Telepresence

Will you ever need to leave the house? This was a real question at during the dot com boom as people projected all the things short of actually getting laid that could be taken care of over net. Along with the dot com bust and web 2.0 real space made a come back with the net relegated to being merely a great tool for augmenting it. But you have strong urges to reproduce and interact intellectually and physically. The internet did greatly enhanced your ability to disseminate your ideas and get get reaction from many more people without leaving home. With just 24 hours in a day and competition between your urges for memetic reproduction (ideas) and genetic (babies) reproduction for those hours, we might expect the urges being serviced well on the net to try to silence the others. The extent of pornography on the net might be sign of yet another swing towards the idea of the net hoping to get other urges from keeping you away from the computer.
This reductionist approach assumes that reproduction (memetic or genetic) is the motive of all our actions. Even if you believe that any action is ultimately traceable to these motives, so many intermediary steps now feel as if they pursued for their own sake.  For instance meeting with a friend face to face for a meal or a drink with little potential for any kind of reproduction just seems enjoyable and the absence of it feels bad.  In other words conviviality and loneliness maybe side effects of evolution but the feel real.

Thanks to communications devices like the internet people live apart from the people who they want to eat, drink and sleep with.  Given that those devices are not going away, what can you make to help  people eat drink and sleep with people at a distance?

When exploring the perspective of another entity through some form of broadcast medium one must consider the importance of time. By this I am trying to understand if one needs to experience the “teleplace” or “teleactor” in real time.

I was motivated to explore this topic after stumbling across the following website:http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/pe_catcam1.htm. Although the images were still, and there was no relative sense of common time between the “actor” and the reader there is still a profound sense of connection between actor, the location and the viewer.

As pictures are able to flood our minds with rich memory based experiences, I feel the teleactor and the teleplace do not have to exist at any specific moment of time. There availability is enough and it is up to the user to make the necessary interpolations in order to satisfy their own expectations from the experience.

I will be implementing a project that follows this logic over the course of the semester. My mother and father were the inspiration for the idea. Given the nature of my lifestyle, balancing graduate studies and part time employment, I often find that there are not enough minutes in the day to complete my most essential tasks. Given this condition, I often do not have time to contact my parents for a significant stretch of days. My parents understand my situation and simply request I check in from time to time to let them know that I am still alive.

My solution to this dilemma is to create a non invasive solution that will allow for my parents to know that I am alive and well while not presenting any sort of inconvenience on my end (this relationship can work in both ways, I can check in on them and not bother them).

Each participating user will require a small desktop application. The application will allow them to send a request to “check up” on any of their listed contacts. A central server will receive the request and pass it on to the appropriate individual. The next time the recipient of the request starts their computer they will notice a small window asking them to either ‘accept’ or ‘deny’ the request. If the accept, (or deny) a single click of the mouse is the extent of the effort necessary to participate in this project. The appropriate camera will activate, capture a fixed amount of footage, and upload the video to the central server before sending a notification email to the original requester. Now the concerned party will be able to see a moving image of their contact allowing them to see their face, surrounding environment, and general demeanour.

Furthermore, I am hoping to extend this concept to the mobile world, allowing one to receive a request on their mobile phone presenting the opportunity to broadcast while on the go.

Although there is no real time interaction, it presents the ability for people to subtly experience the presence of their friends and family.

-ameya.

This project is collaborated with Jae Yoon.

http://suchamagicworld.blogspot.com/2008/02/may-i-have-your-seat.html

We know in public places, people tend to keep a distance with others and set a social border for themselves. For instance, when there’s a 3 seat bench, the first place to be occupied, normally, is always on one end; then if the second person is coming and he/she is a stranger to the first one, he/she probably will take the seat on the other end.

That may be because of the physical reason: we want a bigger space to seat ourselves to feel comfortable; but more important, that’s because of the social reason: people want to act normal and seating next to the stranger if there’s still space unoccupied is not being regard as normal act in our society.

