Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts.

All things come to an end but ironically the end leads us to the first blog, my favorite. The First blog was about image and perception. Here I learned about perspective and perception: how people perceive a picture by photoshopping an original picture. Sadly, the Photoshop software is really expensive and not free at all and I had to use the version available in the Business computer lab. I learned how to use mask on Photoshop.



Here is the link to the first blog.


I have always been fascinated by synesthetes and how they can associate sound with colour. I've heard about colour blindness (color vision deficiency) but synesthesia is altogether a stranger and more intriguing genetic disorder. People afflicted by the disorder can sometimes see sound as a colour (see image below to have an idea as to how such a perceive might perceive sounds) or even taste sound. This obviously leads me to conclude that we don't all view the world in the same way. Using audacity, a readily available and sound editing software,  I realise that sound indeed has a visual component to it. Each unique sound has a distinct waveform. In fact some animal such as the dolphin may be able to see sound. The caw of a raven and the call of pigeon can be easily distinguished just by looking at the waveforms by recording the sounds and analyzing it using audacity.

How a synesthete might perceive sounds

Raven cawing.

Here is the link to the synesthesia blog and the link to the bird sounds blog.

How people perceive the world is recurring topic in media art. Video game art as a form of new media art is an interactive form of art. Nowadays with open world video game, each person can have a different experience interacting with a video game. Some might call video games pointless escapism but it is indeed a form of interactive art in its own. The Smithsonian museum seems to agree as they have a dedicated an exhibition on video game art.

Here is the link to the Open world blog and the link to video game as art blog.


Here are all the links:

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
Link 5


 

All the lectures are outlined here and the way this is structured, there are a range of themes, image, space, sound and atmosphere, in particular, spatial and temporal are woven through all the subject headings and there are three weeks for each subject heading, this week and in the following two weeks. The aim of this subject is to think critically and analytically and the point is to develop skills theoretically and practically and in the tutorials with Hugh, Shannon , Felicity or Joel about perspective within a context of media  arts and media arts within a context of history. These are the theoretical part but to put theory into practice, we were taught to use a wide variety of tools, freely available on the internet, such as, the sound editing software audacity; the sound hosting website, soundcloud; cellphone to capture sounds and images to be edited by aforementioned softwares; free blog hosting websites such as blogger.com; and the not so free image editor, Photoshop (I only wish the lecturer would mention Gimp instead, which is free and almost as good).

Open World

According to my friend, Eric, Open world or Free roam is a game design where the player is allowed to roam a virtual freely and has great freedom of action. In that sense an open world mimics the real world except in the virtual if someone dies, he can be respawned. Wouldn't it be nice if the real world was like that?

Video Game Art

My friend, Eric, showed me a screenshot of the game he developing for android and told me that video game can be art. Judging by screenshot, I had to agree with him. See below

Wikipedia described video game art as a specialized form of computer art utlizing video games as artistic medium. As such video game is nothing less than a form of modern art. In fact big art museums are now paying attention to this form media art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum dedicated an exhibition of the art of video games in September 2012. It was a success.

Lecture 10/09/2013

10/9/13.. with Hugh Davies..

