Hypermedia: Post Project Creativity Debrief

Orders from on high demanded that this week we take on whatever role we've managed to avoid up til now. For me, that was the role of coding. I can't speak for the others, but for me this is the position I'm least happy in: not so much because I don't enjoy code--I do, at times--but because I don't like being in a position without creative control. So this was for me a week to sit back, say nothing, and do my best to bring the others' vision to life in a working prototype. This is, of course, as natural to me as riding a bike, which is perhaps only a funny statement if you know me well enough to know I never learned how to do that either.

What I find really interesting about the results of this particular collaboration is how much it reveals of our individual styles. We assembled on our main page a sampling of our own individual projects along with profiles discussing our backgrounds and creative intentions. We also have a page with images from the previous collaborative projects and a discussion of each. Looking at the individual set next to the collaborative seems to reveal our roles and influences just as plainly as when we come out and say it. Of course, I might be biased, since I spent a couple of hours surrounded by those images getting the site together and coded.

I find this really interesting thanks to my minor obsession with the idea of creativity. I'm immersed in a creative writing workshop every week taken online through my other university and I constantly marvel at how we all--yes, myself included, or why would I take it at all--buy into the notion that creativity is something that can be workshopped. The only way I've ever found to feel like I'm a "creative person"--whatever that is--is to read so many things that I can at least be sure that whatever I'm spouting comes from digesting as many ideas as I could fit in my head. My mother occasionally said that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but they also didn't keep any apples in the house, only books, and I find that those go down much better on a daily basis than any fruit not blended into drink form.

So that takes me in a roundabout way back to my point: what is at the root of divergences in creativity? Why do some of us think in grids and others in colliding bubbles? For that matter, why do some of us see in grids and others in bubbles?

Thankfully for me, I have no qualms at all about not answering that question with anything but a list of the books I believe answer that question better than I ever could--without, of course, ever answering the question at all. First up, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which I revisited while thinking about the first group project. Queneau was on the frontier of stretching language to its limits when he was writing in 1940ish, and he somehow still seems to be on the frontier when I read it again today. How on earth is that possible? Maybe for the same reason most people don't read Finnegans Wake: it stretched the idea of what a novel could be so much that no one has really felt the need to venture out that way again. (My web domain, by the way, comes from a Wake quote: "Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud"--which offers another stretch on the way we think about language. Just don't mention that to the Joyce estate, they've gotten rather touchy these days.)

And one last book I open whenever I need a different way to think about a design, or a writing project, or a research question, or a writing desk for that matter--Alice in Wonderland. Oh yes, it's cliche, but such a glorious cliche! Perhaps we all need a trip down the rabbit's hole now and again.

So a question back at the metaverse, or up the rabbit hole, or through the void: choose your own metaphor. What do you read when you think on creating?

Hello, Mary

The text for the (very, very) silly story, and evidence of what happens when I try to write a picture book text in a day:

Hello Mary!

