Blooms: Strobe-Animated Sculptures
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Tagged: technology
Sarah Bergbreiter: why I make robots the size of a grain of rice
Meet Dorothy:
Have you ever been stuck in an awkward situation, praying your phone would ring so you could politely extract yourself? Of course you have. That’s why we made Dorothy, a physical trigger that makes any dumb shoe smart. Dorothy consists of the “Ruby” (a small connected device that slips into your shoe) and a mobile App that allows you to trigger a call to your phone from a fake contact (your “boss”) whenever you tap your heels together 3 times. Dorothy can also send text messages to your contacts with a custom message and your current location, letting them know exactly where you are. Soon, we’ll be working toward summoning an Uber.
I can’t even fathom how important this idea could be, how life saving. How many people have been in a situation where a timely phone call could save them from a potentially dangerous situation?
Definitely keeping an eye on this one.
What we do with the accidents: week 4 symposium
- Conglomerates and reality TV as a hybrid: Big Brother is not just a TV show, but a website with extra footage, a voting system, etc.
- Why do we like reality TV so much? Adrian suggested because “we live and die by our constraints“. Reality TV certainly plays on constraints and expectations: the constraints of living in a house with 14 others and the expectation to do dishes or compete in games and tasks for example. These constraints and expectations mirror the modern world, eg the “Nanny state” which constrains us.
- Public and private spheres: how have they changed? We now hear half a phone conversation instead of our conversations being held in a private phone booth or within the home.
- Making mischief – why not talk into someone’s phone? It’s not a private conversation after all!
- So what are the boundaries between inside/outside, safe/dangerous, legal/illegal?
- TV has an insatiable need to see –> the desire to see is much more important than the camera quality. Content is more important that an HD image.
- Jasmine mentioned that the individualised nature of our devices has changed the public and private spheres. iPad, iPhone, iPod: these are named for the individual.
- Adrian questioned if the internet allows us to build walls further around us or whether it allows us to open our minds. The internet is capable of doing both, it depends on what the individual wants to use it for.
- It was asked whether new technology/phones ruin TV/film making, and I immediately thought of the recent iPhone 5 film starring Scarlett Johansson:
- Adrian proposed that the more tools the better off you are, which I tend to agree with. But this idea does avoid our need for constraints and the creative liberation found in putting constraints on our work.
- Our language can’t even keep up with the rate of technology change: it’s not ‘film’ and it’s not a ‘video’ for instance.
- Embrace the constraints
- It’s all about what we do with the accidents.
The future is disorder
It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
Ten Dreams of Technology starts with a number of quotes such as “predict the future by inventing it” that remind me somehow of Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressive fiction, particularly Invisible Monsters where the main character invents personas and basically her entire existence based on how she sees fit. In this novel it’s done in a disturbing and enthralling way, but this idea of inventing your own future is interesting in an “everyday” kind of way: what is stopping us from inventing the future, particularly in this era of technology as king where really the possibilities are endless. I only have to look through the plethora of links I’ve posted here during the semester to realise that the way we do things and the way we look at the world has been changed by these inventions, and more importantly, that we all have this power to create change.
I enjoyed this reading for its commentary on technological art, again, a new way to look at the world and the things we can create.
This ‘glitch art’ appropriation of Irises in Monet’s Garden is an example of what can be created through new techniques: The role of the network in these projects is essentially to create an open system of input to promote adaptation.
I also enjoyed the take away idea of not criticizing a work too early:
Criticizing a new idea because it is not yet fully realized seems unreasonably impatient. On that basis, the caves at Lascaux would never have been painted because we did not have a full palette and could not animate in three dimensions. Give us a few centuries and then revisit this complaint.
This rings true of ‘process’ type mediums, such as our blogs. Everyone starts as an amateur, so to criticize someone for not yet knowing how to achieve a certain technique… this doesn’t make sense to me. Criticism in general I don’t understand, but that’s another issue altogether.