But how about if the seat is not occupied by a physical person, but by his shadow which corresponds to and reflects his presence in another place, say one bench is at the subway station of W4, the other at Cannel street ; or even both benches are situated at the two end of one subway station. When I find an empty bench, I seat myself on one spot, while my shadow is reflected on the same position on the other bench; then if you also want to seat yourself over there, will my shadow bother you? Will you avoid seating on my shadow? Will you keep a distance with my shadow which is the tele-presence of me? Will you feel your space is invaded by my shadow or by me if we are on the same seat position in different bench? Or will you ignore it? How my tele-shadow is gonna affect your behavior of sitting on a bench?

Our project is about to do an experiment with people, especially the strangers in public setting.

So technically, the project is setting in this way:

We tried using recorded video, or animation, to create the telepresence at the beginning, but we feel to make the telepresence real is a key, so we turn to use cameras. When using cameras, there’s also some challenges: to avoid the shadow which is projected on to the bench, being recorded back into the camera. So we applied a black mask whenever there’s a physical person sitting on the seat (and press down the button basically in microcontroller).

Video is going to be uploaded:

meng

In both face-to-face and screen-based conversations, we depend on visual perception to guide us in assessing the other person’s authenticity, emotion etc.  While we say that we are “talking” with someone, we are just as much involved in watching them—the things that others “give off” are perhaps more important than the words that pass. Without a doubt, perception of visual cues can help us “sum up” or assess another person—if I am talking to Jim and he is blinking too much, I might conclude that there is something wrong with him—he isn’t telling the truth, perhaps.  Or, he is making a little grimacing microexpression just before he smiles that make me realize his smile is forced. But what if the conclusion I make is wrong?  Our brains are constantly filtering through millions of bits of data gathered by our sense perceptions and filtering them from the subconscious to the conscious.  As soon as they are in our minds, we must do something with them—make an evaluation about Jim blinking too much.  While we may use our minds and our intuition to assess correctly in most cases, the only way we can really and truly know the contents of Jim’s mind at that moment—know why he might be blinking too much—is by asking him.  But we know he might lie.  This is why we trust his body so much—we think it will be more honest.   For my first project for Telepresence, LieChat, I decided to explore trust in conversations by using sensors do the work of perceiving what is “given off” by the body.  Sensors measuring galvanic skin response (GSR) are attached to both of the people, who are sitting in front of their computers in distant places.  The GSR sensors measure the electrical resistance of the skin (sympathetic activity), which is connected to emotional arousal.  While it is not possible to identify the particular emotion that is being read by the GSR, fluctuations from a baseline measurement can be used to augment our perception of what the person we are talking to is “giving off.”    Each person sits in front of a pan-tilt camera that is controlled by his or her galvanic skin response.   The other person sees them on their computer and can have a video Chat just like normal—except they are constantly seeing a graph of the other person’s GSR readings displayed at the bottom of the video.   When, in the course of their chat, the GSR sensor picks up a reading that is above the baseline level (indicating emotional arousal) the camera starts to move around.  The amount it moves is correlated to the difference between the baseline level and the GSR’s current reading of emotional arousal.  Thus, when the person’s GSR goes over the baseline, the person they are talking to sees them, not in focus at the center of the screen, but through the person’s own emotions. While the working name of this project is lieChat, it is really a way of augmenting our perception, and perhaps perspective.  We see the other person clearly when they are at the baseline, and in a jerking, erratic way when their GSR is above this level.  While the task remains for us to make an assessment of what the GSR values mean in relation to what the person is saying (perhaps they are experiencing anger, perhaps they are embarrassed or in love), lieChat seeks to connect what we “give off” with our interior sates—our emotions so that the people we interact with can trust both our words and our bodies.

Kacie

Feeling weather, not to check weather. I have been interested in visualizing dynamic information, as I said in the first class. I don’t know how many people remember it.. This web page, Teleweather, is challenging idea to show weather more lively and visually. People sense weather by watching web camera also, newest date is updating often.