For next three weeks we focus on SPACE.. so a different direction to where we have been going. Someone presenting to you, their creative practice and then go in to tutorials and then more discussion and look at the readings, digital programs to create sounds, things take a turn here, we don’t have digital programs that create SPACE..let us look at it differently, it is a media we perceive and receive in a completely different way. We can make images and sound but we can only really shape SPACE. We are not images or sound, but we are in the realm of space, we are like fish in water, we don’t perceive SPACE as we are immersed in it. This lecture is an introduction and Hugh’s perspective is that SPACE is media, you can do various things in space, you can record in space, fundamental to media, you can replay SPACE. Go in to a childhood space and remember the feeling and then it replays memories and emotions so it is like an electronic media, with playback, it goes back to the digital realm again when we look at game spaces, space has a possibility of being playable as well, not just in game realm, space and out transit through it are so important, when we move through space, we mostly do as human beings, we are structured to do, we walk through space, it is a play speed, so walking or riding a bike but then you can fast forward through space, you do not experience it in the same way, you can fast forward through SPACE but you don’t then, experience that in the same way. The thing with space too and why it is such an important MEDIA souce is our sensory experience of it is so immediate, with images we see them with our eyes, with sounds our ears, with space, not only all our sensory capabilities but with capabilities we have mapped. Perhaps it is a case of I like this space, so feel these things about images and sounds, space is so evocative of this sixth sense, our soul sensation of space.. For this reason, SPACE is the most powerful of all the media as it is so pervasive, we are fully immersed in it. Media not recordable but at its fundamental level, so that which is in between  between us all now is SPACE.. For next series of lectures we investigate, according to The Poetics of Space book. Space is a sensory location, not simply something in which we find ourselves, but something which has a poetics to it. It is not hard to read like a lot of books, it picks up lexicon jargon, easy to read and a familiar text written to introduce an appreciation of space ascetically. He introduces new idea, at fundamental level, the idea of the home, the idea it is the first fundamental space we are familiar with, the home. He divides house in to house, cellar, chest, wardrobe, chairs and this he considers different aspects of space and then extends ideas further in to idea of cities, parks, nests, shells and the universe. In doing all of this he takes a phenomenologicalapproach, phenomenology is something you are probably familiar with, phenomena is things, appearances, things we perceive and phenomenology, ology is the study ofand bio is study of environment.. living things and phenomenology is the study of things we perceiveand it is across different areas such as, philosophy, ethics, architecture and experiential design. Through him, it is embedded in architecture, phenomenology, experience different spaces that we perceive. When we go in to spaces, and feel them, we change them as well, a weird quantum mechanicsso space we don’t know and place we have an empathy with.. ie the homeSPACE, PHENOMENOLOGY AND PLACE.. ARE YOU GETTING IT, touchstone ideas Hugh said, will be occurring through the next three to four weeks. Space is atmosphere and in atmosphere see how space is shaped through other media we will be looking at.. so vocabularies we will be looking at. We will look at ideas creatively, explore through creative arts, next week think of the home, so over last couple of weeks, Hugh talked about the uncanny or the unfamiliar or unhomely. Find some parts you are not familiar with and in doing so, Hugh said explore a space that you feel you know very well, so this is this week’s assignment. Pull up some carpet or look behind a fridge, if you moved home recently, this might not be so difficult, there are possible spaces you may not have checked out. Movement through space,is something we fundamentally do all the time. We will take up these ideas, space as an urban area, this week, space as home and moving home. This idea of moving house, something uncanny about moving home, Hugh would have moved home 2030 times, every time he moves, it feels uncanny, not until he gets in there, say putting up. The narrowest house in Denmark was about as wide as a desk Hugh pointed to in the Agora theatre, so Hugh made remote homes and drove around the city.. It was an old house, a cute house.. Uncle Tom’s house,.

Week 3

WEEK 3

Hugh is talking about a project and will address some issues by mentioning and showing examples. Hugh recommends you write two blog posts a week, some are long and some short, some will be better than others. Things to write about are what is discussed in lectures, what inspires you, things mentioned in tutorials and what is mentioned in the readings. This week’s reading is on color and this is what is about to be discussed in the lecture. I looked at the reading by Olafur Eliasson titled “Some Ideas about Color” and some of the key ideas I picked up on were from page one and they were as follows, “The experience of color is related to the experience of light and is also a matter of cultivation. As much as perception is linked with memory and recognition, our relation to color is closely derived from our cultural habitat. The Inuit, for instance, have one word for red but various for white. By the time of Industrialization, when modernity also introduced its dogmas for a healthy, good life, the color white was already deeply rooted in our culture as the only truly purifying color.

There are several other blog posts which are great to see. One discussed the creative process in responding to this task and there are a couple of examples to help.You can hyperlink in your blog, if you don’t know how to do it then come to see me Hugh kindly invited the audience. I recall you saying you might put a brief tutorial up in Wordpress and he realised that most of us use a lot of these tools and hyperlink is slightly more sophisticated than Facebook. It is out of focus, going through the Wordpress interface, when categories was mentioned was it blogging categories, this is not the level of blogging he is asking for. If looking at it at a deeper level, it teaches assumed knowledge, in the media industry it does not matter what level you go in at, it is assumed you will have the basic skills sets. You can frame a shot and even sound and video editing skills are basic across the media industry now. A presenter also needs these skills, we are operating in a  media convergent environment. The news anchor individual is a dying breed and people know there are news anchors and many are being mitigated or boulstered, someone may have a blog but it may not be written by them. Having somebody write up your blog costs money, in an ideal world the individual does it themself. You will notice the channel 9 jobs, go back and edit, it is high quality television vision and from the journalistic point of view you need to be able to do that and from an arts point of view, you are expected to subvert it and this is the perspective we are looking at. You need to know what is happening industry wide, you are responding to the world as it is.

