April 30, 2003
Metadata
Scott and I had an interesting chat today about the possibilities of metadata. Like Marc pointed out in his talk at UCLA last Thursday, metadata is both underutilized and lacking in standards, but the benefits of integrating automatic data abstraction into our workflows offers more than just increased efficiency, it offers us fresh perspectives on the virtual and physical objects that we manipulate. Imagine an augmented reality system that automatically catalogs objects then allows the user to annotate it with personal notes.
April 23, 2003
Georges Méliès
Who is the Georges Méliès of interative media?
April 22, 2003
Arbitrary
ar·bi·trar·y (ärʼbĭ-trĕr'ē)
adj.
1. Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle: stopped at the first motel we passed, an arbitrary choice.
2. Based on or subject to individual judgment or preference: The diet imposes overall calorie limits, but daily menus are arbitrary.
3. Established by a court or judge rather than by a specific law or statute: an arbitrary penalty.
4. Not limited by law; despotic: the arbitrary rule of a dictator.
[Middle English arbitrarie, from Latin arbitrārius, from arbiter, arbitr-, arbiter.]
ar'bi·trarʼi·ly (-trârʼɘ-lē) adv.
arʼbi·trar'i·ness n.
Synonyms: arbitrary, capricious, whimsical
These adjectives mean determined by or arising from whim or caprice rather than judgment or reason: an arbitrary decision; a capricious refusal; a whimsical remark.
April 20, 2003
Soul Depressor
I would like to create an interactive piece around the theme of depression.
If you are interested please contact me. We will start as soon as the semester ends.
Two components: Melancholic Meditation(Mediation?) and Networked Isolation.
The first part will be defined by the progressive loss of control in a virtual environment.
The second part will be created around the structure of users interacting through manipulation of color and sound that combine to form an abstract expressive stream.
I just thought of this on my lunch break so there is much more to develop. Anyone that is interested is encouraged to participate. I am interested in including photography, film/video, painting, poetry, music, computer code... whatever you feel that you can contribute. Perhaps a database structure that is dynamically expandable to include submissions? I would like the networked experience to allow the recording of an expressive "performance" that is retained by the system.
I feel I need to escape the constraints of "narrative" and retreat to a subject with which I am intimately familiar. At the moment it's depression and I would like to grow something creative from that.
KMAC
April 19, 2003
Tori Amos, Ten Unknowns, and Sigur Ros
I saw Tori Amos last night (Friday the 18th... timestamping is not working... it is now, I fixed it.) at the Arlington in Santa Barbara with my sister (Julia) and her friends (Jessica and Al) . Wednesday my parents came down to LA for a visit, so I showed them the cinema campus (introducing them to everyone along the way... in fact I think that Tatsu, Todd and Sam are the only students in our program that haven't met my parents... they met Jen too!) before we went to dinner at the Newsroom and saw Ten Unknowns with Stacy Keach at the Mark Taper Forum. Combined with the Sigur Ros show that I saw on Monday the 7th at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I have found myself inspired by the power of live performance.
I won't review the shows.
I will say that the appeal of live performance on stage has not been exhausted over the several thousand years of human history since it became a formal structure and fixture in civilization.
Blah, blah, blah.
Just go see more live events!
And take me with you!
KMAC
Mobile + TV = ?
"Interactive TV is now just a cell phone text message away."
April 17, 2003
Genderspace
Genderplay: Successes and Failures in Character Designs for Videogames
April 15, 2003
1D (first in a series)
Does linear imply chronological?
Does chronological imply linear?
"Linear" as a word/concept has been heavily abused. Especially when in its negated form as "non-linear."
Linear means (it's tricky to ever claim "x means y" but I'll leave that problem to Saul Kripke...) having a line-like quality.
This requires a perspective. So linearity is a "visually" observable characteristic.
The word linear does not contain a description of the progression of narrative time. The word linear does not contain a description of the order of the construction of the parts. It merely says that from a certain perspective the subject appears one-dimensional.
Use of the word "linear" should be restricted to referencing specific points of view and specific aspects of the subject. A "linear narrative" may have been written out of order but it retains its linearity from the perspective of the reader. A book that tells the events of the story out of chronological order is still read from "beginning" to "end" (or "front" to "back" or "cover to cover") so it is still in every sense quite linear. One should not say "non-linear" when one means "non-chronological."
Although the reader is free to navigate the text out of the word order, the conventions of language are powerful restrictions that most people will not attempt to resist or subvert. [there is a habit, one I share w/ many others, of reading the last page/chapter of a book before I "get there".] Films viewed in a theater do not this navigability, due to the shared experience of the audience, but video and DVD versions do.
As to whether chronological necessarily implies linear I would like to object but I have not come up with a good counter example yet.
This is a deep subject with serious consequences in our understanding of interactive media.
Blog Velocity
I feel the need to apologize for my lack of postings over the last week. Perhaps there is a sense of competition among the Interactve students (there certainly is...) or perhaps I have personal expectations about what I should be contributing to this blog project (I certainly do...), however vaguely I understand the goals or mechanics of it, which is not to say that I am not invested in it, rather that I am having trouble diverting my thoughts into blog velocity.
