Tunnel Visionary

We asked CRDMer David Gruber to explain his recent art/project/publication. His response below explains “Tunnel Vision” and its inspirations:

“Tunnel Vision” is an interactive digital project that uses motion-tracking software to respond in real-time to users’ body movements.

You might call it a “cybertext” since users’ movements alter the appearance of a poem and users tend to move in response to the reaction of the poem. It will be featured life-sized on a wall at the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh this winter.

The project started in Katherine Hayles and Bill Seaman’s digital art and literature class at Duke two years ago. (Interesting CRDM fact: the course was also offered at UCLA in 2002, and Dr. Silva was a student in that course!) I decided to interpret Mark Strand’s poem The Tunnel as an analogy for the human-computer relationship. At the time, I was reading Dorsality by David Wills, a book where Wills dismantles fears of new technology by suggesting that any “technological thing” is always developing out of us and along with us. Wills imagines the backbone as an early human technology to say that once we desire to turn around to see what’s behind us enabling the turn, the backbone is already there. Even if the turn is a paranoid one where we turn back to see who or what is behind us or if we turn back to try to understand where we came from and how we came to Be whatever we are, there’s comfort in knowing that what precedes the turn is what motivates it and what enables it—what is already us.

I saw a connection to the poem, The Tunnel, where a paranoid man hides in his home and digs a tunnel to try to escape a “stranger” standing outside on the front lawn. (I always think of the movie PI when reading this poem, probably for good reason.)
In the end, the paranoid man emerges on a lawn and finds himself standing outside a home for days, waiting for help, desperate, as someone inside hides from him. So the character is trapped in a loop of experience, a dilemma where he fears the Other even while he is the Other and doesn’t even realize he fears himself or becomes what he fears. I wanted to build some kind of digital work that would express this idea and extend it to the human perspective on the computer-as-Other. I asked for Dr. Rieder’s help. He liked the idea of visualizing the poem in terms of the human-computer loop and taught me a lot about the processes involved in programming a digital work. Together, we shaped Tunnel Vision.

A couple of people have asked me whether I would count this as a publication. The question seems motivated by anxiety about the legitimacy of hands-on digital media work and/or digital media art in English and Communication Departments. Floating in the background are concerns about what tenure will mean for CRDM students doing this kind of work. But my answer is “yes, I’ll count this as a publication.”
My answer doesn’t indicate a belief that digital media projects like this one will carry the same weight as peer-reviewed journal articles available in print (although they should—and getting into an online academic journal or into a museum almost certainly requires peer-review). Rather, my response follows from my belief that scholarly digital projects (whether deemed “art” or not) are conceptual, that they require as much work or more to complete as any traditional publication, and that they will soon be viewed as the outcome of a valid intellectual process, instead of a novelty or a side-project for less serious scholars.
Building things with digital media is another way to do intellectual work. I learned this from Dr. Rieder. Right now, for instance, I’m trying to visualize the multiple interpretations of the functioning of mirror neurons, and I’m thinking about how the code can reflect (pun intended) the concept of a “mirror” and still compel users to see their own body movements through the movements of others. To do this, I have to think about the mirror as a metaphor and the different types of “mirroring” going on and what a computational mirror might look like. What’s a mirror expressed in numbers or in the structure of an English sentence? I’m thinking of chiasmus and parallel strings and loops and repetitions. So I’ve learned that hands-on digital media work is a way to explore, a way to develop new ideas, and a way to see connections to rhetoric and writing studies.

CCCC 2010

Vibrant. Aesthetically Pleasing. Equine Approved.

As a first-timer at The Conference on College Composition and Communication (Cs for short), I didn’t know what to expect. A lot of people wearing thick, black glasses? Monkeys? What I got was a plethora of free food, plenty of free drinks, and a banquet of delectable conference presentations, including one with a monkey! More on that later.

About the presentations: For me, when attending any conference, I am always afraid of getting stuck in that one presentation with the sad, rambling instructor. And prior to attending Cs, I was warned about the infamous “teacher lore” sessions, where someone says: “Look what I did in my classroom; those kids loved it!” However, I am happy to report that there were very few boring or lore-ish presentations at Cs! In fact, I saw many awesome presentations discussing important questions in rhetoric and composition: Should “composition” be reconfigured more generally as “writing studies?” How can we re-think the physical space of the composition classroom? Should (and how can) social media platforms be used in the classroom? How might attention to different lived experiences of time help us re-think rhetorical criticism? What role does visual rhetoric play in the writing classroom? Fascinating conversations. Good discussions.

Of course, this excellent range of conference presentations was likely a product of the wealth of presentations available. There were, no kidding, 30-40 concurrent sessions every hour or two. The choices were endless! And it is important to note that there were many, many excellent NC State presentations! As a group, the CRDM program certainly made a good impression. What I noticed was how our presentations really tried to bring together writing-as-composing, rhetoric, and new media. I was very proud to be a part of such an awesome group!