Web camera makes it possible for us to watch far place. We dramatically get rid of time and don’t need to travel in order to glance the world. They look like interesting; moreover their images must contain a lot of information rather than text. Nowadays, the weather information system is almost text or illustration, as far as I know. To utilize information from web camera, I try to build dynamic information system on the web site. I believe it can be my proposal.

please check link below.

Teleweather ver1.0

Noriaki Okada

I generally don’t think that trust is something that can be measured or secured through some device, agreement, or any kind of remote or face-to-face interaction. My feeling is you could have as many reasons to not to trust someone you meet up close as someone you meet online. I mean, if they really want to deceive or betray you, they could do it even if they were very close to you.
of course, if it is someone you have never met in person, this would be a different matter. Seeing what they look like would give you a better sense of what they are like, and if the basics of who they claim to be are true. It’s possible that meeting someone online you wouldn’t be sure if they are lying to you about who they are, but hopefully having a more complete image of them will help ease your worries.
That said, I am interested in the thin line between distrust and paranoia. Most of the times it only takes common sense to know whether or not you should trust someone. If you are talking to people you know nothing about, you could build trust slowly, or by getting external information about them. If you are afraid that they are not revealing something, then you could try looking when they do not think they are being observed. An idea would be a platform that connects people to each other only if they are willing to be connected to the other person whenever that person wishes, with no step in which the person “agrees” to accept the connection, then you would hopefully be a little more convinced that the other person doesn’t have something to hide. But that sounds an awful lot like surveillance/spying.
On the flip side of distrust is, obviously, trust, or faith in something. An interesting commentary on the untrustworthiness of the internet as a medium to meet and interact with people would be to use the internet as a source of “trust” so as you are talking to someone, you will get a background check with any online traces of the other person, or who they claim to be. Sure that could just lead to even less trust, but it is faithful to the technology — you have to trust something. It is also somewhat taboo, to openly admit that you are not trusting someone, and are “stalking” them to see if they are telling the truth. if the other person trusted you and found out that you were being so paranoid, would they still trust you?

While webcams are really about providing us with a window to a different place, surveillance cameras are most often used for security and protection. They are placed in discreet places to see who goes by and what they do, ready to catch any ‘evil’ deeds. They transfer the image of the place they are in to someone who is overseeing (a security guard), or to a machine that is recording, or sometimes nowhere at all. This is such a common concept that numerous websites are selling imitation security cameras that you can attach to the outside of your house if you can’t afford a real one and want to scare away people with bad intentions.

Traditionally the act of seeing is considered so powerful that there is a very widespread, deeply rooted in very old traditions belief that someone can harm you just by looking at you, by casting on you the Evil Eye. To protect yourself from that, you would wear one of a variety of amulets, depending on where you are from (different cultures have different amulets). Greeks and Turks use a blue bead that represents an eye as protection against the Evil Eye. I am not sure why that is, but one interpretation is that the protective eye reflects the malevolent gaze, protecting its wearer.

By merging the iconic traditional eye with a camera, the symbolic charm turns into an active observer, perhaps one that, at a time that superstitions are frowned upon and technology is glorified, might be able to protect you better. The renewed eye contains a cell phone camera embedded into a blue bead. It is worn discreetly on your body, observing (and recording?) everything even when you are not. Wearing it and believing that you are protected by it is still a matter of faith however, as it is not certain that what is seen by the camera is being sent to someone who will be able to protect you.

Last year when I was in seattle, I went hiking with my friends. When I was tired, I started with both feet and hands touching the ground and crawling. After being laughed at for a while, I started feeling that must be the way how I see the world, the grass, the earth, the tree, the insects, and the people, when I was little, that tall.

Another thing is I always enjoy my parents telling me my scary experience when I was 1 years old: living in the hospital as a little patient and dragging away the transfusion wire and throwing the bottle to the ground, for some reason. Is that me? I really wish I could have good memory of my baby time.

Also interesting when I was doing my shopping in the mall, being stared by a baby in his/her (not sure) baby cart for 2 min and 3 times. We always encountered and the baby always looked at me, no distraction.

So having experienced these things, I want to make a baby-Eye: to track what a baby sees by having the baby wearing a camera hat.

