Michael Joyce: "Print stays itself, electronic text replaces itself."
Ron Wodaski: "For centuries, books have been the cutting edge of artificial reality. Think about it: you read words on a page, and your mind fills in the pictures and emotions - even physical reactions can result."
Lev Manovich:
"How does fictional, critical, theoretical, and historical writing
take advantage of all the multimedia capabilities offered by the
Net? How to write about ideas using images, animation, sound, video
and 3D worlds? How to communicate complex concepts while also being
able to employ traditional rhetoric functions (seduce, convince,
scare, inspire) using multimedia? How to allow the user not just
to be simply a 'co-author' (which is what the ideologists of interactivity
naively aim at) but rather to take him/her 'inside' the mental space
of a text, inside the thinking process of another subject? How to
think through multimedia? What are the historical precedents for
'multimedia writing' in cinema, book design, theater, concrete poetry?
Vilém Flusser: "What do those do who sit in front of the computers, who are pressing keys and who produce lines, surfaces, and
bodies? What do they really do? They realize possibilities. They gather points according to precisely formulated programs. What they thus realize is an outside as well
as an inside: they realize alternative worlds and thereby themselves. From possibilities they 'design' realities which are more effective the more densely they
are structured. Thus, the new anthropology is put into practice: 'we' is a node of possibilities that increasingly realizes itself - as it gathers more and more densely
the possibilities swirling in itself and around itself, i.e., as it creatively shapes them. Computers are apparatuses for the realization of inner-human,
inter-human, and trans-human possibilities, thanks to exact calculatory thought. This formulation can be understood as a possible definition of 'computer.'"
Christopher Alelxander: "So, the real work of any process of
design lies in the task of making up the language, from which you
can later generate the one particular design."
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Study of communication
and design issues in multimedia composition. Focuses on communication,
creative expression, persuasion, interactivity, and rhetorical principles.
Practice in composing multimedia documents such as online publications,
interactive literary works and tutorials.
What is multimedia writing?
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A pragmatic knowledge of applications and technologies?
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A genre of writing? Electronic fiction, hypertext...
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A journalism or business writing for multimedia platforms?
- Multimedia writing? Multimedia writing?
- For that matter: What is writing? What is multimedia?
- Is writing already multimedia or are they antithetical? (A code
inscribed on a surface? Or a recording of thought and voice?)
Some starting points:
- Learning about media means understanding media.
- It is not possible to differentiate the technology of writing, as a seemingly neutral and pragmatic set of skills,
from the histories and modes of knowing implicated
in/by writing.
- Writing remains the meta-code of culture. This is a transformed code: no longer a matter of the inscription of language in printed books but of the transcription of programs across multiple media.
- Programming is writing: a concern with design (its philosophy, its structures) and a concern with material implementations.
- This course combines pragmatic experience in writing new media artifacts with a theoretical understanding of how media frame our situation. We'll start
by exploring the concept of "multimedia writing" before turning to specific multimedia writing machines.
No technical experience is required, beyond a general
familiarity with word processors and web browsers. Writing is the important thing. In doing your work, be as creative and original,
and as professional and scholarly, as you want to be. Don’t let the
new-ness of new media force you to be anything other than yourself.
This is a growing course web. Check back frequently for updates.
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