Monday, September 24, 2018

Voice Artwork

This the voice artwork:

Title:

Auto-fill Chorus: I want to find a way to live

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XmnfB3Z6f_BsQZ3w7a-OjGksD8Kw74yH/view?usp=sharing

Week 2

I thought the lolcat article was quite interesting because I have seen and enjoyed memes of that style before but I hadn’t really thought of it all in that much detail. I agree with the premise that the meme format that allows for a greater range of expression will probably have greater longevity. I was particularly impressed that there was a bible written in the lolcat style. That seems insane to me and it really makes me wonder what sort of person created that. Clearly, it must have been someone who cares about the bible and yet it baffles me to think that someone religious would use lolcats as a vehicle for their faith. I found the second piece’s critique of the internet's ‘flatness’ interesting. I hadn’t really thought of the internet being flat before. I will admit that by virtue of being displayed (for the most part) on flat computer screens that internet does seem undeniably flat in that sense, but in terms of shallowness of conceptual depth, I don’t think I agree with the article. It’s true that there is plenty of simple meme-like content on the internet but there is also plenty of deep analysis. When academicians want to drop their wisdom from their ivory towers, the presses run to print their babble, but when a random fan wants to devote hours and hours of research to make a complicated theory about an obscure work of fiction, there is no university press for that. That analysis can only be seen on the internet. Are those analyses sometime presented with clip art? Perhaps, but I’m not sure how important that can really be.

Monday, September 17, 2018

Week 1

This week’s readings covered the basis of new media and in particular sound.

The Manovich piece “Principles of New Media” does a good job of trying to define and new media and explain what aspects it possesses and how it differs from old media. I don’t completely agree that new media can be described mathematically, because new media just like old media has the potential to age and become corrupted. Bits on computers can be flipped randomly by solar wind in ways that cannot be predicted. Furthermore files sometimes need to be compressed and sometimes this occurs in irreversible ways. This is another point that I think should be emphasized. New media is fast, but there are limits. Of course it takes time to, say, ship a painting across the world whereas an email can be sent nearly instantly. However the nature of digital media communication leads to some interesting effects. For instance it would take an equivalent amount of effort to ship a canvas across the world regardless of what is painted on the canvas, in fact the canvas may even be blank. On the other hand the effort to email a large image file can vary wildly depending on the Kolmogorov complexity of the painting and how compression is used even if the image dimensions are fixed. One well known effect of this is the confetti effect.

I thought the Hatcher work and the LONG RONG SONG both show much periodicity. In the video the words are stated in a regular cadence and are placed in a regular grid. Periodicity is especially evident in Hatcher’s Ping. In that piece the rhythm of computer pings and packet routing is contrasted with heartbeat and blood flow.

I agreed with Cayley analysis that 'audible literature' is an oxymoron, although insofar as listening and reading have mechanistic differences, I think it is possible for there to be meaningful differences caused by the different mediums. One example that comes to mind is tone.

Final Project link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qg1kHlKq8xfY_AyzC2vd89_G84RQNfwH/view?usp=sharing