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