First of all, it’s really interesting to learn from baby as an adult, see how the baby see the world. Even though parents and baby are always together, the thing parents  see is different from their baby.

I want it to help parents know how the baby see the world, what they may be more interested in, what they may be more focusing on, baby likes to imitate other’s behavior, so it would also be nice to get the source why they behave in certain way if we could follow baby’s eyes.

It’s also be good to leave a memory or evidence for the baby him/herself, so that when they grow up, they could be reminded what great things they’ve done when just came into the world. 

meng

I changed my idea; well, pillowSolus was too pathetic, and maybe too lonely idea, so I went back to my initial idea. This was something that I thought right before coming to ITP, before breaking up with my girlfriend I was thinking to do some kind of mouse, which can send the touch of one’s finger to the otherside, which the same device would push the one’s finger in real time. So here it is, the coolest video ever, and more info at itpedition.

Click to play

play_blip_movie_701376();

When people want to sit on a chair or bench in public place, they used to sit at enough spaces to others.

If there are 3 seats in a bench, people used to sit at side seats, because we can lean on wall and also we can avoid being touched by other passengers. No one wants to sit right next to your seat while there are many seats still available in the subway.

In consequence, next person about to seat the bench usually tends to sit the other side. I wondered how people react to the seats right next to them when the seat represents that a person in somewhere is just sitting down or standing up. Do people concern about blinking LED or projecting image on the seat in accordance with other seat far away?

Meng and I talked about this idea with diverse point of view. We decided to show manipulated webcam images in silhouette over the seat using a projector. When a person sits down a bench then the other side of a bench represents the person’s movie.

I remember that a movie called ‘strange days’ several years ago. In the movie, there was a device allows people to feel and see exactly what other people saw and felt with wearing the device. Even though someday we will be able to record all information of us into some device, we probably act a little bit different from usual while we know the fact that we are being recorded.

People like to be looked good when they are in front of camera. Besides some of documentary films, what we see through the small rectangle is intentionally modified images in some manner. However, when someday we do not recognize a camera or any sensors that acquire information like as ubiquitous computing era, people will no longer concern about being stored their data. Then they should abandon their privacy in some degree. I would like to see what is going to happen when people can see someone’s image is sitting next to him/her. Also, I am wondering how people react after they knew that they are being presented to somewhere another bench.

Jaeyoon 

Since the first hand drawn maps of the stars to satellite imagery and GPS navigation today, our frame of reference and our perception of space has been molded into a view from above. Our understanding of place is often linked to an abstract representation on a map rather than a physical relational comprehension. You could probably point out Azerbaijan on a map, but how many of us can simply point in its direction across the globe? The image of the globe projected onto a vertical surface is so pervasive, we often associate “up” with north as we project ourselves into a mental image of map.

The accessibility of GPS and online map services have continued to reinforce the “up” vector while creating a greater divide between the physical world and its virtual representations. Today, we view from above, as primarily experienced on our screens, in an elevation view without any regard to its physical context. We project our presence into the screen through multiple translations of orientation. Viewing a map on a computer screen requires one to find a location on the screen that represents a position, then the abstracted orientation of the vertical screen must be translated and scaled into the physical context of the current position. We’ve lost a step in comprehension without the compass and the horizontal map. The traditional map and compass gave an intuitive understanding of a current position in relation to physical space by rotating the map to align with the space it represented. What appeared one inch to the left of my location on the map could be confirmed by looking up to my left.

Ornos is a telescopic view from above. The horizontal screen reconstructs a view from a position directly above itself using satellite imagery and maps. Exploring your current surroundings is as simple as sliding the device on any surface to pan across the globe. Zooming is controlled by rotating the device itself. The onboard digital compass and GPS modules orient the image on the screen to reflect your physical surroundings while satellite imagery and maps are dynamically loaded from Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo.