This is the last lecture discussing imagery, light and color, Hugh is going down at a deeper level, he is looking at the materiality of color. In the first lecture we looked at an overview of this course, in doing that, we took a top down hierarchical approach and it was quite linear. Last week was collage/montage and the lecture was like that. Sequential images!! In this lecture Hugh is coming at us in waves as does light and sound and color. Before we discuss color, consider the source of color which is light itself, our eyes have a whole series of rods, in cones, our eyes take the light particles, we don’t quite know what light is, there is so much information here we don’t have. In the seventeeth century, Isaac Newton thought light consisted of waves or particles. Both theories are right, light is waves and particles, this is the nature of quantum mechanics, this is the Copenhagen interpretation. Within the realm of optics, it is confusing, it is two materials, it is particles and waves so getting away from this level of confusion, see the way we understand color. Look at our bodies ,how we receive colour, all colour is from light, it is refracted and colour bounces back at us. The first fundamental media is the sun and the other is through projected light. They are digital or rendered. In the human eye, we have primary colours, these three colours are red, blue and yellow. For us colours can not be reduced further than this. If you mix these, you get secondary colours and mixed again, you get tertiary colours. If you use colour, the way to respond best is in in a standard complimentary way. For example, use this colour, then another and yet another, get a triad of colour, so it is a prominent one at the moment. Last week, he mentioned the digital programs formed the colour ascetics of the nineties. In the case of computers colours were light projected out of a computer screen and today we have a different dogma of colour. Think of Frankie magazine, there is a grey backdrop, such as soft pink and then pale blue and then perhaps a tan or brown, very light, very tinted, so not strong, rather soft colours. Turning to the home page, this image does the same thing, we have a grey backdrop, with pink and brown colours. Another example is the Richard Hamilton collage piece, there are soft colours done in triad formation and the other ways to look at it is analogous colours all of the same scope, meaning there are a whole series of blues or greens, the area of the spectrum.. pantone colours… There are two aspects of hexadecimal colours, so if you look around photoshop, every colour digitally has an alpha numeric.. L.T.U. has a brand, the colour of the seats, a hexadecimal market and that is the colour things should be. La Trobe Univeresity goes from orange to the red of the seats, they are not ambiguous, they are very distinctive one is in print and one is in digital.. CYMK.. We made web documents, we have been doing RBG.. red, blue, green. Pixels which are tiny components of the screen, a pixel has a blue, red and green components and all the colours on the screen are made up of different mixtures, when you have all three, the result is white.. That is how we break light into colours, Newton used prisms.. These are all the meanings we prescribe to colour as well and this is where it is difficult meaning to say that what culture drums in to us and what is part of nature. If you encounter red in nature be careful they might say. Hugh said he eats tomatos all the time, so the theory is not true always, red has oral connotations for us, when we see red, it makes our mouth water. Pizza Hut and Hungry Jacks use it, it makes your mouth water, it is a visceral reaction, maybe back to carnivore origins, it has that level of origin deep in humanity. At another level, we have pink and blue which are themes for boys and girls, it is pervasive and we are all aware of it that children can live in these worlds.

Pythagoras mapped colors to music, he felt everything in the universe could be mapped back to numbers and he thought that everything was made up of numbers, he thought of them in terms of eights, the eight tone musical scale.

Eliasson, Olafur: “Some Ideas about Colour.”

In Olafur Eliasson: Your Colour Memory. Edited by Ismail Soyugenc and Richard Torchia.

Exhibition catalogue. Glenside: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2006: 75-83.

September 24,2013

 

SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

Mapping outer space is still within the realm of our imagination. There is an actual voyager, this ship, it went outside of our solar system and so in uncharted territory,  it is going in to areas we could only map with intense telescopic vision. When you travel through space, you travel through time!!!

