Lesley's Music
I just uploaded some songs I've written these past couple months (along with older favorites).
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March 26, 2007
March 23, 2007
OctagO
Designed in collaboration with Charles Pratt and JooYoun Paek
Octago is a strategic generative board game. It combines the traditional Go game and octagon-shaped tiles. The objective of the game is for the user to destroy other player's 'branches' while preserving his or her own. Starting from a single tile, the game board grows generatively as the playing goes on. While the board grows, players can experience the beauty of the rule system.
Rule 1: One blank, 3 buds
- Each player selects a color and draws three tiles of the same color. These tiles are your ‘buds’.
- One blank tile is set in the center of the table.
Rule 2: Draw random tiles by taking turns
- Moving clock-wise, players take turns drawing random tiles, and connecting them to the tiles already on the table.
-To connect tiles, they must be placed next to each other, with at least one side of each tile meeting evenly
-Tiles of one color can only connect to tiles of the same color.
- Blank tiles, those without color, may only connect to a color once.
- Players play tiles no matter what color, even if they are not their own.
Rule 3: Encircle another player's branch
- Networks of tiles that are all the same color are called ‘branches’.
- If a ‘branch’ cannot grow, for instance if it has been encircled, it dies.
- If a ‘branch’ grows too large, if it reaches seven tiles, it dies.
- A dead ‘branch’ is left on the table, but cannot be expanded.
Rule 4: Play buds to restart a branch
- When a player’s branch dies, that player must immediately play one of their ‘buds’.
- A player’s ‘bud’ can only be played when one of that player’s ‘branches’ dies.
- A ‘bud’ can connect to a tile of any color.
- After a bud has been played, the normal turn rotation is resumed.
Rule 5: Player with lasting buds wins!
- If a player’s ‘branch’ dies and they have run out of ‘buds’, they are out of the game.
- Tiles of a player’s color who has lost may still be drawn and played by other players.
- If there are no other players, the remaining player is declared the ‘winner’.
NOTES :
There are forty-eight tiles of each color, and twenty-four blank tiles.
To play a longer or larger game, increase the number of buds and size of branches.
March 22, 2007
Essay : Dungeons and Dragons
“The dreamer’s art, the ability to cut loose from the restraints of reality and touch new shores and lives, is the essence and lure of D&D. It is the challenge of pitting one’s skills and common sense against a strange and sometimes hostile universe where death awaits with open arms.” – a player’s perspective from Dragon magazine
This quote from Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, by Nick Montfort (p. 195), sums up the overwhelmingly imaginative and immersive world of Dungeons and Dragons, the best-known and best-selling role playing game of all time. I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons when I was 17 years old. My friend Matthew and I were at a book store talking about fantasy books when he mentioned he loved role playing. My immediate thought was of playing “make believe” as a child, but this was not the role playing he was referring to. He led me over to a massive book shelf filled with Dungeons and Dragons manuals – and I was shocked. Somehow, despite my love of all things related to fantasy and science fiction, I had completely missed out on the widely popular role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. I was also curious about how a collaborative world of make believe, typically a stomping ground for children, is successfully created for adults.
My curiosity for D&D continued to grow over the years primarily because of the collective consciousness I’ve observed many D&D gamers share with one another. Gamers speak of D&D with deep love, nostalgia, and some embarrassment. In my opinion, their embarrassment is part of the joy. Playing D&D is like being a member of an elite “nerd” club. D&D gamers are infamously depicted in pop culture as socially inept, detached losers. Although there are certainly good reasons for this stereotype, I also find that many gamers share many characteristics like high intelligence and creativity. Dungeons and Dragons is not a simple game -- it is a complex balance of performance, math, storytelling, and collaborative communication. Players memorize dense books filled with rules and sub-rules so they are able to collaborate in telling a story – a shared emergent narrative. This experience can be compared to performing in a jazz band: music is created through the improvisation of a skillful, shared language. A D&D game, like performing music, is only as good as the dynamics between the players playing it.
