I looked online, and found that a new piece of software had emerged, Dragon. It's a stop motion program. It's really designed to be used with DSLRs, but it will work with DV cameras. I spent some research time reading over the manual and trying a few 2-3 second things, just to get the hang of the interface. I then put together this 30 second little beauty. not awesome, but not bad. I liked the story, such as it is.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Research/Final
So, I got to thinking about this class. i think it's meant to be a place to mess around in a sanctioned way, and to pursue things that interest the student. So I looked at the things I've always wanted to try, but never really made time to learn how to do it, and I came up with stop motion. I love Robot Chicken, and I've always wanted to really try it. I've messed around with it a bit, but had never really tried to put anything together for real.
Monday, April 27, 2009
IN Innovators. Where are they?
Sorry to say, but art for art’s sake isn’t a big business in Indiana. Most practitioners of New Media around here are in it strictly for the dollars. And most of them aren’t terribly innovative. I think that’s probably true anywhere, but more true here. I’ve found a few that are interesting though. Some of these are cool because of what they make, and some are cool because of the overall effect they could have on our community. Some I think are alright just because they’ve found a way to monetize the skill we’re learning here. You can tell that graduation is rapidly approaching, and I don’t have an employer yet.
The first thing new media source I looked at in Indianapolis was artbabble.org. I’d seen it in action at the IMA, and thought it was pretty impressive. What I liked about artbabble is that it combined several aspects of the modern New Media landscape, online video and social networking, and combined them into a promotional tool for the arts. The thing that I found most impressive about it was that the IMA seemed to be a leader in this sort of thing. Generally, when I think of Indiana, I don’t think of arts leadership. But, looking at the partners involved, IMA is sharing video with MoMa, the Smithsonian, Art:21, the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library, LACMA, and SFMOMA, all pretty heavy hitters in the world of art and information. What I found innovative about it was that they were using the models that are known to work, and adapting them to art. I liked it. Not enough to sign up, but I liked it.
Next, I looked at Medical Animatics. Founded by an IUPUI New Media grad, this company is interesting to me. I don’t do 3d work or anything, but I thought this guy’s vision for the market was smart and innovative. He saw a way to take 3d modeling talent, and use it for something other than special effects in movies. There may be nothing glamorous about making informed consent videos for kidney transplants, but as a cynical, got-to-live-in-the-real-word type of guy, I like to see New Media successfully monetized, and not just used as pure art. Art is nice, but bills have to be paid, and there are only so many charitable foundations paying artists.
I don’t think that it really qualifies as artsy New Media, but I’m pretty impressed with what ChaCha is doing locally. They are a text/email/phone service that provides answers. You send them your question in human language, and somebody looks up the answer for you. It seems to me that they’ve thought their system out pretty well. They get your question, and forward it to an actual human being who looks it up, and gives you a pithy answer. Kind of cool. What I think is innovative is that it uses a system to allow people who don’t understand searching to search effectively. I think that’s clever. One of the great future threats to information brokering companies is that people will learn to use search engines effectively. ChaCha is wisely building a clientele of people who don’t care to search for things themselves, and ensuring that they never learn how to search for themselves, keeping them dependent on ChaCha. It’s so clever, I signed up to be one of their guides, who do the searching for the answers.
The Indiana State Legislature. I’m going to give it to them not as a creator of New Media, but as an advocate. The production incentives that were passed last year (over the governor’s veto), provide tax breaks for companies making media productions in Indiana. While this only applies to film and TV projects of $100,000 or more, and digital media productions of $50,000 or more, I think it will have a large effect on the type of artistic New Media creations that appear in Indiana in the future. The key to interesting stuff getting produced is to have Indianapolis be a hub for production. The more productions that happen here, the more producers will locate to the area. Hence, more interesting stuff being made.
I’ll have to list Creative Street as my fifth. They aren’t innovating in any of the flashy arts ways, but they are finding enough ways to please their clients that they can keep fifty full time employees. For Indianapolis, that’s pretty good. They must be doing something right.
