Though this week’s readings were related, I’ll divide them along the line of “written by Marshall McLuhan or not.”
First, the non-McLuhan. I loved the Lethem essay and was surprised that I’d never seen it before. I enjoy Lethem’s breezy but engaging fiction and was a little surprised that he could so easily switch gears to this more serious, academic style. I’m interested in copyright issues, though not as intently as some of my peers (perhaps because I don’t have a background in creating art). My interest stems from a belief that copyright issues — especially along the lines of remixing, mashups, etc. – are going to be among the largest legal issues of my lifetime; one of many smaller battles in the larger cultural shift that is taking place as our society converts from electric to digital. Lethem’s essay (itself a reuse collage demonstrating formidable intellectual firepower) lays out the argument that all art – from the bible to Mickey Mouse – is based on art that came before. Why, Lethem asks, should Disney, Inc. have the right to simply stop this ongoing cycle of use and reuse when it materially benefits them? To me, this is clearly the right side of the argument. And, as Barack Obama frequently quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. during the election: “I believe the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends toward justice.” To me, the vision Lethem describes – of limited periods of copyright that allow artists to be compensated for their efforts (thus encouraging creativity and innovation), followed by those works of art entering the public domain – is just and should be the law. I think that that is the legal definition we will eventually arrive at, though it will likely take some time and many court battles to get there.
The other two readings – about the cases of Molotov Man and the Shepard Fairey “Hope” painting – illustrate how these arguments are fought out in the real world. In both instances, legal wrangling ensued after artists based paintings on photographs taken by news wire photographers. Both cases seemed to end inconclusively. Out of both readings, one part that really jumped out at me was Susan Meiselas’ argument for not allowing photographs to me remixed in the manner described in the article. She basically said: “The guy in this picture suffered a lot, and if you take away that context it cheapens that suffering.” She spends the bulk of the space she was allotted describing this suffering, which seemed like a cheap shot in its own right to me, and lacking in thought. Yes, we know Nicaragua was no fun in the eighties. But does Meiselas’ photograph by itself contextualize this man’s suffering? Without a caption or other non-photographic layers, how do I (sitting in 2009 Brooklyn) know that this is Nicaragua? How do I know what year this happened? How do I know what this man is fighting for or why? Obviously, I can’t know any of these things from her photograph. This is likely the very reason that Joy Garnett used the photo in the first place: it had no context, and she thought it was representative of global anger against a unilateral American military action in Iraq. So, ironically, the very thing Meiselas says is her reason for being wary of reuse – provision of context – was exactly what was lacking in her photograph to cause this entire incident to unfold. Fail.
Otherwise, what I found disappointing about these essays was that they focused largely on the artistic, cultural and historic merits for legalizing (or not) reuse of existing material. These are all good arguments, but the real issue here is, of course, money. If nobody made any money (or had the potential to make money) from these images, words, videos, etc., we wouldn’t be having these conversations about copyright. This should really be the first thing addressed. How do we decide who makes money from a creative effort? If that creative effort is later remixed/reused/mashedup/etc., how do we decide how much the original author should be compensated? What amount of change from an original work of art constitutes a new work of art? These are the important questions in my mind.
Another important question associated with this issue, but not addressed in the essays, is that of copying or file sharing. This is a bit more clear to me, though an unpopular position: I think that all artists who want to be compensated for their work should be compensated at whatever price consumers are willing to pay for that work. I’m not saying I support current distribution models, but I do not see a benefit in a world in which there is no material gain associated with producing art. The rise of “illegal” file sharing is troubling, because it is steering us toward such a world. Proponents of an end to copyright and a totally open creative commons have never adequately explained to me how this will benefit artists, and thus, in the long run, society as a whole. This is tied to the issue of reuse/mashups/etc. because it goes back to the issue of “how do we decide when a ‘new’ piece of art has been made out of existing art.” For example, if I add 1 second of my own voice softly humming at the beginning of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album and then release it as a torrent to be endlessly downloaded for free on the Web, I haven’t really done anything to honor Michael Jackson or expand on his art, yet I’ve provided a way for people to enjoy his creative efforts without paying for them. Who is to say that my 1 second of humming doesn’t constitute art? How is this helping to inspire the next Michael Jackson or any other artist? This issue – of the infinitely copyable and sharable nature of digital media in the Internet age – is the much more difficult one in my mind.
OK … on to the McLuhan.
