So much that in the past has required sophisticated, expensive, large, and specialized equipment now exists in user-friendly compact forms that allow for quick and easy image and sound capture & production, sometimes with results that can begin to rival what expensive professional equipment counterparts can produce. As an example, check out the musical offerings (visual offerings, too) from strexx.com, offerings outside of formal studio and publication protocols; some technologically empowered individual initiative.

You can listen to one sonic offering: environmental experiment 69 (New Teacher Lessons Crowding Rhythm Catalog Mix) from strexx.com right here:

The audio (and video) remix is something that has been greatly facilitated by technological developments, and is overwhelmingly collaborative as in this remix of Like Music by The Jinks also from the strexx audio lab:

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The amount of sharing that occurs is staggering --I think about the number and range of cyber communities to which I belong, the good fit, the appropriateness of so many of these memberships without certain physical details or other facts (including a certain literary clout & related assumptions) interfering.

And I can easily --so I will-- inform you about GadgetTrack to help you recover your stolen portable digital devices:

(how it works diagram from InventorSpot.com )

You can watch a Gadget Trak video at KGW.com, and more information is available from Gadget Trak Recovery System blog

Knowledge of this device did not come in time to help someone from strexx.com who wrote about an aggressive ipod theft(at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor) in this post in the strexx particle labblog.

--Leave some comments at the strexx particle labblog; okay? Give strexx some encouragement & support, please--

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I maintain five email accounts, each one in touch with a part of my existence, the umich account, the only one that requires me to be professorial.

But the sharing --that's a Wow! for me; the impulse to make information, aesthetic information and other information, available is stunning. Whatever someone makes, as long as there is some form of digital conversion, can be placed where there is potential for that thing to be encountered. This is downright revolutionary. And with all the shared material, it is easy to capture material generated by others and bring it into my own/your own cyber locations --just amazing, and an example of joint custody. The sharing, the potential of something I contribute making contact with someone anywhere in the world who may take interest in it is much greater than an impulse to control it; I take pleasure in finding my video poams in Russia, in Japan, in Germany, in Brazil.

So I can share with you something I find compelling that was shared in other online locations:
Introducing the conceptual text-based visual systems of Jason J Gillingham.

You are not likely to find work like Gillingham's in most anthologies of poetry, even in anthologies of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry where there is exploration of the language's inexactitude and uncontrollable interfaces so that its use does not clarify and only seems to because of the trust placed in language without considering the structural and conceptual limits and fallibilities of language. The fragmentation implicit in language usage in exposed by Language poets; there should not be expectations that groups of words can form reliable coherency when it cannot be determined with any exactitude just what is being connected and what the logic of the connections might be.

Rather than trying to produce incoherent poems, language poetry extracts the meanings and portions of meanings that might be available in arrangements operating on other logics, often based upon the nature of experiences words have endured in use, misuse, overuse, abuse. negligence, assumption, over trust. etc.

HIGHLY COMPATIBLE WITH LIMITED FORK POETICS, AND MAY BE CONSIDERED A BRANCH OF LFP

Gillingham is not deliberately making poams; while text is a part of his work, the text is not meant to convey meanings based on their definitions. The words are placed in situations that change them, revealing alternative concealments, often at the expense of kinquisitic and syntactical integrity. As the words interact with their environments, there is a physical reaction. Usually, words are representational, but in Gillingham's poams, the words have thingness, and as things they are liberated from representing what they are assigned in language systems.

Of course it is possible to view Gillingham's text objects as fragmented, but I think of it more as the splitting of pods when growth erupts, the accessing of the interios of the egg; Gillingham opens the words, none of which are empty.

The use of words as objects, and the making of poems that arrange these objects according to systems other than definitions is also compatible with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry although Gillingham's work, nor the work of Ed Rusha is usually categorized as poetry, as problem with dominant and domineering systems allowed to shape the systems of significance/insignificance that shape the rules and protocols of society.

Ed Rusha, Lisp, and Lisp detail from National Gallery of Art.

"CREDITS

Web feature written by Sally Shelburne, designed and produced by Donna Mann, and edited by Ulrike Mills. Thanks to Jeffrey Weiss, Barbara Moore, Phyllis Hecht, Lesley Keiner, Ira Bartfield, and Ric Foster for their contributions to this project.

A special note of gratitude to Ed Ruscha and his staff for their generous assistance in the development of this online feature.

NOTES

1. Neal Benezra and Kerry Brougher, with contribution by Phyllis Rosenzweig. Ed Ruscha [exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden] (Washington, 2000), 144.

