Videoplace

From Myron Krueger’s essay on responsive environments, the one passage that struck me was the section focusing on VIDEOPLACE. While we are in the age of video conferencing and cameras on street corners, something about the VIDEOPLACE idea seems so futuristic and exciting. It would be cool to experience something where, not only are you seeing the image of a friend in a different location, but you would see yourself there, in the same scene, with that person! I can only imagine that, with time, one may actually fall for the mental illusion and feel as if they were actually spending time with that person. The idea of VIDEOPLACE makes me think of Project Natal for Xbox 360 where a camera captures movements of the human body and uses those movements to control the videogame.  It seems to be in the same vain as VIDEOPLACE where the human image is incorporated, on the fly, to a given medium.

Computers!

I could watch videos documenting the history of computers all day long. Seriously.

I’m sure everyone in my generation likes to say this but I have been in love with computers from a very young age. My dad is a graphic artist, and when I was little, my family had an old, old, Macintosh computer. In the early to mid nineties, however, having a Macintosh and being 10 years old meant you envied all the kids who got to play “Roller Coaster Tycoon” and “The Sims”. But the lack of computer game stimuli forced me to get creative with my Macintosh. I remember using Adobe Illustrator to draw when other kids my age were using MS Paint. I also remember writing stories when other kids were wasting away playing their plethora of video games. When I wasn’t doing those things, I would explore the computer’s file systems and tweak settings (usually to my father’s discontent) But it was this time that I spent with the computer that really made me fall in love with it.

In my short lifetime, I’ve seen computers come SUCH a long way. I remember when I was in middle school, using the first release of iMovie to edit together videos made with friends. I would leave my computer running overnight in order to render the megabytes upon megabytes of footage. Now, ten years later, I am annoyed when it takes longer than 20 minutes to render 15 minutes of 1080i HD video.

These documentaries reminded me how lucky I am to live in the digital age. Everything I want to do in life has been discovered because of the computer and I can’t imagine a world without it.

Running Fence

The Running Fence installation art project blurred the traditional line between what is art and what is not. Additionally, it ended up blurring the line that let us identify the piece’s artist. At the outset of the film, I thought that Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude would be considered the artists, and their 27-mile nylon fence; the artwork. . I did not think that the fence would look like art, and I didn’t really consider their project to be art, in the classic sense of the word. As the documentary progressed, however, I came to agree with Christo in thinking that that the artistic elements of the project were everything that went into the fence’s construction. The town hall meetings, the arguments, the agreements, the labor, the teamwork, all of those elements were, in fact, a beautiful work of art in and of themselves. In the end, the fence itself also turned out to look magnificent as it curved up and around the California countryside. In a sense, then, the Running Fence project was art from start to finish.

While Christo and Jeanne-Claude came up with the idea for this piece and were important in the pieces construction, the true artists of this piece were the people who either gave Christo support or the ones who opposed him. The battle between the pro-fence people and the no-fence people proved to be one of the most interesting aspects of this whole project. Here we have Christo, out in the middle of nowhere, building this incredibly long fence while there is all the back and forth bickering going on. It made the end product that much more impressive.

Engelbart

I was surprised to learn that Douglas Engelbart was the inventor of the mouse, the word processor and the hyperlink. I was not surprised, then, to read about Engelbart’s thoughts on Augmenting Human Intellect. The mouse, the word processor and even the hyperlink all seem to accomplish Engelbart’s ultimate goal of making the human language more economical. The mouse eliminates the need for computer users to enter in complex and confusing command codes, the word processor fractionalizes the amount of time used in writing and the hyperlink instantaneously takes an internet user to a desired web location. One section of his essay that was particularly interesting to me, probably because it was a large image in a sea of text, was the depictions of time spent writing the sentence, “Augmentation is fundamentally a matter of organization.” The ability to type out words has, essentially, augmented human intellect. Instead of wasting upwards of 40 seconds writing the sentence the body is able to outsource some of its power and become more economical.

