ASCII party tricks; word coinage

growl...missing pictures from the Wordpress transition...

I come across lots of new words in the readings for my information science class this term. The whole field is fertile ground for making up new words. Aboutness, findabilty, satisfice, berrypicking. The list goes on. I've decided to coin three new words this week.

1. memesta - A digital gangsta who has a specific goal of spreading or popularizing a new unit of cultural information, and does so through a planned and concerted effort.


2. homepwnership - Annoying maintenance/labor/money costs of owning a home. You may own the house, but the house pwns you.


3. ASCIIwall - A wall full of ASCII art, the source of which may come from a video feed.

Meme becomes a more significant term for the info-saturation age based on how agile and fanned-out our new ways of "telling" are. Write about a meme on a popular blogging aggregate website and a potentially huge audience receives it. This may usher in the day of the memesta, a digital gangsta of ideas.

I like that idea so much, I think I'll be one. You see, here's how homepwnership came up originally:



I looked, and the word's been used before, but not very much as far as I can tell. Now, I've put it up on wordie.org, submitted it to urbandictionary (which surprised me--they have editors and I have to wait for my submission to show up!), and I'd imagine I could find some image of a tree falling on a house and put the word in block white letters near the bottom of the frame and post it randomly in fark forums and CL rants & raves. With the housing market crisis that's been in the news lately, its pretty timely. Default on your subprime loan? This is homepwnership in a big way.

And for the ASCIIwall. A friend of mine is helping Camille Utterback (a prominent interactive video artist) with an installation in San Jose this month. I also came across QuickASCII, a Mac command line tool that renders any Quicktime video into ASCII and plays it in Terminal. We were having a party, so I set to work on an installation for the event. Here's how it went:

1. iSight records 60 seconds of video


2. QuickASCII plays that video in Terminal, which is projected onto the wall.


3. iSight records another video while the first one is playing.


4. QuickASCII plays that second video.


5. Repeat 4eva.

Here's the janky AppleScript I wrote to keep the party going. I liked having the minute-long delay between recording and projection. That way, you noticed the installation, thought "hey--that's me" and moved your arm around. When it didn't move right along with you, you had to watch a little more to figure out what was going on. DJ took some good pics here.



I'll upload some other pictures and give them the texasparty07 tag, too. I also had people hacking the KraftPad so we could play StepMania, an open source DDR clone. That's right, it just ain't a party unless AppleScript's involved and there's a hot soldering iron.