2. Benezra and Brougher 2000, 147.

3. Benezra and Brougher 2000, 145 and n. 1.

4. Yve-Alain Bois, Edward Ruscha: Romance with Liquids, Paintings 1966-1969 [exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery] (New York, 1993), 15–16."

Text & credits from National Gallery of Art

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For some of you, what follows will be an introduction, for others an opportunity to reacquaint yourself with what I consider extremely significant conceptual poam work by two visual makers whose text systems are enclosed by visual systems further enclosed by the placement of text systems within visual systems and by the content of the text systems.

Those of you unable to readthe text systems literally, will still be able to read non-literal implications of the text systems. Do consider the strong possibility that the text system is not necessarily meant to be as read according to the usual protocols of engagement with text. Opportunities to encounter alternatives to pervasive (and seemingly unchallenged) (deeply embedded) protocols of existing are steadily increasing because explosions in digital technology help innovation to flourish within widespread attempts to determine what this technology can do, can't do.

Shirin Neshat is primarily visual (still and moving) poam maker whose pages (a page is a host of a poam event; where a poam event pccurs) often disallow negative space, text filling any location in the map of the poam that may be filled:

This visual poam by Shirin Neshat may be experienced in its source context, and more
of her visual poams may be experienced at Iranian.com.

Lalla Essaydi, visual poam maker of Converging Territories, a collection of visual poams in which what might otherwise be consigned to negative space is populated with text to an extent that saturated black areas of visual poams may be perceived as areas where text is so dense, so saturated, that individual parts of texts are not discernible, as evident in:

This visual poam may be experienced in its source context, a neighborhood of other Essaydi visual poams from Converging territories at: Laurence Miller Gallery.com
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And, of course, this inclusion can remind us of just how strong the impulse is to supplement text with sound and image. The sharing of idea includes responsiveness to a range of human sensory perception, so sharing includes the writing of sound and image as well as the writing of words.

What I now consider my work could not exist without these advances in accessible technology.
The exploration of other possibilities of aesthetic expression has been simplified and made even more meaningful because the accessibility of technology has been accompanied by relatively easy modification of these evolving tools. I am able to bring more of what I can imagine (and what I can imagine has been extended as well) into a shareable form.

Not only has my work been transformed, I have been transformed; the very structures that produce my ideas have been reconfigured as a result of my exploring possibilities of making and living that take advantage of an examination of protocols of expectation that had shaped me without my conscious consent. Once I acquired an identity of maker, an identity as modifier of what exists; once the play-doh and tinker toys were in my hands without the manuals telling me what and how to make, I became aware of how easily restructuring and reconfiguration could occur.

Looking across scale and identifying the repetition of basic forms, using metaphor as a navigational tool instead of a literary device, investigating how systems form, how they are sustained, how they degrade and come together again as variables come and go --all this helped me understand what and where (other) possibilities were, and I continue to seek ways to utilize what I am still finding with my limited fork.

(the Limited Fork plant didn't just sprout, didn't just blossom; it took hold in a fertile area from seeds that came from something enclosed in a system just as fertile)
(image of Limited Fork plant in the Garden of Forked Delight by Proforker T Moss)

The interview Shadows, Boxes, Forks, and “POAMs� addresses some of the evolution of Limited Fork interacting systems as an enclosure system for my life.

(image by Strexx --rare view of forkergirl in AH 3241)

Here the popular image of CS, the popular mythology, the, some would say, necessary spin:

(image from All Posters.com where this inspiring and illuminating poster depicting idealized Native American sentiment can be purchased.

Growing in popularity is the debunking of the ideal, and the following links will take you to locations aware of the effects of gravity.

Unforking the speech of Chief Seattle

Chief Seattle Resources from The eJournal website
Critical Thinkers Resources where Chief Seattle and his speech are given multi-faceted consideration.

Should the beauty of the speech, should the aesthetic integrity so well imagined in the speech be tarnished and discredited by the knowledge that the speech may in fact be ersatz?

Is it not a lovely idea even if it is a lie?

What should be role of the human skill to fabricate, to create, especially if this skill is used to help humanity grow, to assist with an extension of humanity?

Points made in the, researchers have explained, likely spurious speech are ethical points, ideals of integrity, and quite similar to a Native American Legend retold and illustrated by John Steptoe (from the cover of the Caldecott Honor Book: The Story of Jumping Mouse, shown below):

(image from ccfpl.org)

This story approaches ultimates, ideals in sharing and sacrifice, so it has incredible usefulness in promoting compassion and ethical behavior

yet even in this story, there are several versions,, Steptoe's (the one with perhaps the most aesthetic accomplishment) emerging as the one best known and widely shared with (American) (North American) children.

