OWS

1. New York Times article talks about the genius behind OWS branding:

"By christening its first camp “#Occupy Wall Street,” Adbusters set a precedent whereby other groups could instantly invent their own versions of “Occupy” in different locations..."

"Occupy" is easily customizable and translatable into different languages. The hash tag helps people search for the movement on Twitter. Using a raised fist as a symbol places the movement historically.

The crux of this argument, which highlights the irony of this success, is here:

In short, “Occupy” is a stellar example of both what is known in marketing as an umbrella brand name and what the anti-corporatists in the movement could call beating them at their own game.

2. Interview with the man behind OWS' "Bat Signal" on its two-month anniversary.

Mark Read, 45, used a Sony 12K lumen projector that sells for around $10K to get the graphics on the wall. He used the apartment of a relative stranger in the building across the way from which to project. He wrote the words himself.

Class #10

1. New York Times article about Carsten Höller, the artist now showing at the New Museum. His work captures a sense of innocent fun and experimentation, especially his famous slides. He also is interested in altering the viewer's mental state.

2. At the New Museum, Spartacus Chetwynd reacts to "over-professionalism" in contemporary art with a ragtag group of dancer-performers who celebrate improvisation and amateurism.

3. Face recognition

New York Times article explores the marketing trend of the future: facial detection and facial recognition. It explores issues of privacy associated with this advance and the murkiness of the law surrounding it.

4. Duck Duck Go is a search engine that seeks to eliminate the problems of the filter bubble caused by the algorithms in Google and Bing. It doesn't track your information to tailer a search result for your taste. Without that, you are able to encounter ideas that don't necessarily fit with your world view.

In this article, a rep from Google tells us how we can avoid some of Google's built in personalization features.

In this book, Eli Pariser explains the online filter bubble, an "individual universe of information" and argues that it is bad because it leaves "less room for the unexpected encounters that spark creativity, innovation, and the democratic exchange of ideas."

In this article, Parisner is quoted as saying that the Internet "can encapsulate us in a little bubble of our narrow interests, or it can connect us to new people and ways of thinking.” Parisner proposes that a greater collaboration between editors and code can solve the problem of the filter bubble.

5. Emerald Demo

Hunch is a recommendation site. It is also described as a collective intelligence decision-making system. These service-y sites are on the rise now, it seems. I can think of two, Jinni and Goodreads that serve similar functions.

6. My Demo!

A new camera for the iPhone lets you take panoramic video. It's a relatively cheap add-on with lots of potential uses. I can imagine it catching on.

7. Pearl's Demo

Pearl showed us a tourism video that lets users interact with panoramic images. Taken from a plane, the click of a mouse lets you see all different angles as the craft soars above a landscape. A great way to travel without leaving your seat!

8. A headset that reads your brainwaves

Tan Le's headset lets one alter images in a computer program with the power of one'smind. It was most effective in the demonstration when the tester performed a pre-programmed command. It was less effective when he had to rely more on his imagination to make the box disappear.

9. Brain-powered iPhone?

Hackers harness electrical activity in the brain to command Siri for the iPhone. It's not mind-controlled necessarily but it's a neat trick.

New York Historical Society

I had never before been to the New York Historical Society, but I recently had the chance to go shortly after its renovation with Cynthia.

America's history is rich and colorful and the museum serves to celebrates it. In the lobby, I saw the real pistols that Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton used in a duel. I also saw interactive, quasi-augmented reality screens that helped me learn about different artifacts. I was also introduced to the new smart phone app connected to the museum. I never got to use it, but it's interesting to consider how new media is influencing the museum-goer's experience.

I also saw paintings that explored the notion of taste. These included America's dramatized landscapes, and I particularly remember one painting that combined imagery of New York City with Ancient Greece. On the top floor, I viewed a vast collection of artifacts, including election buttons, lamps (where I remembered Abigail who lives in Connecticut), chairs, daggers, and busts. I saw a ghostly display of chairs with outfits slumped on top of them as though a crowd had just vanished from them. I learned about voodoo and lots of other stuff which now slips my mind (I still have work to do on my memory tricks).

It was a fun visit, followed by a nice walk in Central Park. The weather was lovely.

A Few Notes On The Woody Allen Documentary

This weekend I watched Robert Weide's two-part documentary of Woody Allen on PBS.

I have long been a fan of Allen's work and found the documentary fascinating.

I knew little of Allen's early career, especially the fact that he got his start writing for television, and was a late bloomer in New York's stand up comedy scene. I found it amusing that Allen was such a reluctant performer, considering how much natural ability he seems to have to entertain.