Humans are very fascinated by the fact that they can talk to each other or can see each other or feel like they are at the same place even though they are not in the same place. My family once tried to talk and look at each other at the same time by using skype. Somehow it wasn’t working well. We almost gave up but my father (in Seoul) called to my sister and my niece (in NJ) by using MSN and my sister called me(NY) by using skype. I could hear everything my father saying through my sister’s mic. It was fun but I was thinking if it’s really that much worth for people who are in different places to talk to each other.

For me, broadcasting is more one-way of expressing. You are not really moving and the person that is seeing you is not really moving either. Even though you are moving it doesn’t mean people who are watching it need to show their reaction. One-to-One is two people meeting at some point and it’s pretty close to the physical conversation comparing to broadcasting. Can the communication happening in the space caused by One-to-One streaming be more effective than physical communication? If that’s not, then can it be at least very close to the real one? From the experience in HP HALO center, besides the whole ‘trust’ thing, I was more curious about the efficiency of the communication in that TelePlace. Even in real life, people need to know better than to trust someone. The very specific way of giving your opinion to the other can be really important. But in the teleplace, you won’t be able to see the other person is really looking at you and listening to you. So, I was thinking maybe it would be fun that you can check if they are really looking at you or not. For example, randomly you can give the other quick question which needs yes/no answer into the one’s window. So people can’t fake where they are looking at by hiding the chatting window behind other windows. Just..thinking.

Jain

I was recently reading about JenniCam—which was one of the first websites to use several webcams to stream video of a person—Jenni—involved in her daily activities. Wikipedia claims, “At the height of her popularity (around 1998), an estimated three to four million people watched JenniCam.org daily.” I think that there is an interesting relationship that comes from being able to tune in at anytime and see another person (or the space they inhabit) with complete anonymity. Jenni’s case is especially interesting because it was a sustained relationship—most fans seemed to visit on a frequent (even daily) basis, and so they probably felt some sense of intimacy with this one individual. Jenny was a teleActor in the sense that she could be seen remotely, but also because she would occasionally dress up and create spectacles for the audience behind the camera. I find it very interesting that in spite of the fact that Jenni orchestrated performances for the camera, the sustained presence of Jenni (JenniCam existed for five years) creates a feeling that most of the time we are seeing the “real” Jenni, which is validated by the accumulation of so much presence. Maybe that is one of the appeals of webcams—in a world dominated by artifice and actors, the fact that we hop in and hop out of observing someone gives a sense that what we are seeing is authentic. Perhaps people equate webcams to video surveillance, forgetting that the webcam captures someone who is 1) aware that they are being observed, and 2) had some reason/motive for wanting to expose their actions to a viewing audience. Whatever our understanding of the nature of or viewing relations, it is somehow satisfying to partake in this voyeurism—we want to see without being seen, just as a few like to perform for the many without the accountability or social constraints imposed on normal (face-to-face) interactions. In a way, I guess webcams and teleActors has created yet another of connection-without-connection—we are in someone’s life and yet completely out of it. All normal conventions that we would go through in getting to know someone in reality are disregarded—we do not develop intimacy, there is only exposure. This relates to telePlace, too. For example, yesterday in class Zannah was showing her favorite telePlace—Antarctica. I believe when I look at my computer screen that I am getting to know this place—if only a little bit—and yet I am never going to freeze to death or curse the cold from seeing it on my computer screen.

Project Proposal One:
For a project I would like to set up a webcam in my house. In front of the webcam, I would place another webcam, so that all viewers saw when they went to my website would be another webcam staring at them on their screen, thus commenting about he nature of viewing relations and perhaps– for a moment, creating a feeling that THEY are being watched.

Project Proposal Two:

I’ve been thinking a lot about people in nursing homes and the lack of stimulation and connection with the rest of the world that they experience. I think it’s especially hard when people forget people or places that they once knew, and no longer appear to be the person that they were. I was thinking about installing webcams in the homes of their family and displaying them on a screen in the nursing home. This would require some software that would manage multiple feeds—showing maybe one resident’s family for a brief period and then switching to another. In this case, I think that seeing even other people’s families would provide a connection to the wider world. Also, it would allow for the families of these people to feel their “presence” because they know that they may be being watched by that person during their daily activities.

