PowerPoint presentations. Not surprisingly, Prezi has been received well on the web. Since its launch in 2009, in Budapest, the company has established a large market-base and is making a profit. The U.S. office in "San Francisco . . . was established in November 2009 and the company has been cash flow positive since 2010" ("Brief History," 2011, par. 2).

In this course, we are using Prezi to create an image of electrate thought. Last year, our task was to create a static image that turned the expected logic in a different (electrate) direction, but Prezi has additional features that will allow us to work with our image base differently. For example, we can use zoom and pan out features to emphasize or deemphasize features within and among images and text. We can also create a sense of progression or regression with the zoom feature and the image path feature, which allows us to connect images and text and travel visually travel from place to place on the canvas during the presentation. One other interesting aspect of Prezi is that users have an infinite blank canvas to work with. There are no edges to work with. We are able to create frames around objects and groups of objects, though. Also, like in PowerPoint, users can send images and text areas backward and forward on the canvas, creating something like PhotoShop layers.

Tale / Kovitz's Instruction

Kovitz uses pig farming as a vehicle.  His tenor is utopian planning through Fourier.  We need to figure out a vehicle and tenor for out accident space using Prezi, in much the same way that Kovitz uses pig farming and the concept of utopian planning. 


Kovitz Pig City Model Farm creates meaning from the reader's interaction with the text--the reader's ability to make associations that extend beyond images and text.  This space is the event space, and, in this space, he states that social planning is wrong.  He states that "what is good in pig farming is bad for society" (class notes).  He frames something old within a new order of logic.  This is how the consultant report--our final Prezi presentation--will frame its meaning.  The concept of the document itself--its basis in literacy--will shape something new out of the old logic (using a new logic).  Our Prezi presentation will represent writing from the position of electrate logic.

Class Notes

• The Prezi presentation will represent our experience of the collective agency of which we are a part.
• We need to get at the entelechy of the accident.
• We have to receive the notice of the problem in the world through the apparatus that allows us to notice it.
• The accident is a sign that shows us the relationship between technics and culture.
• The measure of the world is given there.
• What is the regularity; what repeats in the accident?

General Economy & Restricted Economy

The accident space has a general economy and a restricted economy: for every need, desire, or drive, the culture we move and act through satisfies that need (class notes). The restricted economy consoles/satisfies public need, but, with this satisfaction, comes death, injury, social problems, etc.; the factors that constitute the general economy. The general economy used to be the sacred economy--the holy, the terrifying, the celebrated (class notes). If we are going to have an economy that includes losses, we have to acknowledge them (class notes). In society, there is a "massive denial and rejection of the general economy." We don't deny that there are accidents, murders, deeply ingrained social problems, etc., but we refuse to take responsibility for them, logically or otherwise (class notes). This is a disaster. "As consultants, we can say that this is not very rational. As a culture, civilization needs to address this (class notes). The role of the EmerAgency/exhibit/consulting report is to "notice this reality. The accident is not an anomaly--it has to exist.

INSTRUCTION

In Prezi, we need to evoke this dimension of insight that is neglected. We need to try to articulate and understand what the accident as sign and figure is about by exploring its semantic potentialities. We have to place ourselves in the event position and receive the sign; ask ourselves what it is saying; examine what it can say; and find out where we can go freely and where we wouldn't usually go using the inference principle of conduction. As we explore the accident space, we need to look for an area where we can jump to turn the logic in on itself and say something else. This jump is the tenor. We should gather the potential in the accident site, and the turn or jump we find will represent the moment of epiphany, which, once found will be the light speed moment we spoke about at the beginning of the course. This moment will traverse the span of time associated with our accident and express the new moment/the new logical space all at once.

Rob Kovitz's "Pig City Model Farm": Tale

Rob Kovitz's collage-themed Pig City Model Farm is fascinating visual and intellectual experience.

Kovitz put us in the event space. He gives us an example of thinking in the position of the event (the space of excess where Baudrillard combines the subject and object in "Fatal Strategies"), and that example seems to tell us (or prove) that the imaginary space of pataphysical innovation is logical and that meaning can be maneuvered and guided (can mean) without being bound by constraints of either a pre-defined meaning or logic.