It's also amazing to reflect on how much control Allen got of his work so early on. Indeed, Allen has always relished creative control in his films, and you can tell by how bitter he still is about his first film, which was butchered by the studio. It is interesting then, how flexible he seems to be with his actors, allowing them to improvise, and offering little critique of their performances. These two practices, control and restraint, seem to fly in the face of one another.

I learned more about Allen's admiration for the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, and how his influences come from both high and low culture. Allen's body of work straddles these two extremes, from slapstick comedies like Bananas to mock-philosophical films like Love and Death. Allen himself seems to struggle with his identity as a filmmaker and writer. He really wants to be a tragedian but in fact his natural gift is comedy.

Allen's career has had ups and downs, as has his personal life. I was pleased to discover that, after the financial triumph of Midnight in Paris, he is feeling more confident in his abilities. It is unfortunate, however, that a man of such talent has never considered himself a success by his own standards. Perhaps that's the byproduct of being an artist. Filmmaking for Allen is a lifestyle, and maybe he will always chase the notion of a great film. I feel lucky, as a viewer, to be able to follow him on that journey.

Class #9 New Media Reader

Chapter 14- Four Selections by Experiments in Art and Technolgy

Intro

• Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) formed in 1966 by four guys after one of them, Billy Kluver from Bell Telephone contributed technology to a sculpture called "Homage to New York."
• The organization helped advance the possibilities of technology and art
• E.A.T. made a performance exhibition called 9 evenings, which received mixed reviews but served as an inspiration for the new media field

The Garden Party by Billy Kluver

• The sculpture "machine" he helped make destroys itself
• He calls it a spectacle
• The destruction of the machine is an ideal of good machine and a good human
• Both New York and the machine has humor and poetry

The four selections

• variations VII by John Cage- a piece of music that is created using the sounds already in the air at the performance
• vehicle by Lucinda Childs- consists of animate, inanimate and air-supported materials that make a sort of music. Inolves a doppler sonar, a refrigerator vacuum, etc.
• carriage descreteness by yvonne ranier- a dance whose choroegraphy is relayed over walkie talkie with multimedia in the background
• open score by robert rauschenberg- tennis as dance improvisation. wireless mic on a tennis racket
• a press release calls the exhibition a marriage of new technology and art that should have always developed together and that, together, open up new creative possibilities

The Pavilion by Bill Kluver

• The Pavilion is open-ended, an environment that allows for personal choice
• The artist shows how technology can be used in new environments
• It was a collaboration of artists and engineers in Japan and the US. There was some confusion and frustration when artists and engineers tried to switch roles.
• Aspects of the Pavilion: the Fog, the Mirror, the Clam Room, the Mirror Room
• There were programmers who lived inside the structure
• Pavilion was "theatre conceived of as a total instrument"
• This brought up interesting questions about the role of the artist, legally. Also talks about the relationship of the artist and industry.

Chapter 15 - Cybernated Art

• Nam June Paik is considered the first video artist
• He coined the term "information superhighway"
• There was a history of TV before it was even invented
• June wrote a manifesto, which provides a cybernetic/ Buddhist context for his work

NOTE: On the topic of technology and art, here's an interesting contribution from Brooklyn artist Adam Frank. "Performer" is currently in Times Square.

Chapter 31- Will There be Condominiums in Data Space?

Intro

Artists changed the viewer/video dynamic

Bill Viola is a video artist who has a poetic approach to the video medium

Will there be Condominiums in Data Space? by Bill Viola

• Really interesting quote: "Possibly the most startling thing about our individual existence is that it is continuous. It is an unbroken thread -- we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives us the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods, or section of certain times or 'highlights.' Hollywood movies and the media, of course, reinforce this perception."
• "Life without editing it seems, is just not that interesting." Old video art recorded everything and didn't "forget."
• Memo-technics = artificial memory
• Data space - imagined physical space must exist in order to operate within it
• Video and holism- the idea that the art exists before it is executed
• Reality is people putting together pieces that were originally whole
• Art and structuralism, the author argues that it is important
• The marriage of video and computer: "the ultimate recording technology: total spatial storage, with the viewer wandering through some three-dimensional, possibly life-sized field of prerecorded or simulated scenes and events evolving in time." THE VIDEO GAME!
• The idea of a "Master" edit and "original" footage will disappear in the future
• "Playback speed....can be modulated, shifted up or down, superimposed, or interrupted according to the parameters of the electronic wave theory...." TIVO?
• Moving from constructing a program to carving out one....infinite points of view as opposed to one singular product
• Mapping conceptual structures of the brain into technology- the matrix, branching, idea space, etc.
• The author concludes that artists need to start paying attention to video.

