the gaze

wow. i just found a john cage cd that my roomate owns of a piano piece that i used to play in undergrad. it's called in a landscape. really simple and beautiful.

so today is sunday. i woke up only mildly hungover after quite an evening of drinking and dance. andrew has decided to rename providence "providaaance." the textual interpretation is mine but it's supposed pronounced with and "on" like in font. providoncé. any way, so i went shopping for food so i can actually eat and ended up getting side tracked into olneyville. that place rules. i actually saw a sign that was hand painted and had a dragon ball z character on it that said "olneyville rules."

my point.

is that i found this little indoor flea market that had all this junk in it. it was pretty cool. nothing spectacular but a few things gave me pause for speculation. for example, why is it that the typical flea market vendor is often found selling cheap taiwanese large ornimental knives and blankets with cartoon character / fantasy themes on them? i do not know. actually i think it's because there is one distrubutor for both of these types of items. why they buy them both and sell them together? i do not know that. next item.

directly across from BLANKETS&KNIVES-R-US was a vendor selling alot of little fountains. many of them had large marble balls floating on a pool of water, just to the point where the ball was elevated enough to roll. there was even one of a fish spitting water onto the ball while it was doing this... clever. but it made me realize the whole thing about perfectly efficient machines. we don't have them. at least not yet. but wouldn't it be easier to overcome friction in space? i'll have to ask neil. because, if you combined say, a frictionless energy generator that was near 100% efficient, with this: www.spaceelevator.com/, we could have something. you just run a power line up to the top and farm away. that could be supercool.

and then there was the point of writing this down. the coolest thing that i saw was this one old guy sitting amongst all this electronic junk. he had a original nintendo and a bunch of other consoles and an old ginormous multi-meter. that thing probably wieghed about 40 pounds. any way, in the back of his little stall, there was a little tv hooked up to a ps1. not the orginal playstation with the boxy design but the one that is super small and looks like a lozenge of some kind. any way, the tv was on and the guy must have been in the middle of a game and stopped, because the character on the screen (it was some sort of quasi 3d side scrolling game with a human / tiger hybrid martial arts dude) was just sitting there rocking back and forth in front of the entrance to a buddhist temple. every now and again he would look behind him as if to check if anyone was following him. but obviously he was alone in the section of the game. it seemed like it was random when he would look behind him because every so often he would do it 3 or 4 times right in a row. i don't know if i'm explaining this effectively, but it was a really bizzare and subtle aesthetic experience. teri said the phrase "returning the gaze" recently in class i think in reference to feminine confrontation of male objectification of the female body. maybe it was christiane? it seemed to me that this small tv was returning the gaze and that's what videogames do. they are visual programs. the logic clicks and shutters at 50hz right in front of your eyes. and it's staring back at you. i sat there watching this video game watching me. waiting for something to happen while this mancat wobbled back and forth in his fighting stance entirely outside of time. i don't know what the moral to the story is. but i begrudgingly agree with our professor george fifield about the potential of the videogame for art. i just wonder if we will get lost forever in these experiences outside of time and ourselves. and where do the people fit that don't get to play these games?

what makes videogames fun?

race game = so much speed you can't think about anything else. you are pushed to the limites of your reaction time.

fight game = you are pitted against something else and you must use hand eye coordination to effectively do combinations to beat your opponent.

adventure game = you get to play someone else and enter a fairy tale more or less. you get to succeed in an alternative life. just like d&d.

what makes real games fun?

how does the logic of games in general arise from who we where before civilization? before culture? what is culture? yar.

Posted by peterflat at 2:56 PM | Permalink

75% of interactive art is bad.

it's funny how we all have blogs and we don't ever have time to write in them. at least i don't. i'm too busy drinking my college money away.

so tonight we saw jim campbell speak. he pretty much said it straight. i wasn't as star struck with him as some people where but his work is good and he looks at things honestly. here's the rub tho. really it seems in my mind and in some of our classes, we have been discussing the whole data mapping as art thing and where to draw the line. as far as interactivity is concerned campbell suggests that when you deal with 1 to 1 ratios for translating data, it gets boring... in a different conversation, someone suggested that it wasn't art at all. which i feel has some foundation. so as to not be too wordy and also so i can go to bed this is what i think:

alot of data mapping art, interactive or no, verges on not being art at all. while this is true at the same time that translation of context and information can definitely be art. duchamp's urinal? pure translation. nothing to it. that's art. most everyone can agree on that because of the context. thinking machine 4 by martin wattenberg? i'm not so sure.. yes it charts the proccess of a computer plotting moves for mind numbing number of games of chess, and very aesthetically, but does it have the same intention of truly shifting the viewers consciousness surrounding the experience of it? sure people can be wowed by all the decisions a computer can make, but these are things that sit just under the surface of what we do everyday, and bringing them to light isn't such a drastic context shift as duchamp's choice. i know it's unfair to compare them in some respects, but honestly, between utterback's deal with herman miller and wattenberg's design of the smartmoney java applet, which in turn they licensed to the smithsonian museum, at this point we are talking about technical and innovative information design and craft or simply nice looking vehicles to put marketing goo into. ???

sleep.

