499

parallel

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/003095.php

This looks pretty relevant to (what I alone am probably still referring to as) the SMS impalla project. MIght be worth a look...

"allow[s] people to snoop into fellow travelers mobile phones and read text messages, view images and listen to conversations while traveling. The MSS was available on trial on bus nr.52 in London earlier this year."

Luna Incognita

I have the text for the project here.
Pictures to be shown during class.

"...Captain seemed to be looking away from us at the colours in the sky, he suddenly turned and sent our souls to the Moon. And it was colder there than ice at night; and there were horrible mountains making shadows; and it was all as silent as miles of tombs; and Earth was shining up in the sky as big as the blade of a scythe, and we all got homesick for it, but could not speak nor cry..."

Lord Dunsany, "Poor Old Bill"

final propsal

this pdf outlines the project i am proposing to build next semester for the zml projection space. there isnt anything to say about it here, but i wanted to provide a link to the pdf in case someone wanted to reference it.

Grocery Database online

check it:

Gelson's Log

if someone could post some comments or something, it would aide my final presentation. thanks.

Will in the news

Today's (Sunday's) LA TIMES Calendar, Part 2 page E33
This Old Obsession,
an article about Gegor Schneider's Dead House ur:

"Will Carter, a 23 year old USC student, visits shortly after the house opens to the public. To navigate parts that are dimly lit, he uses the glow of his cellphone. He explores the house, finding hidden spaces and trying doors.
He finds some rooms quite disconcerting, such as the cellar with a child's bicycle and a deflated sex doll. "It reminds me of playing a video game," he says afterward. "It didn't feel like an installation in a museum. It feels like you're in a real space."

Ping Pong

Moonscape

This project concept has changed considerably from my original concept. Right now resolution mapping of the moon isn't quite up to what I originally wanted to do (that is, recreate the moon to the extent that you can accurately walk around on it). However, the location of the moon is still intriguing, and brings with it a way to view a more familiar object: The Earth.

What I propose is sort of a reverse, or remote planetarium: In short, a way to view the sky from a vantage point on the moon. The driving narrative would be the history of the Earth as seen from the moon, from the moon's origins through the climate changes in the earth, up through skybox seats to the celestial impact c. 65 million BCE, up through the modern age.

Immersion is a key part of this project. A planetarium-like structure would be ideal, although an head-mounted display would also work pretty well. The flat, lunar landscape would be projected around the virtual horizon, with an accurate night sky above. The installation would act as a sort of almanac, the user being able to input dates to the the corresponding moon's sky. Certain events would be bookmarked, especially unique events like the dinosaur-killing meteorite. Other infrequent events, like lunar and solar eclipses, would also have to have special attention paid to them.

The player will have access to a virtual "telescope", although it will not be any more powerful than any current terrestrial telescope. Watching the earth changing from a distance is key...you probably won't be able to see your house from here. In the case of the room installation it would probably be a replica of an actual telescope, complete with eyepiece. The headmount version would end up more like a zoom function.

The interface for controlling the installation would probably be a kiosk in the center of the room (or simply a keyboard and mouse with the hmd) that essentially acts like an H.G. Wells time machine. Commands for "speed up" and "slow down" would be primary, allowing virtual days to pass in seconds (or perhaps hours), plus a bookmarking system for favorite dates and ease of travel to distant times.

If the immersion is done well, I think it will be a primary tool for engaging the user. While the factual information will (hopefully) interest the user, allowing them to spend time in a darkened room, with events happening just dynamic enough to catch the edge of perception, but not so dynamic as to be overwhelming (and hence quickly tiresome), people would stay and watch. If virtual days would pass by every few minutes (enough to catch the eye, but not enough so the sky becomes a strobe light), I think an pleasant ambient equilibrium could be maintained by default, one that the user could change if they wanted, but a preset that would kick in after a period of idleness.

The project as a whole would probably be most at home in a gallery or museum. I'm designing it with for the "museum mind-set." In essence, I hope to give users of the installation a new perspective, both in terms of scale, celestial motion (the "dark side" isn't any more dark than the face we see, for instance), and perhaps a way to better estimate how big (or small) the Earth really is.

Dead how?

I was not very intrigued by the house at all. I felt less was explorable in a group setting, and more was to be enjoyed by the individuals own personal expierence. I feel that one person should be let into the house at a time, given at least 10 minutes to move around, and then send the next one in. If my expierence was an individual one, I would have been frightened more than curious, at least for the first few minutes. I don't think, that even being alone, I would have gone into the tiny crevices that we as group climbed through. Therefore, I would have missed the very few intricacies of the house.

Tripps comment about the amount of secrets available was a rather valuable one. I would agree partly that the doors that are closed are frustrating, only because there were so few open to begin with. One or two frozen doors would be fine, but the amount close were not.

My thoughts of the authors intent was that they were trying to communicate the feel of a personal space that had been lived in, and that it had a very specific narrative behind it. I think where this fails is that they were trying to express the history of the space without anything in it. As interesting as this concept can be, I feel the only way to effectively pull it off would be to have many more rooms, each constructed in the odd fashion that those were. Stairs were meant for climbing, but they also need to lead somewhere, not just nowhere. Houses all have their locked doors, but the inhabitors have more ways than one to access those secret places.

Basically, I needed a lot more of the same thing, or less with more secret rooms full of junk to give me some sort of narrative. Hiding it all in one place didn't seem to be to effective; pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Hmmmm, maybe if I could just see it, but not get to it.

grocery database | project outline

so my final is going to be a prototype for something possibly larger. below is an outline of what the prototype will entail. on monday, I started cataloging everything I buy at my gelson's (the one that beck shops at, too. most cool people must shop at this store, huh?)

see my recent purchases here

Dead Again

I felt from the moment that I entered the installation an intense desire to escape from the group and let my hands blindly and silently lead me through. There were flashes of a natural and intuitive path through the space despite the "follow the leader" behaviour pattern and the sensory disruption of the guard, so even though the piece is not striclty linear, the sense of exploration is constrained by the artist's intended environmental narrative. Doors that do not open, panels that are sealed tightly shut, stairs that lead nowhere and hallways that dead-end abruptly in cement are naturally frustrating to a "user-interface" designer trying to understand the map of the exhibit but at the same time, are instructive to the way that we should read the experience; not all pathways yield an epiphany or maybe even a message at all. Then the experience is liberating for both the author and the audience.

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