Computation08

Day 3: Concepts

1. LCD game table  (interactive/ installation)
2. Origami lamp  (interactive art/ installation)
3. NY scrap book (dataviz/ graphic narrative)

 

Prototyping 1

Prototypes:
1. movie/people/news comparison

2. collective great wall

 

3. kinkos/google books

4. musical visualization

5. memory game

6. sketch tool

7. clock/age meter

8. bread baker

9. memory gallery

Max and Processing can be friends and talk to each other

Here is a photo of First Thursday which happens in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California. It is a community of artists that open their lofts and gallery to the public. I envision myself installing a sound visual performance.

Here is a photo of the outside of the gallery/loft of where I envision myself installing the sound vision performance.

Here is a photo of what the space looks like inside this venue.

The following are snap shots of getting MAXMsp and Processing talking to each other.  I found out that the file path is really crucial especially in MAX. If you don't have the right file path, nothing works. Also it is important NOT to have the same copy of the file in MAX.

The following is diagram of a potential installation location in Los Angeles, California. The city is called San Pedro also known as the Port of LA. It is an loft in an artist community. I would like to integrate myself into a sound/visual  installation performance here.

The following is called the Dream Machine. I thought this was be very interesting to install in this gallery. The first picture is my quick prototype of the Dream Machine. The second picture is what it should look like. It  is a stroboscopic  flicker device that produces visual stimuli.

Here is a photo of the mini integration of using a projector onto the cheap table cloth.
Here is another digram prototype of using the projector onto the entrance door.

Here is a photo of what Ms Pinky looks like. Ms Pinky will be my controller for sound and visuals.

Mini Thesis: part 2

PRECEDENTS:

Collaboration, games, movement, information, history, communication, connections, relationships, flash mobs, interpretation, instructions, curiosity, boundaries

Visual example of some ways humans communicate through speech, gesture and writing:

html / jar / pde / data

 

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Diagram of precedents:

html / jar / pde / zip

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Other themes and interests:

Ways to alter the way people see the world.

Leave behinds

Users creating their own map/narrative

Using the city as a "playground"

Being a tourist in your own city

Participation from random strangers

Group dynamic vs.  the individual

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PROTOTYPES: All of these prototypes explore the idea of exploration and interpretation. I want to explore the city and its recent cultural changes in relation to the changes in the physical landscape. Local venues are constantly being replaced.  With a collaborative effort of a handful of people I would like to create an observational "closed and forgotten" tour.  Everyone involved has a duty to the team.  They interpret each location with the tool they are provided. I-pods, digital cameras, pencils, voice recorders, walkie talkies, mobile phones, etch-a sketch and mad-libs are some examples. Ultimately I hope that this collaboration will document each destination in a way which will communicate its past, current and future place in history.

Look and Feel:

Stop 1: Empire skate rink

“This place is old and run down. The paint is bright greed.
People keep walking by without giving it a glance.
I imagine this place was packed on Friday and
Saturday night.  The music must of spilled onto the streets.”

 

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Role:

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Integrated:

1. This is one idea that explores the idea of community.  The circles identify local venues in Brooklyn that have closed down over the past couple of years.  Scroll over them and they change color, click on them and text appears describing the location.

html / jar / pde / png / vlw

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RESEARCH: 

These examples demonstrate the idea of collaboration and/or activity that adds quality to life.  Each example focuses on individual activity contributing to a larger whole. The most appealing thing for me is the "escape" each one creates for user.

Lee Bul's Cyborg Karaoke pods

"The pod-like capsules are soundproof, lined with leather and foam, and equipped with karaoke machine which visitors can enter, one at a time, to sing along to their favourite pop songs without fear of intrusion." 

Electric Picnic

"When a collective of people pour their heart, soul, energy, enthusiasm, vision and passion into a space you can be sure that the experience will be both magical and alchemical. It comes from the heart, and is infused with love!"

Lucent Dossier

"Lucent Dossier is, at its very core, a playground for the innovative genius child in all of us. It is a collective based on magic and inspiration, living by the ancient wisdom of choosing confidence over doubt, joy over pain and love over fear."

Game festivals

Hide and Seek Festival : About (Video)

Come out and Play Festival

Picnic : Video "This dizzying festival of ideas will also include top class entertainment, public lectures and master classes, art performances, demo sessions and pitch events, games, challenges and awards, press conferences and product launches, and a spectacular closing party."

Mobile Game development

Games Atelier

Other

Waag Society grew into an institution that was active in the fields of networked art, healthcare, education and internet related issues like bandwidth and copyright.

We Feel Fine data visualization about connections between people that use that are posting comments on the internet. Other relationships for data visualization iclude weather, population, age, gender and location.