But outside of NC State, here’s a list of some of the more memorable presentations that I saw:

Pierre Cyr, Oklahoma City University, OK, “How to Remake the Composition Classroom into a Greek Symposium—And Why You Would Want To”

Megan Trexler, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Rhetorical Reflection: Reconceptualizing Reflective Narratives through Sophistic Verbal Techne”

Suzanne Rumsey, Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, “The Rhetoric of Weight Loss and Food Porn: Conflicting Messages of Responsibility”

Joshua Prenosil, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, “An Actor-Network Theory of the Enthymeme”

Scott Campbell, University of Connecticut, West Hartford, “Writing Evidence: Quotation as Object”

Laurie Gries, Syracuse University, NY, “Resuscitating the Temporal in Rhetorical Theory and History: What’s Time Got to Do with It?”

Gage Scott, Florida State University, Tallahassee, “A Method of Non-Linear Dynamics: Tracking Discursive and Material Flows in Post-Katrina Baton Rouge”

Now about that monkey: So, I went to see Peter Elbow discussing “writing and intonation.” His idea was that speaking-out loud (or thinking about how the intonation of the voice can mark clausal segments) might lead students to write in a “natural” voice and then produce a “clear” writing. Some pedagogical problems, from my point of view, overshadowed the presentation; however, to be fair, his idea is still in its infancy, and I’m sure he’ll develop this work more fully over time. But amusingly, Elbow had William Greaves, a linguist working on ape-human discourse, open the show with a discussion of ape intonation as communication. Greaves showed a video of ape (Bonobo) vocalizations. I’m still not sure how the ape video applied to thinking about practices of writing. But you have to love ape videos! Hey, I was excited.

All in all, I learned that going to Cs is great way to be inspired, both as a teacher and a researcher. Even Elbow, in his desire to do something new and incorporate research from other fields, was an inspiration. Being back home now, I’m reviewing my notes. I’ve decided to apply at least one lesson from the conference. I don’t want this information/experience to go to waste.

P.S. The parties at Cs were good too! Here’s the breakdown: Pearson had the party with the best food, Bedford had the most impressive location (Churchill Downs!), and McGraw had the best dance party (although the DJ was questionable). Next year, I hope that Pearson’s party will incorporate live music, Bedford’s party will have better food, and McGraw’s party will not charge for drinks.

~David Gruber,  Class of 2008

Liveblogging the CRC: Panel III

David Gruber taking over this morning.

Eme Crawford from U. of South Carolina (10:45 am):

A new translation of the Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir is coming out. The early translation was done by a zoologist and deleted some of the text, making the book sexist, suppressing philosophical work about women–mistranslations of existence and alienation. This created impression of women as “fuzzy thinkers.”

(10:55): Crawford claims: But better translations may not always clarify the text. So how should we read this text? Should we blame Sartre for the parts we don’t like? Should we just beat it into submission? Crawford: the text asks us to read the contradictions–”the text performs the content–woman– it seeks to explain.”

(11:00): Simone de Beauvoir launches volleys against herself; she shows how woman becomes. We should read to experience the book’s becoming. The Second Sex text is contradiction and ambiguity. A new translation will not solve the rhetorical multiplicity of the text–that is the text.

Nicole McFarlane from Clemson (11:00 am):

How does race rhetoric frame multimodal pedagogies?

On visuality of race: We have an archive of racial visuality that “shows us what we know about the subject.” Thinking about color & appearance has become a basis of classification–”an exterior expression of a deeper organic truth”–origin & ancestry.

There is a historical visual rhetoric of race: Blackness is defined in relation to whiteness, and visual culture upholds these relations. Race is a social construct.

McFarlane wonders how can she rework this by challenging/re-thinking the cliche’ that “race is a social construction.” She turns to post-pedagogy and wonders if it can uncover the cliche’.

(11:10): How is this cliche’ cynical and “a stock item of what is real”? In our classroom, when we use multimodal stratgies, we encourage students to conduct rhetorical analysis that should increase sensitivity and multi-cultural knowledge–but while doing this, we can incite a re-entrenchment that “works against practices of freedom.” So how do we explore multimodal spaces that are supposed to meet outcomes of diversity–while bringing in music, film, photo, etc–in a way that is responsible that avoids racist or sexist compositions? She proposes this as a question for us.

Kevin Brock from North Carolina State U (11:20):

Critics tout liberating nature of cyberspace as we assume electronic identities. But few critics have examined Open Source environments critically.

The developers are assigning the limits on users for constructing E identity. So we need to look at developing communities to understand how users are being controlled in these environments & how much limitation they’re willing to accept.

(11:30): In Open Source, users can become developers, and a mega-community is formed, a stratified community–those who develop and those who want to be involved and those who watch. Brock looks at the SourceForge.net community.  The users negotiate themselves in reference to other users–but these knowledges of users is limited by the site itself–the spaces provided in profiles and structures on the site. In this website, programming is primary and other identity info is trivial/irrelevant. Interesting, the layout of the profile pages are unimportant–contributions to the programming community are important.

The effort to see oneself (following from Massumi’s work here) is difficult–a user cannot see oneself or others in the community–this lack of knowledge & acceptance of identity boundaries produces “a self-castration.”

(11:40): Following from Baudrillard’s work in America–the SourceForge website acts as a sort of “hologram” where every part looks like every other part.

Open Source communities try to save users from the proprietary threat but draws on proprietary systems and defines itself in relation to those softwares. And OSS inscribes users’ need into the software as proprietary systems do and makes OSS for corporate operating systems–so as SourceForge bills itself as empowering developers, it develops systems for users who are not proprietary free.