--
Sarah stood in the bathroom. The light was off. The big mirror was in front of her. She could not even see her face in its shiny surface. She’d heard her brother talking. She’d heard him say how to call the ghost. The room was dark. She was ready.
“Hello Mary.” Sarah whispered. The mirror was dark.
“Hello Mary.” Sarah said again, and again. The mirror was empty.
“Hello Mary.” Sarah said again. Her brother had told her to say it thirteen times. Had he lied to her? She still saw nothing.
“Hello Mary!” She almost shouted the words the thirteenth time.
A face appeared in the mirror! A big black pointy hat sat over glowing eyes.
“Hello Sarah.”
Sarah shrieked. She knew who that was. A witch! Sarah ran out of the bathroom.
“Mommy, mommy, there’s a witch in the mirror!”
Mommy came running. “Don’t be scared, Sarah. Mirrors only show your reflection.”
“But I saw her!”
“You’ve been listening to your brother’s Halloween stories, haven’t you?” Mommy sighed. “There’s no witch in the mirror.”
Sarah’s big brother Bobby was right behind her Mommy. He laughed at her. “You saw Bloody Mary! She takes people’s faces from them. You’re going to wake up without a face!”
Sarah wanted to cry. “But I like my face!”
Mommy hugged Sarah. “Bobby, stop that!” Mommy opened the bathroom door and turned on the light. “See? There’s no one in the mirror but you and me.”
That night Sarah didn’t want to go to bed. There was a mirror above her dresser. “Can I sleep with you, Mommy?”
“Are you afraid the witch will get you?” Mommy smiled. “Don’t worry. I can stop her.” Mommy took a pillowcase and put it over the mirror. “See? Now no witches can come through the mirror.”
Mommy tucked Sarah in and turned out the light when she left. Sarah stayed awake. She could feel someone watching her. Finally, she had to know. She went and peeked under the pillowcase. “Go away, Bloody Mary!”
The girl in the mirror frowned. “I’m not Bloody Mary. I’m just Mary.”
Sarah sniffled. “So you aren’t going to take my face?”
Mary laughed. “I have my own face. Why would I want yours?”
Sarah nodded. That made sense. “Why are you in the mirror?”
“Why aren’t you in the mirror?” Mary asked back.
“Because I’m a girl, and girls don’t live in mirrors.” Sarah replied.
“Well I’m a girl, and I live in a mirror.” Mary said firmly
“What’s it like in a mirror?” Sarah wondered.
“Shiny. Everything sparkles here. But it’s boring.”
“Why?” Sarah asked. “It sounds pretty.”
“There’s no one to play with.”
Sarah frowned. She always had someone to play with. Mommy played with her, Daddy played with her, even Bobby played with her. She wouldn’t like to be all alone. “I’ll play with you.”
“Really?” Mary smiled.
The next day, Sarah and Mary played together. They played hide and go seek. Sarah searched through the house to find Mary in different mirrors. Once Mary hid in Sarah’s mother’s pocketbook mirror. Another time she was in Bobby’s bathroom mirror. Sarah and Mary played all day.
The next day was Halloween. When Sarah woke up, she went to her closet. What was she going to wear to school? Sarah wanted to have the best costume. Sarah searched and searched. Something was sitting on top of the dresser. Sarah went to look. It was Mary’s pointy hat! Sarah put it on. She knew what she would be for Halloween!
Sarah went downstairs in her new costume. Mommy was making breakfast.
Mommy exclaimed when she saw Sarah. “Sarah dear, where did you find that hat?”
“Mary gave it to me.”
“Is she one of your friends from school?”
“No, she’s the witch from the mirror!” Sarah explained.
Mommy smiled. “Oh, of course she is. Mary is a lovely name, and that is a lovely hat!”
Sarah beamed. This would be the best Halloween yet!

Hypermedia Production: A Children's Halloween Story

So, this week Jill, Jermaine and I decided to take on displaying a children's book in a single html page. The results are here: http://hypermedia.selfloud.net/HelloMary/

Since I'm in an MFA program in Children's Literature at Hollins University when I'm not in the doctoral program here, I decided to spend the evening after class doing something I haven't done for any project yet this semester: writing content. I wrote a short Halloween story based upon the Bloody Mary legend where a girl misinterprets her brother's taunt to summon Bloody Mary by saying "Hell Mary" to a darkened mirror--she says "Hello, Mary," instead, and the story ensues. I passed the story on to Jill for illustration, and she came up with the simple styles for the two girls and the mother as the encounters continued. I later added my text on top of those images based upon her divisions for illustrative scenes, as the illustrator is usually in charge of that decision in the business of writing picture books. It was written to be read aloud by a parent, so some of the language is formative but mostly it is simple to understand. Jermaine took on the coding. The interface is very simple--navigational arrows--and takes its cue from other online picture books. The assumption is that a parent would probably be navigating the site and reading aloud, or perhaps encouraging their child to click on the next arrow to see what happens.

Cha cha chas and Expression: Hypermedia Production

I just got back from a ballroom dance lesson with the same coach I've been working with since I first decided to discover movement a couple of years ago now--around the same time I started graduate school and realized I'd need social contact in my life with non-graduate student to remember what the real world was like! (Ironically, my coach? In addition to being a former ten dance champion, host of nationals, etc--currently an English graduate student.)

Yes, stay with me a moment, there is a point.

