What do we think of when we encounter the concept of ‘Virtual Reality’? Perhaps we have visions of people like myself staggering around the padded podia of the VR Cafe, or perhaps we have visions of sending our avatar out into SecondLife for another kind of immersive social experience.
Such immersive experiences position the user/reader in an artificial world comprised of computer-generated graphics. These greet us, perhaps at one end of what Ruthrof (1981) termed the ‘ladder of fictionality’. Ruthrof here depicts the distinction between invented and non-invented narrative as a ladder of varying degrees of fabrication. The steps of this ladder are bounded within authorial structuring of narrative and set in contra-distinction to what Edmund Husserl terms the ‘world-out-there’. I want to argue throughout this chapter that there are strong parallels to be drawn between the reality/virtuality debate, and the figurative/non-figurative debate in contemporary literary theory. Read more of this paper on the page to the right, or click here:-)
I have begun a slow restoration of my Motobecane 40V moped. The ped was built in 1970 and I have owned it since near new. I rode it for several years, before putting it into storage for almost 20 years. It’s all eBay’s fault! I finally found some 6V light globes to fit the indicators, so now there is a real chance of getting them to work again.
The moped has been reluctant to start, requiring a squirt of ‘Aerostart’ straight into the spark plug hole before it even thinks about it. So today I took the points out and filed them and reset the gap, and then dismantled the carburettor and cleaned the jets – and now it starts easily and runs well.
The points are located behind the magneto rotor on the right side.
Here is a short video of that starting procedure – just turn on the fuel, roll the throttle forward to decompress the engine, start pedalling and bring the throttle to idle and the engine starts easily.
If you look carefully you should be able to see the clever expanding pulley “variator” in action on the left side of the moped. This provides an infinitely variable gear enabling the engine to maintain power even on hills (for steep hills some light pedal assistance is required)
Once I have the indicators working, I’ll start work on restoring the engine – notice the seepage from the head gasket – I’ll strip it down and rebuild it as the historic vehicle it is 🙂 Watch this space!
New media researcher Angela Thomas has written a lovely post about my semiotics of music experiment. I have drawn on MAK Halliday’s systemic functional semiotics to develop a schema for music, which can be used to analyse multimodal texts.
Interestingly there seems to have been very few attempts at developing such schemas. Angela raised a useful question in relation to my schema, namely that there is no listing for an analogue of adverbial phrase – or even adjectival phrase come to think of it. My response is two-fold. Firstly, if an adverb-function were to exist, it would probably lie in the selection of mode – major, minor, dorian etc – which would provide a sense of the manner in which a musical phrase acts/creates drama or action.
My second response is that music, along with other non-linguistic systems of signification, probably doesn’t translate directly into a linguistic model. Sure, linguistic or literary semiotics is probably the most highly developed as a means of analysing texts (however broadly defined), but I’m not entirely convinced that such a model maps all the signifying activity of a non-linguistic or multimodal text. It does, however, form a useful point of entry to any discussion of how we make meaning with non-linguistic or para-linguistic signs. Is there a grammar of music? Emphatically yes, but beyond forms of analogy, I remain uncertain as to how far one can map it directly onto a linguistic model.
But there remains the tantalising possibility that one could develop a metalanguage for analysis of music and how it functions to make meaning within a sign system.
Posted by jerry on May 17th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Travel
This is the land of commerce! Where else in the emergency instruction would you find, not only the emergency escape route marked out in case of fire, but also the
emergency route to the vending machines in case you have a bad attack of the munchies! And all this in your hotel safety instructions…
Meanwhile the Mall roof references the height of Victorian railway station design. The interplay of line, angle and curve works very well. And the palm trees are reminiscent of the Paris Orangerie – a signifier of elegant fashion.
And to add to the sense of being in a gallery of contemporary style there are artworks positioned around the mall – like the cubist violin series, called “Three Violins”. It’s more like what happens when your violin has an industrial accident with a bandsaw… I actually liked the way the violin has been sectioned and displaced, giving the violin a sense of movement and time.
I knew I should have brought mine to the ‘States – I was offered a spot at the open mic session at the hotel. I said I’d do it if they could locate a violin. They didn’t so I didn’t, but it was kinda fun to think I could’ve started my overseas tour right then and there! I guess they didn’t know who I was…. 🙂
Posted by jerry on May 16th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Travel
The US is a land of contrasts, from the elegance of the parks to the visually rich malls. This elegant park bench is in The Mall, Washington DC
as is this floral urn, with its Classical references
And even in the shopping malls there are elements of wonderful design, like these power sockets in the shopping mall
And in the shops, there are the fleeting clothing styles, but these bags caught my eye – completely encrusted with beads and ‘bling’.
Interestingly, the design of the stores themselves, also referenced classical architectural style, but did so by creating facades resembling furniture display cabinets, rather than purely architectural buildings. It was like these stores saw themselves as indoors rather than as retail spaces, adding an elegant domesticity that referenced the interior of elegant homes. Given their up-market contents it is not difficult to see why such a style would appeal. But I thought it was an interesting stylistic feature 🙂