(including the accessing of illumination)

With a fork ~most definitely with a Limited Fork~ we can, we do Bifurcate.
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You have considered situations of fork, properties (plural) and property's (possessive) of fork; multiple and separate bifurcations can occur in a simultaneity that is not confined to a single increment of time for its measure; each tine or prong of a forking system can approach something different, in different planes of existence, locations of different materials and substances, tines of different materials at different times in different locations --some ideas which may be used as models for situations of human populations in various global locations.

(map of Worldwide Internet Usage as of March 2007, from eBiz Tutors.com whose source is: iPligence.com where you can see and study this map & related maps full size).

iPligence also has lists and maps of the number of IP addresses per geographic area, and a comparison of population density with IP addresses.

This is where the XO easily enters again:

(Refer to 28 November post: Kindle and Kindness for details.)

Whether or not members of these human populations share their poams (which include political, social, religious, and cultural policies), there is direct and indirect, circumstantial sharing of the earth itself: the populations are on (a changing or forking) earth.

This is where (one of several wheres) the practice of Internet Filtering can enter: Study: 25 Countries Block Websites

Documentation of Internet Filtering

Reporters Without Borders is dedicated to forking information and here provides a list, as of November 2006, of 13 Internet enemies.

RWB is also the source of the following map of internet black holes, locations of filtered access:

Read about implications of this mapped data at: Strange Maps.

The limited fork functions within the parameters of what is possible for the device (the specific fork used varying according to the situation), those possibilities adapting to what is possible according to the particular iteration of fork in use.

These are quite generalized comments; they are not made in reference to an enhanced or extended or magnified surface or layer or scale of fork dynamic behavior; modifications will be made to account for specifics according to the situational focus of some aspect at some moment in some investigation.

Bifurcations may occur at either end, along tines, along the handle, at any location of the forking system of which an eating utensil fork is only a generalized model.

A generalized static model of a bifurcating system, image by Linda Wright/Science Photo Library. Includes interactions with sub-effervescing(a bifurcating form) system and interactions with light.

No information is given at SPL about the material of the fork, the weight, the length, the design of the handle or even whether or not the handle extends.

Here is a generalized diagram of how a fork eating utensil is made:

**Tine shift: Science Photo Library is a great location for science-related images which may be freely downloaded in their low-res versions as long as the credit is given fully. The fork image used here is an example of SPL's low-res quality.**

My favorite limited forking system, my favorite situation of fork, my favorite fork property is the mouth of the Ganges

as shown in this NASA satellite photo of southwest Bangladesh shows where the mouth of the Ganges River meets the Bay of Bengal (as featured on the Georgia tech research News site):

A model of the Ganges bifurcating system is available for purchase from Hidden Art Shop.
The Ganges Delta Cube by DH Products

The Ganges Delta Cube is based on an aerial photograph. The delta could be seen as a huge evolving drawing made by nature. It is long lasting, in contrast to the transient qualities of lightning.
(from the Hidden Art site)

(recall the Lichtenberg Figure as seen below, image from Bert Hickman's Tesla Mania site, gallery 2)

FORK: for attempts at access

(including the accessing of illumination)

Open CourseWare: Surprises and More Surprises When You Open Up Your Teaching Materials to the World"

29 November at 4:00 p.m.

1110 Ford Classroom, Weill Hall, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy

Shigeru Miyagawa is Professor of Linguistics and Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture, MIT. Miyagawa was on the original MIT faculty team that recommended Open CourseWare. He has won numerous awards including MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award, Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education, Best of Show at the MacWorld Exposition, Distinguished Award from Multimedia Grandprix 2000, and was named by the magazine Converge as one of twenty national “Shapers of the Future.�

Refreshments will be served.

About Open CourseWare: OCW Consortium and MIT Open CourseWare

OCW Speaker’s Series Organizing Committee: Joseph Hardin (School of Information, SAKAI), James J. Duderstadt (U-M President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering), John King (Office of the Provost), Judith Olson (School of Information, LS&A, and Business Administration), John Wilkin (University Library), Ted Hanss (Medical School), John Merlin Williams (Digital Media Commons)

Questions? Email ocwseries@ctools.umich.edu or call 763.3266.

(image from osierra.com where it was extracted from MIT OCW)
(text from an email message from John L. King)

Well to the scratch possibilities, please add Squeak, an open source, as stated at the Squeak site, full-featured implementation of the Smalltalk programming language and environment that being object-based should be easy to learn and implement.