 

 

Minithesis Prototypes, Round 1

Look and Feel

• vxml_audio_prototype.m4a
• SMS school social network

• SMS Group Storytelling:

 

 

 

Implementation

• Email to SMS

• Shift Space, way more problematic to work with:

• VXML: Skype +99000936 9996075324 Download helloworld.xml

Role

• International Family:

• Mobile Social Network:

• Cell phones makes you $:

prototypes

Look and Feel:

Role:

For me, magic is defined as the point of confusion caused by something that is not the same as it seems. It is special, it is taken for granted, and it can be found in art. Artists try to make it all the time. Can i do it too? The goal is to make people stop at some point and maybe think, "This is different/unexpected."

(miscellaneous role)

Implementation:
Projection, Processing using motion detection/blob detection, in the 2 w. 13th street lobby

Mini Thesis Stage 3 - Prototypes

Role

Look and Feel

Exploring Precedence of Domains

Question Refinment

My original relational mapping helped me to arrive at domains I wished to study as well as interesting questions within each domain.   The domains and questions I wish to carry forward include: 

1. Can a method be derived for creating order in the massive information soup of the internet?
2. Can games be used as a tool to communicate?  Currently games are a one too many communication platform,  could they be a many to many communication platform?
3. Can simulated environments help us understand our own environment?
4. How can the web be made more accessible?
5. The web allows for the forming of communities,  individuals who join these communities are self motivated, what does this do to a persons self reference?
6. What does the power of creating do to ones self reference?
7. How can computer interfaces be changed to allow for more of the body to be utilized?

 

I am particularly interested in the intersections of these questions. specifically:

1. 1, 2 and 4: Can a game be made that gives order to the internet and makes it more accessible?
   
2. 2, 3, 5  and 6: Can a community based  game about building be designed to make players more conscious of our environment?
3. 4 and 7: How can computer interfaces be changed to allow for greater interactivity and interconnectivity?
   

Inspiration/Precedence:

Each question has a body of existing works and ideas to draw from.

Question 1 inspiration:

Google Image Labeler: is a feature, in form of a game, of Google Image Search that allows the user to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results.(from wikipedea full article here.

"The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number." --Hermann Hesse from the Glass Bead Game Wiki link here

Question 2 inspiration:

This is an example of simple evolutionary software life. It consits of different colored pixels.  Purple pixels are stationary food.  Other colored pixels represent a set of rules, the author calls these bugs.  From the authors page: "The bugs eat their food by moving onto it, and they move strictly according to their limited genome (they have no sense organs to help them detect food).  The best genome is one that keeps a bug moving mostly in straight lines, turning only occasionally; this keeps a bug constantly moving to new areas, rather than exhausting the local food supply and then slowly starving."
Link to authors page (Scott Max)

link to the creator (Karl Sims) web page

Spore is a game where all content is user generated.  The player grows and evolves their species from tiny bacteria to sentiant beings capable of exploring a vast universe. 

New Computer Interface - Greater interaction

Computers consist of three distinct interactions.  Input, processing, output.  Since it's invention the computer has undergone dramatic innovations in each of these ares. Processing has evolved from cogs and gears (Charles Babbbage's Analytical Engine), large wire grids, to vaccum tubes, to transistors, all the way up to the modern micro processor.  The number of computations per second has increased from around 2,00 in the 1970 to almost 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) in todays fastest computers.  Output has evolved from fixed displays, to printouts, to todays modern screens outputting millions of colors.   Inputs have also evolved.  In the beginning we would input data with punch cards.  This was the practice for decades until the terminal was introduced.  The terminal provided a full keyboard  for entering data.  Allowing users to input data in a way that was closer to natural expression with a full English alphabet.   In the 1980s the mouse was invented at Xerox Parc and made popular by apple's Macintosh computer.  Graphical user interfaces were created that complimented the mouses ability to point and click.  Most recently multi touch displays have become popular and seem to be the future of computer interfaces.  All of these technologies rely on and are indeed limited to human finger interaction.   Below are examples of technology that go beyond the fingers.