I never actually played D&D until this past month, at the age of 28. Five of my friends organized a campaign (game) under the tutelage of an experienced “Dungeon Master” (leading storyteller of the game). We started by spending several long hours one afternoon designing individual characters using a complex formula of numbers (determined by the random roll of dice), character manuals, and our imagination. Our character’s attributes of strengths, weaknesses, and abilities were logged on a “Character Record Sheet” for reference throughout our games. After the characters were developed, the DM started the game by introducing our characters to each other, much like the beginning of a story. We met at an inn and began our journey, rolling dice and talking along the way from one adventure, obstacle, or puzzle to the next.
Most of the narrative of a D&D game is determined by the imagination of the DM and the choices the characters make (does my character want to fight this monster or spy on it?). The rest of the narrative is determined randomly by dice, the core mechanic of the game. Characters accomplish tasks by making skill checks, ability checks, or attack rolls using dice. For example, if a character wishes to attempt an action which he or she might fail at, that character must roll the famous d20 (20 sided dice) and after a quick series of calculations, the number rolled determines their success or failure. This basic rule system keeps the narrative moving with relative suspense and uncertainty as to what the outcome of decisions will be. When rolling the dice, not even the DM can know what fate will bring.
I had a lot of fun playing D&D, but what I enjoyed most was creating a story with friends. Our group was endlessly entertained by the ridiculousness of our narratives, and in many ways, our characters and stories continue to develop as we joke about our “adventures” outside of the actual game playing. Much of D&D’s appeal is embedded in its socially collaborative environment. Navigating the settings established by the DM, decisions made by characters, and random dice rolls, groups of friends are able to share individual imaginations through play. Says my high school friend Matthew via email, “The magic of D&D is that it you have just enough structure to frame your experience, so you are free to create any scenario because the rules are flexible enough to govern it. Basically, there are only rules for combat. The rest is completely open. I guess my favorite part was not the actual playing part when things were often reduced to math (OK guys, roll for initiative. OK guys, roll for your attack. OK, roll for hit points of damage, etc.). The best part was the creative enterprise of building the world.”
The ambition of “building the world” is a powerful, immersive concept behind the game. As players become engaged in developing an alternate reality world, characters may die, plot lines may change, and goals may be achieved, but the game as a story can go on forever. D&D does not have a set of winning conditions. In this respect, it could be debated whether it is really a game or rather more of an elaborative form of storytelling. I would argue that D&D, by its inherent nature of make believe, is the oldest and most fundamental style of game. Our earliest games in childhood were those of make believe. Children intuitively impose rules on their make believe games to structure the characters and stories of their imagination, whereas D&D captures these natural game playing actions using a formalized rule system of numbers. D&D may not be about a set of winning or losing conditions, but it is about the experience – it is a game condition dependent on the subtle balance of player interaction within this system.
One gamer told me that dice in D&D represent the randomness of life. Quickly after saying this, he asked me not to quote him. He felt like he was making D&D sound too special. However, I think he is absolutely right. Looking at games as metaphors for life, as systems of rules governing our play within a cultural context, D&D is a game of life. Sure, the characters are running around a Middle Earth environment fighting Bugbears and searching for magic swords, but they may as well be fighting their spouse and buying a new car. Characters in D&D, like people in real life, have to make decisions based on the imposed randomness. They have strengths and weaknesses. They interact with other characters to problem solve, build, and move forward. They gain experience. They make future decisions based on past experiences. And they laugh, they live, they play.
March 21, 2007
Gods, Pirates and Monsters
Created by Lesley Flanigan, Joo Youn Paek, James Daher, and Rolf Anderson (with additional consultation from Charles Pratt).
OVERVIEW:
Explorers race across the ocean discovering treasure, islands, sea monsters, storms, dolphin, pirates, whirlpools, and the ferocious god of the sea, Poseidon, along the way! A game of luck, strategy, and exploration in the spirit of Checkers combined with Sharks and Minnows.
This game was developed by designing a core mechanic based on the concept of shared goals.