Einstein discovered by traveling through space and coming back to earth you would come back in a different time phase.. Hugh thinks, younger than people you left behind. It is also when you travel though space, here to the city which is 20 to 40 minutes away but previously it may have been half a day.We think of space as time, when we talk about outer space, if we we look at the stars, we think of things we see that existed 100,000 years ago or a million years ago. The light from the sun takes three to four minutes to reach us. On this spaceship, it exited as the solar system.Hugh shows a map of our galaxy, on this ship are directions of how to get back to earth. Directions are given in a couple of ways, behind the naked man and woman is to scale, to the left of that is a whole lot of pulses that go in to where they are centred. At the top, two discs join together, it is symbol, a hydrogen atom, that is what we have, we have water, that is what is distinct about our planet and at the bottom is our solar system..so a whole range of  planets and  this is the path that the Voyager has taken, so it left earth in 1977 with a map on  board and the map is created to communicate to any alien species, who we are and where we are. The is an LP on board, made of gold, a gold record and printed on one side of the gold record is a whole lot of music, languages across earth saying Welcome and Rolling Stones and Beatles music and information about earth in various languages and there are instructions on how the record is to be played. There is a sound wave, over here, of how to create a stylist and the speed of how it should be played in binary code, ones and zeros. Hugh was fascinated with the map and as he is approaching completion of his PHD, several times he approached this as a MEDIA person to think what does this mean. Some of it he could decipher, the craft in the background is the voyager, mainly from this and from years of context wherein he saw a whole range of planets, but alien races would not have noticed these things. If we talk on alien races, not only is there no user testing,if  it was not for fish, octopus, chimps, organisms can be separated by one gene. A beautiful failure, as many communicative failures are. The attempt to communicate is what is happening across here. This is what art tries to do, what all stories try to do, to communicate something about the world. Maps are a primary form of artwork, maps are trying to communicate basic information about the world, so in that spirit, Hugh wants to go through a few maps, as ways of communicating maps of the world. Let's look at the top ten busiest air routes, we are not a very populated country, one of the most sparcely populated and yet we have one of the busiest air routes, none of the busiest air routes were in the U.S., Hugh was surprised, by contrast with how our economy is booming. What you see here is an economic reflection of the world. It is Africa, Australia, South America and Asia. This map represents PANGEA.. how the continental plates were once joined.

Maps have religious and political connotation as well. This map shows all the countries which are not in pink which Great Britain has not invaded, so all the other countries have been invaded by Great Britain. We are for the most part of Europe. This is a map of Europe with all the Chinese names for the countries translated in to English. Some interesting names, not so much a mapping of place but also of language. They don’t just have to map space, the space being mapped is as much China as it is Europe. A map of the writing systems of the world at the 16 minute mark and it is contemporary, some writing systems are nolonger represented, the Nordic rooms, the Mayan languages, a great deal of spoken languages, the Indigenous languages. A series of perspectives of the world mapped differently to how we usually see it, a map of a cargo ship which had hundreds of millions of rubber ducks and they ended up in the Pacific Ocean and the map tracks their movement over the next decade. Here and in South East Asia, some were found in South America and many found in Northern Passage, it is notoriously difficult to navigate there. A great opportunity for global warming, where a lot of land is controlled by  Norway. Global warming is happening, we want to control the oil, getting a ship through there is too dangerous to do, there are a lot of pros, yellow rubber ducks got through this area quite easily. The ducks ended up in England and the U.S.A. A map has own distinct ways of being, existing, so he turns now to the changed lanes a little bit, so this is the last week of the space project, so create a map. Atmosphere includes sound, light, color and space which will be in the lecture after the break. Tim Nowles did a lot of mapping in his work, many of you would have done a lot of those exercises, he will come in in the first week after the break. Introducing the idea of the next theme which is atmosphere, when he talk about atmosphere, there are a lot of different meanings, a layer of gaseous liquid. Gas is a material, another state of being, it can be solid, liquid or plasma. Mercury but in our conditions on earth it is a liquid, we can turn steal in to a liquid, for some planets the atmosphere itself is steel, so our atmosphere is made of water, it becomes ice, in the middle it flows and becomes air. In our atmosphere on earth, humidity around the middle and frozenness at the poles; atmosphere refers to censorial qualities, the atmosphere space emits, what you did with the mapping projects, looking for is the atmosphere in places.. What you try to do with psycho geography, you search and look for the atmospheres, how space manifests, has a different sense, in terms of sound recording, atmosphere is the audio-presence. In the John Cage work, 4.5 minutes of silence, that is what he plays to you, the room tone, the sound in this room even, the hum of the sound projector, coughing, which is what sound recording tries to cancel out and tries to create a blank page but there is no blank page, there is so much media already happening that you have to compete against and those media change. The sounds in this room would have been different 20-30 years ago. Hugh began animating film at about 11 years of age and it got sent to America to be processed. At that time video was booming, it was exciting, there were all sorts of possibilities, it changed everything, it changed television, video was an incredible media, exciting, video is a nostalgic form now, so in 20 years since he was 20, cds, blueray phone and the internet.  The point of Hugh looking back through memory lane, media land scape changed significantly. In the next twenty years, what is fundamental about this course, we explore dusty corners of your bedroom, he is trying to give you a foundation or knowledge about media, so you can create valuable media throughout your whole lifetime, a broader understanding that can be fine  tuned over next few years. So returning, bridging space and atmosphere, as it is space, we can only rely on imagination. Understanding of space is limited,  we take what little queues we have and create what we can, then Hugh put on a video, Alien by David Gottsching so what you are hearing is atmosphere, that sound, vision, what you are experiencing, what the whole film provides is atmosphere, they are quite dense with atmosphere, he uses a lot of light/smoke to create a tense atmosphere, a thick atmosphere. The film, Alien has a soundtrack, which is quite atmospheric and it occurs throughout the whole film and it was discovered in the seventies and they recorded what sound they could hear, they put recorders in spaceships and they concluded it was the echo of the big bang, did Hugh say!!!!!!

