my MEmorial & Suitcase

Hey ya'll,
For now, my suitcase is located here, but only b/c Clemson's site is giving me grief. In the meantime, enjoy the ads. Though it's linked to from the suitcase, my MEmorial is reproduced below.
My memorial is on faith and it's death/rebirth. I felt that this was something we could all relate to in one way or another (as academes who have a sense of the spiritual as well). It's meant to be meditative, not didactic, so I hope it comes across that way.
It's a three parter. All three parts are best viewed in full screen because of the amount of text. Click the google video button and go to the video screen from there. Then click full screen.

This first section covers the birth and death. Music=Weakerthans "Illustrated Bibles Stories for Children."



Again, music by the Weakerthans, this time it's "Reconstruction Site". This second one is about trying to revive a faith that has fallen dead due to a swelled head.




The third one is by far the most experimental. All text, no images. Song is "Hospital Vespers". Title is "Faith like a violent wound" is taken from Josh Abboud. In fact, it's taken quite literally a la printscreen. It may take two or three viewings to get anything out of it.

enMemorium

Hi all,
Here is my very amateurish movie-making venture, which I am mighty proud of.
Jos

Eletronic monument

Hey guys
Here is my piece

Torture and Death in the Slums :
The Violent Path Through Fear, Blood and Vice




I really enjoy the class, the material and the assignments.
The books were very good and very enlightened.

Best

Henrique

Finally...structure/experience project

http://people.clemson.edu/~ruperth/320/

Experience-lectures have totally changed the way my class functions.

Live video+audio+chat+breeze+flash presentations....killer.

All instruction is recorded and uploaded to the lecture archive. Instant faculty audits.

This has had a dramatic impact on my career.

Interesting 3D model program

Hello RCID gang!

I just found out this really interesting 3D model program, its called Blender.
This is an three dimensional program that can model simple objects, complex animations, and the most amazing, you can create your own game.
Unlike sketchup wich is an simple program modeling , this you can insert scripts and animate different parts.
This of course demand a lot of knowledge, but If someone is thinking about following this path, this is a good program. The best part is that it is open source, so its free.

here is the web site
http://www.blender.org/

I'm still going over the basic tutorials, but if I manage to learn something, Ill be glad to demonstrate at the class.

See you all tomorrow

LULZ 4 ALZ!

Last night while talking with three noted scholars in the burgeoning field of St8ninomics I found myself debating the linguistic differences between L337 and LOLcatese. Just thought I'd post this reflection:

Follow this link. It perhaps answers some of those questions that have plagued our twenty-first century minds.

On the Disnification of Culture

Just remember this little tidbit from (the late great) Jean Baudrillard--it's not that we think Disney is "the real thing." Come on! We're smarter than that.

It's that we know Disney is not the real thing, we know it's fake. Because we know it's fake, we (foolishly) believe that the rest of the world going on outside of it is real. Its status as fantasy serves to anchor that other fantasy: the real world.

Structures of an Urban War

Hey Guys!

Here is my piece

Lacan and the gated community

This one needs some explanation. I wanted to create a gated community with the idea that it is structured on visual surveillance - keeping the wrong people out and the keeping the right people in. The giant "silo" combines an agricultural feel with the unnatural-ness of the larger than life concrete walls and metal fencing. Inside the homogeneous homes mark the center of the artificial landscape and are watched over by the surveillance camera/eye in the sky. The camera/eye structure is a 3-D rendering/translation of Lacan's model for how photographs (images) project representations through mediation. The eye is the gaze creating a scopic field which in turn is part of a corresponding scopic field for an object of representation. The model is from a short article he wrote called "What Is A Picture?" I am imagining surveillance as a visual activity that functions both externally and internally, surveillance recordings codify relations between community members while they include/exclude based on visual markers.

I also think the eye is appropriate for Halloween!

Hey e'rbody

I'ma put my video up forya. Enjoy!

Interactive Fiction

Here's my experiential design thing as it stands now. The genre of Interactive Fiction carries with it its own jargon etc. Click on the applet and begin to type. If you just see a blue screen with no words, or only half the words, type "restart" and press enter. You can do a lot of things, but not everything--the game should help you sort this out. So far there are only a few puzzles and they are fairly simple. Just be logical and it should work. Oh yeah, as far as shortcuts go, use "x" as short for "examine" u,d,e,n,w,s for their respective directions. For more info on IF click here. If the applet doesn't work, download the game and interpreter for PC or mac. Install the interpreter and load the game once you've opened the interpreter. If you get it to work, please post a comment and what you used (e.g. It worked in Firefox OR It worked using the Mac Interpreter). Thanks.