If I had to describe the experience of reading Kovitz's book, I would say that he created confusion in me and then controlled (and sustained) that confusion with the ideas that each quote and image created in me, in themselves, and due to their particular placement. His topic on pigs in itself is enough to initiate confusion in the reader, but he obviously uses the history of the mass production and slaughter of pigs to make simultaneous statements about the influences that govern society and human thinking and action. His book is notably meticulous in its appropriation of models and plans for pig farms. I particularly enjoyed the detailed accounts of workers' experiences on the farm, which made me think of how routine relates to our project. Kovitz makes art out of the agricultural practice of pig farming simply by re-creating its details--and newly identifying them as simply what they in a different context. He uses pigs and pig farms, but he could just as well be writing about the data that transfers through well-designed and optimized databases and server farms that drive the information exchange on the internet and internal and external data networks? Kovitz's order in the book identifies a deeply rooted (mechanistic) disorder that operates on a semantic level which the order itself dismisses. This idea alone makes his book--and the story I decided to make from its associations--profound.

Meaning emerges on a spatial plane that exists beyond (and because of) the juxtaposition and order of quotations and images in the book. The book cannot make sense without a reader. In this sense, it insists that meaning is derived from the reader's cognitive interaction with the visual and textual triggers. The meaning does not exist in the words or their grammar, but it depends on a collective social system of rules that it does not itself define. Kovitz arranged the book by appropriating texts and images from different authors. It can be said that he didn't really author the book itself, but there is no denying that he authored a meaning that exists beyond the text. The book itself, with a black and white image of a pig on the cover partially highlighted by yellow ink and framed with a black border, seems to suggest an oddly articulated dimensional emphasis, vaguely recalling how a 3D image looks without 3D glasses. Perhaps this yellow distortion is representing the holographic dimension of meaning that Kovitz authors. The book takes work to understand, even when the meanings start to flow into a recognizable form about a quarter of the way into the book. It is certainly not a passive experience and, in that respect, reading the book is an extremely intellectual experience, which involves what I can only describe as the pleasure a person experiences privately when he or she gets a joke or manages to work out a complex puzzle.

As our tale, Kovitz provides an example of what we need to achieve with our accident space of our disaster.

EmerAgency: "Conceptual Consulting Agency"

One of the things that I find so compelling about electracy is its inclusion of human experience in its logic/philosophy. In fact, I've learned that the human sensorium is integral to its logic. It recognizes a social problem, and it is offering a solution. Professor Ulmer uses the terms of the capitalist business world--at the heart of the problems that electracy addresses--to identify the philosophers of electracy as belonging to a virtual consulting agency (EmerAgency). And the material we create using electrate logic is a conceptual consulting document, a thing that exists virtually in thought governed and patterned by the CATTt and which offers the tools for thinking philosophically in contemporary society, addressing our current problems, and establishing that ever-elusive happiness and a feeling of life well-lived that the Greeks wrote about. Professor Ulmer describes electracy's virtual consulting agency in a 2000 lecture at The European Graduate school:

What we were working on in class is a virtual consulting agency, a new consultancy, called the Emer(a)gency. The idea is to use the internet as the delivery medium for our consulting, the specific knowledge we want to apply is from the liberal and fine arts, and we want to address public policy formation, understanding that we are going to be consultants without portfolio for some time. So this Emer(a)gency take a particular approach to problems in the world, and we have to ask what should be our relationship to disaster, and to problem as such? (Ulmer, 2000, par. 2)

If I had the time, I'd try to draw this consulting document (perhaps I will return to this if I finish my Prezi presentation in enough time).

Bachelor Machine

Artist Christian Hubert writes that

The term ‘bachelor machine’ was first used by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 in connection with pieces of work that would later be assembled in the Large Glass of 1915-1923. (Also known as the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even) For Duchamp, the term refers specifically to the lower portion of the glass, the realm of the bachelors, which contains, among other things, the chocolate grinder, the cemetary for uniforms and liveries -- Priest, Delivery Man, Gendarme, Cuirassier, Policeman, Pallbearer, Footman, Stationmaster and Page Boy -- and the témoins oculistes. The Large glass consists of two distinct realms, the realm of the bride above, and the realm of the bachelors below, both desiring and imagining one another without any possibility of mutual comprehension. (one is here reminded of the real / imaginary distinction and the discussion of cyberspace) (“Bachelor Machine,” par. 1) 

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, (The Large Glass), 1915-1923



Analogy / 'Pataphysics: Instruction

Our Analogy instruction is to take the attitude of fumisme; the attitude of play. The attitude of electracy starts with fumisme (class notes).

