Glenn Kubish

In these late days of the U.S. election campaign, Lev Manovich has been swirling around in my memory. Manovich I met Manovich in print during my time in the University of Alberta's MACT (Master of Arts in Communication and Technology) program. I was intrigued by the way media made a generation ago, in my case, clips of the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street, were brought back to a kind of life. Loveable video and audio of Cookie had been mashed together with infamous video and audio of Stephen Duckett refusing to talk to news reporters, and, voila, I had my research project, courtesy those remix artists.  Manovich, a new media theorist and computer science professor at City University of New York, made a point about the avant-garde aspect of digital media's moment. In the original avant garde movement of the 1920s, artists sought new forms and new ways to represent reality and see what is out there....

Before I hit the keystrokes that started this sentence with the words  Before I hit the keystrokes that started this sentence,  I had already sounded out and quickly given up on a few other openings, including different versions of  This morning's New York Times serves up, etc... before hitting *delete* *delete* *delete* *delete* and starting again. With a blank screen and invisible gargoyles screeching at me from somewhere. With no apparent way to begin, I tried for a headline. Hear, Hear came quicker. Don't know if that will last, but, sounds good for now.* After wasting another five minutes failing to find that first sentence, I started collecting possible stuff for the middle of the piece. A cut-and-paste fragment of a quote from Walter Ong on the fleetingness of sound. Dictionary definitions of sound as noun, verb, adjective. Even a pic of Howe Sound from Google Images. And a graph showing the rising usage of the word "resonate.' Resonate . While ...

The structure of modern life, Carey has said, is that we are being watched. And that we are watching. Lately, I have been watching Cascade Mountain and a few of the buildings at the Banff Centre via the centre's cool  webcam . I check it out in the morning, I guess, to try to simulate the thrill of getting that first view of the mountains when actually lucky enough to be in the Rockies—and disciplined enough to get up early. Occasionally, I use it as a momentary emotional escape hatch out of an office tower meeting pushing an hour that should have been 30 minutes. You get the picture. Laundry out there For a rectangular image that sits on my laptop, the webcam screen is, in a way, enlargening. Typically, when we get back from a vacation, whether to the mountains or wherever, I return resolved not to submit to the tyranny of the now visible. And to remember, for instance, that at this exact moment there are people walking into the Safeway on the corner of Robson a...

Presenting Joyce, Beach This is the hyperreality of my brain. I share this for the good of science. And as an apology for what might make me look like a bad listener from time to time. This afternoon, Mikey was sitting on the couch with his laptop, planning his UAlberta term next fall with one eye to toward educational depth and the other toward having time for lunch. "I think I'm going to take something about galaxies," he said. "Stars. Maybe take an astronomy course." Out of the flow of his words, what extracted itself was the word "stars." Originally, I wrote that sentence in the active voice; that is, Out of the flow of his words, I somehow extracted the word "stars."  But then I delete-keyed over that version, landing in the passive, because I can't really say I had set out to segment the word "stars" in any meaningful way. How that worked, I don't know, but I suppose the word had been circling in another ...

Tonight's LA Kings Twitter post won't get as much attention as the infamous spear from last year's NHL playoffs. Remember? It was immediately after the Kings beat the Canucks 4-2 in Game 1 of the Western Conference quarterfinal that we saw and laughed and reacted to this gem: The Internet lit up, the mocking tweet became news, the @LAKings apologized, sort of, B.C. wondered if the rest of the country was, indeed, cheering for them to lose, they lost, and the Kings went on to win the Stanley Cup. The Kings are playing the Canucks again tonight and most of the tweets from the LA Twitter account are pretty typical shots at the manhood of the Sedins and Lapierre. But there was also this one: LA Kings  ‏ @ LAKings Great pass from Burrows and Hamhuis one times it past Quick. Canucks up 1-0 early in the 1st. That's not a tweet you'd see from too many other NHL teams. Really, would the Oilers compliment an Iginla-Cammalleri pass that ended with puck behin...