I’ve worked in mass media of almost every major kind – print, Web, radio, a little video, some marketing, etc. — for the past 10 years. I’m also fascinated by the evolution of human societies and the “big picture” of historic cultural change. However, by some combination of laziness and … well … more laziness, I had never read any McLuhan. I’m very glad I now have. That’s not to say I totally understood everything he was saying in these first two chapters, and I look forward to revisiting them again.
The title of the first chapter, “The Medium is the Message” has long since become a cliché, but one that I don’t think many people really understand. McLuhan is basically saying that humans develop their own tools for communication and that those tools and their limitations shape how we communicate, and thus how we think, thus how we act, thus human history. The printing press, for example, allowed for an explosion of communicable information, but all of it had to be in a linear, sequential order. This is a limitation, and one that shapes the message in ways we have a hard time realizing while living in societies saturated by that media. I was also interested in his thoughts on media being separate from content, though this did not seem as revelatory to me. Perhaps because I’ve worked in different media I feel like I can pretty clearly see that the same piece of information can be communicated in dramatically different ways depending on the available tools. What’s really interesting to me to think about is, “What kind of media did human beings fail to create at earlier stages of our development, and how has that affected our history?” McLuhan sort of approaches this from another angle when datedly talking about “backwards” and “oriental” peoples’ first exposure to Western society’s electric tools of communication. He uses these pre-literate or literate-but-in-a-different-way societies as sort of a control sample for how technology changes culture. I’m interested in that, but also in the science-fictiony inquiry into how a different form of communication, or the invention of a key piece of technology earlier in time, would have affected history.
The second chapter is about how “hot” and “cool” media. Hot media, McLuhan says, has a high amount of information and requires low participation by the viewer; cool is just the opposite – it has a low amount of information and requires high participation. He then goes on to talk about how hot and cool mass media creates different kinds of change in different societies. One interesting point – appealing to the conspiracy theorist in me – that he makes is about how these hot and cool mass media could someday be used as a kind of cultural thermostat to control developing countries: drive up a population’s anger with hot media, cool it down with cool media. While McLuhan’s talking about first world countries using media in this way to control developing countries, I’m sure he would not have been surprised by our own current culture: the one in which we see incendiary videos of our cruel enemies during the march to war; but otherwise our airwaves are full of celebrity gossip, sports and high drama. Thermostat indeed.
Beyond his direct points, I also really enjoy the metaphysical, big picture stuff that McLuhan alludes to. As Lewis Lapham (who I used to love in Harper’s each month) says in his excellent intro: “McLuhan … learned better to understand the psychic effects of the electronic media … he began to posit the existence of a world soul.” That’s cool shit. And something that – while unproven – rings true to me. Human consciousness – divided among the many minds and bodies of individuals for the vast majority of our existence – has for the past few hundred years (statistically insignificant in the big scheme of human history) been spilling out onto the page, screen, airwaves and now bytes. Suddenly, our individual consciousness could be shared. This new knowledge of each other, our thoughts, feelings and experiences, helps us connect with each other and form that “world soul.” In my mind, this is really about reconnecting with our own humanity by learning about other humans. Genetic anthropology in recent years has in fact been able to show that all human beings can be traced back to one location – The Great Rift Valley in Africa. Humans evolved there over hundreds of thousands of years, and then set out to populate the world some 50,000 years ago. So, with that context in mind, it’s easy to see today’s explosion of global mass media as more a reconnecting with family that we haven’t talked to in a very long time … the reformation of a world soul that drifted apart two thousand generations ago and is only now coming back together.
I chose to observe the MTA metrocard dispensers at DeKalb Avenue station; specifically, the entrance to the station located near the corner of DeKalb and Flatbush. DeKalb is a busy station, providing service on the Q, R, W, M, B and D. It serves a fairly broad cross-section of New Yorkers, as well as the occasional tourist. I wanted to see how my fellow MTA riders interacted with the machines that sell them their tickets.
This particular station entrance has four machines, all clustered around the attendant booth. I tried to make my self inconspicuous nearby for approximately half an hour, watching people use the machines during the afternoon rush hour. I didn’t always have a good view of the screen but tried to follow their transaction as closely as possible without seeming like a psycho.
My expectation for the overall user experience was based on my own experience, which has been largely positive. I’ve found that the metrocard machines are generally easy to use, but sometimes have technical issues. Specifically, I’ve found the menu system easy to read and intuitive to use; I’ve also found the touch screens to be sturdy and responsive.
However, the machines are not perfect. One of the biggest issues the machines seem to have is faulty reading of debit/credit cards; occasionally, the machine will simply refuse to read any cards. Additionally, I’ve found that machines that are malfunctioning often fail to inform users that the machine was out of order.
