Education – Page 21 – Thoughts from the Underground

Synchronous Objects, a collaboration between OSU and William Forsythe

This past Tuesday, one of the groups managed to get all 120 of the first-year students together to put on a group performance. It helped that we were all in the same room together. Our performance was to use beer bottles, packets of Pop Rocks, and our own hands, thighs and feet to recreate the sounds of wind, a thunderstorm, and make a symphony of 120 people eating Pop Rocks with their mouths open. It was wonderful.

What I found so special was the way that small, simple movements turned into something bigger than they could possibly have been if we had done them on individually. And, it was fun. Their performance idea was a reaction to the previous week’s speaker, Clifford Ross, whose initial-to-dogged curiosity in capturing the beauty of a mountain landscape in the end revealed a new world.

The performance and the pursuit of more, guided only by curiosity, got me thinking about how basic art pieces can be furthered by exploring new outlets of expression and investigation. For instance, what else could be representative of our performance of a thunderstorm? How would the sound of rain look, if we could make it 3-D? How can wind be visualized by pixels on a computer?

For instance, I was reminded of Synchronous Objects, which was launched this summer as a collaboration between Ohio State University and choreographer William Forsythe. Here’s an explanation: “Synchronous Objects reveals the interlocking systems of organization in William Forsythe’s ensemble dance One Flat Thing, reproduced through a series of objects that work in harmony to explore its choreographic structures and reimagine what else they might look like.” These “objects” include “data volumes” of the outside of the dancer’s body that dissolve into space, an interactive choreographic score, performative furniture as interpreted from the choreography, and a statistical graph of the dance data. There are definitely more, but I’ll let other people explore them for themselves.

In the end, this whole thing is about “Visualizing choreographic information”.

(What?…I mean….what???!!!!)

Wow. I’m just amazed and dumb-founded that this is even happening. One day, I really hope to be a part of this world of this dance-tech-visualization-curiosity stuff. Who cares if it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Communications Lab – Sequential Images

This week I worked with another student to create story from a series of sequential images — see Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud.

The story we created starts in a zoo and ends in a cemetery, but I won’t go into the details because the story is (hopefully) self-explanatory.

For the production, we first thought we’d try to use Photoshop, but my partner didn’t have much experience with the program. She also didn’t have much experience with using the Mac OX, so those were challenges for us to overcome. After one day where we failed to make any real progress, I suggested that we use the highest level tool possible, like Office, since our final product was going to be 8.5″ x 11″ anyway.

That seemed to work. We did use Photoshop here and there, such as using the Clone Stamp and Cropping tools to touch up our images. But most of the time we used OpenOffice in presentation mode. Although the photo editing tools are pretty primitive, the benefit of using such a high level tool was that my partner was able to follow what I was doing even though I went through much of my activities very quickly.

Communications Lab: Week 5 — Response to “Understanding Comics”

Chapters 1 and 2 were interesting summarizations of psychological patterns, as well as introducing the idea of simple, yet complex, design.

In Chapter 3, I found interesting the discussion on the Visual Iconography of comics. That is, visual iconography is used by comics as its “vocabulary”. Closure, as used in the “gutters”, or spaces between panels, is its grammar.

I also thought the breakdown of the types of closure – i.e., subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, etc – and the analysis of the evolution of Japanese comics, as a reflection of the Japanese culture, was very interesting as well.

Chapter 4 was a discussion on the breakdown of the passage of time, which was compared to photographs and the way we typically experience time. My notes include: “Time in comics is different from photographs; we may see several moments in time arranged within the same panel. In photos, the action is all from a single moment….” and “[in comics] time breaks down into panel-to-panel closure[s].”

Chapters 5-8 discuss the impact of line, and mixing of words and pictures. Points I found interesting:

Expressionism and synaesthetics are distortive by nature and can obscure their subjects.
In a visual medium, the visual sense has the burden of taking in all the other senses.
Words have become more simple, while art became representational & specific.
New media have been misunderstood – first beginning as an imitation of the previous media
People find art in all aspects of human life, outside of the basic human instincts.
Most comics artists don’t use color, because it’s expensive and can take away from the meaning of the comic, or art, itself.