Posted by peterflat at 2:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

we are making the organ. i don't know how much it's going to be made in the end, but we are making it. news at eleven.

Posted by peterflat at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

MIT Media Lab: Michael Casey's Audio Research Projects

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Posted by peterflat at 9:39 PM | Permalink

so it seems like everyone is starting to talk in the department about this idea of organizing and shaping the information we have. i have this aimless desire to synthesize all that i am learning into powerpoint presentations or something. needless to say this department is pretty experimental. even on a social level.

potentially i could make it a project. brinton showed me a program called freemind tonight that does some graphic representations of mindmaps. kind of interesting. but in java and clunky as f. i'm thinking that if i had to make one personally it might just be a memex. an actual physical object that exists outside of the computer. some sort of crossreferenced list. but the internet is good with databases. hmm... or a series of paintings or something.

what exists in reality that we can infuse with ideas. obviously
+ any designed object. a calculator. a mouse. a spoon.
+ paper / writing
+ actions

today in class teri was talking about the technology of illuminated manuscripts being a mnemonic device for remembering. infusing the reading with a color sense and shape along with the ideas. i'm sure many people remember children's books because of the fusing image and text.

what if i created a series of mnemonic objects. say one a week or whatever to engender my ideas into something physical that is not an art object, strictly as a practice of inscribing meaning onto things. the problem is that to effectively convey meaning often to you have to be so blunt as to be crude where as if you are too subtle the meaning may be lost on you after a while. maybe i don't actually need to remember things.

i'm talking about creating an object to manipulate and shape that holds my ideas and connects to how the ideas of others relate to me. i feel as though this is getting too intellectual though. the proccess of actually making needs to be a factor in this. and so it goes.

what if i used max? okee dokee.

Posted by peterflat at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

are you lovers?

Posted by peterflat at 9:43 PM | Permalink

ho huum. mcluhan.

i dont' think we ever really got around to anyone asserting whether or not they found mcluhan's ideas of cool and hot media useful. although, honestly i haven't looked at it enough to really understand it. i'm definitely feeling like my brain is full. go figure.

one of the things that we talked about that was interesting is how we are going to filter all this information into an actual functional education. teri suggested that we subscribe to nettime and empire, and yet i feel like just covering the basics of mcluhan and debord and the others in our postpost digital context in and of itself generates enough substance. eh.

i feel like the big three projects of this semester are in no order of importance:

+ building an organ
+ identifying a way to build a database or field of information that is accessible and updateable for my work.
+ writing alot (see above)
+ taking this idea of the celibrity rag as far as it can go
+ tape operations
+ live performance objects
+ sound
+ sound
_ music
_ sound
+ music

you get the idea.

maybe a database is the way to go. i could get a little mysql thing going. i wonder what the maximum cellsize is. tagging your work becomes pretty essential as well. i need to start doing that.

really another part of this whole thing that i've only barely been acknowledging is that it's hard to be in a new environment and properly contextualize information.

mcluhan mentions the environmental stress reaction cycle = 1. anxiety resistance exhaustion? is that how it goes? i don't know but i just found this on google:
http://www.macses.ucsf.edu/Research/Allostatic/notebook/catecholamine.html

figure 1 is pretty interesting. i wonder what striving means.

anyway. i'm definitely going through the initial anxiety of being in a new environment. bill said something at the beginning of the semester about everything being crazy and that's just the way it is. it's good to know i'm not completely alone.

so look for my fully functioning world of ideas soon. i know i will.

Posted by peterflat at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

the fact that risla disburses loans on monday and wednesday and risd disburses loans on tuesdays and thursdays

the fact that cingular just changed their voicemail software so i have to dial my 10 digit phone number into my own phone just to get my messages.

the fact that an imac g5 *actually* sounds like a radio controlled gas powered model plane at a distance of about 10 yards.

the fact that to save a multi-document pdf in illustrator you have to print(!?) to pdf.?!?

more to follow.