Despite all my cynical talk about making money, and nothing interesting in Indiana, I have to say artbabble was my favorite subject from this little research project. I like the idea that they are promoting art videos and video about the arts right here from Indianapolis. I think their partnerships with respected museums is a wise move, and I think they’re raising the profile of new media arts in Indianapolis. They’re also providing an outlet for those arts right here in Indiana. They’re my favorite innovators.
The first thing new media source I looked at in Indianapolis was artbabble.org. I’d seen it in action at the IMA, and thought it was pretty impressive. What I liked about artbabble is that it combined several aspects of the modern New Media landscape, online video and social networking, and combined them into a promotional tool for the arts. The thing that I found most impressive about it was that the IMA seemed to be a leader in this sort of thing. Generally, when I think of Indiana, I don’t think of arts leadership. But, looking at the partners involved, IMA is sharing video with MoMa, the Smithsonian, Art:21, the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library, LACMA, and SFMOMA, all pretty heavy hitters in the world of art and information. What I found innovative about it was that they were using the models that are known to work, and adapting them to art. I liked it. Not enough to sign up, but I liked it.
Next, I looked at Medical Animatics. Founded by an IUPUI New Media grad, this company is interesting to me. I don’t do 3d work or anything, but I thought this guy’s vision for the market was smart and innovative. He saw a way to take 3d modeling talent, and use it for something other than special effects in movies. There may be nothing glamorous about making informed consent videos for kidney transplants, but as a cynical, got-to-live-in-the-real-word type of guy, I like to see New Media successfully monetized, and not just used as pure art. Art is nice, but bills have to be paid, and there are only so many charitable foundations paying artists.
I don’t think that it really qualifies as artsy New Media, but I’m pretty impressed with what ChaCha is doing locally. They are a text/email/phone service that provides answers. You send them your question in human language, and somebody looks up the answer for you. It seems to me that they’ve thought their system out pretty well. They get your question, and forward it to an actual human being who looks it up, and gives you a pithy answer. Kind of cool. What I think is innovative is that it uses a system to allow people who don’t understand searching to search effectively. I think that’s clever. One of the great future threats to information brokering companies is that people will learn to use search engines effectively. ChaCha is wisely building a clientele of people who don’t care to search for things themselves, and ensuring that they never learn how to search for themselves, keeping them dependent on ChaCha. It’s so clever, I signed up to be one of their guides, who do the searching for the answers.
The Indiana State Legislature. I’m going to give it to them not as a creator of New Media, but as an advocate. The production incentives that were passed last year (over the governor’s veto), provide tax breaks for companies making media productions in Indiana. While this only applies to film and TV projects of $100,000 or more, and digital media productions of $50,000 or more, I think it will have a large effect on the type of artistic New Media creations that appear in Indiana in the future. The key to interesting stuff getting produced is to have Indianapolis be a hub for production. The more productions that happen here, the more producers will locate to the area. Hence, more interesting stuff being made.
I’ll have to list Creative Street as my fifth. They aren’t innovating in any of the flashy arts ways, but they are finding enough ways to please their clients that they can keep fifty full time employees. For Indianapolis, that’s pretty good. They must be doing something right.
Despite all my cynical talk about making money, and nothing interesting in Indiana, I have to say artbabble was my favorite subject from this little research project. I like the idea that they are promoting art videos and video about the arts right here from Indianapolis. I think their partnerships with respected museums is a wise move, and I think they’re raising the profile of new media arts in Indianapolis. They’re also providing an outlet for those arts right here in Indiana. They’re my favorite innovators.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Randomness
I know this is a bit late, but I threw together a simple flash demonstration of randomness. Or the lack therof...tune in to find out if I fall on the side of randomness or determinism. Do we have free will? Can you beat the casino? Can we have any expectation of order in the universe? All this answered and more!
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
What the Fuck?