Points I found interesting in Chapter 9:

All media of communication are a by-product of our inability to communicate to others what it’s like to be ourselves
Each media converts thoughts into forms that can traverse the physical world and can be interpreted by another of our senses – taste, sound, sight, etc.
Mastery of a medium is the degree (percentage) that the artistic vision can survive the journey from artist’s thought to perception by others
Comics use cartoons to command viewer involvement and identification; and use realism to capture beauty and complexity of the visible world
Embedded in all pictures are the seeds of expressionism and synaesthetics.

Phys Comp – Week 4: Stupid Pet Trick

We were assigned to create a “stupid pet trick” which combines a bunch of stuff we’ve learned in our previous few weeks. It doesn’t have to be logical, which is why it’s called stupid. Some of my classmates made really awesome stupid pets, that weren’t really stupid at all. Mine, I admit, is a little goofy.

For now, I’m going to call it, “The Pickup Artist Bear, for Sensitive Gals and Guys”. Here’s how it works:

Step 1 – The Pledge: The Bear finds someone he/she would like to pick up. Bear sings a sweet song to attract Gal/Guy.

Baa Baa Black Sheep

To play the song, you press a button. I installed my button within the neck of the teddy bear.
The song plays while the button is pressed. When you let go of the button, the music stops. When you press again, the song starts off from where it left off.
When you get to the end of the song, the music starts again at the beginning.

Step 2 – The Turn: Guy/Gal is sufficiently impressed with sweet, sweet song. Bear continues the pickup by helping Guy/Gal build self-confidence by showing you how tender your caresses are – and in the process, shows off ability to be affectionate.

For this, you squeeze the Force Sensing Resistors on the breadboard. To do this, I’ve set up 2 analog inputs which take a variable level of force not equally set. So, the same level of force for the Green light will not necessarily work for the Yellow. If you light them both, the red light comes on and teddy bear’s heart lights up. It’s a little bit tricky to do actually, and you can adjust it to really annoy your friends.

Step 3 – The Prestige: The bear has now sufficiently won the heart of Gal/Guy, and now gets you to really show your affection. Bear asks Gal/Guy to spill secrets. Bear shows happiness.

Phys Comp – Week 4: Servo Motors && Tone Output

Part I. Working with the Servo motor

I did have some difficulty with setting this up. I think I’ve repressed what went wrong. Anyway, here are photos.

Actually it seems that most of my mistakes are caused by plugging in my wires wrong, after I’ve set things up the first time and tried to experiment with something new. I really dislike that it’s something so small and innocuous as putting being off by one set of rows, but I guess that’s how it works. Maybe I should invest in a Polaroid so I can take immediate photos right away. Or, just be faster on the draw with my own camera.

Or, I could create a new sub-culture: breadboard pornography…

Part II. Tone output

I tried a few of the labs and, for my stupid pet trick, ended up modifying the 2nd lab that uses an array to play notes in a specified order and in a specified duration. Both the notes and the duration of the notes can be set in the code. I set up my arduino to play the first 2 bars of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. It doesn’t sound exactly right, but it’s close enough. And, it’s better than the screeching that I was getting with the basic tone output lab.

What you hear when you listen to the link below, is the sound from a speaker that I took from a set of headphones, and buried within the head of my bear. Consequently, it’s pretty quiet.

Baa Baa Black Sheep – music

To play the song, you press a button. I installed my button within the neck of a teddy bear.
The song plays while the button is pressed. When you let go of the button, the music stops. When you press again, the song starts off from where it left off.
When you get to the end of the song, the music starts again at the beginning.

Baa Baa Black Sheep – the code

ICM Week 3: Functions, ‘For Loops’, and ‘If’ statements

This week it got serious. We were using a bunch of Processing methods – if statements, loops and functions – which at the time was a big deal to me, since in practice I still didn’t really understand how to put it all together.

But, I found some residents to help me out and explain how things worked. They also introduced the ‘Switch’ statement, a more efficient ‘if’ statement, which later came in handy for my midterm project. So, while the finished product looks the same as last week, when you check out the code you’ll see that the two sketches are very different.

Color bars, Week 3: Switch, Ifs and For Loops

(Written Oct 29, 2009)