Article

Sonic Space-Time: Sound Installation and Secondary Orality

admin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:15:23 +0200

Dona - Dicke Japaner können platzen

Armin Medosch — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:06:21 +0200

Howto integrate 'Footnotes' and bibliographic References with your texts

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:36:56 +0200

If you are used to complex text editing programs such as MS Word or Open Office, you will probably enjoy the Footnote and Biblio functions. In your text in a book page (but also other content types such as Research Journal or 'story'), you can us the fn tag <fn>and what you write in between the tags will appear as an automatically numbered footnote, but don't forget the end tag </fn>

Almost analogue to that works the bib tag. If you want to refer from within your text to a bibliographic reference, use
<bib> and </bib> whereby in between the tags you have to put the citekey.

You can only use bib if your reference exists in the biblio reference database of tnl. To do that, go to create content -- biblio and add a reference, which can be anything from book to article to journal, etc. Once you have entered your reference a citekey will automatically be generated (you could also enter one by hand). the automatically generated citekey is just a number. Put this number between bib tags and it will again create an automatically numbered endnote which will contain your reference.

Howto create structured research documents with 'Books'

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:34:06 +0200

A 'book' in Drupalish, the Drupal slang, is a content type which allows you to create static pages which are linked to each other through a hierarchical navigation system. On a book page you can use all the things that you can use in a Research Journal Entry (which is called 'blog' page in Drupalish). The content type book is useful for longer texts where you want to split content into different pages. As the navigation control is created by Drupal, this comes in very handy.
This howto explains how to use Books but also integrate this with 'footnotes' and 'biblio' the Drupal module for bibliographic references. Together, thos em modules allow nicely formatted text with links to footnotes and references, so that TNL can be used for 'serious' text production.

In the left sidebar, in the navigation menu under your name, go to create content -- book page http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/add/book

You can create a new book page either on the top level of navigation or under some existing second layer such as 'Documentation' or 'Readers' or 'Waves and Code' which are at the time of writing the three top level links for books.

A book page is nothing else than a static page which is linked in a hierarchical structure to other static pages. You give it a title, select one of the categories and / or create a new one under the 'topic' vocabulary and then put your actual content in the body of the book page. Here take care to select the right Input format. For a beginning, filtered html will just do fine.

If it is your first page, the 'weight' pop-up menu can be kept at 0. Later this will take on a crucial function.

If you want to add an image or a 'related link' then just do so. You can also ignore those menu options. scroll to the bottom, the only menu option you should look at is 'publishing options'. Here you can decide if your book page should be published on the front page or not. If you are certain that you want to share your page with the wider public, then go ahead. Otherwise un-tick the 'published to front page' option. Then choose preview or submit and here you go, you have created a book page.

Once you have created your first page, you can scroll to the bottom of it and simply click on 'add child page'. You will get a menu which is exactly the same as the one you got via create content -- add book page. If you add now a second page, this page will automatically show up in a navigation menu below the first page.

However, if you have a more complex structure with nested hierarchies between pages, you will have to consider the weighting. by selecting a weight from -15 to +15 you select where the page shows up in the navigation. if you have a lot of pages which need organising this will probably take some trial and error. However, in principle this is easy and you cant break anything which cant be repaired equally quickly.

So far we have just used the built in book function. Part of the fun is that you can invite other people to edit your book pages for collaborative writing projects. If you make significant edits to a page, either your own page or the page of somebody else, select 'create new revision' at the bottom menu under 'publishing options'. This will later allow you two things: to move backward in time through revisions of the page, and to 'diff' revisions. Diff means that you can compare changes between the last two versions, which comes in handy if you do some collaborative text editing.

Howto create and use 'Organic Groups'

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:13:20 +0200

The organic groups module allows you to create a working group where a number of people with shared interests can create content which is non-public, visible to group members only.

To be able to create and moderate a group, you need to get 'group moderator' permissions. To get this you need to ask the Administrator.

To create a new group you first need to create a new content type.

In the navigation bar under your name on the left side bar, which I call the admin menu, go to 'content type', then select 'add content type' choose a name and a type (same as name but machine readable), tick 'published' but not 'promoted to front page'.

Under 'organic groups usage' tick 'Group Node', this is mandatory, everything else select to your liking and save content type.