The XO (and XO-1)
can run Squeak! (read about the XO in this long 280 limited fork impact post of mine --go ahead; you won't regret it)

Want to try Squeak (could make for quite an aspect of enclosure)?
Then Squeak by example!

At this moment, Amazon is heavily promoting Kindle, a new wireless interface reading device whose advanced technology is supposed to simulate the visual qualities/properties of paper (not the texture, of course --Limited Fork, by the way, studies interactions in visual (any/all forms) systems and tactile systems --among others);

Kindle certainly has texture, but not the texture of paper. And it is a device to hold; there is an expected protocol of intimacy in the use of the device. A book itself is a device.

Anyway, an entire book (100+ pages) can download wirelessly, no computer connection required, in about a minute (or so).

There's also the Sony Reader, side by side with Kindle:

(from Gizmodo online gadget guide --read the specs on both).

The laptop keyboard on which I'm typing this, by the way, has interacted with my fingers; there's been structural adaptation on the part of the keyboard, adaptation that reveals patterns of use and variance in pressure as keys are depressed, so there are actual depressions in the metal keys, some deeper than others, some more like greatly-reduced scale glacial gouges. Varying degrees of discoloration, some letters completely worn off the keys. So as I use my laptop more, the laptop increasingly responds to the use, becoming more my laptop. It has been marked; I also mark my books, but in different iterations of mark.

At the moment, it is easier (for me) to overcome protocols that restrict sharing through digital means.

I have about 4,000 books in my home, and I continue to acquire them, continue to enjoy them (but they are turning my home into a warehouse --not a library because I have no space for the display they deserve, so there's quite a bit of stacking and rotation of books from shelves to stacks on the floor.

An electronic system that would allow linking of texts and passages in my library is quite appealing --and Kindle supports note-taking, cross-referencing, linking, and so forth --that sounds good, but I'm not planning on acquiring Kindle this year. Now if someone gives me one, I'll try it out, eager to see whether or not and/or how quickly it's able to show evidence of tactile interactions with my hands.

More:
You should know that Kindle has prior association for me; I've been shaped by what has become a memorable encounter some years ago with the technologically-advenced remake of A Little Princess in which Sara Crewe sings Kindle My Heart as she does in this video tribute to the movie:

Download options are available at this You Tube link.

The second video is a response to the first.

The next video, from the same university introduces a class studying You Tube (& related online) Culture --Oh the impact value!:

What about the future of libraries?

Physical space of libraries may not permit the warehousing of all titles, so criteria of selection related to significance, local user need, shared inventory avoiding duplication of certain titles in a region, those books available to customers via loans.

So books are routinely withdrawn from circulation, others added.

And not all books are likely committed to some form of digital preservation.

Physical copies of newspapers may not be stored intact, some? many? not stored at all.

This article, E-books and Their Future in Academic Libraries is from a Journal with content directed toward porfessional librarians.

A few years ago, Nicolson Baker published Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, a book that ignited quite a furor among Librarians, Patrons of libraries, and other lovers of books, including those whose livelihood is book-related.

The following excerpt is from part of the enraged part of the Library community against Baker's Book:

Pulling no punches, novelist Baker (Vox) is a romantic, passionate troublemaker who questions the smug assumptions of library professionals and weeps at the potential loss of an extensive, pristine run of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. For him, the wholesale destruction of books and newspapers to the twin gods of microfilming and digitization is an issue of administrators seeking storage space not of preserving a heritage. He contends that the alarmist slogans "brittle books" and "slow fires" are intended to obscure the reality and the destruction. Throughout his book, Baker hammers away at the Orwellian notion that we must destroy books and newspapers in order, supposedly, to save them. Particularly singled out for opprobrium are University Microfilms Inc. and the Library of Congress. This extremely well-written book is not a paranoid rant. Just this past October, Werner Gundersheimer, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, said at LC's "Preserve and Protect" symposium that, amid all the smoke and fury, Baker was essentially pleading for "a last copy effort of some kind." Double Fold is the narrative of a heroic struggle: Picture Baker as "Offisa Pup" defending "Krazy Kat," of the printed word, against the villainous "Ignatz Mouse" of the library establishment all in glorious, vivid color on brittle (but unbowed) newsprint. Highly recommended for all libraries.
-- Barry Chad, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh; Library Journal, 12/00

