Just finished scoring and putting together the soundtrack for the end of my thesis which I’m super happy about. Since I plan on finishing things off with the timelapse portrait of my grandparents, and the interview, it only felt right to score something that I felt represented them and their story!
Now I’m in the process of assembling everything, all the portraits, audio and music into an experience that will hopefully be impactful and fun!
If you’re reading this I hope you’re doing well! Just finished up my Practice Presentation with Sarah, Ada, Elizabeth and Jason! I had a really wonderful time hearing my peers present their current progress as well as hearing about their process leading up to where they are now! Even though we’re all working on different things, I learned a lot about what I need to work on along with what to condense for my final presentation on May 9th! So for myself, I just need to condense, condense, condense! The information is there, but I need to condense! Overall I felt that this process was really helpful! It was wonderful getting feedback from my peers and now feel a bit less nervous about presenting on May 9th hahah! 🙂
Main advice from Sarah is to schedule in-person product testings with at least 3~5 elderly (testing specifically on the social aspect of the product). Audio chat messages  vs. voice call vs. video call, or all. She also provided a lot of references on how this social function can be applied (visually) on the TV. For example, Screener for watching movies or tv shows together online and chat on the side.
Peer meeting was with Brian and Suri. Brian suggested me to focus more on the visuals first and then the interface. We both started to question on whether the social function is necessary because the product feels more of a personal thing (inner peace & calming effects). User testings would be really helpful at this stage. Suri also talked about her project updates – I like the storybook idea which serves to complement the exhibition experience.
I had a meeting with Brian, and I present my project to him again, with more detail, and more sources. He suggested me can focus on completing the full series of sketches first. So now I have 8 out of 12 pictures, 4 more to go.
A couple of weekends ago my trip to the US National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, WV. My mom agreed to go with me to help me out with the almost 5-hour-long drive, keep me company, and have a little adventure. This was great news because leading up to the weekend I was feeling a little stressed because I didn’t feel prepared, and was hoping to do some work in the car on the way to West Virginia. A big part of the reason I wanted to visit the Quite Zone was to collect data. I have been hoping that I could find some sort of data to collect that I’d be able to use to compare the Quiet Zone, with where I am currently located in Pennsylvania. The problem was I hadn’t quite figured out what sort of data I wanted to collect, and how. I had been playing with my software-defined radio dongle and could tune into certain radio stations, but I didn’t know how to get data out of CubicSDR into a raw format.
I had been thinking that I would work on this adafruit tutorial to create a radio scanner and hoped that along the way I’d figure out how to get the sort of data I was looking for. In hindsight, I think that I was hoping to gather the signal strength of frequencies within a certain band. The funny thing is, my hypothesis was that I would get very weak or nonexistent signals in the Quiet Zone, so I was basically hoping to get readings that showed the lack of data.
Halfway through the journey to Green Bank, we switched drivers, so I could start trying to figure out how to collect what I needed with my software-defined radio. Driving through the mountains of West Virginia, in the rain, with my laptop open and a weird antenna (my rtl-sdr dongle) sticking out I felt like a storm chaser. It felt like adventure.
Before I left I had played around with my raspberry pi and got the operating system installed. But one thing I didn’t account for was how I was going to ssh into the pi from my laptop on the road – I didn’t have an ethernet cord so I couldn’t get the pi on the same network as my computer (which was using my phone’s hotspot). Shoot. It occurred to me then, that I didn’t really need to create the full radio scanner in the tutorial to get data readings from the SDR – I just needed a way to interact with dongle, and save that data. I started digging into the tutorial a bit more, and that’s when it hit me – they must be using some sort of code package! I found the github repository that the tutorial is based on, and sure enough, they are using a python lib called rtlsdr. Just as I was really starting to make some progress, my internet connection slowed to a crawl. We weren’t even in the Quiet Zone yet, but the mountains seemed to affect the radio waves making their way to my phone as cellular data, which was powering my Google search. I decided to put my computer down, and just enjoy the scenery.