So, you can end up with a situation where Rider A arrives at the metrocard machine, goes through the menu selection screens, arrives at the moment of payment, swipes their card, and then stands there while the machine says it is processing the order, only to have absolutely nothing more happen. Sadly, Rider A often moves on to another machine, only to watch Rider B repeat the same sorry interaction.
What I witnessed seemed to confirm that my experience was shared by others. Seemingly 90% of the time, most users of the kiosks breezed through their transaction: They confidently approach the machines and tap through menus on the screen to find their desired metrocard. In many cases, people are aggressively tapping the screen; they seem to have the menu options memorized and are just trying to get through the menu choices as fast as possible to complete their transaction. There’s a small spark of fun in using your finger to zip from one menu to the next as the hustle and bustle of the station spurs you on. This made me think that the large button size on the screen was a great choice by the designers because it allows for this kind of quick, aggressive button pushing, and it probably also helps in allowing users to remember locations for which buttons to push.
The few issues that people seemed to have with the machines all seemed tied to the actual purchase point: whether inserting bills or coins, or swiping credit/debit cards, this seems to be a sticking point. People insert bills/coins the wrong way and the machine rejects them; people insert bills/coins the right way and the machine rejects them; people swipe their card and nothing happens; people swipe their card and the machine tells them it can’t read the card; people mis-enter their PIN numbers; people drop their money/cards as their trying to pay. In short, the screen-based portion of the transaction seems to go very fluidly; the problems lie when the physical action of providing funds is required. That said, these physical issues are fairly few and far between. I found that extremely impressive considering the volume and diversity of people who use these machines day in and day out.
This lab seemed fairly straightforward after my (mis)adventures in Serial Communication for my failed first Pet Trick attempt. I pretty quickly had both Arduino and Processing running as planned, and received the expected output on the screen. I’m excited to try other serial communications projects, and have one in mind for the near future involving sensing basic cell phone data and displaying it as some kind of map.
Let’s go to the video tape:
I really enjoyed this assignment. I worked on it with Nik Psaroudakis, who was a great partner.
First, the final product:
Stop Motion Animation from Nikolas Psaroudakis on Vimeo.
Here’s a description of our process:
We met once to discuss our ideas. I had thought of trying to animate a small model plane flying through my apartment. Nik had the idea of doing something with letters moving on paper. We ended up going with Nik’s idea because it provided for a physically controlled, but otherwise unlimited “stage” for our project. We then set about figuring out exactly what would happen on with this text on a page. We liked the idea of letters moving around, changing meaning as they did. We settled on the idea of creating a short scene in which one sentence turns into its anagram.
Nik began acquiring all of the materials we’d need to make the letters – stencils, exacto knife, felt pen, etc. I worked on the sentence. We knew we wanted it to start with hands writing something. I thought: “What is a stand alone sentence that people write?” What eventually came to me was:
“I have writer’s block again”
I then set about rearranging that into an anagram and eventually came up with:
“We love being characters”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t an exact anagram. The second sentence required two extra “e”s and a “c”. Additionally, there would be two left over “i”s and a left over “a” and left over “k”. We forged ahead anyway, confident that we could come up with some way of overcoming these issues.
On Friday, Nik and I tested our idea on the floor using a light kit, DV100 and tripod. After a decent amount of trial and error – wrong cables, iStopmotion wouldn’t recognize camera, etc. – we got it running and did a quick recording of letters moving around on the paper. It was rough, but it looked good, so we agreed to go for it.
Saturday, I checked out a light kit (heavy!), DV100 and tripod from the ER and took them to my place in Brooklyn. Nik came by on Sunday morning. After some coffee and muffins, we began the setup. The camera, computer and tripod were no problem, but the lights were a bit of a struggle. We couldn’t find the exact white balance we needed to get the letters to pop off the page while not making the hands look an unnatural shade of orange. After a lot of trial and error, we arrived a situation that worked: a small spot light shining directly down on the middle of our shot.
Then we began recording. For most of the production, I had the easy job of operating iStopMotion, while Nik handled the painstaking details of moving the letters around the page in tiny movements.
Shooting the opening part – the hands writing the first sentence – wasn’t that big a deal. We did discover that when people write, their hands move more slowly while actually writing, and much quicker while jumping to a new line, or doing something away from the page. So, for each shot of actual writing, we captured an image and made four duplicates in the timeline. For movements to a new line, we used three duplicates. For the scene of the cap being put back on the pen, we used the continuous capture.