My partner and I have a competition coming up in a couple of weeks, so this lesson was spent running routines for latin over and over--four times through the cha cha, four times through the samba, the jive, the rumba, you get the idea. Sometime in the middle of one of those repetitions, my coach got as close to exasperated as it's possible for him to get and said to me, "You're one of the most expressive people I know...*except* on the dance floor."

So that got me thinking about what it means to be expressive, and where it's being expressed. A lot of people, when they start to dance, make the mistake of obsessing over wardrobe and makeup and hair. But when you go to a social dance, you can spot the great dancers in jeans and a t-shirt. The self-expression isn't in all the frills, although those frills can accent a great idea--take a look at Lacey and Lance's tango on Dancing with the Stars last week and you'll see what I mean:



Those costumes, however fabulous, are like the graphics on the scrolling site I put together this week (here)...self-expression? Of course. The point of this week's exercise? Not really. They're the means I thought most fitting to express the conceptual idea of the UI, not the UI itself. That routine and their movements make it work. This week, I tried to express something (admittedly, a very tiny something) through code, not through surface.

For instance: I could have tied my appendchild event to a mouseover of an image, or to a clickable "look here to see more" element. Instead, I tied it to the completion of scrolling, that is, to the viewing of all the available content. Would this annoy someone else from a usability standpoint--knowing that the user has no control over what happens, and no reason to expect more content? Probably. But I would be more annoyed at having to go through some extra step to get to the rest of the flow.

Coding doesn't seem like something for self-expression to a newcomer. That's why stealing code is so tempting: if someone else already wrote it, why do you need to do anything differently? It's the same thing as stealing a dance routine: they put these steps together and they work, so why wouldn't you do the same thing? Newcomers at comps usually dance the same routines they've all learned in classes from whatever coach teaches their school, so you can see dozens of couples dancing near each other all going through the same steps at once: an alamana, a closed hip twist, fan position, all in sync like they learned it for formation teams.

Wocket in your Pocket?

Despite the initial covetous reaction that swelled up when I read the announcements, I came through Black Friday without purchasing a Kindle. I did, however, upgrade my old Nintendo Gameboy to the DS Lite [Zelda edition, of course, which is a fancy way of saying it's gold and pretty]. Within a few days of the purchase it's been fully incorporated into the swarm of electronic devices that are integrated to my life. I am only a bit embarrassed to confess that this assimilation includes a newfound addiction to this generation of Pokemon and the understanding that an extra few minutes waiting at the accupuncturist's office can be spent catching a Zubat.

There's nothing particularly useful about a device of this kind. The interface allows for the nifty use of the touchpad, which can be taken advantage of in ways like shaking trees to make apples fall in Animal Crossing or in using the battle management system of Pokemon. This is nothing on the scale of the revolution Nintendo created with their other interface design for this generation of console wars, namely, the motion responsive controller for the Wii. But it's still a fun toy, and it's worth losing some room in pockets or purses to displace the mediocre interface of the cell phone as a method for playing games in waiting rooms and the like.

Trick or Treat

Every year, I've seen less trick or treaters come to my door: it seems like fear of terrorists and other such "boogeymen" has driven this holiday to nearly a halt. I spent too much of my evening while awaiting children [I was dressed up as Jack Sparrow myself...] online, and saw a dismaying number of people engaged in facebook Mafia and Scrabble. Rather than join them I grabbed a friend and we went trick or treating ourselves. We saw perhaps 20 or 30 other people out during our wanderings through the neighborhood and encountered the rare outpourring of Halloween spirit in the form of a costumed man waiting to chase children out of his yard or a nicely decorated house with moving ghosts in the windows. But mostly these were blips in a generally dismissive scene.

The virtual world holds its counterpart to the more traditional Halloween. It's possible to go "trick or treat" within World of Warcraft: visiting the innkeepers in any town and passing the virtual pumpkins and apple bob my character can possibly get candy or be transformed into a costume for a while representing another race [or even a ghost!]. Sometimes the virtual innkeepers are feeling mischievous, and then my character might end up hopping around helplessly as a frog for a while. The spirit of Halloween even continues in the form of quests, from taking orphan children around the smaller villages to a very high level quest to defeat the Headless Horsemen. I can trick or treat within Facebook, too, visiting friends for Bloodtinis and other such goodies.

