Tag Archives: itp

Cooking With Sound: Makeshift Microphone

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Using the instructions provided in this wacky video, Archana, Elena, and I attempted to fabricate a microphone out of some magnets, wire, a paper tube, a plastic cap, and a plastic straw. It looked pretty cool, as you can see in the videos below.

Mic Attempt #1 from Elena K Parker on Vimeo.

I have a pretty clear understanding of what went wrong. The dimensions of the straw, coiled wire, and gap in the magnets didn’t quite match up, so the vibrations were not occurring the way they need to to get the sound we wanted. Part of me wonders if there was more tweaking we could have done to get it to work as was, but I am optimistic that when the appropriate magnets come in, the microphone will work properly!

The good news is that putting our microphone together helped clarify my understanding of how a microphone works, in all of its various parts. So the project was not a complete failure!

More attempted microphone action below…

Mic Assembly #2 from Elena K Parker on Vimeo.

Collective Storytelling: The New York Tenement Museum

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Last week our class visited the New York Tenement Museum on Orchard Street. It’s an amazing place where small apartments untouched for more than fifty years have been restored to how they looked at the turn of the previous century.

The specific tour we did followed a family of Jewish Russian immigrants who moved to New York and started a tailor business. This story really resonated with me, because that was my family’s story. My great grandfather moved to the United States in the first decade of the 20th Century and worked as a women’s tailor, just like the Levin family featured in the museum. One detail about the exhibit that stood out to me was that the elder son in the Levin family slept in a wash basin on the floor of his parents’ bedroom. One family story I heard was that my great uncle slept for a time in a dresser drawer. The experience encouraged me to ask my dad for some of the information about this early part of my family history. I thought I had the story down pat, but it’s amazing how stories you hear when you are seven years old can get corrupted in your mind over 20 years.

I also tried to think about the museum as a place of interactive narrative and learning. I found the tour guide’s rhetorical questions helped me to put myself in the space where these people lived. However, I wish there was just MORE. More content, more to explore, more to discover, more to learn.

Comics: Six Panels

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This is my six-panel comic adapted from T.C. Boyle’s “The Ape Lady in Retirement.” I tried to have the content of the individual frames influence my choice of framing. Also, because I struggled last week with the interdependent form of text/image interplay, I tried to make all the panels in this comic in that style. I think I nailed it.

Comics: Assignment 2 – Words and Pictures

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For this week’s assignment, we had to demonstrate our proficiency in utilizing different types of interplay between text and pictures, as outlined in Chapter Six of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. The four types I used were:

Word specific, where the image does little more than reiterate what is described in the text.

Picture specific, where the image tells the story and the text simply enhances the visuals.

Parallel, where the image and text appear disconnected.

Interdependent, when an unspoken third idea is created by the meaning in the text and picture.

Here is my single image with four different captions:

Word specific

Picture specific

Parallel

Interdependent

 

Collective Storytelling: Fan Fiction

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I wrote this piece of flash fan fiction for my Collective Storytelling class. I’ve never felt compelled to write fanfic, although I respect writers who do. For this experiment, I was originally going to do a fairly cynical piece titled “Ginny Weasley and the Quarter-Life Crisis,” about an eighth year at Hogwarts where Ginny is dating the new Defense of the Dark Arts teacher Harry Potter. She freaks out because without Voldemort there’s no reason to do anything, and she realizes that she goes to the only high school in the world where NO ONE HAS SEX.

In the end, I decided against this piece. I wanted to write something from my heart, the way that true blue fan fiction writers do. I chose to retell the end of the controversial Spider-man arc from 2007 — One More Day — in which Peter Parker makes a deal with the devil to save his Aunt May’s life in exchange for his marriage to Mary Jane Watson and 20 years of series continuity. Although my version nullifies every issue of Spider-man since One More Day, it stays true to the characters and the integrity of the series.

And besides, those new issues suck anyway.

Continue reading →

Collective Storytelling: Drabble

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My first assignment for Collective Storytelling was to write a story using a very rigid form. I chose the drabble, a form popularized in the UK in the 1980s where the only requirement is that the story is precisely 100 words. Not 99 words. Not 101 words. Here’s what I came up with:

LITTLE DESIRE

BY MATT LONDON

Written for Collective Storytelling, NYU-ITP © 2012

My friend lived in a bubble. Not a metaphor.

She never ate, never slept. She worked. Dance. Macramé. Taxes. Whatever.

Everyone walking past her bubble fell in love with her.

Be my wife, my whore. Do my taxes. They dragged her out. She stayed inside, but a double appeared, followed her savior to the chapel, hotel, H&R Block.

I pulled a double out. Go! Be free! The double gave me a quizzical look and vanished.

Bubbleward, I shouted, You just need a little desire. Your own.

She looked at me, appreciative, understanding.

She stepped out of the bubble.

And vanished.

Phys-Comp Final: The Story Room

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For my physical computing final, I wanted to create an immersive narrative experience that utilized multimedia. Mission accomplished! My initial inspiration came from the point-and-click adventures I played as a kid, as well as more recent video games that eschew the blockbuster storytelling we see all the time. Early in the semester, I had an idea for something like this, and now it has been realized! I’m so thrilled.

I never could have accomplished this project without my team Elena and Hannah. They were creative visionaries on this project and I would work with them again in a heartbeat.

I’m starting to become sympathetic to the challenges of writing interactive multimedia. Often, deadlines come up fast. When I write linear fiction, generally, I have all the time in the world, but in the case of this project, we had to write FAST! We came up with a very sad story that I think lent itself to the darkness of our piece, and although it was hard, I think the end product was great.

Incorporating elements like the puzzle box added strong physical computing elements and enhanced the user experience.

Although we were somewhat limited by space and time, the end result was well-executed and emotionally satisfying. I hope to explore this idea further in the future, incorporating more sensors, more visual elements, and a larger, more impactful story. The video of The Story Room is below.