Structure beginnings

Richard Lanham's handling of Attention Structures makes a scary observation; style matters more than substance? How/when did we get here? Well, the large amounts of information being proliferated seem to blame. We are no longer in search of information, information is in search of us. And it usually is all the same, and so the burden is on, for lack of a descriptive word, rhetors to get to us (consumers of information); they have to get our attention by appealing to our sensitivities.

It seems to me that these attention structures have a lot to do with digital rhetoric. Digitization of content annihilates distances between consumers and producers of knowledge. With that distance shortened and information abundant, what is scarce is human attention. The attention we consumers need to make sense of information. I guess the definition of economics changes; as per Lanham, economics becomes not about scarce but abundant resources.

However, to make sense of information, we need to oscillate our attention between style and substance.

Fascinating stuff.

GM preventative technology

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e_ZeYy3qjs

the ethics of surveillance came up a couple classes ago...just stumbled upon this.

Not only is your car GPS'd but they can control your car from space....ohhhhhhh......

quite the experience-design.

This is a Scary Prospect

So, I found this and I think that it is interesting, but scary: http://www.broom.org/epic/ols-master.html.

Structure

Here's what I've got so far. Now I'm working on the game itself. That should follow. NB: be prepared for nausea.

iRetract

Well, Jason...maybe your iHack remix had some effect!

Check this out.

shock therapy

Just a quick note on the Swedish artist article. I noticed that the only muslim that the article represented was a female "wife and mother" that wears a burqa. I'm not expecting some quasi-objectivity from a news media source, but I think that the choices for speaking muslims have been severely limited to the voice of this one woman. I have no idea what the general thinking is within the wider muslim world, but the article itself already leads the reader to a certain conclusion about what to think of this artist.
Personally I respect his right as an individual to express something (anything), but he had to know that something like this was a possibility. I think we have to consider the possibility that he wanted something like this to happen (maybe not the slitting the throat part) in terms of publicity. He claims to be an atheist, but he demonstrates some "faith" in his ability to shock other religions (Jesus as a pedophile?). We could even coin a new term for a religion of shock -- "shockigion"? Anyone? Maybe not.

Enabling Designers

I find it interesting that Donahue, in Enabling Design, tries to distance himself from a comparison of design research to ethnography. I understand why he differentiates it from market research. The process he advocates seeks to approach subjects on their own terms and in the process develop new design methods and forms. Market research seems to revel in reification and interpellation of the subject. Design research, according to Donahue, is dimension, not synergy. However, his own "immersive investigation" with the low-sight community bears resemblance to ethnographic participant observation. They also seem to share goals in how they treat the research subject, though Donahue stops short of involving himself in the community as a low-sight participant.
I bring this up because there are some issues involved with participant observation that may affect enabling design research as well. First of all, no matter how hard you try you can never completely close the gap between researcher and subject. I do think that Donahue has a sincere interest in the community that he addresses, and the goal is to offer choices that the community deems appropriate and desirable. He speaks "to" low-sight people in his design. However, he does attempt to speak "for" the community in this article. This is not a complaint, but a critique that design research can somehow empower the community by speaking for them. It really is more of a political issue than a practical one.

art and violence

Check out this piece in CNN about an eccentric artist in Sweden whose drawing have made him the target of death threats. What do you think?

"Defiant Artist"

Use Less Stuff

Hey Guys,
finally I'm leaving my state of Digital shyness and posting on the blog.
Here is my Ecological/Societal Message-Remix against consumerism.

Operation "Use Less Stuff - sharing this message over the campus"is on its way, stay tune for the vending machines.

the truth is out there!

Henrique

Pantene spoof

Sorry for getting this in so late. Here is my visual reMIX:



Copy and paste the following link if the video doesn't work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sVJFfyxmwQ

Description:
This is a visual reMIX of a popular Pantene commercial, circa late 80s/early 90s. I am spoofing the commercial by captioning it with criticisms of Pantene's parent company, Proctor and Gamble.

The New Clemson Seal

reMEX

Just a thought...and before you all jump me, I have to admit that I found the general Betrayus ad fascinating...not for political reasons but the serious minds that played on the pun and sent a message based upon that.

And given the general uproar and press the ad generated, the movers' move was a success. Is that work in general an element of not just remix but also of serious design?