My dad had printed out directions from the hotel to the observatory for my mom before we left – he was worried we weren’t going to have cell service and wouldn’t be able to use the navigation on our phones. Lucky for us, because sure enough, we lost cell service and when I closed my maps app, we lost our directions in the middle of a curvy country road! I was able to reverse the directions that my dad had printed and realized that we were going to pass the Green Bank Observatory on the way to our hotel. As we came closer to the observatory, you could see the telescopes sitting there in the middle of the green of the mountains – so out of place, and almost otherworldly. We decided to stop and check it out in daylight hours, even though we had planned to go back that evening for an event at the observatory called the star party.
As we were pulling up, I realized that I was pretty unprepared for this whole trip. I didn’t really even know what I was going to do at the observatory, or what sort of visitor experience they offered. We walked in and discovered that they had a small exhibit and a bus tour. Seeing how small the visitor’s center was, I was a bit disappointed at first, to be honest. Did we drive all this way, just to see a little science center? But when I walked in, I was instantly SO EXCITED. We decided to do the bus tour to get out closer to the antennas, and while waiting, we looked at the exhibits. In the exhibition, there were several pre-teen kids pulling their parents around telling them how cool the different interactive exhibits were. And then there was me, in my late thirties, doing the exact same thing! Having this experience of being pulled back into the wonder that children feel when they learn about science was almost like an epiphany for me. It helped me explain to my mother what I was even doing in this program. I want to be able to create something that makes these invisible things (the electromagnetic spectrum) more tangible. My mom finally got it. I finally realized that though creating educational tools for kids isn’t necessarily the core driving force of this work, it is a good benchmark. If I’m able to create something that can make kids feel and understand something invisible, hopefully, I’ll also have gotten that same understanding myself.
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A couple of super cool things we learned:
The Greenbank observatory has an array of antennas that are waiting just to observe Fast Radio Bursts – these are radio signals that are observed periodically and scientists don’t really know where they come from. They’re very quick and powerful and happen sporadically without a pattern. Based on their wavelength, scientists think that they aren’t manmade (or alien-made 👽), but are natural phenomena.
The observatory is in Greenbank because they wanted to create the facility in a valley where they would have natural protection from stray radio frequencies from the mountains, and that is close-ish to Washington, DC.
There are several groves of densely packed white pine trees on the campus because white pine needles are good at absorbing radio waves! I just found this article too, talking a bit more about this phenomenon, so cool!
I had a meeting with Brian, I showed him the whole project and explained what is the information that I want to deliver to my audience. he likes my pictures, but I was out of mind to keep drawing my story, he gave me some game references, and a movie list to learn. such as blade runner. I watched it during the weekend. it was really help to keep my creating progress.
Wow. A lot has happened, and I’ve posted about none of it. So it goes. This is my update/clarification post.
On April 10 I lead a workshop that I developed at Utah State University, with their beginning acting class. The workshop centered around Theatre of the Oppressed, opening with a brief history lesson on Augusto Boal and his theories, and then moving into exercises that got kids on their feet. My primary focus for the workshop was to see how untrained “actors” or audience members would respond to Forum Theatre techniques. I was initially worried that I’d run too long (I had two hours lol, but I’m a rambly anxious mess) so within the slides for the workshop I gave myself the leeway to run a shorter version, focused around Image Theatre techniques. This wasn’t what I initially wanted to do–I thought Forum Theatre was the move, you know?–but it proved fruitful, as it went WAY smoother than expected, with tons of engagement from the kids. Because of this, I was able to run both the Image Theatre and Forum Theatre sections, to great avail, and finish on time. The whole thing was filmed and photographed, thanks to my lovely former professor. All the pictures with me in them are too big to upload here, however.
The beginning acting class in question.