What the Bleep Do We Know was problematic for me. I was expecting some hard core quantum mechanics, and I was disappointed when it bloomed into a New Age spiritualism based in pseudoscience. I'm not well-versed enough in physics to refute any scientific claims in the movie, but I am a total skeptic when it comes to spiritual matters, and this use of science to try to create a religious setup with no morality, and the ability to control your destiny through concentrated will smacks of a blend of Scientology, The Secret, and Johnathan Livingston Seagull. The throwing away of the anti-anxiety medication was particularly reminiscent of L. Ron Hubbard & Co. I will make a science claim, and say that the scientific evidence behind the ability to alter the molecular structure of water through thoughts is dubious at best. I'd go so far as to call it ludicrous.
The sequence at the end, in which all the interviewees are identified, and all their degrees and books are listed came off as a desperate attempt to make these spokespeople appear credible, simply because they had obtained advanced degrees and gotten published. I have neither, but I've been around the block enough to know that these qualifications don't always guarantee intellectual rigor or validity of thought.
The interesting thing about the movie is that the ideas were all very loosely based on science. It seemed to me that this was a group of people who are desperate to indulge the innate human urge to see "patterns in the static" in a way that they can reconcile with their scientific training. These are people who have been trained to explain the universe thorough natural processes, and to discount supernatural causation, as it cannot be recreated or behave predictably. Science seeks to explain the universe in predictable ways, but this group has taken advantage of the limited understanding of unpredictability in quantum mechanics, and decided to fill a void of concrete knowledge with spirituality. This has not always worked out well.
What really bothers me about this school of thought is that the speakers repeatedly differentiate their beliefs from traditional religion. They do manage to keep a classic feature of religion intact, when they are careful to point out that you can only manifest change in your cellular structure, throw away your pills, and become happy when you believe that you can do it with every fiber of your being. Therefore, if this doesn't work for you, then you just don't believe it enough. This is quite reminiscent of the out that traditional religions use. You still have problems in your life because of your imperfect faith. There is always a way to shift blame to the practitioner for the failures of the system of beliefs.
The philosophies in the movie even account for my skepticism. I'm probably too much of a slave to my addictions to be able to see the light and get my act together. I'm far from having my shit together, that's for sure, but I really can't believe that this is how things work.
Also, I was surprised and sort of offended by the idea of each individual as god. The idea that each person creates reality as they experience leads to the idea that the individual is the only truly conscious being in the universe, and is simply creating the rest of the universe as he/she goes along. This is such a self-centered idea, it reminds me of Dwayne Hoover's experience in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr's novel, Breakfast of Champions. Hoover reads a sci-fi novel that is written as a letter from the Creator of the Universe, informing the reader that he is the only conscious being, and the rest of the world is populated by automatons designed to test his reactions. This ends badly, with Hoover attacking a bunch of the robots, since they aren't real people anyway. What consequences can there be, if they are designed only to test his reactions? Isn't this reaction as valid as any other. That is a possible outcome of the belief that the individual is god, creating the universe as he/she experiences it. Why not kill others, as your experience is the only one that is real? When you're not interacting with the universe, it becomes a probability rather than a certainty, so why not do anything you please?
The last point I'll make is about the insistence that there is no right or wrong. This is troublesome to me. I'm no fan of organized religion, and I think that religious beliefs cause many more problems than they solve in the world. But, as 98% of people claim to believe in a god of some sort, human beings are obviously wired for spirituality, and will believe in some sort of deity. I'd argue that it if people are going to be believers, it is at least useful for them to believe that their god is looking down at them, judging their misdeeds and brewing up a punishment. If you're going to have religious beliefs, you might as well take the morality with it, and get the social stability with it. I know that this is a spectacularly cynical and elitist view, but there you have it.
I'm sorry to ramble on, and get so upset about this. I hope that my rejection of this doesn't offend anyone who believes it. I'm not an evangelical atheist, and for the most part this seems like a harmless set of beliefs. It just rubs me the wrong way on a lot of levels.