I think that remixing projects in general require guts and radicalnesss. Of course there is plenty of creativity too and know how but I think the ideology that informs the practice is a genre in itself. radical architecture? Who would have thought? cause architects bring things together in measured tones and carefully chosen mixes of patterns, of designs or colors. radical, I don't think so! However, if you have ever had to start over, certain material things cease to matter. You get a totally different perspective in life. doesn't matter if you are in Darfur, or Katrina; if your California home has been toppled over by a lansdlide, or your shack just went up in flames. Life has a way of reminding us, that there are things more powerful than we are. And it's our task tolive and let live.

a rEmIXture

The weird thing is that someone actually gave me two stars!

images

Products of Our Environment?

iSuck

Arcidia

Welcome to the benevolent...er, scratch that, ambivalent...er, polyvalent? anyway it's a loose collection of cultures, both topic and atopic. Come join. When you are in Jennifer Govt. click on your region and then "move on to new region" and type "Arcidia." Then click to move in. We can all be pals!

Iterative design and community (and MOOs)

Zimmerman's argument throws some light on an issue of play that I hadn't thought of previously: testing. Iterative design is "a form of research for informing and evolving a project as successive versions ... of a design" (176). That is, game testing of this nature requires makers to submit the draft through to various channels of testers. The maker's ethos is thus dependent upon how well he follows the revisions.

What stands out to me here (perhaps rather obviously) is the classroom workshop application. The presentations today in our pedagogy class revolved around the creation of technological communities; just as iterative designers create a type of community with thier testers, so writers create a network with thier peer editors.

Just some thoughts I wanted to bring to the table.

btw >We did talk about MOOs today, which up until this point I was not very familiar with. Cynthia, is there a way we could have Lingua MOO activated here?<

Feast Quickly

I just came upon this through Stumble. I think this is hillarious.

MyTube

Just thought I'd send this link out. It's a video I made for a book review, and my first post to YouTube. It's interesting that you almost have to create with YouTube in mind since there are some things that are a little difficult to read on the small screen. I think there's a paper to be written there... of course not by me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j0soEuUtY4

Mystory as a remix

I was intrigued by one of Ulmer's examples on definition: taking a word that's defined a certain way and redefining it. How cool is that! I kept thinking of one such word that I could subject to Ulmer's MOD, but the pressure to deliver, and to internalize all I am reading, well, I need to balance.

Ulmer and electracy

Greg Ulmer suggests that internet invention and electracy are forms of "applied poetry." I like how he links the power and potential of electracy with beauty [theory = poetry], community, and pedagogy.

A ReMix

Here is a cover for the Greg Graffin album "American Lesion":













I think this is an interesting remix with an interesting social/cultural message. Just putting it out there.

design writing and criticism

I'm interested to hear your views of the 3 articles by Bruinsman, Heller, and Poyner :-) And by the way, the :-) turned 25 yesterday =:0!

new book by Brenda Laurel

"A heady hybrid of critical thinking, personal narrative, and economic analysis, Utopian Entrepreneur is a field manual for those who want to do socially positive work in the context of business. One of the few Silicon Valley veterans who participated in all four of the major computer tech bubbles – games, multimedia, virtual reality, and dot-coms – Brenda Laurel is known for injecting humanistic values into computer-based media."

check it out at MIT Press MediaWork

Cyborg Manifesto

Thanks, Sergio, for posting about the Unabomber Manifesto. Chilling, though. I happened to think of another very important manifesto, but it's written as an article, so read it only if you have time. Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto."

An Addition Manifesto for those interested

Here is another manifesto for those that are interested: http://www.thecourier.com/manifest.htm. In this manifesto, the Unabomber discusses the industrial-technological move in society during his action. I think this may be interesting for this class. Reflecting on what he says and where we are at with technology today.

On a side note, we were talking about the (Red) Manifesto tonight and I just had a thought. It seems that even though it is a business model, this model provides a benefit to consumer by showing that they are being socially conscious and the business is profiting financially. I wonder if this is a product of the structure of our society in that we want to receive something in return when we are being charitable. I'm not sure if this is something that is real or just a perception that I may have. This came to me through a conversation with my S.O.

foggy

It's literally foggy this morning here in Clemson, and that's perfect for my foggy jet-lagged brain, too. I'm back, folks, and happy to be home for good for a long while. Will be catching up on reading you and re-mixing you and the readings! See you Wednesday night, if not before.