Class #9 Delicious Posts

1. Why your next phone might be bendable

flexible displays can mimic paper

it might allow any surface to become a screen

2. Hacking the drug cartels

Boing Boing- speculation about whether Anonymous really plans opcartel to take on a murderous Mexican drug cartel

Wired- though Anonymous has lately begun to take strong moral stances, many within the organization have distanced themselves from the op

3. History of the Guy Fawkes Masks concerning Occupy Wall Street

Guy Fawkes was a British conspirator who plotted to kill King James, but was unsuccessful. He is celebrated in England.

Anonymous grew out of 4chan, and the group idolized comic book hero V, from V for Vendetta, who wore a Guy Fawkes mask

Anonymous helped the OWS movement, and now many in the movement have adopted the mask

4. Floating Cars- Quantum Levitation

Quantum locking-- the water object stays locked in place even as it moves along the track

This technology might be used to make floating cars in the future

5. Hacked Kinect, Projection Device

OmniTouch is a wearable projection system that turns any surface into a digital interface

You can interact with menus, keyboards, and other applications on any surface

6. Bergenz Festival

Toxel- Creative floating stage changes every two years for Bregenzer performing arts festival.

BregenzerFestival website- This year's opera, Andrew Chenier, is set against the background of the French revolution.

Live picture- The festival has a webcam that updates viewers with a new picture of the floating stage during construction every two minutes.

Class: Interactive News

Interactive news is a recent and innovative field in journalism, helping find new and creative ways for readers to consume and participate in news. It combines data journalism with data visualization and all the latest tools of the web including social media.

Michael's presentation showed us some of the possibilities of this field, especially in the area of sports. He showed us how the New York Times covered the soccer World Cup, using live-updated maps of the field that changed to display ball possession. Michael then showed us how he adapted this model for last year's coverage of the Quidditch World Cup for the Washington Square News.

Michael also showed us what he's working on for this year's Quidditch World Cup, including a new website and an iPad app that will let Cup officials update the website with stats instantaneously.

Interactive news is exciting, but as Michael told us, it is not a perfect science yet. He showed us some unsuccessful examples of interactive news, including one from Al Jazeera that seemed to have limited functionality. Michael explained that a lot of news organizations don't have the means to draw the best talent to this field, and even with the talent that they have, they don't have as much resources to devote as is really necessary.

Michael's presentation, however, showed me that this is a field that deserves one's full attention. While it is no substitute for a written article, interactive news has the potential to tell stories and engage audiences in ways that are not possible in a print medium. I believe the field will really take off once more accessible tools are developed so that smaller organizations and individuals can contribute, and not just the big organizations.

Rich's Video Game Presentation

The main goal of Rich's presentation was to trace the development of narrative in video games.

Though I missed the latter part of the lecture to go to the Huffington Post, I was able to catch some of Rich's points.

One of his contentions is that creating a good story in video games is not necessarily dependent on excellent graphics. He also sought to show us how sometimes in video games a good story sometimes comes at the expense of good game play.

To demonstrate these fact, he showed us an old game, Final Fantasy IV, that had relatively simple graphics, but a rich, complicated story that gamers could experience by clicking through dialogue exchanged between characters. The clicking, Rich explained, is actually a much more active way of experiencing the story than some of today's games. Those games use cut scenes that take the control completely out of the gamer's hands.

Rich also showed us a newer game, Heavy Rain, that had better graphics and a complex environment but had game play issues. In the introductory scene, we are a father looking for his son in a shopping mall. As he runs around shouting his son's name, the only option the gamer has is when to shout.

The other problem with this game is that the character design is close to reality, but not quite close enough to seem real. Rich showed us a chart that explained the range of realism in characters and how that relates to our suspension of disbelief. We are able to connect to a stick figure because we know he is meant to be merely a symbol of a real person, but when we see a figure who is meant to be human but does not fit the bill we cannot believe it as easily. He showed us a scene from Mass Effect 2 to further prove his point.

The field of video game development, Rich said, has expanded beyond the big game makers to every day consumers. As an example, he showed us a game he developed using software that you can purchase. Today, playing video games is not a passive activity, but one that can involve creativity and individual expression.

Later, Rich showed us an example of a game that combined great storytelling with great graphics. The scene we saw was the climax of the game in which the protagonist kills a crazed character, and learns that he has been motivated to kill all along by a string of code words. Rich' assertion, that video games are an art form, seems to be proven by this scene, which shows the potential of a form that many once belittled.