Posted by peterflat at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

it's all well and good that i jot all this shit down about what we are learning. i could for intents and purposes go away and just keep up with chris robbins blog and elliots. i wonder what john baca's is all about. there is this wierd pull that keeps things going and i want to make my blog this virtual version of me. is that the fucking gibson total digitization desire. why am i in this fucking wind tunnel? i feel wierd.

but i was saying that even though i can write and write and write. the ideas are only going to come so much. AH, and in some cases they just come from doing. so let's do BOTH. lets do the organ and lets do the us weekly and let's do the everything else.

I LOVE PDFS. i dont know why. i will make many in my time.

incidentally, i'm going to be using the word incidentally alot. you go to k10k everynow again and see all the good design stuff that's going on and you realize that more and more junk is being generated everyday on the interrrrrrrrrrnet. macluhan said we would get to the point that we would only recognize patterns. it's getting that way. how do i effectively generate data in this tundra of digital detritus. in a format that is legible for myself and others? i don't know if a blog is the way to do it.. we shall see.

Posted by peterflat at 8:01 PM | Permalink

Posted by peterflat at 7:34 PM | Permalink

wait.

so do the fluxus and surrealist artists want to elevate people's consciousness to a disorriented place in the way that traditional renaissance painters wanted to elevate consciousness to god or the devine?

do computer programs want to elevate consciousness to an experience of maximum efficiency and centralized control of all systems connected to one consciousness?

where do these different things want to put us?

Posted by peterflat at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

game: wallball

equipment: a ball and a wall

# of players: from 2 to alot (4 to 7 is ideal)

rules:

essentially wall ball is like handball or tennis. the players select an order and then hit the ball in the order created. the goal of the game is to be the last player in. there are two rules in the game:

• each player must hit the ball in the order created.
• each player must hit the ball and it must hit the ground and then the wall.

each player is allowed one bounce before they hit the ball. if anything else happens the player is out. just for clarity, a player is out if:

• they hit the ball before it is their turn.
• the ball bounces twice after it has hit the wall and before the player hits it.
• the ball bounces twice after the player hits it and before it hits the wall.
• the ball hits the wall before it hits the ground.

wallball is a game of rhythm and timing. unlike tennis, nothing is out-of-bounds in wallbal and the players can serve as ruthlessly as necessary to each other. this rule presents the crux of the subtlety of the game. because every player generally has the capacity to get the next player out with very little difficulty, it becomes uninteresting. what is interesting is identifying the next player's skill level and serving them something that will be challenging for them to return but not unfeasible. thus people are removed from the game due to typical occasional folly along with the collective desire to up the ante until the serves are too challenging for some players. the dynamic of interplay and conversation that arises from this style of play is very compelling.

the narrative of wallball is a singular and spiraling point of focus in a social context. each player serves the ball to the next player ad infinitum until all players except for one is out. if the game is composed of 5 players which is a near optimal amount, there is enough time to serve and watch the other players serve to each other, observe differences in individual style and still hold a conversation. another subtext of the game is a social pressure to cooperate with the group. this is a result of the lack of an out-of-bounds rule. if a player ruthlessly puts another player out by serving a shot too far away, that player is likely going to suffer the same fate. this is a natural sort of gravity to the game. implicity everyone wants to stay in the game, and if someone is trying to end the game prematurely, that person will most likely be removed so the game can continue in it's spiral count-down pattern.

beyond the internal social dynamic of the game there is an external social field created. when a group plays wallball in a highly populated environment it's common to "pick-up" extra players who see the group in passing. there is also a situationist style appropriation of the space itself, if the game moves into an area not traditionally alloted for game play (for example a food court in a mall).

the other side of the narrative of the game is the indeterminate nature of what the game is being played on. any wall will work, but what makes the game interesting is a wall with some inconsistencies that the players can acquire proficiency in using the site specific idiosyncracies and at the same time be surprised by when their anticipations about the direction of the ball are incorrect. what the players are playing on is also a result of the lack of an out-of-bounds rule. often games will travel from one area to another because of a long shot that was returned with another long shot, pushing the ball further away from the original playing area. this type of event has it's own logic or gravity as the game settles into the most natural area to retain it.

so, the experience of playing wallball is as simple as waiting for the ball to be served to you, hitting it, and watching it go around the circle again. this process goes on until the circle is small enough to constantly engage you and you win, or you are ousted to the sidelines by a more aggressive opponent. in this way wallball engages players in successive layers, starting with low levels of activity shared between many players moving on towards the more active peak of the game between the last 2 players involved.