The sequence at the end, in which all the interviewees are identified, and all their degrees and books are listed came off as a desperate attempt to make these spokespeople appear credible, simply because they had obtained advanced degrees and gotten published. I have neither, but I've been around the block enough to know that these qualifications don't always guarantee intellectual rigor or validity of thought.
The interesting thing about the movie is that the ideas were all very loosely based on science. It seemed to me that this was a group of people who are desperate to indulge the innate human urge to see "patterns in the static" in a way that they can reconcile with their scientific training. These are people who have been trained to explain the universe thorough natural processes, and to discount supernatural causation, as it cannot be recreated or behave predictably. Science seeks to explain the universe in predictable ways, but this group has taken advantage of the limited understanding of unpredictability in quantum mechanics, and decided to fill a void of concrete knowledge with spirituality. This has not always worked out well.
What really bothers me about this school of thought is that the speakers repeatedly differentiate their beliefs from traditional religion. They do manage to keep a classic feature of religion intact, when they are careful to point out that you can only manifest change in your cellular structure, throw away your pills, and become happy when you believe that you can do it with every fiber of your being. Therefore, if this doesn't work for you, then you just don't believe it enough. This is quite reminiscent of the out that traditional religions use. You still have problems in your life because of your imperfect faith. There is always a way to shift blame to the practitioner for the failures of the system of beliefs.
The philosophies in the movie even account for my skepticism. I'm probably too much of a slave to my addictions to be able to see the light and get my act together. I'm far from having my shit together, that's for sure, but I really can't believe that this is how things work.
Also, I was surprised and sort of offended by the idea of each individual as god. The idea that each person creates reality as they experience leads to the idea that the individual is the only truly conscious being in the universe, and is simply creating the rest of the universe as he/she goes along. This is such a self-centered idea, it reminds me of Dwayne Hoover's experience in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr's novel, Breakfast of Champions. Hoover reads a sci-fi novel that is written as a letter from the Creator of the Universe, informing the reader that he is the only conscious being, and the rest of the world is populated by automatons designed to test his reactions. This ends badly, with Hoover attacking a bunch of the robots, since they aren't real people anyway. What consequences can there be, if they are designed only to test his reactions? Isn't this reaction as valid as any other. That is a possible outcome of the belief that the individual is god, creating the universe as he/she experiences it. Why not kill others, as your experience is the only one that is real? When you're not interacting with the universe, it becomes a probability rather than a certainty, so why not do anything you please?
The last point I'll make is about the insistence that there is no right or wrong. This is troublesome to me. I'm no fan of organized religion, and I think that religious beliefs cause many more problems than they solve in the world. But, as 98% of people claim to believe in a god of some sort, human beings are obviously wired for spirituality, and will believe in some sort of deity. I'd argue that it if people are going to be believers, it is at least useful for them to believe that their god is looking down at them, judging their misdeeds and brewing up a punishment. If you're going to have religious beliefs, you might as well take the morality with it, and get the social stability with it. I know that this is a spectacularly cynical and elitist view, but there you have it.
I'm sorry to ramble on, and get so upset about this. I hope that my rejection of this doesn't offend anyone who believes it. I'm not an evangelical atheist, and for the most part this seems like a harmless set of beliefs. It just rubs me the wrong way on a lot of levels.
Monday, March 30, 2009
The Word Part 3
All this thinking about words got me thinking about words. My original word was structure. The thing I found most interesting about the word after spending some time with it was it’s variability. While not the most diverse word in English, it shows a little bit about how many meanings a word can have. Structure is a little boring. All of it’s meanings have to do with how things are put together. But it got me thinking about shades of meaning. And that led me to the word set. Set supposedly has more definitions than any other English word. About.com said that the Oxford English Dictionary has 464 definitions for the word set. And 396 for run. So this got me thinking about the variability of meaning in English words. These words with many meanings are called homonyms.
