Mike and I started out with the idea to lay down a beat made up of ITP noises, looped into a rhythm. We were then going to overlay it with various faculty statements. After recording a bountiful cacophony of ITP effects, like the mirrors, lockers, drums and so forth, we focused in on the faculty voices. The effects made an okay beat, but GarageBand quickly proved the better tool to create a funky techno groove that mixed in compellingly with the voices. It was a lot of fun and I’ll never again forget to check power and ground. 4th Floor.
Archive for October, 2005
The Grey Art Gallery is showing an exhibit entitled “Paper Museums” that highlights printmakers’ reproductions of other traditional mediums starting in the 16th Century. The exhibit demonstrated that reproduction of art is not just a 20th Century phenomenon, but goes back much farther and with surprisingly deep effects. We are shown that each of these drawings interpreted original paintings differently. Shading and lighting changed, and sometimes entirely new elements were added. For sculptures, a point of view had to be chosen, as well as an expected audience of either artists or collectors, with different styles and viewpoints selected as appropriate. Of course, we are not surprised to learn that the original and the reproduction differ. This is a lesson that a 21st Century audience should already have under its belt. After all, today reproduction is the point. But in the past, the lesson was new, and artists learned an eye-opening lesson. Reproduction of their work not only reached a new viewing public, but also secured them a place in the canon of well-known artists, fashioning a historical legacy. To be reproduced was (and is) the key to fame. Downstairs, a small exhibit by Andrea Franco has inverted the reproductive cycle.
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My cartoon project was to create a cartoon without content and explore how much information could be conveyed in structural elements. I used different sized frames, layout and various types of conversation and electronic announcement conventions to convey the shape of the story without any story or characters present. This was an interesting project for me because I could focus on exploring rhythm and timing.
My money’s on Clay. It’s all about the barriers. The thing is, a physical quarter is something you already have. but Bitpass is totally different. If I had to put a quarter in my computer to read a comic, I would. Well, maybe… There’s surely enough to read without spending a quarter. In fact there’s more than I could ever read right now and new content shows up every day. Scott McCloud’s page links to his 20 favorite comics. I didn’t click onto all the links because I immediately found more free ones than I had time to read.
McCloud wants me to sign up with some company I’ve never heard of, and submit personal information while committing to a User Agreement that’s 13 pages long! (I pasted it into Word). Well that’s just totally different from an anonymous sliver of silver. In addition I now have to plop down my time, energy, credit card number, email address, password and three bucks up front that I’ll probably never get refunded. I’m dubious as to whether I’d ever spend the $2.75 remaining on my pass. Paying $3.00 for something that’s worth 25 cents seems inherently silly. Maybe if McCloud charged more I would find his work more valuable.
Continue reading ‘Micropayments’
This weekend we went up to Central Park for a picnic and decided to give the model sailboats a try. We got boat 73 which was already in the water. There was a light wind so we set out to tack across the Conservatory Water using only two little joystick controls and our limited combined knowledge of sailing. I was surprised by a lot of things. Firstly, the boat only moves when there’s wind. Now everyone knows that about a sailboat, but somehow as soon as the wind dies down it does nothing to quell the overwhelming urge to wag the rudder like a tail, hoping to see some movement out in the water. Secondly, it’s very tough to judge the angle of the boat from the shore. Everything has to be done visually since the wind we feel on the shore is not the same as in the middle of the pond. Also all other sensory feedback is missing. The proprioceptive feedback from the angle or speed of the boat that one would feel aboard is entirely absent. In a lot of ways this reminded me of many multimedia exhibits. That sense of watching something move in three dimensions, but being totally divorced from a certain richness of sensation was quite familiar.
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Oren and I combined several found images into this fanciful Manhattan mountainscape.
