Scott Rettberg » random

FD, an amuse bouche for the Web

Scott — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:46:18 +0000

Anyone who likes cute animals, culinary pursuits, and gratuitous profanity will love the shit out of Fucking Delicious.

Cybraphon

Scott — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:31:41 +0000

Cybraphon is a project from Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman). Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a large display case, Cybraphon behaves like a real band. Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day.

Cybraphon Demo Song from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

Two turntables and a microphone and a mac and a website

Scott — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:24:28 +0000

Just a quick post here to say I think Beck gets the Web in ways that a lot of contemporary recording artists don’t. While a lot of bands give you discographies and tour dates and bios and the like, maybe a few sample tracks, I’m impressed with the Web strategy Beck is embracing on his site. As far as I can tell, he is not directly promoting his albums, his tour dates, or his merchandising on is site at all. Instead, he is using the Web site as an occasion to make and distribute cool stuff with his friends. His new site has features including Record Club, a project to informally re-record a classic album in a day with other musicians, and release a new track on the site every week. Irrelevant Topics will feature Beck informally interviewing other musicians at length about whatever comes to mind, released in serial installments. The first part of the first interview, with Tom Waits, is a fantastic discussion with one of America’s best songwriters. Planned Obsolescence is a weekly DJ set mixed by Beck’s crew. In an age when anybody can put on a pirate hat and download any album without paying a dime, this type of creative approach to using the web as a experimental platform for music and its environments is exactly the type of thing that might make me want to support an artist by buying his CD or MP3 or concert ticket or T-shirt. Beck’s crew is using Web 2.0ish tools and social media like facebook and vimeo to reach their fan base and share their funky new readymades.

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “Venus In Furs” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Major League Lifestyle Improvement

Scott — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:34:44 +0000

Today I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, which has a much nicer backend interface and some smart improvements (though I can’t seem to get the media uploader to work). In the process I also found out my previous theme had somehow been spam-hacked, which explains the new look-in-progress. But the major technological upgrade of the day was my subscription to MLB.TV. We have a DV cable to put the stream through to the TV. At anything over 400K, the image stream is too jerky on my connection, but at 400K, it is a lot like like watching baseball used to be when I was a kid and broadcast television involved rabbit ear manipulation. Still, you can’t beat being able to watch the Cubs live from Norway. Great game, the Cubs beat the Phillies 6-5 in the 10th inning. Well worth $20 a month.

My Sloppy Handwriting as a Logo for Vagant

Scott — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:52:04 +0000

Hey this is the coolest thing that happened to me today. I’ve got a short piece on the recent Audiatur poetry festival coming out in the next issue of the Scandinavian literary magazine Vagant. They translated the piece from English into proper Norsk for me (I could have given them a third-grader Norsk version — “Jeg liker audiatur, audiatur var veldig bra, etc.) which was nice of them. But the cool thing today was that they emailed asking if I could send them a sample of my handwriting within the next hour or so to use as their logo for this issue. My students always complain about my handwriting, crack jokes about how I ought to be a medical doctor with the level of scrawl I work with. So what the heck, why not? I wrote “Vagant” a few times on a piece of paper, took a picture, and emailed it back. Two hours later they sent me a cover layout with my scrawl where a proper logo should be. That’s cool.

Dancing Kangaroo

Scott — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:30:30 +0000

Getting Translated . . . into Bulgarian

Scott — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:33:56 +0000

The internet works in mysterious and sometimes wonderful ways. Yesterday I got an email from Reneta Bozhankova of the faculty of Slavic Studies at Sofia University Bulgaria on behalf of a journal called Literaturata (The Literature), asking if they could translate my essay “All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation” into Bulgarian. I had to get out a map to remind me where Bulgaria actually is, but I’m pleased as punch that somebody wants to take the effort to translate some of my writing, particularly into a language I have no hope of understanding. A revised version of that essay will also be coming out next year in New Narratives: Theory and Practice, Thomas Browan and Ruth Page, eds. published by University of Nebraska Press, but I’m glad that the Bulgarians will be able to read it in their native tongue first. Now if we could only find some Romanians willing to translate The Unknown . . .

Rap Canterbury Tales

Scott — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 16:39:38 +0000

Can You Balance An Egg on its End on the Vernal Equinox?

Scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 09:46:28 +0000

Apparently, yes, but you can also do so on any other day of the year, given the right egg. It has more to do with the number and arrangement of bumps on the egg than the time of year. It also helps to shake the egg with enough force to break the yolk, lowering its force of gravity. I got to wondering about this last night when we went to go see an excellent folk music show including music from West Norway and from the Shetlands last night, performed by “Columbi Egg” whose name is derived from the story of the Egg of Columbus. Regardless, happy vernal equinox. I plan to celebrate by shaving my seasonal beard and starting a paper on appropriation in electronic literature.

Internet Advertising Resolution

Scott — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:12:51 +0000

If you advertise on the internet and make use of an ad that moves from its original position to cover up what I am reading and demand my attention, I will not buy your product EVER. If I am already buying your product, I will boycott it thereafter.

This trend of advertising that zips all around the browser window until you click on it is driving me nuts. It’s an intolerable form of textual pollution.