When I emailed Beth for my final step, I got told to relate this idea to the word “deer.” As in the animal. It turns out, this word had only one meaning. How deflating. I couldn’t have been more disappointed, because the word deer provided no insight into my fascination with variation. It was a literal, concrete word that could only mean one thing. Unless you didn’t see it but only heard it. Dear. As in Dear John. So now we’re into homophones. Words that sound the same, but have different meanings and spellings. Confusing. I’m glad I learned English before I had time to think about it. This is a crazy language.
So what does this all mean? Why is this important that words can mean different things, and words can seem to be the same and mean different things. It means language is interesting. It means you can use homonyms and homophones and all sorts of different linguistic tricks and oddities to make something interesting with language. I know this class is about New Media, but I think it all comes down to good writing. Whether you want to be a web designer, movie maker, or create graphic novels, all of these things are just manifestations of written language. So if you can’t control the English language in an effective and interesting way, you can’t create things in other media that connect with people. Not very easily anyway. I guess that what I’m saying is that most media products have their origin in the written language. And that’s how structure and deer work together.
I tried to come up with a way to put all of this into a New Media-ish project with after effects and such, but I think that since all of this stuff led me to think about language, it was best served in essay form. Now if that isn't seeing sideways, I don't know what is. Or is it a cop out, falling back on the medium in which I'm most comfortable, writing? I guess we'll never know for sure, as it would have been a subconcious impulse for me. I would certainly never take the easy way out on purpose.
When I emailed Beth for my final step, I got told to relate this idea to the word “deer.” As in the animal. It turns out, this word had only one meaning. How deflating. I couldn’t have been more disappointed, because the word deer provided no insight into my fascination with variation. It was a literal, concrete word that could only mean one thing. Unless you didn’t see it but only heard it. Dear. As in Dear John. So now we’re into homophones. Words that sound the same, but have different meanings and spellings. Confusing. I’m glad I learned English before I had time to think about it. This is a crazy language.
So what does this all mean? Why is this important that words can mean different things, and words can seem to be the same and mean different things. It means language is interesting. It means you can use homonyms and homophones and all sorts of different linguistic tricks and oddities to make something interesting with language. I know this class is about New Media, but I think it all comes down to good writing. Whether you want to be a web designer, movie maker, or create graphic novels, all of these things are just manifestations of written language. So if you can’t control the English language in an effective and interesting way, you can’t create things in other media that connect with people. Not very easily anyway. I guess that what I’m saying is that most media products have their origin in the written language. And that’s how structure and deer work together.
I tried to come up with a way to put all of this into a New Media-ish project with after effects and such, but I think that since all of this stuff led me to think about language, it was best served in essay form. Now if that isn't seeing sideways, I don't know what is. Or is it a cop out, falling back on the medium in which I'm most comfortable, writing? I guess we'll never know for sure, as it would have been a subconcious impulse for me. I would certainly never take the easy way out on purpose.
Monday, March 23, 2009
The Word, Part 2
I see now I never got to the final part of this assignment. Ah, well. Sorry about that. The word, structure, I have to admit, didn't get me thinking a lot in specific terms. One thing it did make me think about is the variability of meaning in English language vocabulary. The same word can mean so many different things. For example, I found 11 meanings listed for the word structure. it's interesting to me that the language has such a variety of definition for simple words. This led me to playing the dictionary game a little bit, in which I basically look through a print dictionary. It's not as easy to pick out random words in an online dictionary. "Stock" was a near neighbor of structure, and had 63 meanings in my dictionary (61 online). I'd be interested to know how true this is in other cultures and languages, and if this phenomenon make English difficult to learn. I suppose if I were going to propose a project, it would be a in-depth linguistic study to see how much variability of meaning exists in other languages. Off the top of my head, I would guess that Asian languages have little overlap, what with their huge character sets, each conveying very specific meanings. But that's just a jumping off point for some reading, I guess.
Sorry again that I didn't complete this appropriately. The complexity level was a touch high for me. I don't really have time for such convoluted processes at this time in my life. I'm operating on a just-in-time manufacturing structure around here.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
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