a looking-glass book

the decentralization of art, v2

(yes, this is the updated report from last week. no sense in not updating it.)

here is a second draft of the paper i first posted in oct. this draft, after reading will's comments and speaking with scott, has a lot more in the back end than it did before. the graphs included aren't the greatest, but hopefully they at least illustrate the ideas. if you read this before, page 10 (with 'the fallacy of search engines') is where a lot of changes really start happening. i know that this might need one more draft before i put it to bed, but i hope this will generate some discussion. which will then aim me in the direction i need to head with it.

as always, i welcome your comments/ideas/feeback/editing skills.

the decentralization of art, v2

on character

character is defined by situation and reaction only.

to say "i am depressed' means very little. there is no context, no proof, no understanding, no trust. this is the difference between showing and telling that is commonly taught in writing classes.

to show is to explain, to place in context, to prove.

all you know of me is what you witness. the situations and my reactions to them are what define me in your mind. and the situations i place myself into and how i react is how i am defined as a person.

this holds true for both fictional and nonfictional personages.

it is the only way we can have any real understanding of another person. action and reaction.

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?

project listing

not a list of just projects for 542, these are most of the im projects that are floating around in my head these days.

1. a sort of homecoming. fleshed out last semester, it involves presence detection, video projection and narrative. the proposal and explanation can be found here.

2. wrist annotator. id love to build a small gestural device that sits on your wrist and takes notes for you. thus far, ive managed to narrow down input to (i think) finger tracking using shorthand. i need to have some serious talks with people who know more than i do at this point though, because its starting to seem a little hairy. (th ebest would be to dump the ascii onto a compact flashcard. then you could view it anywhere - i dont plan on this device having a screen, its for notetaking only.)

3. patholog. will gave a really good explanation of where this is going and provided links to where it has come from and what it is. in addition to the items he listed, im interested in the metadata/mining abilities this system could provide you, your trusted sources and the rest of the world. building in the option for realtime updating, flagging, alerts, temporal/location overlap options and privacy for the system are all things i am interested in building on. (these differ, in some cases slightly, in some majorly, from wills explorations of the same platform.)

4. mobile project / collective responsibilty. in collaboration with imsc, we are working on developing a tracking/projection/multi-player game system. i would like to turn this out for my midterm, but im not sure about that as a realistic timeframe. ill know more after we have a mobile meeting this upcoming week.

5. that paper. im not providing a link because i expect to post my new draft this weekend. this is the same paper i have been working on for several months, with more words now. it still isnt a final draft, but its approaching one. of course, this draft has inspiried more ideas and there are two more sections i would like to explore once i wrap this one (and its two sections) up. the ideas that have come out of this one have been extremely heavy on the metadata side of things - both in creation and utilization. as always, the actual process should be kept as simple as possible for the end user (both the browser and the content creator). currently weighing in at about 7500 words, its a bit to bite off. but i dont want to give up on it now.

theres more, of course, but these are the foundations/fleshed out ones. im still very interested in location-based narrative, sending the player around and interacting with others. while i think the zombie game is mostly done, i think that lessons learned can and should be applied to something new, hopefully on a pda.

im not really all that interested in persistant worlds, but mobile entertainment is still way up on my list. games and accessories are things i am really intrigued by - the type of thing you can use briefly and put back away. i find more and more that i have a few spare minutes to play. not 30 minutes to explore, but just a few while im waiting for something or someone. this is the niche i would like to work on filling with currently available technologies.

thesis thoughts

i stressed how much i wanted to create something that was reproducible the other day. it isnt simply important to create something that can be used in the future. i like having it be accessable - that is, the less the user must adapt to the technology and the more the technology can exist in the background, the happier i am.

i came into the program wanting to tell stories across media. the further ive gone into this program and research, the harder it has been to continue on this path. more and more, i feel i am working on beuilding the tools that will enable others to tell stories.

thats ok with me.

i see myself graviatating towards some sort of web interface/data mining/hardware creation of some sort. though i would love to be able to make a game/narrative to leverage location and player into the larger piece.

links
(i must admit i despise link lists, so these are a smattering in no particular order of site i like - either content, programatically, usefully, and other items...)

http://www.friendster.com
http://www.slashdot.org
http://www.underworldlive.com/
disinfo covering majestic
http://www.quvu.net/interactivestory.net/
http://www.grant-morrison.com/
http://grouphug.us
ai web game

well

this post wont count for much, the ones in the next 24 hours should count for a lot more. but i cant believe i havent posted in almost 2 months. this is not due to sheer laziness on my part.

im about to finish a second draft the paper i posted in october. hopefully a more rounded version, more fully explaining my ideas. working on this paper has led to more ideas, 2 future sections exploring more of these ideas.

ive got a ton of ideas to sketch out on here and i plan to in the next 24 hours. but realizing it had been so long but yet not quite being ready to post them, im throwing up this 'useless' post in the interim.

ah well.