Review of Gods Pirates and Monsters by Frank Lantz:
"Wow! Great game!
There are some really original and interesting formal
structures here, especially the modular board that
gets revealed over time and the special Poseidon
player role.
The core mechanics work great. The dynamic board
creates a palpable sense of exploration and discovery.
One of the highlights of the game is the emergence of
multi-step, chain-reaction routes across the board
which leads to some nice suspense, and some surprising
and funny "Rube Goldberg" style moments.
There's no denying the amazing quality of the game
materials - they are lovely and very satisfying to
manipulate, and add a lot to the overall game
experience.
There was also plenty of interesting interaction
between the players, with some good opportunities for
strategic defensive maneuvers.
I playtested this game with some pretty serious gamers
and we all really loved it. Over the course of several
play-throughs the biggest shortcoming of the game
emerged. Mainly: the game has a tendency to run too
"fast". It is fairly common for multi-step routes to
emerge that allow for players to jump across the board
before Poseidon, or any other players, have any chance
at all to catch up. The games that are over too
quickly are very disappointing.
This problem could have easily been fixed through
additional playtesting and tuning. I think maybe the
dolphin should be +2 rather than +3 and there should
be fewer of the positive tiles in the mix. Because the
overall game is so strong it's a shame not to
fine-tune and polish the system.
This is a great game, and very impressive work. Nice job!"
March 17, 2007
Essay: Walking Space
In response to Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life
Chapters 7, Walking in the City and 9, Spatial Stories
Everyday understanding is managed by speculative and sorting operations. These operations take place in metaphorical and physical space. As physical beings, we are set apart from the world by the surface of our skin. We meet the world in terms of inside and outside. We come to know the world as if we are containers, accepting a continuous stream of information through our senses, the highlights of which are mixed with memories and blended with experience to be contextualized and finally sealed with meaning. Inside, our bodies hold a visceral knowledge of everyday life through our process of receiving the outside world. We comprehend this knowledge through metaphor.
Spatial metaphors are grounding concepts upon which people build all other concepts to understand life. Life is comprised of our relationships with the world through places, people, objects, time, memories, and reflexively ourselves. When we speak of relationships, we are referencing the space between. We are acknowledging an inside and outside, a here and there, the above and below. We instinctually classify and categorize the layers of daily experience through a system of spatial metaphors so incredibly dense that to break down that information, to try to view the contents as they are and see them without their implicit relationships, is impossible. The universe is like a matryoshka doll. Our brains work faster than our consciousness and we simply can not understand the universe without understanding space.
Certeau approaches our everyday understanding through the spatial set theories of a city. He begins above the city of New York, in the sky of the World Trade Center. From this vantage point, he takes a snapshot of life below, a neat package of order, and contemplates the “pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts.” (92) The joy in this view is that from a single perspective, the complexity of the city is made readable. We clearly see a map, the structure, the design of life in the city. We can follow the circulatory system of economic, political, and social structure up and down the avenues. We see not individuals, but masses of dots moving in rhythm, even car horns faintly heard are in time with the rhythm. The city, indeed, has a unifying pulse – just like the universe. But the universe, life, and the city are not this simple, they are complex. Complexity lies somewhere between order and chaos. It is at this point, we fall back down into the pulse of the city and as parts of the whole, walk through everyday life.
Pedestrians simultaneously read and write the city like text. As readers and writers, they walk paths of “unrecognizable poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, [and] elude legibility.” (93) On the ground, there is no single map. People weave together in subjective ways, existing in spaces translated uniquely for each person and shaped by each. Certeau uses linguistic concepts such as rhetoric, enunciation, and semantics to capture this process of shaping and translation. In a sense, people walk narratives writing sentences upon sentences. Which roads we choose to walk hold in our wake the history of a decision with the content of an action. We enunciate the topography of landscape, transform the signifiers of direction, and insert the “social models, cultural mores, and personal factors” (101) of rhetoric. We walk poems, intuitively processing the perceptual chaos of the world around us writing into it the spatial metaphors of continuous interrelations. As our bodies move, the physical reality of our skin defines the inside/outside, here/there, and above/below of space, ultimately dictating our consciousness, woven by personal narratives of understanding. Simple metaphors build our reality, keeping us sane.
Making things look simple is not easy, because simplicity requires clarity and clarity requires depth. Good art is full of mystery -- secret layers of depth that in a single moment resonate with complexity between the banality of order and madness of chaos that is life. Good art grows with time and transcends static meaning because it too is informed by relationships. Good art is like the view from the Certeau’s sky; it both speaks of and is part of the matryoshka doll universe. Anthony McCall’s light projection, You and I, Horizontal (III), offers insight into this idea. Using a pair of three-dimensional forms of ‘solid light,’ each thirty-five feet long, projected side by side, McCall’s installation cuts, divides, shapes, and changes visual space. One feels like he or she is walking through walls, both omnipresent and contained in a single experience. Light shines upon the natural relationships of our bodies to air, people, objects and all we can not see or ever hope to know. You and I, Horizontal (III) embodies concepts filled with life experiences and expresses them in metaphor -- clean, fundamental constructions of space. The layers, subsets, and categories are there and need not be said, only felt.
March 15, 2007
Light Drawing Sound
Created with Michael Dory using Processing, this performance interface implements video tracking to trigger musical notes. Using a small flashlight, the user “draws” music, controlling both volume and midi note values that are mapped onto a square grid. Midi notes can be played using a virtual synthesizer such as Absynth, allowing for an infinite range of exciting sounds.
March 12, 2007
Kinetic Conversation
I chose to continue building technically upon my "finite state machine" involving rotating cams and conceptually on my "make a random" piece involving communication between two people.
"Hi, Hello, Hey"
...marks start of conversation. Working off metaphors of sound waves/communication waves, this object requires two people turning the cranks on either side to create the sine wave motion of the wooden sticks. A rhythm is sometimes reached, and sometimes not. The physical sensation of turning the crank and watching the sticks weave a wave is a simple but fully engaging experience. The sticks are not attached to the object, but rather float on the physics of their positions in the machine.
where it all came from...plus 2 cups of coffee
Future Work
There are some technical issues I need to address with this piece. One is that the ball bearings of the top cam shaft are slightly misaligned, causing the crank to stick at times. This is a perfect example of how tricky it is to work with kinetics -- one fraction of a measurement off and the whole thing falls apart! Two is that the "hinge grid" only works in one direction (ah, stupid me!). Both conceptually and aesthetically, I believe it is important to not lock down the sticks with anything permanent --they should remain loose and free floating. Of course this is tricky to design. I have a couple ideas for how to address this "loose hinging" system technically, although it will be a complicated build.
The primary conceptual issue I need to address is what will be animated. I'm not convinced that they should be sticks. After all, the poetry in the piece is very much determined by what is making the waves -- for example, there is a great difference in the narratives behind sticks vs spoons vs fishing poles. I must think about this further. I am very happy with the motion of the wave, and there is more poetry in that motion than I am may be giving credit.
March 08, 2007
Annotated Listening Presentation
For the past several months, I have been curious about contemporary classical music. The following presentation outlines the connections I've discovered and experiences I've had regarding this genre.
CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL MUSIC
What is it?
In the broadest sense, contemporary music is any music being written in the present day. In the context of classical music the term has been applied to music written in the last quarter century, particularly works post-1975.
Michael Gordon on being a contemporary classical composer:
I used to like to say that I write “strange” or “weird” music, but now, for the sake of simplicity in social situations, I simply tell people when they ask that I’m a “classical” composer. Nine of ten people don’t know how to respond to this, and there’s usually an awkward moment in which they process this information trying to find something to say.