Rearranging that sentence proved a bit more daunting. At first, we wanted all the letters to move at once, comingling all over the screen on their way from their starting location to their new location. We drew up at least three maps of how this letter movement might work before agreeing that it was a disaster waiting to happen. Instead, we struck on the idea of having all the letters move to the edge of the page and then rearrange themselves one word at a time. This worked quite well. We plodded through these many movements with Nik moving the letters a fraction of an inch and me capturing and pasting it in iStopMotion. We used one duplicate copy of each letter movement in the timeline, as we wanted this motion to be fairly quick.
This is where we had to settle the issue of how to deal with or “extra” letters. We decided to simply clone the extra “e”s and “c” we needed, which was fairly easy: We simply layed another letter down on top of the one on the page, and then used a couple of frames to “birth” it into its own letter and move it into its proper location. The extra “a”, “k”, and “i”s were a bit more perplexing. We decided the “i”s could become exclamation points, with the apostrophe from the first sentence becoming a dot a the bottom of one exclamation point. But that still left us needing to get rid of the “a” and “k” and find another exclamation point dot. We solved both problems, and added a touch of violent whimsy, by deciding to play off of the cultural significance of “a” and “k” together: AK, as in AK-47, the notorious assault rifle. We played around with the pieces of the letters a little and realized they could be deconstructed and reformed into the shape of an AK-47. So we ended the piece with the “a” and “k” moving to the center of the screen, tranforming into the rifle, which then shot a single “bullet” that became the needed point on the exclamation. We did this in three five stages:
a) The “a” and “k” move from the right to the center as whole letters
b) We cut up the “a” and “k” into individual pieces, and then shoot a few frames of those pieces rearranging into the rifle
c) We then traced a “whole” rifle onto a single piece of paper, so that it would be easier to move around then the many small pieces of the former “a” and “k”.
d) We had the rifle tilt up and fire a single shot into the bottom of the exclamation point; all of this waswas animated in four frames.
e) As a finishing touch, we had a little curl of smoke appear out of the rifle tip. Nik did this with a felt tip pen.
Overall, I really liked the way it turned out!
PS: While I had the equipment at my house, I did a brief rendition of the model plane idea I had originally conceived:
My first idea for a stupid pet trick was to jump ahead to Serial Communication and create a fortune-telling machine that would be able to sense when a quarter had been inserted into a “machine” and then randomly generate a fortune via Processing. I went pretty far down this road, but eventually realized that my choice of sensor – PIR – was not optimal for sensing something as small and close as a quarter passing through a slot. I considered getting another sensor – like vibration sensor – and rerigging the quarter insert area to make the fortune telling machine work, but then had another idea … a motion-triggered catapult. This may or may not have been inspired by an accidental viewing of the Kevin Costner vehicle “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” on TV recently.
I thought a little about what the catapult would need: a strong base to “throw” things from; a flexible throwing arm; a motion sensor to detect “intruders;” and someway of triggering the arm to throw. In Robin Hood, the catapults work by pulling the throwing arm back with a rope, and securing it in place until you want to throw something. To throw, you simply cut the taut rope. I went with a similar approach, only using fishing line instead of rope.
I had the motion sensor; I bought a ball throwing thing for dogs to use as the arm because it was strong but flexible; and I used a cement block at first for the strong base. At first, I just stuck the throwing arm into a hole in the cement block, but the block on a board, then tied fishing line to the throwing arm, and then pulled the line back until it was taut, and nailed it to the board. I put a cherry tomatoe in the throwing arm cup and cut the line … success! The tomato was fired across my backyard. I set about making an automated, more portable version.
Because cement blocks are heavy, I decided to build a nicer version out of wood. I sketched out my design on paper and had the hardware store cut up a 2×4 into appropriate pieces. My main concerns in the design were: a) having a strong base to support the throwing arm; having ample space to attach the Arduino, breadboard, servo and sensor; having the back end be long enough to provide space to tie down the thread that holds back the throwing arm. I think my design accomplished all of this.
I knew I wanted the motion sensor to trigger an action that would launch the throwing arm. I thought this could be accomplished by using a servo to spin a razor blade down onto the fishing line holding back the throwing line. So, I glued a razor blade to a servo arm.
I assembled the wooden model with a screw gun and put all of the components in their places. Wiring concerns dictated specific locations: sensor in front, breadboard, Arduino and servo in back, in that order, as the Arduino needed more open space for the USB plug, and the servo needed to be all the way in back to allow for maximum space to stretch the line taut.