E.A.C And Kaprow

The main ideas surrounding happenings seem to escape traditional categorization. To me, these happenings seem to be nothing more than outlandish and strange experiments involving light, sound, or human action. Happenings are constantly evolving, presently existing forms of art that comment on any particular theme. In class, we learned of the happening that involved a bed, an eye motion scanner, and a large loom. The happening spoke to the connection between sleep as we usually see it, and sleep in the digitally metered sense.

In Kaprow’s interview he speaks about the role of the spectator in happenings. Typically, in art, the audience is more of a passive spectator while in happenings, interesting dynamics can be achieved when utilizing active audience participation. With happenings though, there is no fear that audience participation may bring about error, or failure. While audience participation in any standard art medium, (theatre, painting) audience participation is a dangerous variable as it may not fall in line with the artist’s intent. With happenings, however, the actual actions that go into the making of a happening are all part of the art. There is no way a happening could fail.

One of the happenings depicted in the textbook that caught my attention was the happening that related sound to light. In it, a microphone was placed on a tennis racket and two individuals began to play a game. The sound created by the rackets in turn controlled the level of light in the room. When the lights went completely out, infra-red camera’s captured the action and the audience, watching on monitors were able to actually see the actions taking place right in front of them despite the room being pitch black. It’s happenings like this that tie together such artistic elements as movement, sound, and light into one artistic presentation.

McCloud

The presentation of Scott McCloud’s “essay” made it an incredibly interesting and enjoyable read. The preface made mention that an essay about comic standards could only be presented in the way of a comic, and I found that to be quite true. When McCloud needed to make a point, he was able to utilize diagrams and graphics to make his points clearer.

When reading this comic I was always aware of, and constantly trying to make the connection to, new media. (Obviously, we wouldn’t be reading a comic about making comics if it didn’t have something to do with what we are discussing in class.) On page 722 McCloud talks about how different types of media are bound to move in one direction whereas a comic’s past, present, and future can all be seen when looking at a whole page. McCloud seemed to personify the human eye, alluding to the fact that, at any point, it could change direction and give the reader a different story. This resonated with me as I always find my eyes darting ahead and back when trying to read. I like the idea that, in comic, this is embraced and perhaps even encouraged. For me, it was interesting to think of comics as a form of new media in this sense.

The FIfth Element

Before watching Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element I did a little bit of research, which is what I normally do before watching a new film. On metacritic.com, a review aggregator site, The Fifth Element received generally favorable reviews. To satiate my own curiosity, however, I scrolled down a bit to read some of this film’s less than favorable reviews. David Edeldstein of Slate magazine said in his May 1997 review that, “[The Fifth Element] may or may not be the worst movie ever made…” After sitting through this film and suppressing my scornful laughter, I have no choice but to agree with him. However, if you can look beyond the terrible acting and script comparable to an early episode of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, one can relish in the film’s one redeeming quality, the score. Eric Serra’s score alone makes this movie worth watching. The music is inventive and catchy and it emphasizes the dramatics of the movie quite well.

With regard to the movie’s main character, Leeloo, Eric Serra is able to draw out poignant emotions simply by utilizing different timbres of the same melody. From the outset, the confused and scared Leeloo is associated with a simple melody, and throughout the film, different timbres are used in different scenes to convey different meanings.

Piano – When Bruce Willis’ character, Korbin, is first telling his cab dispatcher about the mysterious woman who literally fell into his car, Korbin’s affectionate feelings for Leeloo match the timbre of the piano, an instrument typically associated with love songs and generally docile tunes, as it plays Leeloo’s signature melody.

Alto Saxophone – After a close call with the police, Korbin helps Leeloo out of the shower. She is soaking wet as the shower, equipped with an auto-cleaning functionality, has turned on with her trapped inside. The saxophone is an instrument traditionally associated with blues songs and romance and its timbre lends a sort of sultry sexiness to the scene. Despite the bright fluorescent lighting and Leeloo’s oblivious nature, it does a wonderful job alerting the audience to the sexual tension between Korbin and Leeloo.