Second Life doesn't feel like a place for trick or treating: it's a costume party year round, and I didn't get the sense of much different in the world for Halloween. Perhaps somewhere more was happening, but mostly it felt to me like Halloween is too generic a metaphor for daily Second Life existence to be of much particular interest to the Second Life denizens. The trappings of Halloween, however, seem to be everywhere. I see people dressed as beasts or bunnies or strippers or pimps. In many ways the more wild outfits in Second Life wouldn't be at all out of place in a costume shop. There's even some of the same focuses I've seen in the transformation from children's costumes to "adult" costumes as sex replaces both cute and evil as the defining characteristic and everything from pilot to french maid is recast in objectified extremes.

What is it that's killed Halloween? Is it fear of neighbors as pedophiles and candy as poison? Or is it that we spend so much more time now in virtual masquerade that the real thing has lost its magic?

Dance Clubs, Indians and Porn Stars

For me, first logging into Second Life today was akin to stepping back a few years to visit an old neighborhood and finding it mostly unchanged but somehow even smaller and seedier than I remembered. I've kept accounts in Second Life during my final year of college as I was working on my undergraduate thesis on the Avatar and revisited it for various classes at Georgetown, but I've never been very interested in the world for my own pleasure. I've been an inhabitant of virtual worlds most my life, from the chat room and message boards of Mummies Alive role-playing that I lived in during middle school, to the fantasy world of Asheron's Call, to the space-sim of Anarchy Online, and now to the plains of Azeroth in World of Warcraft.


But those worlds satisfied many needs for me, often dependent on the era. My middle school role-playing group used the simplest of text-based communication systems, but they were the closest to virtual friends that I've ever made--I connected to this small community through email, message boards, chat rooms, and the exchange of stories and images generated among ourselves: this was our own virtual world. Since then, I've mostly entered virtual worlds as a participant in someone else's story rather than as a creator of stories--Asheron's Call and World of Warcraft use the model of telling the player the story rather than having the player tell them. Second Life, on the other hand, is a world without story.

New Beginnings and Snobby Indians

Unfortunately, Rathera Quasimodo, my old Second Life alter ego, has wasted away with the past year's neglect and I can't pull up the email account to get her back. Undetered, I decided to start a new avatar, this time tied to the Dreamlands world instead of beginning in the dreary commercial environs of the Second Life mainland. My new character is Wistfully Iwish, a pale red-head with unnatural coloring. After picking up a few boxes of free clothing, I ran into my first Second Life native, a man fully decked out in a Hollywood style Indian outfit. His presence inspires me to put together something besides the basic shirt and jeans combo, and in a few seconds I'm working my way towards looking out of someone out of a Forever 21 catalog with a barely-there top and pants that would only stay on in animation. I at least surrender the urge to try for a Jessica Rabbit look. Strangely enough, the Indian still declines to speak with me. Clearly it's time to fly to more welcoming places.



I pass over one area that looks lusciously decorated only to be ejected immediately after I started taking advantage of their pool--apparently it's not a public one, though what harm a virtual swimmer can do I still don't know. But the Dreamlands is filled with opportunities, and so soon I found myself at a seedy looking hotel, Club Tropics. There were a few people there, but they seemed to be engaged in the type of activities that don't invite interruption, so I left them undisturbed. Walking around the exterior of Club Tropics I get a message from a nearby object: Wistfully Iwish feels a sudden urge to go dumpstering. Well, I can't say that I've ever felt a great need to go dumpstering in my life [antiquing, maybe, but I'd like to think that's a bit higher on the scale of desperation.] Nonetheless, I went over to the dumpster past the Sesame Street lookalike and picked the ever-so-attractive menu option of "dumpstering."

A few minutes later I had myself a genuine "Rolexxx." Just the thing to add some spice to my outfit put together from the free clothing castaways in the newbie area. Clearly, I need to get a job: I can't spend the rest of my life--even my Second Life--living off other people's castaways. Still, I decided to dig a bit more in the dumpster, and came up with a chair and a bar stool, both of which I'm still carrying in my inventory--though where my avatar finds the space I have no idea.