Then go to 'create content', you will find your new content type there, select it and everything else is pretty self explanatory, by creating the first content node of this type you set up the group. Select
'private' maybe and 'moderated', do not offer it for 'selection on registration'

You can decide if your group should be listed on the 'groups' homepage. I would suggest to say 'yes' to that.

Now, to create content for your group, click on groups, and then on your group. Once you are 'inside' your group, there is a new 'groups' menue on the lest sidebar; you will probably have to scroll down a little bit to get there. Select one of the content types offered there.

You can then decide with each article if you would like to publish it only in your group or visible to all.

Here you go. Enjoy group life;)

note of caution: as a group moderator you are given quite a few rights. please use those rights with caution.

There is some more information here:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/og

Creative City Discourse: Amsterdam as New Babylon

Armin Medosch — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:18:16 +0200

Interesting piece about creative city policy in Amsterdam in Variant by Merijn Oudenampsen
http://www.variant.randomstate.org/31texts/issue31.html#L6

The following quotes are from "Back to the Future of the Creative City
An Archaeological Approach to Amsterdam’s Creative Redevelopment" by Merijn Oudenampsen in Variant, issue 31, Spring 2008

"Constant Nieuwenhuys envisaged a society where automation had realised the liberation of humanity from the toils of industrial work, replacing labour with a nomadic life of creative play outside of the economic domain and in disregard of any considerations of functionality. “Contrary to what the functionalists think, culture is situated at the point where usefulness ends”, was one of Constant’s more provocative statements." Constant Nieuwenhuys, ‘Opkomst en Ondergang van de Avant-Garde’. In: Randstad 8 (1964), pp 6-35.

The work of Constant thus combined an aversion for modernist functionalism with an intense appreciation of the emancipatory potentials of new technology. Mechanisation would result in the arrival of a “mass culture of creativity” that would revolt against the superstructure of bourgeois society, destroying it completely and taking the privileged position of the artist down with it.

Together with the consolidation of consumption as a leisure activity, the expansion of labour time has led to an unprecedented amount of human activity being directly or indirectly incorporated into the sphere of economic transactions through a process Marx would have called ‘real subsumption’, or the extension of capitalism onto the field of ontology, of lived social practice.

Copyleft vs. Copyright. All Rites Reversed!?

sokrateska — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:03:37 +0200

all communication is propaganda.
all publication is political.
all business is personal.
all art is pornographic.
mind you,
free your mind.

the issues that are now disscussed on the hype-level of political discourse are everything but new. back in whose days where we said of us "on the internet no one knows, you're just a dog" pretty much anyone with a decent standing (in the most static sense of the word) knew about the infamous Steward Brand quotes:

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive.Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better." -- Steward Brand, in the early 80ies of the previous century

"The counterculture excelled at trying a whole lot of stuff in a short period of time. Almost everything we tried either failed hideously or didn't pan out. Communes failed, drugs went nowhere, free love led pretty directly to AIDS. A lot of people thought Mao Tse-Tung was a hero. Domes leaked. Graphic art was dreadful, except for Andy Warhol and Robert Crumb, the underground cartoonist. The rest was basically tie-dyed. The Music was good." -- Steward Brand, commenting his 60ies of the previous century

these days the fun is even better. i always love swarms that team up in crowds to listen to pretentious gospels of their new zeitgeist guru e.g. Richard Barbrook, just to name one random example off the worst-seller bookshelf.

why? fucking really, why? why on earth!?
well, because i'm a stupid skeptic - whence i enjoy most the very questioning
my own skepticism. ( questioning as the most humble act of being :)

to finish off well polished i would like to kill&yank [0] words of my soul-mate Marko Prezelj: "Joining this circus gave me the opportunity to present my opinion .."

[0] these days the political digital bullshit discourse hype calls this:cut&paste. same formal concept - different pretentious gospel :)

have fun,
sokrateska

Disclosure of Potential Conflict of Interest: too many conflicts to name any.

video documentation of first tnl conference

hadzi — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:34:34 +0200

please follow this link for the video documentation of the first next layer conference, april 08

http://www.archive.org/details/the-next-layer-april-08

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Armin Medosch — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:36:39 +0200

Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication

Armin Medosch — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:36:39 +0200