Raven vs Pigeon

Apple hoped to get a ban on 23 different Samsung's devices, but the irony is that most of the models have already been discontinued by Samsung. Apple and Samsung have been involved in this legal tussle for nearly three years over various Smartphone features patented by Apple. Hence this win is a home run for Samsung.
In a statement, Samsung said it was pleased with the ruling. "We agree with its observation that a few software features alone don't drive consumer demand for Samsung products - rather consumers value a multitude of features," the company said.

Despite the fact that Samsung no longer sells the model (old) phones targeted by the injunction request, Apple has argued in court documents that such an order is important to prevent Samsung from future copying of new products "not more colorably different" from the defunct models.
But Samsung argued that Apple was trying to target new Samsung phones in order to instil fear and uncertainty among carriers and retailers. Also Koh wrote that a consumer survey by Apple likely "inflated" the value that customers place on the patented Smartphone features in dispute.
"A multitude of other survey evidence not prepared for the purpose of litigation," Koh wrote, "indicates that numerous features that were not tested - such as battery life, MP3 player functionality, operating system, text messaging options, GPS, and processor speed - is highly important to consumers."
Apple must demonstrate more than an insignificant amount of lost sales due to Samsung's copying, and Apple's survey is "unpersuasive" evidence on that point.
The caveat: For the damages stemming from the 2012 jury finding of patent infringement, Koh recorded a final judgment against Samsung for $930 million, which is slightly lesser than the original amount of $1.05 billion. Samsung said it would appeal that decision.
Thursday's ruling comes ahead of another patent war set to kick off later this month involving newer Samsung phones. There seems to be no end to the patent war between Apple and Samsung.
To contact the editor, e-mail: editor@ibtimes.com

Synesthesia

There is a group of people that walk among common society, but are anything but normal. This group of people displays no physical detail that distinguishes them from a
anything other than the norm, but these people are very special indeed. They are a group of people called synesthetes and are afflicted with a disorder known as synesthesia. People with synesthesia are often misunderstood. Though this disorder is mysterious, new research says that it might hold the key to some radical new treatments and behavioral studies.

LECTURE ONE WITH HUGH DAVIES

LECTURE ONE WAS REALLY REALLY INTERESTING AND BECAUSE OF IT, I WAS HOOKED FOR THE REST OF THE SEMESTRE.. GREAT JOB HUGH.. THANKYOU!!

Week one with Hugh.. in the Agora theatre..July 30, 2013..

Hugh welcomed us to exploring media arts, so for those of you who have had Hugh before, you would understand Hugh’s methodology of delivery. He will go through this in class and the content too. As of today, all the class material will appear by the blog.. exploring gmedia arts.wordpress.com and you can get information about lectures, tutorials and assessment. Hugh went through the website and urged us all to go in and the homepage is where all the latest information and material will come up. All the lectures are outlined here and the way this is structured, there are a range of themes, image, space, sound and atmosphere, in particular, spatial and temporal is woven through all the subject headings and there are three weeks for each subject heading, this week and in the following two weeks. The aim of this lecture is to think critically and analytically and the point is to develop skills theoretically and practically and in the tutorials with Hugh, Shannon , Felicity or Joel. There will be a range of tutors and it will change a lot as well and in the first few weeks there will be several changes as people are working to expert areas and there are eight tutorial groups. The headings are fairly solid but they may change and in terms of themes; image, space, sound and
atmosphere. 


This leads us to the first blog, my favorite. The

first blog was about image and perception. Here I learned about perspective and perception, how people perceives a picture by photoshopping an original picture. Sadly, the Photoshop software is really expensive and not free at all and I had to use the version available in the Business computer lab. I learned how to use mask on Photoshop..

Here is the link to the first blog.