Moving further around the virtual world reveals that everyone here is involved in the spending of money. I'm confronted with one storefront for what seems to be virtual sex toys. The owner of the shop is dressed only in a batman mask and cape and wields a virtual phallus--custom made, no doubt--as he plays virtual pool and awaits customers or companions. I'd like to ask him about his profit margins and customer base and the realities of life as an online virtual merchant, but he seems more interested in the prospect of animated cybersex, and I move on with a quick teleport.

It's All About the Money

Unfortunately, getting a job is easier said than done. I went over to the Second Life Newspaper Office, but the application on the desk informed me that they wouldn't take anyone who was under 30 days old. Clearly, this new character was underqualified; a shame, since I've always wanted to write for their Red Light section. They did point me to the SL classifieds, but I can't afford the body I'd need for dancing in this universe, and that seems to be where the major market is. Nowhere is there a listing designed for sarcastic wallflowers. So much for that.


But I do know of a much less lucrative way to make money off of dancing with far lower entry requirements, so I headed to the Black Pearl Mall. The Black Pearl Mall is an imposing structure filled to the brim with new body parts, slutty outfits, and skin lightening and tanning agents of all kinds. The mall is not like one of the commercial areas one reads about in the economics journals and newspapers covering Second Life: this is definitely part of the less talked about adult section, with everything dedicated to making your avatar more attractive.


Already there were a number of avatars gathered, most absorbed in the constant task of putting together outfits and updating their image. A few other poor souls were already taking advantage of the various low level money earners, dancing on the paid dancer circles or sitting on one of the pay out benches. I found myself a spot on a dancer circle that pays out at $3 for twenty minutes of dancing, and went at it. The strangely hypnotic dancing of an animated being wears thin after a while, though, so I only made it up to a meager fortune of $3 before I left in search of more interesting diversions. A fan took pity on me and bestowed a folder of more appropriate clothing, so I too took on the task of avatar editing, making myself a new outfit from the scraps I'd been handed.

Dancing Through [Second] Life

I've left the realm of Forever 21 and moved to something that's more of a crossover between Hot Topic and Victoria's Secret. I've matched my clothing to my hair and created an image that's perfectly Not Me, which is something I've always thought is important around here--unlike the Real Me, my avatar is definitely set to hit the club scene. But it's been too long since I've traveled these worlds and I don't know where the action will be. Thankfully, the map search engine will point one anywhere [and I do mean anywhere--do a search on Sensual Stoneworks and say hello to the gargoyle if you don't believe me, but don't say you weren't warned.] A search for "club" gives me a long list of options, and I'm not sure where my pseudo goth newbie avatar is going to blend.



I picked one at random, Club Jenna, and ended up at pornstar Jenna Jameson's virtual dance club. There was a large concentration of people gathered to enjoy the DJ, who seemed to be live and was continually reminded the audience that he worked for tips. After crossing DJ off my list of possible Second Life occupations to pursue, I headed in to enjoy the dancing. For a while all I did was bump into walls, as the server struggled to load the fancy club environment around me. Flying made the problem even more noticable, as I hit obstacles that for all I could tell didn't actually exist. But after a long struggle, I was on the floor with a crowd of people gradually resolving into unique forms and wrapped up in their dance.


That is, if you could even call it dancing. I suppose it's a vague approximation of what goes on at a club: I wouldn't know, I've only been at a Salsa club the once, and after that lead to one of the worst heartbreaks of my real life I have no desire to repeat the experience in virtual. But here, no one dances together, and the beat of the music doesn't seem to have much effect, so it doesn't seem like anyone's at much risk of falling for someone's virtual flair and smooth moves. It's like watching a bunch of generic hip hop background dancers move in vague paralell on a dark and unimpressive floor. Virtual dance doesn't strike me as much of a contest to the real thing, and yet there are dozens of people in this one club alone--not to mention on the nearby Dance Island, which I visited and left quickly.


I think I'd rather not spend any more time in *this* life dancing by myself, so I leave the club and its world behind for today. I don't think I have many of the motives that might drive one to spend time in Second Life. Companionship? I don't have enough time to spend with everyone I'd like to in the real world as it is. Love? Sex? I'll stick with reality on those, thanks.


And as for dance? Well, I'd rather dance with a partner, with hands and body providing a connection I can touch without feeling the plastic keys of a keyboard.