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December 13, 2005
on Failure
"F Minus!"
That was (Dr) Tony DeRitis' favorite exclamation for whenever some sleep-deprived student made a dumb comment — and don't let your elementary-school teachers fool you, there are such things as dumb comments and questions. This semester I haven't really been studying Interactive Telecommunications so much as failure. This is 50% tongue in cheack, 50% desperate gallows humor, and 20% damn-serious wisdom — perspicacity. Capstone made sure I knew the taste of failure, and graduation allowed me to deal with it. Acadamia is for failure —l and that's its greatest success. Savvy? I'm not afraid to try new things — things I know little to nothing about. Java? MAX/MSP/JITTER? MySQL? Video tracking? Chroma-keying? But the actual result means nothing — as compared to the process. I find this true not just in acadamia, but in the professional world as well. The cliche "say whatever you want about me and my work, just say it" entertains the most important value in any business. Theres small difference in fame and notoriety. I'd fail any day, so long as my goal + work-ethic was proportionally greater. Zero-sum game.
So stop saying 'it's okay, you'll do better next time.' Because it's okay, you'll do better next time. Blue skies are ahead.
Posted by alex at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
December 10, 2005
ITP Winter Show
2000 people on the 4th floor of Tisch over two days. What a brilliant mess this has to be. As of yet, I have one project in the show — the Sound Domes for Spatial Design. The SMS-SmartCase just wont be fully functional/ready, I think. J2ME has been too strong — I can't beat it. Not yet... But I will. And the victory will be sweet, and the hills will ring with song, blue sky bright with the light of a thousand Suns. But the sound domes...
Java + MSP + Physical Computing
What else do you really want in an installation piece? It's a post-linear, post-narrative spatial exploration of temporal auditory stimulation — literally tranplanting experience. And its mostly made of big, shiny salad bowls. The piece is interactive — to an extent — different audio content programs are controllable by SMS text-messaging — implemented with code I hacked together earlier in the semester. It seems like everything that gets done is hacked out. Maybe thats the new art.
To continue the tangent theme... I've lately had issues concerning art — the labeling, the validity, the context, etc. It seems that art is anything frivolous without liquid commercial value that exemplifies a certain contextual reference... essentially, anything called 'art'. But who cares. It's a tired argument. Artistic-expression is coming about as a humanizing link between technology and marketing. The creativity lies in that little crevice as well — the application of technology to propagate a concept — a narrative. The system is not a pyramid structure.
I find curious this new trend of ubiquity. The world is shrinking to the size of a cell-phone. Bob Greenberg spoke about the impossibility of escaping the job, with the prevelance of laptops, cell-phones, broadband wireless, high-speed travel, satellite comm... Is this scary?
Just what is physical data — is it real/imaginary/valuable? How can a physical body [meat-puppet] classify something so abstract as pure data? Can a byte's value be measured in some electronic flux quotient. I won't shut up about the new paradigm — a new meta/physics — liquid, allowing for the virtual — the logical. But what if this is the wrong way? Spinoza maintained physical divinity. Is this physical divinity an abstraction of the transient omnipotent — what we view as abstract? Knots.
Posted by alex at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)
December 02, 2005
Life now consists of research in social web applications, algorithmic filtering, and J2ME development. Stumbled across an amazing resource with the name of Paul Graham. Super intelligent guy, with a lot of interesting things to say. A Plan for Spam is especially relevant to what I'm currently working on - and his study of Bayesian Filtering
Posted by alex at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)