I have been thinking a lot lately about repetition.  In his morphology of the joke-tale, Berger assigns repetition the standing of one of the 45 enduring techniques of  humour.  Now there is nothing so unlike humour as a rational explanation of the humorous, but this is what he says:  "The humor of repetition comes from the tension created by some kind of series being established. We wonder whether the series will be able to maintain itself or whether some interesting variation will take place."  " The humor of repetition comes from the tension created by some kind of series being established. We wonder whether the series will be able to maintain itself or whether some interesting variation will take place."  Repetition is on my mind as I continue to try to make sense of the Duckett Cookie Episode. As I read Berger's An Anatomy Of Humor, it's not difficult to find room for Duckett, without the harsher name-calling, to wit: ...

Me today at Enterprise Square, listening I have always enjoyed eavesdropping. Not the spying-on-what-you're-saying-about-me variety, but more of an academic, creative kind of espionage where I imagine listening in on authors, across time, space, genre, sometimes the grave, discussing a topic of my choice. It's a bit dangerous, this practice of combining what this writer wrote with what that speaker later said, or what this observer on this author said with what that person subsequently posted or painted. Risky, obviously, because I am hosting the debate in my own mind without direct access for clarification to the principals I imagine to be encountering each other. It can get crowded, and crowds make for not getting right what you think you are hearing. But it's a fun kind of daring. And it makes the literature review I am building for my final assignment on the meaning of the Duckett Cookie Episode (when not blogging about building a literature review for my f...

Tonight I am reading Berger's Media Analysis Techniques (1991), and there is this about editing: "...the order in which events take place in a narrative is of great importance. There is logic to narrative texts and the arrangement of elements in a story greatly affects our perception of what anything "means." That, in fact, is what editing is." (p. 18)  Berger And, so, what of a piece of video that is not edited, such as Duckett Cookie? What happens to the meaning when the arrangement of elements is structured simply by the passage of time? Are the members of the audience free, or freer, to rework the meaning of a text in terms of their own peculiar context? (cf. White, p. 10). It seems a case could be made for this. Bruns, et al, would say this is a healthy development, a good move away from gatekeepers. So far, so good. What next? Carey Maybe Carey (2009) comes in at this point. Maybe this is the place to explain the two alternative conceptions o...

Two days from now, the beginning of the end of my hike to reach a master's degree begins at the Gow trailhead. It's named after my advisor, Gordon Gow, who runs the master's of arts in communication and technology program (MACT) at the University of Alberta. I'm glad I've made it this far. And I'm grateful I will have some help finding my way up from here. Because there are a lot of signs, pathways and loops up that hill. Some of which actually take you down. So, on Monday in a meeting with Gow I will decide what theory, what methodology I will carry up, or will carry me up. Just over two years ago I found myself, as news director at CTV Edmonton, in a spot with a remarkable view on the mediasphere we live in. A CTV reporter and shooter had just taken part in the questioning and recording of Stephen Duckett, who was then the president and CEO of Alberta Health Services. Infamously, Duckett refused to answer questions about emergency room wait time protocols...

It's the end of the year as we know it, and a fine time for looking back, peering ahead and, most importantly, making lists. By my count, there are at least five good reasons for making year-end lists: 5. "Five" suggests but doesn't guarantee the movement to "four" which, in turn, delivers that same sense of hanging on the way to "three" and so on. There is an inherent suspense in list-making. Year's end also contains that mix of excitement and anxious uncertainty. Like a rocket's liftoff. 4. Lists impose a kind of precious order on the chaos of events and information we at turns swim and flail in. Compose a list and you get a feeling of the power of putting that note in the melody, and, just as importantly, keeping that note out. Facing a new year, we have yet to have that sense of control pummelled out of us by the passage of time. That happens around the second week of January. 3. It's a thrill to get to the end of a countd...

Somewhere in the mists of my undergraduate learning is a remnant of a memory of a teaching about laughter being no laughing matter. Seriously, that's all I've got. Maybe it's Rousseau in his letter on the theatre or somewhere in Hobbes or maybe it was from Bloom's book or in a lecture from Craig or Carmichael. I can't recall it. And we know what we can recall, said Ong.  Whatever it is that is left floats in and out as I get ready to form an actual research question for my final essay project toward a master's degree in communications and technology. That essay will have something to do with laughter.  You will recall :) that I have spent the last few years circling around the Duckett Cookie Video artifact, trying to gain theoretical perspectives on its meaning, its impact, its lessons. Not yet in the form of a research question, my interest in that video text, which has attracted nearly 350,000 views, will, I feel, reflect my newfound perspe...