Kacie

After reading an excerpt from “The Great Good Place”, I got thinking about how its possible to mend the various problems seen in American suburbs / house developments and the lack of community in these places. My idea for a solution is a simple toolkit that allows residents to throw up a radio broadcast with little to no effort so that they can share themselves, share their opinions, and broadcast to others within their community. The radio broadcast can be an outlet for community radio shows, community news, general dissemination of information, or even a place for community culture, music, humor, and art. The other residents will essentially need no additional equipment as radios are pretty commonplace. No infrastructure would need to be built. All they would need to know is the time and frequency.

The technology would have to be as small as possible, cheap as possible, and easy as possible.

My proposal for our first assignment in Telepresence is a weird one but it comes from an interesting place. I got thinking about that act that a mother sometimes shares with their baby. Not a moment when the baby is in her arms or on her lap or lying in bed with her but the moment when the mother is on the phone with a loved one or her significant other and they want to share their voice or conversation with the baby in her belly. She’ll take the phone and literally place it on her stomach. She is giving this unborn baby a form of telepresence. She is giving the baby a presence in OUR world and the world in a distant location far before the baby has even been born.

My solution is build a bluetooth link between the common cell phone and a belt worn around the belly of the mother. When she has a telephone conversation with a significant other, her voice along with the voice of her husband (or wife, I guess) is transferred to the baby. It will combine three individuals divided by distance and worlds into a single virtual space.

My proof-of-concept will most likely start either with hacking a bluetooth headset or hacking old telephone to create a working system that gives users a sense for how it will work. I’m really leaning more towards the old telephones as it’ll allow me to easily construct something that is much closer to the essence of the final product.

To be in another place. Perhaps a beautiful place, a dangerous place, an impossible space, an important place.  A window. Public encounter. To be another Person.

http://www.earthcam.com/ http://www.naimark.net/projects/bigprojects/livevideo.html

http://livelook.com/

http://www.modmylife.com/

http://teleactor.berkeley.edu/introduction.html

I am going to put a wig on the Sony pan and tilt camera and give it a seat at the table in the lounge.  The web page for seeing it and controlling it is behind password protection

As some of you know, I’m now in the middle of the intensive and disappointing process of “house hunting” which means I have to perform each day, just as “The presentation of the Self” explains.
The search of a new home involves always the expression of my character, the awareness of my needs and the definition of the presence. Like any kind of virtual exchange, this process involves many events concerning (tele)presence of oneself in contact with the (tele)presence of the others. I would like to analyze these from a different point of view, a reversed timeline, through which the start will be the end and with the end we will start.

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Congratulations! You’ve got a “cozy” (or I should say tiny) room in a decent apartment. The rent is affordable and the location is not bad. The roommates…well you don’t know them yet, but they seem easy-going and clean. Quite normal people. You didn’t have many choices though. You have to trust them and trust your first perceptions. This is anyway an unbalanced situation so you just have a mental picture made of the short information you read in the description they posted, and what they told you during the short interview. They have instead a complete profile with facts of your life, the remarkable aspects of your personality and the involuntary expression of both your presence and your telepresence. They can trust you. They should.

During the interview with your potential roommates, you talked about your interests, your hobbies and the time you spend at school. They wanted to confirm some things. They wanted to experience your presence. They wanted to have enough information to be able to trust you. They didn’t ask for references, but if they had them, they would be even more confident. Of course you could have lied them, but it would be pointless. You were going to live with them for a long term, and anyway the probably would have notice something’s wrong. Human senses are very sophisticated: the brain processes consciously or unconsciously the information they receive and generates feelings and reactions.

After some conversations you couldn’t get much information of the person you talked with. His presence is now to general and it can recall many different people. Perhaps the number of words, the use of the language… the contents of the dialogue were to specific to infer anything. This is no key step in the construction of the presence of an individual and the necessary trust. It’s just an arrangement to meet with unknown but apparently trustworthy people.

Only one click, and you received some more posts, offering apartments to share…you found one which seemed affordable! It also described a bit about the personality of the roommates and what they were looking for… The ad was long, they seemed talkative… and even though they could have been anyone in this city!