Then I started working on the code. The sensor code wasn’t bad, as this was something I’d already done for the fortune-telling machine. And it was a simple if statement to trigger the servo – “if there’s input from the motion sensor, trigger the servo.” The hard part was getting the servo to swing in the right way. It took me a while to realize where the 0 and 180 were on the servo. I tried using the “pulse” code from our lab to trigger the servo, but just couldn’t make it work the way I wanted. The servo either didn’t swing far enough, didn’t swing, or just danced all over the place. So I went with the library approach, which proved just the trick after a little experimentation.
The step was fine tuning the arrangement of fishing line, servo motor and razor blade. When I finally found the right mix, I nailed everything down with push pins and voila … the Tomatopult!
I liked this lab … I found it really useful to be able visualize the electricity flowing from place to place with the multimeter. Still don’t totally understand “how electricity works” … gonna reread that section of the Igoe website.
This week’s project was to create a series of sequential images that tell a story. Jenine Durland and I tackled it together. We used a combination of street sign icons and realistic backgrounds to tell the story of a San Fran gal who takes her bike out to a nature area for a hike, and is then eaten by bears. I thought the process was a lot of fun … coming up with ideas for frames, finding the images and merging them together in PhotoShop. Ah … PhotoShop … I would love to be good at it, but honestly don’t know if I can devote the time right now. Adobe’s programs seem so foreign to me … different then both Mac and PC … less intuitive in my book. That said, I want to have at least a basic competency with them, and will devote the time.
Here’s our comic:
Should have had this up a while ago, but better late than never …
5-6
//Rectangle starts at location x
float sq1col = 255;
float sq2col = 255;
float sq3col = 255;
float sq4col = 255;
void setup(){
size(200, 200);
}
void draw ()
{
background (255);
//divvy up into four sections
stroke(0);
line (100,0,100,200);
line(0,100,200,100);
//fill in boxes based on mouse position
noStroke();
//fill(0);
fill(sq1col);
rect(0,0,100,100);
fill(sq2col);
rect (100,0,100,100);
fill (sq3col);
rect (0,100,100,100);
fill (sq4col);
rect (100,100,100,100);
//control fill of boxes based on mouse position
if (mouseX >= 0 && mouseX <= 100 && mouseY >= 0 && mouseY <= 100 )
{ sq1col = 255; }
else
{ sq1col = sq1col – 1; }
if (mouseX >= 100 && mouseX <= 200 && mouseY >= 0 && mouseY <= 100 )
{ sq2col = 255; }
else{ sq2col = sq2col – 1; }
if (mouseX >= 0 && mouseX <= 100 && mouseY >= 100 && mouseY <= 200 )
{ sq3col = 255; }
else
{ sq3col = sq3col – 1; }
if (mouseX >= 100 && mouseX <= 200 && mouseY >= 100 && mouseY <= 200 )
{sq4col = 255;}
else
{sq4col = sq4col – 1;}
}
5-8
boolean circlemover = false;
int circleX = 0;
int circleY = 100;
void setup()
{size (200,200);}
void draw ()
{
background (100);
stroke (255);
fill (0);
ellipse (circleX,circleY,50,50);
if (circlemover == true)
{circleX = circleX +1;}
}
void mousePressed()
{circlemover = !circlemover;}
Got my first taste of HTML/CSS in this exercise and it was … not that bad. I’ve always felt horribly guilty for not knowing how all these Web pages I visit everyday exist, and now I have a little better idea. I also have newfound respect for Web developers/designers. There seems to be so much to know and so many different ways of doing things!
I didn’t really go into my redesign with any particular plan. I liked the layout of my Theme, so just wanted to tweak the appearance. My first dive into the HTML didn’t go so well two days ago … I forgot everything I’d learned in class and was totally overwhelmed by all the code. So, I went back to absolute basics and started with the W3 School online tutorial in HTML (from the beginning). I just kept going back and forth between the code on my Theme editor and the instruction on W3. At some point, things started to click. I kept tinkering and reading, tinkering and reading until I had something that I kind of liked the look of. Changing the location of the main header, and the three images at the top were perhaps the toughest parts for me.
I know I haven’t really scratched the surface yet, in terms of what you can do with HTML/CSS, but my major questions at this point are: a) How do skilled designers know where to go in the code to quickly locate what they want to add/change? b) I still don’t totally understand the relationship between HTML and CSS … for example, why can I change style using the “style” element in the HTML, but can also do so just using CSS? What are the pluses and minuses of each? c) What is PHP and how does it work?
Before and after pics of my blog below:
BEFORE:
AFTER:
