ITP Spring 2006 (mb2811): Homework Archives

December 08, 2005

City Island Line

This week in communications lab we did a whirlwind tour of iStop motion, flash and after effects. Angela Pablo and I worked in flash to animate a story corps story from Ronald Ruiz. It was a lot of fun and we learned a lot along the way. The animation for the story but it's also documentation for the process of us learning flash. We didn't want anything too visual because the story is itself powerful over the radio, without any visuals.

Here is our movie.

Posted by mb2811 at 05:27 AM

November 28, 2005

Universal Design

For my universal design project I evaluated the following objects:

cell phone
watch
alarm clock
coffee maker
oven
ipod
thermostat
lamp
metrocard
bike
bike lock
pen
atm
iron
dvd player
doorbell
washing machine

As I was making my way through this list the first thing I noticed is how poorly informed my ratings were. I am considering the assistive usability of these tools through the lens of an able bodied individual. With these evaluations I am guessing what it may be like to be at a certain disadvantage but the only way to really find out what it is like to be disabled is to ask someone with the disability.

In the case of 'without the ability to walk', all my devices outside of the bicycle have an easy of use of one. The devices are localized. For example, in the case of the ATM, you don't need your legs to use the ATM. You do need your legs to make it to the ATM but that would be the case for any tool. A tool is somewhere, if you want to use it you need to be able to get to it. How you get to it is outside the scope of this exercise. The device might be more easily used if it was closer rather than farther but that would involve making assumptions about where people keep their tools. The only way to find out the answer to those questions is to ask people.

My own prejudices about what it's like to be disabled put a lot of fours and fives in the 'use without the ability to use hands' category. For me, hands are the most indesposable for any device and most devices become useless without the use of one's hands. A major shift would have to be made to make most devices useable hands free because most devices assume the use of the hands. Hands are the most versatile in device manipulation and an interaction that device designers take for granted. Without the use of one's hands, interactions are funneled through a single device, possibly a mouth that controls a straw or a system which monitors eye positioning.

Posted by mb2811 at 11:52 PM

November 15, 2005

Crossed Wires

We're still working on our movie, they're going to kick us out of the lab at midnight, but the most memorable image out of this process are the headphone splitters. The computer only has one headphone jack but since there are five of us we have to split the signal. Each split gives us another jack so we need four of them to get all of us plugged in or audio. The image attached is a grainy cell phone camera picture but you get the idea.

Posted by mb2811 at 03:44 AM

South Street Seaport

For my outside activity I went down to the South Street Seaport to see the Cadavers exhibit. These are reconstructed human bodies, organs, muscles and bones encased and preserved. It isn't something I really want to see but it is controversial and just very out there and I wanted to see it for myself, judge for myself. It reminded me of the time I came up from Boston to see Sensations. I was in town for a wedding but felt like I had a duty to see the show that had the mayor shutting down subway stations.

I didn't see an cadavers. The show doesn't open until the 19th, but i'll come back.

The whole art scene on South Street was distancing itself from the event. No one really knew where it was or would talk about it. That's not surprising since South Street is very touristy, with box stores and bland local food. Reminded me of Faneuil Hall. Ok, that's enough self righteousness for one week.

Posted by mb2811 at 03:39 AM

November 07, 2005

New York City Marathon

For my outside activity this week, I ran the New York City Marathon. I was accepted in the lottery a long time ago when I was still running every other day in Boston. Now that i'm in New York and at ITP, I haven't had any time to train or keep up my running schedule. I was going to pass on the Marathon but then decided that I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to be a part of something so quintessentially new York. I figured we weren't running into the woods. If things didn't go well for me I could just get on the subway and go home.

I had a fairly low number, 8614, because when I signed up I was actually training. This sunday, I didn't want to start in a very fast corral because I didn't want to risk loosing steam too early in the race. It is after all twenty six miles and more importantly I didn't want to get trampled. Ignoring my low number, I started way back, with a group which was expected to finish the race in 4:15 and figured if it was too slow for me I could move up. My friend Leon, who was running for Fred's Team, was back there with me.

The race started out fairly slow. We ran over the Verrazano-Narrows bridge into Brooklyn. To thin out the field, runners split between different levels of the bridge and then rejoined the full pack later on in Brooklyn. This caused congestion and made it difficult to keep an even pace. There was always someone in front of you, slowing down, stopping or going a different speed. I left Leon and his group around mile five or six because the pack density was making it hard for me to concentrate.

The rest is a daze. The marathon takes you through all these breathtaking views but I don't remember any of them. I don't even remember the race that well. Injury wise, I thought my fibula fracture would act up but my lower legs were fine. It was my hamstrings, they seized at mile thirteen and didn't let go for half the marathon. Every time I tried to return to a normal gait they would start to spasm, most likely a symptom of not running for months followed by twenty six point two miles through New York. It was miserable. At mile nineteen I asked a race director for the subway, I was done. I was in Queens and couldn't take the painful shuffle that my running had become, but he convinced me to keep on going .3 more miles to a medical tent. By the time I got there I decided to keep on going.

With the unusually warm weather, I saw people completely loose it. The heat was too much. People passing out, one guy falling and slamming his head on the sidewalk. I think it's then that I realized that this wasn't just something you do. Twenty six miles can kill you.

I couldn't have made it without all the people on the sidelines handing out snacks and water. I drank a lot of fluids, a lot more than I usually do when I run because of the heat and because I felt salt crystals on my forehead. I was sweating salt. At the end of the race, a race volunteer had me eat a couple of packets of salt and that brought me slightly back in balance.

I'm done with my first Marathon and I'd do it again. Yup, I just said it. At mile 20 yesterday I hated myself for not being at a friend's party, watching from the sidelines, drinking but now I just want to heal up so I can start properly training. Running is addictive and I miss it.

Posted by mb2811 at 03:13 PM

October 31, 2005

Outside Actvity: M5 Bus

My outside activity this week was riding the M5 bus all the way up to the Bronx for red's class. It's a really smart way to see the city. If/when I move again, i'll keep that idea with me. I saw all these parts of town that I either have no reason to visit or that I would have assumed had nothing for me. The fake parts they show on television and the poor parts that don't have enough clout to have frequent street cleaning.

I also biked from party to party with my fairy wings, which had to be the highlight of the week. I live living here. You can do stuff like that and not get assaulted.

Posted by mb2811 at 07:13 PM

October 25, 2005

Dia Center

For my outside activity, I did the luxurious and took a day off from school to go to the Dia Center in upstate New York. I went this Monday, my official weekend because I spent the saturday and sunday on the fourth floor doing physical computing. It was nice to go on a gloomy monday morning, when the roads are empty and the museum is quiet.

The Dia is set up to show works that would not be possible to show in a more conventional space, works that were meant to be viewed wide open with great expanses and distance. Huge metal steel sculptures, labyrinths and gallery spaces the size of open fields. My favorite artist had to be On Kawara whose medium is persistance and process, something i'm really into. I did learn that he mixes the pigments for his 'date' paintings every day, a different hue every day and does the lettering by hand. If he doesn't finish a painting for that day, he destroys it. The exhibit had one painting a year from the mid 60s to 2000 and every date was written in the format that is convention for the location that On Kawara was at at the time he made the painting. Spectacular. Some other artists there I want to remember:

Joseph Beuys - We saw his memorable 'quiet piano' in a sound proof room in Paris. The Centre Pompidou. The Dia has a number of similarly themed pieces that muffle.

Louise Bourgeois - A lot of sexual amorphous objects. But the best had to be this spider with its eggs. I want to live there.

Michael Heizer - Pits in the ground. You couldn't tell how deep they really went and they were walled off by glass. You had to assume that they might go on forever.

Blinky Palermo - German flag colors hypnotically arranged.

Richard Serra - Ominous, steel tubes that collapse in your direction. Some sculptures you can weave your way through to an open space in the middle.

Fred Sandback - One of my favorites. It was taut string arranged in rectangular shapes. The placement of the string (some sculptures had two strings next to each other) caused the feeling of space and dimension, the idea that so much perception could be created with so little material.

Posted by mb2811 at 01:01 AM

October 11, 2005

NH Wedding

This week my outside activity was a road trip out of the city. First my friend's brother's wedding in New Hampshire and then back to Boston to see my parents for my birthday. It rained (and severely flooded) the whole time we were in NH for the wedding. We managed to avoid the flooded roads with my barely two wheel drive car. I found out the next day that people died and houses were carried away so the rain was much more serious than I had thought.

Boston was very quiet, a ghost town compared to New York. My friend told me about this and now I get to experience it for myself. When you live in New York long enough every other place becomes eerily quiet, too quiet even just because it's so loud here. I was in Boston in the middle of the day and it felt like absolutely nothing was going on, like it was the middle of the night. I half expected tumble weed to pass by.

I also saw my friend's 10 week old baby which I didn't hold. It looked too strange and fraigle. I was afraid to drop it, or i'm not sure what made me so uncomfortable, but I just played with the little fingers and toes.

Posted by mb2811 at 06:30 AM

MicroPayments

I looked up a picture of Scott for this reaction and by g-d, he's gotten older. I've always associated his visage with the cartoony caricatures his books made famous, so it's funny to see an actual picture. I almost feel like the one here is the fake one. He has been immortalized.

As for the reaction to the argument between Clay and Scott, my response falls somewhere in the middle, mostly in the land of indifference. I haven't kept up with the micropayment debate (and possible progress?) because it just isn't on the radar for me. I have this sense of entitlement about the net, possibly one that I share with Clay Shirky. It goes something like this: everything on the net should be free. If it isn't free, it probably isn't worth it or there is something that's kind of like it that will be free. I see the net as a perpetual fad with heavy turnover. Nothing really hangs around for that long, nothing is tangible so why would I pay for any of it? If I wanted something real i'd get it in the real world.

I can see a day when I may reverse my outlook, but right now I don't feel like anything real is going on. When I buy something from amazon, I get a physical thing in the mail but I have a hard time grasping the purchase of an intangible thing that doesn't reflect in the real world. I usually loose all my passwords anyway and have never owned a printer. I don't have any way of transforming my online purchase into anything feasible (nor do I have any interest in doing so) so whenever I buy 'online content' I always feel like I am being ripped off.

I do think that Clay may be overlooking the people that joined the internet after arpanet was formed. Those people may not have that same sense of entitlement and may feel much more comfortable applying commerce paradigms to the virtual worlds. I just can't do it.

Posted by mb2811 at 06:16 AM

Narrative

I made a short comic with photoshop. This would be my first time actually sitting down and trying to apply photoshop to a project. The captions were done in flash though I could also do them in illustrator when I get a copy. Click on the image to see the full comic.

Story

I was planning on doing a story about the past three day weekend. Either the wedding I just went to in New Hampshire or my trip back to Boston but I was having too much fun to remember to take photographs. Since I was going to use my old digital photos as material for the comic, it only made sense that the story be about the digital camera. I didn't want to have an artificial premise and act like I had this story in mind when I took these photos, because I didn't. I did have the digital camera in mind so that seemed like a fair premise.

Photoshop

I am only familiar with a couple of the basic tools in photoshop so I was using those to set this thing up. There's probably a better way of lining things up and getting them sized properly. I do have some basic questions about lining cells up, figuring out how large a select area (or layer) is and also how to select according to size. That is, what if I wanted to grab a 300 x 200 block, can I specify that somehow without dragging a rectangle?

Also the file is close to 500k and that was a gif in image ready saved for web. A regular jpg with medium quality was about 220k but I wanted to put this up in high quality.

Posted by mb2811 at 03:12 AM

October 04, 2005

Image Manipulation

For the image manipulation assignment, Matt and I added menu guys to floor 4. Some of them were from union square and some from google images.

Posted by mb2811 at 05:23 AM

Court

For my outside activity this week, I went to community court in Red Hook. My court date was supposed to the following tuesday but I was able to move it due to the high holidays. I was cited for riding my bicycle on the sidewalk which I never do. I had only been in Brooklyn for a few days and was still finding my way around.

Court was completely anti-climactic. A lot of waiting around and then:

judge: you have been cited for riding you bicycle on the sidewalk.

me: yes

judge: do you now know that this is illegal?

me: yes

judge: that's it. case dismissed.

Posted by mb2811 at 05:14 AM

September 26, 2005

Week 3 Activity: Wooster Group

For this week's outside activity, I saw Poor Theatre at the Wooster Group. The Smithson activity didn't work out. We waited for well over an hour at Brooklyn Bridge Park and then left. I checked the website with my phone and it said due to heavy river traffic the floating island was running forty five minutes late but it must have been running even later than that.

Poor Theatre - a series of simulacra

The Wooster group performance was an experimental multimedia show which blurred all the artificial lines we are used to in the theatre experience. 'Poor Theatre' blurred the line between audience an actor (common occurrence) but it also went out on a limb with other delineations. The line between sound, lights and actors, the line between reality and television, the line between reviewer and reviewed, the line between the living and memorialized, etc. Accidentally, it was a great thing to see relative to what we are reading and talking about this week.

Posted by mb2811 at 09:54 PM

September 25, 2005

Manipulated Images

1. your hair will come back
2. dead kennedys album art
3. adbusters

(bang! bang! bang!)

Posted by mb2811 at 10:30 PM

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

"The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology."
-- Walter Benjamin

In his essay, Benjamin densely touches upon the current evolution of art with respect to its definition, authenticity and means of production. Art isn't necessarily diminished by new technology and mass production as much at it is irrevocably altered. Several things of interest:

To be art as art with it's wholeness and intention intact, art must be considered with its whole aura, the time in which it was created as well as the physical aging that has occurred to the art as it passes through time. This view of art is bound to an art that is a unique physical manifestation, created in a certain time. Art which cannot be created in any other way or at any other time.

Art that can be mass produced (films) or the art of ideas (conceptual) has no place in this way of thinking. In some ways art that is pure idea has always existed and will always exist. It cannot be bound to a particular time, only a particular interpretation relative to a time and a zeitgeist.

Writing a letter to the editor allows anyone to voice their opinion in a newspaper, everyone has now become a writer. The craft of writing or the granting of a voice is no longer the domain of a group of individuals deemed writers. Everyone has a voice. This shift that Banjamin highlights is the initial seed of the interactive media that has become part of our popular culture. Stanislavski tells us that because we are human we all are actors, we all can convey the human experience. iMovie encourages all of us to be film makers, we all have a story to tell. Blogging software invites us to all be writers. All the lines have been crossed and criss crossed, the boundaries between professional and amatuer, between artist and audience have broken down.

Finally, it's interesting to note that art in the age of mechanical reproduction begets new art. Technology allows us to slow down, deconstruct and then reassemble anew. Technology also allows for the construction of a form before the art. A photograph may be the art, the negative being the tool used to construct the art. Alternatively, in art as process, the negative becomes the art and photograph becomes an afterthought. Technology, in creating space between the details, creates possibilities.

Posted by mb2811 at 09:02 PM

September 17, 2005

Reading: Marshall McLuhan 1, 8, 9

The Narcissistic Trance

McLuhan articulately encourages us to take as many steps as we are comfortable taking out of the everyday manifestations and see what is really going "on". In the realm of ideas, his analysis is solid as he encourages us to glance at the a priori movers, the true actuators of change. Analyzing the result of a medium is a valid enterprise but we shouldn't mistake that analysis for true analysis of a medium. When a medium is ubiquitous and recedes to the background of ideas as its manifestations become prominent we must not forget about the origin of those manifestations. Otherwise we trap ourselves in Abbott's Flatland and forget about the possibilities as possibility.

The McLuhan reading connects nicely with a reading from physical computing on the The Art of Interactive Design (my notes can be found here). Crawford says that interaction and reaction are not on a degree continuum. A very strong reaction does not break into the realm of interaction just as a very bright neon sign does not enter the realm of light as medium.

Reevaluating the language of a medium implementation has correlations to synesthesia. From the pure medium's perspective, all implementations of the medium are arbitrary and equal. From the perspective of 'light as light', it doesn't matter if the light is used to sell beer or perform brain surgery. It is then possible to apply descriptive words from one implementation to another and have the potential for them to make sense. If we think of the senses as a reaction to an encompassing medium, it no longer seems so strange to see tastes or feel sound just as a surgical procedure could have a 'grammar'.

As we submerge ourselves in medium as implementation we must not loose sight of what we are loosing or what we may gain if attempt to retrace our steps. Language is a detachment as is consciousness and any layer that prevents us from experiencing the world as World. Running water may advance industrialization and convenience but it breaks down the family and clan structure. As the Chinese move from ideograms to a more western phonetic alphabet, their world view and cultural nuances are altered in favor of a more linear, abstract forward motion of ideas. These are not necessarily value judgments, they are what is.

As a final note, we can also see a transition with emerging technology as they move us closer to a Tower of Babel, removing the need for languages. Maybe the cultures we are so quick to preserve are in fact barriers to ultimate understanding and connection?

Posted by mb2811 at 07:24 PM

September 16, 2005

Week 2 Outside Activity: 9/11 Site

For this week's outside activity, I visited the site of the 9/11 tragedy. Four years ago, when the planes struck the twin towers I was in Boston. I was working next door to the John Hancock building, one of the biggest high rises in Boston and no one knew what was going on. Since my building was next to such a tall building we were evacuated and sent home. I rode my bike home to Wachusett street in Jamaica Plain and along the way I saw lines snaking out of and around churches. People thought the world was ending.

Last Sunday, I saw the twin memorial lights from my apartment in Brooklyn and finally went down to the financial district to see the memorial. There were signs requesting that people not solicit or be solicited to preserve the solemnity of the area. People obeyed. I sat down and watched people read from the book of profiles, the biographies of all those people who died four years ago.

I don't have anything else to say. I'm glad I went. It's always important to remember.

Posted by mb2811 at 09:45 PM

September 11, 2005

Outside Activity: Food Coop

For this week, I joined and shopped at a Food Coop in Brooklyn. We have Coops in Boston but you can still shop at them if you aren't a member, you just don't get a discount. The one in Brooklyn is the oldest one in the country with over 10 thousand members. You can't shop there unless you are a member and to be a member you have to work there for three hours a month.

The whole place is a bit culty but there is a great vibe there. When you shop, you don't have the "us and them" mentality of a regular supermarket. Everyone who is working that day is a member just like you, you're doing this thing together. Even while shopping, when you aren't on a work shift, you know you'll be working eventually so you try to be careful with everything because you wouldn't want to clean up someone else's mess.

Clearly i've been converted :)

Posted by mb2811 at 11:36 PM

September 09, 2005

Communications Lab Assignment 1: Basic Portfolio Site

I made a very basic HTML Page with links to my homework assignments. I find a database driven blog a much cleaner and easier to maintain system for content. All the links to my homework assignments (including this one) go to the ITP blog.

I'm proficient in HTML so this assignment wasn't difficult. I may know all the HTML tags but I don't know how to put them together in an aesthetically proper way. That's why I am here, to improve on my front end and design skills. My HTML page is just a placeholder for the content I will make once I learn flash, photoshop, final cut and the like.

Now that I think about it, i'd much rather just maintain all of my work for this class in my blog (with external links to content). It's almost a pleasure to maintain when you are used to pico and .html files.

Posted by mb2811 at 10:56 PM

September 07, 2005

Flashmobs

"Margarethe Muller, emerging from a nearby department store, sensed that something was happening. She just wasn’t sure what". -- New York Times, 8/4/03

Flashmobs, still in their incubator stage, have the potential to progress the shift of power and lead to true social change. Their absurd nature helps them move under the radar as they evolve into a general forum for freedom of expression and individual empowerment. Flashmobs envelop individuals in a crowd that expresses itself in an unconventional way, not easily quantified or explained. Much like the Daily Show is given latitude because it is on a comedy channel, or an animated series can be offensive because it is a cartoon, the absurd actions of the Flashmob mask their true potential. What’s the harm of a thousand people simultaneously eating a banana?

The strength of Flashmobs lies in their decentralized power structure and their speed. Leveraging email and cell phone technologies, Flashmobs have an unprecedented time to action and element of surprise. Interestingly, Flashmobs have emerged at the same time as the popularity of distributed mesh networks. As power clamps down on freedom of expression and dissent, whether it is our president or the MPAA, systems evolve and disperse to protect themselves and their beliefs. Correctly avoiding centralization flashmob.info, mentioned in the New York Times article, is an unregistered domain. Other sites like flashmob.com and flashmobs.info dilute the strength of the Flashmobs phenomenon by centralization. Everyone wants their street cred but they forget the revolution will not be televised.

A current weakness of Flashmobs is the taking up of physical space. With the element of surprise, a mob may have achieved its goal of expression, but the mob is collectively in a space and must follow the laws of physics. Understandably, creating a crowd and confusion for a physical "denial of service" attack may be the Flashmob’s goal, but the Flashmob is that much more powerful when both the initiators and participants are distributed. Flashmobs where everyone jumps up in their own individual space at a predefined time to physically move the earth are heading in the right direction. As the type and robustness of available mediums for the message to be transmitted evolve, Flashmobs will become an empowering balance to centralized authority.

Direction:

Flashmobs can adapt to any new technology which supports a decentralized approach for expression. If TV-B-Gone was on everyone's keychain, a flash mob could disperse and turn off every television in a city.

Posted by mb2811 at 04:59 PM