Maya Churi

Articulate a collective participation strategy (i.e., how will you take advantage of being part of a participatory culture?)

Wikipedia defines Participatory Culture as “a reference to the sum of the customs or ways of life that lead consumers to create and circulate new content on a medium.” If the words of this sentence are rearranged it could read, “a reference to content created by consumers to circulate new customs or ways of life.”

I am interested in exploring that deep ravine that lies between learning about something and actually taking action to change it. Recently a seed of pessimism was planted in my brain. It has just begun to sprout even though I have been trying to starve it into submission. This past weekend I realized that the seed had grown when, after a 3-hour drive along the central coast, the mustard colored hills (Joan Didion called them this), made me think of the parched landscape of a planet whose inhabitants are slowing burning it up. I kept having to remind myself that we live in a desert, the hills are supposed to look like that.

No matter. It got me thinking about taking action and how does one encourage…no, demand…no, subtly COERCE people to willingly make change in culture - to participate and understand all of the consequences. That brings me back to the rearranged Wikipedia sentence, “a reference to content created by consumers to circulate new customs or ways of life.” Is this a challenge?

Decide on and articulate your own strategy for creating a productive tension between theory and practice in your work.

In thinking of a strategy I have to first answer the question of whether theory or practice comes first. For me, theory is going to come before practice. In the past the practice of my work has always come before theory. I would like to switch it around.

That said, my first step is to read.

Define proficiency and an economy of value for the realm in which you intend to work (i.e., how do you want your work to be judged?)

I would like for my work to be perceived as one of a group of works that helped change the way a generation (or two) understood the world they lived in. And also…encouraged…no, demanded…no, COERCED people to willingly make change.

3 things you do really well
Manage
Produce
Motivate

3 things you want to learn
To draw
To tell a story
To garden

3 things you want to be great at
Articulating ideas
Remembering (people, places, things)
Balancing home/work, life/love, theory/practice

Post a few links, names or readings that you are interested in exploring as part of the research for these projects.

Coming soon.

The Promise of an Empty Space

Take the promise of an empty space and an empty screen then fill the space with your own story.

All of the digital storytelling mediums take place on a screen. The promise of the blank screen or the empty space is that a story will unfold before our eyes. We may interact with that screen but for the most part we are being told a story - guided through an alternate space.

What if we flipped the unspoken arrangement between digital storyteller and viewer?

What if the viewer was given an empty room and a blank screen? What if when the viewer began to tell their story the screen(s) would slowly become filled with people (or digital dwellers from familiar stories) listening to the viewer. When the viewer stops talking, or disappears, the digital dwellers would disappear - retreating back to the space just beyond the edges of the screen.

Timline/Production Schedule

Nowhere: an unknown, remote, or nonexistent place or region.*

A secret place so secluded no one even knows it exists. It isn't on any maps and doesn't have a zip code. It stands at the intersection of three counties and therefore isn't in any government records and doesn't receive mail. The address is next to the llama farm, at the end of the overgrown dirt road, on top of the hill.

Nowhere is the world I will build in this class.

It is also the fictional location of a children's book I am writing.

*Random House Unabridged Dictionary

Today we met with Perry and he offered us the immersive lab (photo below) to use as the staging ground for the Empty Space project. This is great news since the space already has projector mounts and a screen.

In our discussions with Perry he recommended doing a "live" rapid prototype. For this we need to recruit classmates to play the digital dwellers in the prototype (any takers?). We might have to conduct the rapid prototype experiment in the ZML since there isn't much space in the immersive lab.

What resources will we need?
Hardware:
Projector
Microphone and cables
Mic stand
Speakers
Computer

Software:
MAX/MSP
+Database of movie fragments
+Pitch tracking
+Voice recognition

What research will make this project better?
Prior Art - Don Ritter
Books: Bill Buxton Sketching and a book on body language and meaning

What will your deliverables be?
A scaled-down (3 objects w/ dozens of movies) version of the project. Ultimately, we'd like to have 10's of digital dwellers appear and disappear on the screen. For this semester we'd like to get everything working with at least 3 digital dwellers.

Written documentation.