The first thing to do was thinking about my own…what I was doing here, some facts of my life, and a bit about myself and the image that I wanted to project. I needed to be conscious not only of my presence but also about the presence I wanted the others to perceive and the telepresence linked to these. Controlling my own expression trough email was very easy. I could show my letter to some friends and follow their advisement to correct not only the formal language but also the contents that should recall the presence of the ideal roommate. I was creating an avatar of my presence. It didn’t need to be accurate, just efficient for the purposes it was supposed to achieve.

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The more trust we want to have, the more information we need. The telepresence must be somehow tangible, in order to become reliable. The diversity of the sources is also very important. As well as their credibility. However some questions still remain. How much do we want to control the presentation of ourselves knowing that also another people could do the same? Should we create media to track every aspect of our presence and increase the awareness of our expressions? Is the common agreement the most reliable source to trust someone? Would it be possible to abolish some of our social rules in order to strengthen everyone’s personality or are they too important to keep the safety and the collective sense of trust?

To increase the reliability we need a system to get more information about one individual using alternative sources. Some work already, like the credit check, or the reference letters. However, there must be a way to use the ranking system used commercial environments such as Amazon or Ebay to build a community of people who talk about a former roommate to keep his/her profile. I would be a mash up of sites like craigslist, roommates.com, or facebook. Or it could also be an application for this last one in order to put it in relation with the other to get a more enriched view over the profile of someone.
Again I wonder, do we really wanted? I guess the answer would belong however not to the concepts of trust and presence, but to the field of privacy and surveillance.

here.

and make sure to check the slide-show.

all this reminds me of a series of pieces written by errol morris for the nyt. he delves into the idea of truth in photography starting with some iconic images and dissects our assumptions from there. i’ve always been interested in the aura of trust which surrounds certain art-forms. street photography seems more real to us and more trustworthy than studio photography, for example. the roughness of an image implies an honesty that may or may not apply. a photo with less obvious intention, less inflection, buys a certain amount of trust, like the artistic equivalent of the duality of what we put out in the world vs. what we give out. (is that the terminology we’ve been using?) and you can see this now in things like videoblogging. somehow, an individual with low-tech means lays claim to a whole realm of “realness” that a more produced product can’t. but, are these assumptions valid, or is it just a conditioned response? a response to the lack of trustworthiness so visible in more “finished” media? things get interesting as bigger media co-opt these symptoms of realness. to what degree are we responding to stylistic cues that may have nothing to do with the content’s truthfulness? (i can’t get the race for the presidential nomination out of my head. can you?)

and just briefly, regarding the reading: i was early to meet my valentine date by two hours because of a gig that ended early. it was cold. i was underdressed. i didn’t have my school ID. and one can only spend so much time in the strand. and i can tell you that even in the “sophisticated” city there is no Third Place. or more precisely, there is no third place without a ricky martin-esque soundtrack and overpriced mochachinos.

liss

While reading the excerpt from “The Great Good Place”, the idea of trust often popped into my head. Being American born, I can definitely agree with a lot of the theories and opinions mentioned in the reading. Most of America is paranoid, especially the suburbs. Most of us don’t have these informal places to gather and socialize, so in return we never really get to know our neighbors. Because of the lack of introduction, we start to form paranoid opinions about them. The nightly news tells us about all the murders, kidnappings, and rapes. The government talks about the emergence of terrorism amongst us. And, since we have no real place to meet and disprove all these rumors it just simply marinates within us. It almost seems like someone has put all the pieces in place for a socially retarded, emotionally overcompensating, and excessively paranoid America. It’s funny that a fix for all these deep and tangled problems is simply to give us a place to meet each other. An informal place that allows us to casually encounter one another and befriend each other at a pace that is suitable for all of us.

It sorta remind me of what you’re supposed to do when you’re getting two dogs to befriend each other. You bring them both to a place that neither of them feel in control of, like a public park, so that there is no preceded dominance. They are essentially on equal footing.

Project proposal to follow.