So momentum is an issue that I expect will reoccur frequently on this page. I wander and in wandering I change direction and in changing direction I lose personal velocity on a particular subject.
Just an observation.
I have a few goals :
Create a digital version of my photography collection titled "Infrastructure".
And then post it.
Write about Japan.
Write about photography.
Write about interactivity.
KMAC
April 14, 2003
Robert ParkeHarrison
Another favorite.
"I want to make images that have open, narrative qualities, enought to suggest ideas about human limits. I want there to be a combination of the past juxtaposed with the modern. I use nature to symbolize the search, saving a tree, watering the earth. In this fabricated world, strange clouds of smog float by; there are holes in the sky. These mythic images mirror our world, where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed. Through my work I explore technology and a poetry of existence. These can be very heavy, overly didactic issues to convey in art, so I choose to portray them through a more theatrically absurd approach."
-RPH
Both Robert and Joel-Peter have been published by Twin Palms Publishers.
KMAC
Joel-Peter Witkin
A photographer.
Shock followed by awe.
KMAC
Nihongo ga sukoshi dekimasu
Watshi no omoide ha sen kyuuhyaku kyuujuu hachi san gatsu desu. UCLA daigaku de ichinen deshita. boku no itoko to eiga o torimashita. Itoko ha Larissa Brantner-san desu. Brantner-san ha purodyuusaa deshita. Boku ha eiga o kakimashita. Soshite, direkutaa deshita. Eiga no namae ha "A Dinner For Two" desu.
Ringo juusu ga arimashita. Watashi ha ni juu issai jaarimansendeshita kara wain to "champagne" ga arimasendeshita. Eiga de watashi no tomodachi to watashi no kazoku ha shigoto shimashita. Greg-san ha kameraman deshita. Greg-san no gaarufurendo ha "extra" deshita. Kyasuto ha yonin kyasuto deshita.
Kono hito ha Judd Hollander, Jenny Bond, Stan Pham, Josh Morgan deshita. Hollander-san no toojoojinbutsu ha "The Man" deshita. Bond-san no toojoojinbutsu ha "The Woman" deshita. Pham-san no toojoojinbutsu ha "The Waiter" deshita. Morgan-san no toojoojinbutsu ha "The Killer" deshita. Morgan-san ha samukatta desu.
Watashitachi ha eiga ni futsuka kan shigoto shimashita.
Paatii o shimashita. Tomodachi to kazoku ha kimashita. Watashitachi ha eiga o mimashita.
---
I wrote that about a year ago while taking a Japanese class. The grammar is quite remedial and I am sure that Tatsu will amused to read it.
マクドナルド カｰト
April 6, 2003
"Trigger Happy"
Stephen Poole's Trigger Happy, which I picked up while in London over Spring Break, contains an interesting attempt to analyze the form of the video game and derive some theory about what games must do to become art. I find this project extremely inspiring and I find Poole's effort to be very worthwhile even though it seems tragically dated now, only three years after it was published (subtract another year for the writing process as well). The momentum of the game industry does not appear to be slowing so we must accept that all analyses of it will seem obsolete and try to salvage the valuable critical insight that is chronologically context-independent.
Reading Trigger Happy, I found that although Poole falls far short of a deep textual analysis worthy of Roland Barthes' S/Z, I enjoyed his proposals as to the satisfactions of game-playing for humans and the essential differences of games from any other media. So it may not contain the academic rigor that releases critical interactive media theory from the grip of the crossover film theorists, but it quite appropriately discourages reading video games as film texts. And I think that this is what Poole has done most effectively and lastingly: he has encouraged the reader to stop thinking of games as interactive movies but to (perhaps even more importantly) demand the same level of artistic refinement and reflection.
KMAC
April 4, 2003
It starts with a bang...
If technology has a cutting edge, a cliché that elicits the image of a sailing vessel slicing through the ocean but a cliché nonetheless, then sex is always on the bow of the yacht with arms thrown open screaming "I'm king of the world!"
In fact there are many who claim that the most base of human desires is not just along for the ride but actually providing the impetus for innovation, especially in media and communication technologies. Think of the scene from Boogie Nights where the introduction of videotape revolutionized the production of pornography overnight. Theaters closed and sales of VCRs boomed. Sex changes everything. It goes further and faster than that: my roommate, Joshua J. Morgan, wrote a paper in 2000 while studying communication as an undergraduate at UCLA (now currently an animation MFA there) about how the pornography industry was the first to use banner ads and streaming video.
So what is sex doing for/to technology today?
In an article on thefeature.com, Justin Hall and Jane Pinckard wrote about how the Japanese, far ahead of the US in phone technology and adaptation, have integrated sex into their mobile lives (or is it mobility into their sex lives?). They interviewed David "DC" Collier, a Japanese mobile expert that spoke at GDC 2003 and to the USC IM group in LA by invitation from Scott Fisher, and he said:
"Europe is no less horny, but in Japan they have pictures. A black-and-white lame little WAP thing is just less appealing than a high-resolution cute little i-mode thing."
So the Americans and the Europeans are a little behind for now, but they'll catch up. The human sex drive is a powerful thing. No one will be left behind. And as a motivational force it will bring us moaning and groaning into the future.
Sorry... I couldn't resist.
KMAC