I have always felt uncomfortable with the word “classical.” It sends an instant message to most people that you are involved in something other. And, vainly, I am very aware that classical music has the squarest image on the planet. A bigger problem is that my music is not what most people think of as classical music. It doesn’t sound like Mozart, it is not genteel, will not serve as pleasant background music at a dinner party, and it can not be used to sell a Mercedes. (A passport control officer at Kennedy Airport once told Julia Wolfe that he thought all classical composers were dead.)
If you are an aficionado of contemporary classical music you probably have had similar experiences explaining to your friends and co-workers what kind of music you listen to. For those who are confused, the question that might come to mind is, “Why would you want write weird music?” Or more simply put, “Why would you want to write music that most of the world doesn’t listen to?”
MINIMAL MUSIC
genre of experimental music named in the 1960s which displays some or all of the following features:
•emphasis on consonant harmony, functional tonality
•reiteration of musical phrases and/or infrequent variation over long periods of time, possibly limited to simple repetition
•stasis, often in the form of drones, pulses, and/or long tones.
Tom Johnson describes minimalism in music:
"The idea of minimalism is much larger than most people realize. It includes, by definition, any music that works with limited or minimal materials: pieces that use only a few notes, pieces that use only a few words of text, or pieces written for very limited instruments, such as antique cymbals, bicycle wheels, or whisky glasses. It includes pieces that sustain one basic electronic rumble for a long time. It includes pieces made exclusively from recordings of rivers and streams. It includes pieces that move in endless circles. It includes pieces that set up an unmoving wall of saxophone sound. It includes pieces that take a very long time to move gradually from one kind of music to another kind. It includes pieces that permit all possible pitches, as long as they fall between C and D. It includes pieces that slow the tempo down to two or three notes per minute."
Prominent minimalist composers include John Adams, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich.
LISTENING TO MINIMAL MUSIC
Listen slow...
daydream
sleep
meditate
drift
Listening in context: my soundtrack in Germany
Arvo Pärt
-born 11 September 1935 in Paide
-an Estonian composer, often identified with the school of minimalism and more specifically, that of "mystic minimalism" or "sacred minimalism".
-has said that his music is similar to light going through a prism: the music may have a slightly different meaning for each listener, thus creating a spectrum of musical experience, similar to the rainbow of light.
Berliner Messe - Agnus dei
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki
-born December 6, 1933 in Czernica, Silesia
-Polish composer of classical music. Though his earlier work in the late 1950s and 1960s was characterized by a dissonant modernism, in the mid 1970s he moved towards a 'pure' sacred minimalist sound with Symphony No.3.
-music covers a variety of styles, but tends towards relative harmonic and rhythmical simplicity.
Symphony No. 3 - II. Lento E Largo - Tranquillissimo
David Lang
-born January 8, 1957 in Los Angeles, California
-informed by modernism, minimalism, and rock
-music best described as post-minimalist, a search for greater harmonic and rhythmic complexity
-founding member of Bang on a Can
Sweet Air
Alva Noto
-stage name of German sound artist Carsten Nicolai,
-leading artist amongst current electronic sound and visual designers using art and music as hybrid tools to create microscopic views of creative processes.
-plays with the rules of physicality. Sound is changed and evolved into time and space and transformed by looping oscillators and tone generators. Through these processes the essence of pure electricity is made audible. -mathematically edits his work to give his compositions precise rhythmic structures.
-uses sounds of electronic information transmission such as fax tones, modem sounds and telephone pops and clicks which are sampled and organized into loops
Logic Moon (with Ryuichi Sakamoto)
Train.mov
March 04, 2007
The Tiger Situation
Tonight I saw “The Tiger Situation,” a dance performance by choreographer Anna Sperber. I do not usually attend dance performances, let alone contemporary minimal performances, so my opinions on the experience are abstract, raw and without extensive knowledge of the genre. While watching the performance, I felt a range of emotions: trapped, unsure, uncomfortable, tired, engaged, curious, confused, critical, and excited.