Posted by peterflat at 3:55 PM | Permalink

electronic instrument design that emulates traditional instrument design must be wary of the fact that traditional instruments have been created through a mixture of psychoacoustic analysis of the most aesthetic shape of a phsyical object, performer usability, and happenstance. the third being in some cases playing a very significant role in how the performer relates to the instrument. the violin is a very good example. if you put it on a stick and stuck it the ground, it would be an entirely different playing experience with different gestures and different companion gestures. in fact the design of the instrument over time would have evolved differently. obviously in many cases the design of traditional instruments is the result of a great history of research and development but in some cases, it is very feasible to see where things could have gone differently. i don't want to do the research.

that being said. bahn and hahn and trueman give a very clear and compelling argument for the design of "composed" instruments that mimic the designs of tradition. however should we not be looking further (which they do to a degree) into the shapes of our bodies and our minds to create new instruments that fit us like the proverbial glove?

this brings up the point that is tantamount to my personal research, that being. when we can choose to design instruments that fit us perfectly where to we DECIDE the line is drawn between ease of use and a standard of proficiency?

do we create things that allow children to express whatever comes to mind with the utmost "ease of use" or do we traipse off into uncharted waters of redefining a level of difficulty for a new expressive tool?

the continuum:

easy as breathing -------------------------------> hard as doing timed calculus problems in your head?

what is culturally common knowledge that is difficult. subjectivity aside. translation is hard. speaking different languages. seeing things from a multifarce of perspectives. what else...

endurance... physically sustaining situations. such as 5 hour classes. or 3 hour classes with people that don't know how to teach. ok. gottago.

Posted by peterflat at 3:17 PM | Permalink

i think i'm in love.

Posted by peterflat at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

so last night i went to a show at as220. san serrac and miss fairchild. they were both pretty much off the chain, but miss fairchild turned it out. they all look like they are about 12 but it is evident that they have a deep understanding of how to move a dancefloor. it's beautiful and sort of painful to watch people being so effortlessly talented. it doesn't frame my jaded/california laidback attitude well. i guess i have to get better at something... uuuuuuuuh

Posted by peterflat at 10:31 AM | Permalink

for dinner, i ate beers. and i figured out what my job is. ask me later.

Posted by peterflat at 12:10 AM | Permalink

what if each key on a keyboard had an anti key instead of just being "off."

what if when multiple keys were pressed, or off in a specific relationship the result was a separate analog state or resulted in a different combination of keys.

vocal based mouse - sing low to get to the bottom of the screen, sing hi to get to the top quiet is left loud is right. you could just say click to click.

an array of analog input where some inputs are delayed while others occur in real time. what if your mouse moved in realtime in one direction and lagged in the other? it'd be shitty.

Posted by peterflat at 10:17 PM | Permalink

i don't know.

but i've been thinking about it. though. really all that physical computing is, is an attempt to extend the limits of the computer interface. obvious no? but what happens when we really examine how we can extend ourselves to meet computers... and how much we have already. consider people's posture when they use laptops... although they are pretty ergonomic. a term that didn't exist before people started frying their hands working on poorly designed keyboards. things used to be not so ergonomic. at times we strain to eet the design of the machine and dehumanize ourselves in the process. something people have been aware of and have commented on for a while... stellarc for example. but what happens when we make it more positive? or what happens when we try to maintain our humanity but meet this technology in a new way that stretches ourselves? jeffrey shaw sort of paws at this in things like legible city, but i'm thinking more personal and more experimental in the way we connect to the computer.

list time: how do we connect input to a computer?

-mouse (real time 2 dimensional analog input with a single or multiple contextual triggers.)
-keyboard (array of digital triggers that only have one discrete meaning. the off state is communal and has no discrete meaning for each key)
-microphone (real time 3 dimesional analog input (pitch/freq/amplitude))
-fader/knob/lever (real time 1 dimesional analog input)
-button (digital trigger)
-toggle (digital on/off state.)

so is there anything that is fundamentally different than that in terms of the way we can actuallly get data into a computer?

realtime / non-realtime processing (time is the only mandatory dimension?)
analog 0.0 continuum to 1.0 / digital 0 only 1 only (continuum vs extremes)
single input / array of inputs that are correlate and input simultaneously. (the one and the all)

that's pretty much it? no?

maybe... what about william gibson? there is a short story called "the winter market" in a collection called burning chrome that's about (more or less) a machinima editor. the neat thing about the story is that what he edits is data fed straight from people's minds. so what is that? 6 dimensional analog input? (time / space x 3 / color / sound). in the story the content that people generate is just that, content. it's discussed as if it's something you could record on a vcr. but what if you use that data for control? could someone be aware enough of a dream that they were consciously spinning to understand how it would translate into another medium? can you control a mouse with color and time? with location in 3d space in your mind? i don't knnow. i';m not sure if i care either. we shall see.

Posted by peterflat at 8:47 PM | Permalink