Also from this reading was the concept of file sharing = life sharing. I think about this a lot with the sharing-centric ideas of social media. We post where we are, photos of what we ate, we tag who we are with. I had a conversation with my best friend a few days ago who was feeling disheartened that her own life wasn’t as interesting as all of her Facebook friends’ who post ‘cheery’ photos doing ‘interesting’ things. I put these words in quote marks because, as I told her, sometimes I feel like if people were having that much fun they wouldn’t be on Facebook ‘bragging’ to the rest of us. It comes down to that idea of enjoying the moment, which I’m starting to believe more and more that social media and sharing our every movement is impacting.
In another sense though: I did watch Miley’s most recent appearance on Ellen, in which she spoke about asking creative people around her, such as designers, musicians, etc, for a list of their favourite and most influential films, artists, musicians, books and so on. These may not be files so to speak, but this is another form of life sharing I think… sharing with someone those things that inspire and have changed you the most.
Some other takeaways from the reading:
- Every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective
- One of the most persistent tropes of the intersection of technology and art is that it will lead to a whole new art form, just as moving images eventually created cinema.
Actively interacting interactively
The importance of interactivity in digital texts and how that differentiates old and new media.
Not all digital texts are interactive, but those that aren’t could usually be taken out of the computer and played by another medium.
Ryan asks what this might mean for narrative form and storytelling, and as a self-diagnosed, scaffold-loving, traditional narrative fanatic, I am also interested in what the future might look like in an ever-expanding networked media.
I found most interesting what Ryan raised in the last section, that interactivity is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of relations between the user and the text. So far in the examples of hypertext I’ve looked into, at least online, I’ve had to simply click different sections and links and I’ve been transported to a different story segment. But where else could this idea of interactivity lead as technology progresses? Admittedly, I’m still transfixed by the idea of a build your own adventure theme park, but the directions that could be followed… I can’t begin to fathom.
- Links:
On Evan Williams’ newly launched publishing platform, Medium, a big focus is on sharing and collaboration. Articles are arranged by themes so that readers can contribute and gravitate toward content that fits their likes. The comments are set up to aid in that too. They’re not at the end of the piece, but sprinkled throughout, paragraph by paragraph. The aim is to foster dynamic discussions around what you’re interested in.
“The crowd can actually improve the quality of the content,” says Williams, who also co-founded microblogging site Twitter. “Our goal is to create a better place to read and write.”
– The Publishing Industry’s Secret Sauce Is You
Television has already grown to have what AMC calls the “two–screen experience” with certain shows. The new NBC show, Hannibal (which I recommend highly), live tweets during its episodes, and Sam Witwer live tweets during the SyFy show Being Human for both the East and West Coast air times.
So let me bring this back to the issue that spurred this blog: ensemble casts and the changing nature of big movies.
– A Different Kind of Experience
The world’s first interactive street-furniture installation is for Nokia’s N-90 and the moment it detects a pedestrian it springs into life. The monolith-like installation first swivels either right or left to ensure that the creative message is directly in front of the consumer. It then snaps a photograph of the person and displays it on a screen.
– Street Furniture Gets Interactive (2006)
There is no way to deny that fact static pages just don’t cut it anymore. With every company combining social media profiles with their standard websites, designers are discovering more and more that creating a successful site means embracing interactivity.
Internet users view countless websites each day, so as a brand you need to figure out how to stand out and make your mark in the mind of the viewer. One of the best ways to do this is to incorporate interactive elements on your site. The goal is to draw the customer in and engage them through interactive element—innovative scroll navigation, animated characters or unique click controls. Whatever you choose to do you have to make it worth talking about.
Interaction is something as simple as pressing Space to make the story continue, and as complex as deciding the fate of a universe based on your actions. Such interactive storytelling breaks down into three rough categories. There are games that wish to tell you their story, and ask you to complete tasks that allow it to be told. There are games that have stories which can go in multiple directions, and allow you to choose which of these pre-determined routes to take. And there are games that provide a template in which you can tell your own story.
– Games Are The Ideal Place For Telling Great Stories
A very important factor of interactivity in games is how the player experiences and learns about the story. Audio, visuals, and other elements of a game help to create truly interactive experiences.