From April 18-25 I was in New York, primarily for cultural rehabilitation. Utah can be a lot for me sometimes. During this time, though, I met with my thesis mentor in person twice–thank you Andrew for indulging me and being content to just get coffee and walk through a park talking–and had several extremely fruitful conversations, both with him and my peers. Andrew seemed intrigued by me and my ideas, and challenged me a lot on aspects I wasn’t thinking about. He made it clear to me that what I was doing with the workshop was very cut and dry, opening with a lecture and then asking for engagement. His primary ask was how I could break this structure to gain engagement from the audience almost involuntarily, before they know that they’re hooked. Andrew and I both come from theatre backgrounds, so his insight into storytelling process/method was invaluable for me, as were the conversations and the connection as a whole. Just from talking to him I learned a lot about the affordances of technology–high or low–in the dramatic process. I went into the conversations with the plan to hybridize my workshop, but this led to a whole new level of intrigue. Initially I wanted to simply use zoom and the tools available there (breakout rooms, screen share, chat), and was trying to figure out how best to do this in an interesting way. Andrew proposed that I add more tools; a shockingly simple but needed prod. Since then I’ve been looking into Miro as a live facilitative tool to add in, in addition to zoom, and other tools. He showed me online gallery spaces, akin to VR but hosted on the web, that I thought might be an interesting further exploration as well. Many more insights came from these conversations; using ringers to perform the scenes, dancers instead of actors (people who know how to be present in the body), and further exploration into the power of Image Theatre, especially in an online setting.
Another poignant point brought up in conversation came from Nun, who–like Andrew–was interested in the unseen affordances that a hybrid format offers to this kind of work. She spoke about using tech/digital tools to increase immersion, subsequently increasing engagement. How can I get the audience to participate? Capture their attention in a “theatrical” way, using the digital tools at my disposal.
At this moment I’m working on my presentation for May 2, and compiling my bibliography/archive. I’ll update with how that goes, and post a final reflective blog post soon.
p.s.
Life update: I’m selling all of my material possessions on a whim and going to Shanghai on May 9 with the intention of finding a job and staying. Wish me luck!
I had a lovely and supportive chat with Nicole today that was extremely helpful and centering. It is so helpful to hear about how other students are navigating this ambiguous process, and get feedback on the clarity of my own ideas from someone who is not inside my head.
Sarah pushed me to think about whether the syllabus is the thing, or the nests are the thing. I think that the syllabus is primary, but that I don’t want to have one without the other. I think the syllabus, and thinking about birds, their intelligence, and their technologies, puts this thesis squarely within Process Oriented Work, and toeing into a Design Framework. I don’t think it is solidly a design framework, because the answer to what exactly the framework is has not been clearly articulated in my mind yet. The process of learning has been clearly articulated, as well as my progress through that process.
A link to my syllabus is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZmNyiUIvmzF8WtP0beZYEcD4x32YfZoymxLgBZIKtIE/edit?usp=sharing
So while the syllabus is the primary artifact and the representation of the larger conceptual idea, I think that the physical objects are extremely important to follow through with. These objects are representatives of me moving through the ideas. And while I expect to finish formalizing my thoughts around the class as a whole, I think my object-making may only get to the mid-term of my syllabus.
My migraine vest, at this present moment, is a vest with an extremely oversized hood that I can crawl into when I’m feeling sick. It is my hope that I can build in some additional elements (fans, etc) to fully realize the idea. But this only brings me to the midway point of the class I am envisioning. To arrive at the point of the intended final, I want to consider vastly different materials, processes of fabrication, and parallel metaphorical forms revisiting this same purpose or topic.
Other ideas for Nests for Jamie that I’d love to realize, and then re-examine through the lens detailed above:
A traveling cloak. Dress, coat, etc for wear when traveling. Make one that maximizes my own comfort. Then make a new one that begins to untangle the extremely complicated footprint of travel.
Migratory dress. A dress with LEDs built in that create a visualization of my travels over the last year, inspired by this migratory map of birds. Then make a new one that begins to tackle human (and my own) impact on bird migration.
Symphony of Time Scarf. Inspired by the advent of open window season in Chicago and the ways in which bird sounds and non-human sounds ebb and flow throughout the day, make a scarf that plays the sounds out the window in Chicago, New York, or other location. What would life be if that was your clock? Then do a rev that begins to unpack noise pollution and its impact on humans and non-human species.
 
 
 