Appendix I

www.papertiger.org
Quick comment on Drew: It is interesting to see how Paper Tiger turned a theoretical design into an living, breathing network. The low-tech aesthetic seems to have been appropriated by mainstream networks, most notably MTV. Now shaky camera movements and bad lighting are used for stylization, low-tech becomes high-aesthetic.

This article reminded me of Jefferey Sconce's book Haunted Media, in which he traces the history of radio broadcast back to early use short wave radio among hobbyists. It seems that every media technology has roots in low-tech tinkering, before of course, being given wholesale over to private companies.

Internet Verite

Braun's discussion of "openess" and "lack of completion" makes me think of the difference between so-called reality television and what could be called documentary or even ehnographic media. Although Bechtold says that "everything on TV is reality" it is the presence of the modes of representation that provoke a particular kind of realism, which is, most of the time, disavowed. Documentary (and especially cinema verite), however, attempts to reveal the mode of production and tries desperately to find some truth behind what unfolds. I'm thinking specifically of the Seven-Up series which seems open and resists completion (as long as the participants remain alive and willing), but what bothers me is the distance that the films place between participants, producers, and audience. I think Braun is advocating, at least in part, a way to close this gap with conceptual designs that hold make producers out of spectators and, in turn, partcipants.
I do think (and you can argue this) that in addition to, as Braun states, engage a Utopian non-space of dialogue, the annonymity of the Internet encourages a kind of morbid voyeaurism. I don't think that it is passive, to the contrary, it is an active engagement in the sense that voting for American Idol is active. So while we wait for new conceptual models of how we can use the Internet, it feels more like an extended reality show (maybe even [gasp]... one of those awful dating reality shows that you know you shouldn't watch, but you do anyway. Or is that just me?)

Ab/Using Ethnography

I thought I would respond a little to Plowman's use of ethnography within the corporate realm. Although I see the benefit of methods like participant observation in business settings, I'm not quite sure how far the comparison to native cultures can go. To some extent de Certeau's work about blurring the lines between high/low culture does appear to give popular culture more design power (in the case of "readymade" objects). I guess what I'm getting at is an understanding of what these methods are after. I imagine there must be some amount of "responsibility" (in the way we discussed this) by those involved toward their subjects. But in practice these methods seem more of an attempt to recuperate objects lost to social redesign back into a more manageable (and profitable) form. It makes me think of the obsessive scramble to control the Internet and digital copyrights. Will more participant observation help design a better way to sell music to a generation that feels entitled to it? It seems that the goals have to change before companies can design objects that, in Plowman's summary, "radiate the degrees of freedom necessary to enhance... self-invention". Unless the companies can figure out a way not to pay for those inventions. Now I'm not sure... do I have an actual question in there?

In the mix

Josh,
I am surprised this is your first blog ever. Oh well, there is always a first time, right?

I had the misfortune to take a Technologies of meaning making class my last semester at the University of New Mexico with Susan Romano, in which she not only required us to blog but to Myspace as well. Obviously, I used an alias in Myspace. Wouldn't want my students to access my page and assume all sorts now, would I? It wasn't all bad.

I am both looking forward to learning so much in this class, as I am dreading the projects. My invention capabilities are going to be taxed to the max. And then of course there is the teaching. It's always a balancing act, this GTA thing.

Hmm!


I

here at last

Hi all....I just arrived in Copenhagen, a day late and a dollar short (as they say)! My luggage made it, too.

Read some interesting stuff on the plane and saw 3 movies. Makes the time pass quickly. Now to prepare for this defense tomorrow! Some day it will be defenses for all of you! More soon!

Virgin Territory

Okay, so here is my first ever post to a blog. That makes me sound really lame, but you have to start somewhere. I don't have much to post... just wanted to re-introduce myself to those that care. My undergraduate and master's degrees are both in media arts from Brigham Young University and the University of Arizona respectively. I love movies, but I'm not a movie buff, so don't try that film trivia on me, I will lose. My wife, Kristin, and I just passed the seven year itch and we have two rambunctious boys, Garret (3 yrs), and Jonas (11 mos). Like I said in class--most of my expertise is in old technology film and television, so I look forward to stretching those limits, if that's what they could be considered. Now... let's see if this worked.

ReMixing it up

Welcome to ReMIX, where RCID 805 'serious design' interz the relogos/phere. Some of you know me, others of you will soon enough. Please introduce yourselves and start reMIXing it up. Details are welcome.