My thought Machine

Link to my thought machine I built this simple app to aid me in my exploration.  My goal is to derive definitive domains from my broad and varied list of interests and topics.  I did this with a thought machine.  The first iteration of my thought machine was physical.  I used a set of cards with an interest written on each card.  The exercise of relating thoughts consisted of laying the crads out on the floor in a relational web.  This worked well as the results prove in my previous post.  However the activity is physically difficult.  It requires a large area and many cards.  If relationships change while playing (example: a card is laid down whose context changes aspects of the webs orientation) the process of moving cards around is difficult.  Also, the process of listing topics is arduous with physical cards.  I prefer to list my ideas on the computer, in a single file.  In fact that is what I did in the first iteration, I listed my interest in a txt file and once I was satisfied I copied each term onto a separate card.  Documentation s also a challange in the physical version.  I had many cards spread out across a large area of floor.  In order to capture the total form of the web I would have to backup to the point where the terms written on the cards were no longer legible.  To compensate I would take detail shots of the web, highligting areas of interest.  While this works it makes the process of relational mapping longer and more difficult than desired.  The app above is the first shot at remedying these problems.  It takes a txt file as input and creates a "card" for each term that the user can drag around the screen to make relationships.  At any point during the mapping process the user may take a snap shot by hitting the "Enter" key.  This first iteration few functional problems, which I plan to correct in a future iteration.  It also could benifit from some added features, which I'll discuss later.

Below are a few of the results from my mapping

This series shows the progression of one session of mapping.  You can see that at certain points the web shifts forms.  This usually occurs when there is not enough room to carry out a thought or if things are mapped in such a way that does not allow the most accurate relations to be made.

Domain Exploration 2

Poverty Alleviation:

• open source business
• Facebook Causes: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/2621?facebook_url=true
•                 http://apps.facebook.com/causes/view_cause/47112
• Ripple: make money thru clicking and searching http://www.ripple.org/
  • Also, facebook application: http://utulsa.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2424070831
• Make Poverty History: awareness rasing http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/
• Health text messaging- nytimes article
  • AIDS questions
  • TB medicine reminders
• Grameen Phone- microloaning to setup phone centers http://www.grameenphone.com/i
• Technology for non-profits: http://techsoup.com/
• Mobile Banking- e.g. http://www.wizzit.co.za/, M-Pesa,
• Kiwanja - http://kiwanja.net/
  • facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2219125374
• nGOmobile- getting grassroots ngo's mobile technology http://www.ngomobile.org/
• FrontlineSMS - SMS hub for NGOs -http://www.frontlinesms.com/
• Internet speech: http://www.internetspeech.com/ Call to hear the internet
• Media Lab Asia: http://medialabasia.in/index.php
  
  • Digital Ecosystem for Agriculture and Rural Livelihood
  • aAQUA: An archived multilingual multimedia Question Answer based communication system.    --- aAQUA (almost All Question Answered) is a multilingual online question and answer forum - which provides online answers to questions asked by farmers and agri- professionals over the Internet.

Econ or social growth:

• Base of Pyramid
• micofinance

Technology:

• - Cell phones change the world: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13anthropology-t.html?ex=1208577600&en=528280c6bccfef1b&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERNEWS
•     "Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity"  "A cell  phone in the developing world gives a person a fixed location, particularly important for those displaced by war or drought."
•     "Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network"
•     "A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated the effect even further, concluding that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent."

Empowerment:

Technology:

• shift space
• facebook, and other social networks
• blogs
• wikis

• Dream cell phone drawing- get's people thinking about what they want from life, especially with refugess, etc.
• Computer clubhouse - after school technology mentoring , empowerment thru technology http://www.computerclubhouse.org/
• Hear our voices: young female empowerment thru technology http://www.computerclubhouse.org/programs/hov/index.htm
• Women representations in media: http://shiftspace.org/trails/63e4
• Media Lab Europe http://medialabeurope.org/
  • Textable Movies - video generated thru text from group or individually archived   video and images
  • Mixer-Subverter: http://web.media.mit.edu/~pauln/research/mix-subvert/index.html group remixing and retelling of stories
• MIT Media Lab
  • Confectionary: http://mf.media.mit.edu/confectionary/   storytelling app
• Digital Hub: http://www.thedigitalhub.com/  to create an international centre of excellence for knowledge, innovation and creativity focused on digital content and technology enterprises.
  • Digital storytelling: http://www.thedigitalhub.com/community_learning/article.php?id=45
  • Digital beat: http://www.thedigitalhub.com/community_learning/article.php?id=43# use of stills, sounds and voices for storytelling thru digital means

venn, venn2

Day 2: Researching precedents

Download shipra_workILike.html
Download shipra_workILike.jar
Download shipra_workILike.pde

Project Links:
Calvin and Hobbes (Imagination/form)
John Snow Cholera Map (Systems/Mapping/DataViz)
Shape of music (DataViz)
Zipcode (DataViz)
Levitated: Sea-Thing (Data-Art)
Hans Rosling (Data Visualization)
Zork (Interactive Fiction)
Augumented Sculpture Project (Interactive Art/ Installation)
Messe Di Voce (Interactive Art/ Installation)
Flight (graphic narrative)
Life in the Garden (interactive narrative)