Solo Violin- When Korbin is bandaging Leeloo’s injuries, the solo violin timbre emphasizes the scene’s already prominent sense of aloneness and compassion. Krobin is going out on a limb by expressing his love for Leeloo and the singular violin works well with that.

Toy Piano – This was my favorite iteration of the Leeloo melody in the film. Here we are at the climax of the film, and Leeloo must send evil away. The timbre in the toy-piano plays with Leeloo’s childlike nature when she claims not to know love. The dramatic scene juxtaposed with the playful, and innocent timbre makes the moment when all the violins begin playing the melody even more dramatic.

Response 10/3

Reading the essay on New Media from Lee Manovitch raised a few questions in my mind, but proved to be a rather interesting read. In his essay, Manovitch presents eight propositions for “What Is New Media?”

The term “New Media” has been tossed around quite a lot, in fact, it just so happens to be the title of the textbook. With that being said, I’m glad Manovitch has so painstakingly laid out several definitions of the term for us to use.

Typically, when I think of media, I have trouble discriminating what should, and should not fall within the definition of the term. As far as I’m concerned, everything is media. The clothes we wear, with their emblems and labels, the shows we watch on television, the websites we visit. When media is a term used to describe something that communicates thought, I consider everything to be media. Therefore, when Manovitch starts describing what should be categorized as “New Media” (dvd’s, cd-roms, computer games) I find the categorical distinction to be unnecessary, and arbitrary. While I understand the desire to take the term “Media” and break it into smaller subcategories, “New Media” and “Old Media”, outside of this class I will continue to think of all media as just that, “Media.” Humankind generally appreciates when things are grouped in smaller, more “easy-to-swallow” tablets, but since the term “New Media” takes eight different definitions to be accurately described, I’m thinking it is an unnecessary distinction within the land of media.

Another thing that I thought interesting came in Proposition four. Manovitch was talking about how, in cinema, humans are typically the ones acting, and they are always the ones writing, or working on the creative side of a motion picture. It seemed as if, at this point, Manovitch was making the case for Computer A.I. to begin writing screenplays, and constructing movies. He mentioned how, in videogames, stuff like this already happens. He states that in many new video games, the computer decides what music will play, and where the storyline will go! While this is interesting, and it is an exciting new frontier of technology, I find one major caveat. Sure, a computer may design the gameplay of a video game, but in the end, a human has to program the computer.

As We May Think

One thing jumped out at me while reading As We May Think by Vannevar Bush was the idea that great ideas are sometimes lost in the large, swarming crowd of other mediocre ideas. This is an interesting idea that I have never really thought of before, but it makes perfect sense to me. This idea borrows its main philosophy from the old idea of “A Diamond In The Rough”, where a brilliant thing, or idea, is found in the company of lesser ideas/things.

Bush also spoke about technological advances and alluded to the fact that all great things were once great, but not perfect, ideas. Diamonds in the rough. The computer keyboard technology was spawned out of the technology used for adding machines and the modern car is a by product of years and years of adaptation and re-invention.

The Garden of Forking Paths – Response

(This is probably not going to be the most sensical posting.)

After reading The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges, one quotation jumped out at me, and it was this:

“…everything happens to a man precisely.”

On a surface level this quote is very interesting to me. Yes, it’s always easy to wax poetically on the fleeting nature of time, and how today is just tomorrow’s yesterday, but it really seemed to resonate with this passage’s idea of Hypertext and how one thing so seemingly universal could be read in a number of different ways. In The Garden of Forking Paths, for example, the main character makes note of how instantaneous the present is. He mentioned how he might die at any moment; that the bombs might drop on him at any time; that his life was about to end. I just felt like the way he viewed time was a little unique. While he was viewing life presently I thought of how some people, myself included, view the world in terms of the future (sometimes even the past).