The following links go to articles and commentaries that respond to the implications of Baker's expose (that italicized e is a proxy for an accented e) and/or to the death by digital technology of the book:
"Preserving" vs. "Conserving": Librarians and their hatred of paper
Libraries, Books, and Academic Freedom: Can academic freedom survive the death of the book?
A review of Double Fold from Science Matters Bookclub
Do Online Resources Destroy Student Research Papers? by John Jaeger, Reference Librarian
Paper Chase:Nicholson Baker makes a case for saving old books and newspapers
Preservation Advice for Libraries, Historical Societies and Home Collections from The Connecticut State Library
Q and A in Response to Nicholson Baker's Double Fold from ARL: Association of Research Libraries

These links go a little further out on the tine, but what impact:
Book Autopsies by Brian Dettmer for aesthetic purposes
Hollowed out editions of your favorite books

(image of Brian Dettmer's Book Autopsy from Future Feeder.com)

as you think about the packaging, the system(s) of enclosure you're going to use to (temporarily) conclude (for the purposes of a class) your 280 blogs with a showstopping bang concerning well, of course, given an anticipated showstopping bang, impact, technology, and what's yours in that, what has joint ownership (covert and overt) in that, and so forth.

I'm so looking forward to the videos!
(need help with that?)

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I'll be posting the fatter packaged entry on packaging soon.
Remember to re-visit, offer further comments on posts in this blog and posts in your blog and the other 280 blogs --and yes; you can leave comments on your own posts (oh the lovely layering, the meeting of so many interior/exterior surfaces).

(Mike C has links (in a link list) to most of the 280 blogs in his 280 blog, so that link list (that's in a convenient/prominent dedicated--static, that is-- blog location) can easily function as a 280 blog-access hub. Leave a comment with your blog's URL if you're not on the list, and Mike C --you will, won't you?-- will add your blog to the link list --Oh, Mike C.; please add this blog and the related Limited Fork Academic Split Tine to the list --that is, if you don't mind --I promise not to hold it against you if you do mind. Thanks)

--how's that for pressure, mild abuse of power?)

--feel free to poll others

Here's a view of some of what happens to eWaste:

Once somehow determined that we are in fact seeing, perhaps we will be more able to take advantage of what is illuminating, what can be illuminated, what we have the power to shine light on.

Hence your opportunity to play The Situation of Fork mind-tech game.

Please record the situations and how well the situation illuminates the fork, is illuminated by the fork.
What happens as the situation changes? what happens as the fork changes?
What are the limits of seeing --as suggested by the situations you construct?
What are the limits of fork --as suggested by the situations you construct?
What are the qualities of your seeing? How can you use really seeing the fork to help with other seeing?
How does transparency affect the situations of fork? How does transparency affect really seeing and the sameness of your forks?
How do you determine the situations in which you attemot to see the fork?
How do you determine that seeing has occurred? That really seeing has occurred?
Have you seen the fork in the situations that best exemplify the possibilities of fork?
Etc.

By the way, are there differences in illuminating the fork and in being illuminated by the fork?
Please elaborate.

In debate, the spotlight can bounce back and forth; a light show, a substitute for either aurora in the light play, borealis, australis.

And that light bounce brings to mind (awareness: inner illumination, firing of a neural network) searchlights, the 20th Century Fox twin columns of moving light, the light columns standing in for the WTC, police searching for perpetrators with light).

--Have you visited one of the course resources Malaran.com? Specifically, have you seen her photo essay Watching the Changes? --a slideshow of photographs, taken from her East Village bedroom window, of the NYC skyline over a period of years, including images, as was her routine, of the skyline (with WTC+ and WTC-) on the morning of 11 September 2001. A Watching the Changes poster is available. Cynthia malaran's project began as a tribute to the view she grew up with from her bedroom window. --Did you know that the exterior of the WTC twin towers was a system of forks? See that here, a large-scale (on some scales) situation of fork.

Cynthia Malaran's Watching the Changes poster:

So now we turn toward the impact of technology on illumination as a means of extending us

--and to be extended requires some thought about what/where we are, so that extension has a reference point: extended from which location(s) (since the extension may not be the same for all of us)

So, please specify some reference points for the extension
and examine the following (in your blogs, identify additional high/lo tech illuminations, of course):

Now some ILLUMINATION by design:

This is a site where you can be illuminated by illumination: Bert Hickman's TeslaMania

Enjoy! --and ask to take a look at my Lichtenberg figure (it's among us right now —in DL1
(my queen ant in amber pendant is here, too —ask to see it) **The Lichtenberg and the queen ant in amber illuminate me**

Next: The Illumination of Word/Meaning Mapping as Neural Network
—I hope that you enjoy (and use often) this funky online graphical dictionary

Finally (for now, that is), I hope that recall the collection of photogrpahs by blind photographers Shooting Blind and Touch the Universe the first ever book of images from the Hubble Space Telescopes in Braille