a looking-glass book

midterm ideas

this could easily turn into another paper.

i have been thinking for a long time about the idea of context, defining a character (not by telling or even showing, but by having the character be absent. this was a focus of one of my favorite tv shows - 'twin peaks' and something i played around with in a text game for interactive writing last spring.), blogs and self-expression.

we produce too much text as is, what happens when we look at video? when video becomes as popular? (it is going to happen - technology will allow us to store more and more data and prices will continue to fall on video technology). kurt told me to go back and look at my notes from the mark davis lecture. i have, and unlike his thoughts, i find these ideas to be an extenuation.

so whats the project?

i attach a camera to myself and shoot. shoot where i look - this could be random, it could be setup, whatever, but its strictly pov. and when i say pov, i mean hardcore, the focus of the eye stays in the center of the frame, very directly where you are looking. digitize it and bring it into max. set the playback speed, so the user can vary it from real time to something like 32x (perhaps a better way to think of it is # of frames per second) and add a filter that looks for changes in shots. a threshold, so it becomes a degree of adjustment, how much detail and informarion you want. you can watch the hour uncut or you can watch the 4 most varied shots a one frame every 15 seconds.

it becomes a way to define chracter through context. the filmer remains in control, but the user can absorb as much detail (or as little) as they need or want. this becomes very important in time-based media. we create more things then we could ever hope to watch. once every one of us is doing this daily, we have to have a way to boil down that which is created.

i imagine this as a larger system. if everyone used a system like this, we would 1. be back to data glut. so how do you distill video so it is managable, when everyone in the world produces a copy of their life to be viewed by everyone else. 2. the narrative side of things is entirely context and what you film. given that you created enough of these, you would build up a chracter, not by what they said or wrote online, but what you watched them do, what they looked at and what they controlled.

it becomes more interesting if you had more people using it, much like hte patholog. you could build up entire scenes, days, months from different points of view. in a densly populated area, you could have a complete map of a time/space from every pov.

when i was a kid, one of my idea of heaven/reincarnation was sitting around watching other peoples lifes through their eyes. this seems to be a step.

(kurt wants more metadata, though he has yet to explain why - he wants gps and image recognition. i can see value in these, but i dont believe they are necesary at thsi stage. i believe that given enough of these for a single person, you could begin to understand that person simply from seeing where they looked and what they did. the information becomes the context.)

bueller? bueller?