“The Tiger Situation” began with different dancers struggling with their bodies through awkward, isolating motions: twisting, falling, hitting, and throwing. Rarely was there a sense of release, but rather like steam in a closed kettle, the energy was multiplying, contained and strained. At times, the dancers met each other in groups of two, but these moments never communicated safety or help. The dancers remained physically isolated while throwing themselves together, unable to synthesize their shapes in the way they seemingly wanted to in order to create one strong body. Their imperfect, perhaps even flawed motions seemed empty and uninteresting, lacking in any concentrated mediation or focused feeling one might expect given the minimal genre.
However, as the piece developed over time, the haphazard motions, sound, lights, and costuming began to resonate in its own repetition and build at its climax a tight cohesive unit. All the little bits and pieces of odd motion from the beginning of the piece began to repeat themselves in rhythm, consequently giving themselves the mediation and focus once thought missing. I felt a pattern: the give and take of force, the push and pull of intimacy, the need and refusal of space, the dominant and submissive, the prey and predator. Essentially, the dance communicated a series of aggressive opposites attracting and reacting in a circular pattern. I embrace these concepts abstractly as a study of form, and more specifically how the shape and energy of a body creates psychology as much as it reflects it. Take for example a fever. A terrible fever causes a claustrophobic, lucid, and painfully uncomfortable physical experience. Struggling to shake oneself out of the feverish aching of his or her body by twisting and turning only fires the condition more, multiplying the energy inside the finite, contained space of the body. It is a painful experience of trying to relax the very motion that is both the cause and the effect of the feverish state.
“The Tiger Situation” is first and foremost a dance performance. It is about physical, movement and the metaphors human bodies translate and communicate. Costumes, lighting, and sound are theoretically superfluous. However, in communicating an idea, context is essential, and context is created by space. Space is defined through a sensorial experience of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. The space in “The Tiger Situation” is a minimal environment suggesting abstract psychology, dark emotions, and primal experience. The small amount of light used is connected to the dancers through their costuming, at times the sequenced outfits reflect a dancing pattern of light on the floor creating a subtle, aquatic softness against the aggressive physicality of the dancer. The sound, a pulsing wall of white washed noise entering and leaving the performance at various unexplained times, is reminiscent of a static television station missing reception and creates a sense of being lost in unperceivable space. These additional sensorial elements are essential in building the contextual space of the dance, and are woven into throughout performance with careful orchestration. The dancers do not dance for the music and the music does not play for the dancers. They function together as a whole and blend together to build the performance -- an emotional void of isolated, reactive physicality.
March 03, 2007
Essay : Headphone Space
People walk through New York City with headphones on. Navigating the crowded streets of cars, people, advertisements, posters, shops, restaurants, television displays, lights, noise, dirt, steam, trees, animals, garbage, construction and decay, they walk alone occupying a private space within the public sphere. This private space is marked by sound emanating from headphones which only the user can hear. The sound compliments their living experience, blanketing the immediacy of the physical environment with a personal layer of thoughts, memories, associations, juxtapositions, and projections.
Interpreting our environment is a sensorial experience mixing sights, sounds, smells, and touch. We live in a visually dominated culture because sight is more easily manipulated for messaging. Urban experience is a bombardment of visual spectacle sending us massive amounts of information in such dense layers that we are often unaware of how we filter and interpret the saturated content. The information barrage is accepted as part of the public experience. Consider the sounds that assist these messages in their context -- sounds of the car horns with the piercing bird-like screams of young girls outside of MTV Studios in Times Square playing as a soundtrack for the visual glitz of massive lights and billboard advertisements, or the crack of baseball bats hitting balls and barking of small dogs in Central Park as a soundtrack for the hotdog stand. Spaces are interpreted through the blending of sight and sound.
Headphones let us customize public space with controllable, private sound. The visuals in a public environment remain the same, but with the introduction of a personal soundtrack, the context of the shared images change. Take for example, riding a subway train. This mundane experience of observing the wallpapering of Budweiser commercials, crowds of sullen faces, and the occasional vagabond delivering a speech, becomes an entirely new interpretive experience while contextualized with soprano Maria Callas singing Ave Maria. Depending on the style of headphones or volume level, different amounts of external sound may leak into the private music experience, mixing the content both of the song and public space.