Archetype of Creative Process

1. An aggressive act or an act of disrespect (use of aggression).
2. Act of participation (use of negative capability)

From Class Notes

• Jarry’s figure of Ubu is appetite personified / personified resistance to order.
• We need to articulate an attitude in our design.
• Appropriation is parodic. We need to appropriate an object and use trope and irony to say something else with it.
• Our own position as a collective subject needs to be an aspect/feeling of the final design.
• Look at the accident space as potential sign.
• Back away from saying something specific to try to identify what the potential of the sign is (its fate).
• Caillois makes the transition to ‘pataphysics. Whenever there is a fascination of some sort, it can be broken down into parody.
• Need to break fascination with science / technics. The trance needs to be broken.
• Use trope to break out of the routine of the thing / the mechanism.
• Parody sets up the existing form (reality of a situation) and turns it.
• The first science we are turning in electracy is the engineer’s report
• Narrative form represents the articulation of the presence into the future (gives form to process).
• Start with genre of a report and its purpose, and then set-up the space for the electrate turn in logic (kehre)
• Obscenario / Conceit / Trope. Example: handbooks on how to write a scenario
• Our consultant reports should be articulated in the manner of a conceit but structured like a scenario.
• The consultant report gets at the ‘pataphysics of an event using a practical trope.
• Accident takes place within history.
• We need to be able to see the fatal strategy.
• What is the dimension that is the necessity of the event?
• Use the fourth inference principle to move through information: conduction.

INSTRUCTIONS

• General method is grammatology.
• Working by analogy.
• ’Pataphysics is the stepping stone to see what replaces metaphysics for electracy
• Reality is what our metaphysics gives to us to manipulate in order to make decisions in the world.
• We think with this reality.
• Bök is describing a bachelor machine: a phrase that sums up the invention of the avant-garde.
• Marchel Duchamp’s art piece The Large Glass embodies the process of parody and trope that we needs to guide our thinking in our Prezi realizations of our accident logic.
• Make terms up to disrupt/turn premises.
• Look at the science behind the accident logic—the technical discourse of the event—and extract from it. Take the term and define it as trope.
• Use specialized terms from other fields [the apoptosis of a cell, for example] and make an analogy to something common in reality. Create a relationship between the term, its scientific logic, and something else.
• Give more attention to the secret. We want to make our consulting report seductive. To do this, we have to make it cryptic.
• Do this by introducing a procedure—aleatory or mathematical.
• Look at the physical substance in the accident space, and do something conductive with it. Use the dictionary.
• Find the primary trope in the technical process associated with the accident and ‘distill the atmosphere out of the object.’
• We are designing from the connotative position, from the receivers position (the event space).

French Oulipianism

Oulipo, roughly translated, means "workshop of potential literature." It refers to a

loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members include novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): 'the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.'

Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's 'story-making machine', which he used in the construction of Life: A User's Manual. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec's novel A Void) and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems, such as the Knight's Tour of the chess-board and permutations. ("Oulipo," Wikipedia, pars 1-3)

The French Oulipians, Bök explains, revised "the structure of exception in order to oppose the irrationalism of the French Surrealists” (64). Literature, for Oulipians, is a cyberorganic phenomenon that results “from deliberative collisions between poetic devices: the machinic paralogy of accidents” (64). In revising the structure of exception, Oulipians "study the syzygia between the anomalos of a ‘constraint’ and the clinamen of its ‘potentials’” (64). Oulipo explores the "metaphysics of thetical cases with the ’pataphysics of hypothetical cases--the als ob, the ‘as if,’ of what might have been” (65).

 Georges Perec 

 Italo Calvino 

Italian Futurism

Futurism refers to an "artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century" ("Futurism," Wikipedia, par. 1). THe founder of the movement was the Italian Filippo Marinetti.

Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science. ("Futurism," Wikipedia, par. 3)

Bök's description of futurism beginning accidently out of a mechanical catastrophe coincides with Virilio's statement, borrowing from Aristotle, that

'the accident reveals the substance,' [so that] the invention of the substance is also the invention of the “accident.” . . . [T]he shipwreck is indeed the 'futuristic' invention of the ship, the air crash the invention of the supersonic plane, and the Chernobyl meltdown, the invention of the nuclear power station. (Foreword, par. 8)

Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913-1914

Bök's states that “a car wreck . . . dramatizes the clinamen of a swerve, complete with the anomalous intensity of its shock (la scossa), its noise (il rumore), and its speed (la velocita). Such an event implies that, from any havoc wreaked by technology, there appears a route charted for aesthetics. Such a ’pataphysics epistemology values the uniqueness, if not the randomness, of surprise itself” (47). This “route charted for aesthetics” takes literal form in the entertainment industry’s reproduction and glamorization (and perhaps even, sanitization) of the accident in television and film, but as I have learned in this course the entertainment industry is integral to the logic of electracy—if I am understanding the term correctly, it is or can be the voice of electrate logic.

Bök posits that metaphor becomes "a device of transport" (48). He identifies the difference between 'the artistry of a message and the industry of its transit" (48). Futurism is concerned with the metaphor of the accident, and the uniquely human capacity to recognize something more beyond the facts of a thing or situation (and the things or situations that surround it). Metaphor is thus a "structure of exception" (48), an aspect of meaning that is part of the fact of an enunciation or the reality of a thing but that also exists outside of its control. Bök writes that the factual, objective instrument is the "delirious machinery that revises anomalos, the syzygia, and the clinamen through its own machinic paralogy of shock, noise, and speed” (48).


Umberto Boccioni, Die Stadt erhebt sich [The City Grows], 1910

Christian Bök's "'Pataphysics": Analogy

Christian Bök's 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is the CATTt's Analogy instruction.  Bök's study (he refers to it as a survey) clearly intersects with our previous instructions and sets us up for the tale component of our CATTt--Rob Kovitz's Pig City Model Farm.  Pataphysics, Bök states, "represents a supplement to metaphysics, accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative to rationalism" (3). The single quote preceding the term "pataphysics" denotes the French influence on pataphysical thinking, and the double quote preceding the term signifies the Canadian influence on pataphysical thinking.

'Pataphysics is speculative, waiting for its chance to happen, as if my accident, in a themic park of scientific conception. (4)

'Pataphysics reveals that science is not as 'lucid' as once thought, since science must often ignore the arbitrary, if not whimsical status of its own axioms. (4)

'Pataphysics valorizes the exception to each rule in order to subvert the procrustean constraints of science. (5)

'Pataphysics refuses to conform to any academic standard: hence, this survey cannot demonstrate that it has learned the lessons of its topic without negotiating a virtually untenable ambiguity between the noetic mandate of scholarship and the poetic license of 'pataphysics. (5)

Buadrillard observes that, for the "[']Pataphysics of the year 2000,' history has accelerated past the escape velocity for reality, moving from the centrifugal gravity of the real into centripetal celerity of the void' ([1992] 1944a, I). Events occur in the null-space of simulation, where '[a]ll metaphysical tension has been dissipated, yielding a [']pataphysical ambiance' ([1983] 1990a, 71). Things succumb to relativity, complexity, and uncertainty, shifting from an absolute state of determinism to a dissolute field of indeterminism. The science of 'pataphysics responds to these absurdities with a genre of science fiction that shows science itself to be a fiction. It narrates not what is, but what might have become. It inhabits the tense of the future perfect, of the post modo--a paradoxical temporality, in which what has yet to happen has already taken place. (8)

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), the inventor of pataphysics, was a writer best "known for his play Ubu Roi (1896)" ("Alfred Jarry," 2011, par. 1)--a precursor "to the Theatre of the Absurd and the greater surrealist art momvement of the early twentieth century ("Ubu Roi," 2011, par. 1) . Jarry wrote "plays, novels, poetry, esays, and speculative journalism" ("Alfred Jarry," 2011, par. 1). Bök states that Jarry had an "important influence upon the poetic legacy of this century (particularly the Italian Futurists, the French Oulipians, and the Canadian Jarryites).




Bök draws from an incredible range of sources to present the the details of pataphysics and its influence on current thinking. He identifies three declensions of 'pataphysics (these are the names of tropes):

SYZYGIA	The excessive order coming out of chaos.
ANOMALOS	The chiasm between order and chaos.
CLINAMEN	The swerve of chaos breaking away from order.

Bök divides his survey into five topics:

• Science and Poetry
• Millenial ’Pataphysics
• Italian Futurism
• French Oulipianism
• Canadian ’Pataphysics

Of immediate interest to our project are the topics of Italian futurism and French Oulipianism.