As small plastic objects, headphones nestle close or sometimes inside our ears, cutting out extraneous noise. We “plug in” to our portable audio device, separating ourselves from the sounds of the external world as we move through from one environment to the next. While headphones isolate us, they simultaneously open the world in new interpretive ways. A schizophrenic experience is created as the user occupies two spaces at once, building an entirely new psychological environment composed of the private and public space. Combinatorial in creating meaning, headphones’ designed portability move the personal sound space through various physical spaces weaving intersections of layered interpretation and thought. Included in these intersections are the users’ own memories and personal relationships to the songs, constructing even deeper meaning and subtext within the physical environment. Listening to a certain song that reminds you of a past lover while walking to meet a stranger for a date might flood your thoughts with new, complicated emotions and questions that would otherwise have remained unexamined.
Headphone space is not only auditory and invisible. Headphones are visible and physical objects. The sound emanating from them may be a private experience for the user, but seen by other people, headphones communicate a “do not disturb” message, like a sign on the door of a hotel room. They delineate a clear line of private space within the public space. The user of the headphones is socially excused from listening regardless of whether or not they can hear what is happening outside of the headphone space. In fact, headphones are often worn to create the illusion of separation in order to avoid human interaction or information responsibility. People choose when and where to symbolically excuse themselves by putting on their headphones, and also manipulate (perhaps secretively) the levels of their isolation through volume control. Although interpretation of environments may be unintentional, the decisions to appear absent are always intentional. Headphones are socially recognized private spaces.
There are many provocative ways to use headphone space as a site to explore themes of personal vs shared and private vs public space while probing its inherent intersections of layered space. Consider the concepts of intimacy that result from sharing a headphone space, perhaps the same set of headphones worn simultaneously by two or even one hundred people; or concepts of manipulation and ownership if a set of headphones are controlled not by its user, but rather by an audience. Art and design projects exploring headphone space include Alice Wang’s Peer Pressure, Michelle Rosenberg’s Dynamic Headphones series, Paul Davies’ The Prayer Antenna, and Cre8tive Challenge’s Echo Ricochet, just to name a few. Headphone space is rich with content and metaphor. As the technological and aesthetic design of headphones advance, more complex relationships with these objects are sure emerge as the space grows denser with human experience and meaning.
March 01, 2007
Lever Madness!
Rob Faludi and I created a lever set (with 100% reused materials) to experiment with and demonstrate first, second and third-class levers. Our working model was made from masonite arms, wooden dowels for pivots and linkage points, some gears for spacers and a couple metal parts as simple counterweights.
To calculate the forces involved we use the formula Torque = Force × Distance to fulcrum × sin ϑ. Since sin ϑ is 1 at 90 °, this reduces to Torque = Force x Distance. According to my calculations, our experimental system produces a 55% reduction in force, with a proportional increase in travel distance.
Design Noir / Presentation
Tom Jenkins and I have been talking a lot about Dunne and Raby’s design noir and Wodiczko’s objects as critical designs. We gave a presentation on Monday that outlined a lot of our thoughts on the topic, available here.
Projects mentioned during the presentation:
Dunne and Raby’s Placebo Project:
Wodiczko’s Disarmor Project:
and his Personal Instrument:
radio scanner as reappropriation of the everyday into a noir aesthetic:
An excellent essay covering our thoughts on Hertzian space as site can be found here on Tom's blog.
Underwater Buddies
Tom Jenkins and I bought some discounted Easter stuffed animals and a bottle of wine and made some new, better stuffed animals from their pieces. These fluffy undersea alien creatures, Underwater Buddies (or as Todd calls them, “Li’l’ Fuckers”) will be his toy design project for the semester and I will be his assistant/cohort. Working with themes of bioluminescence, networking to know each others’ proximity, and/or maybe vibration motors or sound effects, these little guys have many directions to go in!
