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.

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.

parallax board of education + parallax basic stamp BS2SX-ic

even though parallax says you don't need the usb driver, you do. it is here:
this thing

this is macbs2 for programming in pbasic on osx.

knowledge;

a basic stamp has it's own ground. when included in a circuit you sometimes use a pull down resistor to enforce the current moving through the basic stamp and not just ignoring it.

homework: serial communication via multiple basic stamps. we should probably use multiple colors of leds and pause commands to see exactly where the data is being passed.

i think my right hand is seizing up on me. where's my dove?

i fell over in my chair. itemize

bike organ
me weekly
pretty much anything having to with electronics and ir sensors
sub ground speaker systems for spatialization
rfid fighting

sleeeeeeep.

i like chimneys.

today we are reviewing everyone's ideas for different applications of digital switches. the basis of the assignment is to push us to think about the most rich applications of the simplest electronic communication. binary states. i thought up a few that are all sort of so so.

- scissors with pennys attached to the ends so that you would make a connection everytime you cut something.
- spitting buttons into a pan with wires attached to them. this would generate a somewhat aleatoric effect because the connectino between the button and the wire is intermittent.
- putting a bunch of metallic tape in meaningful patterns on the wall or something and having a metal mitten that you could sort of rub over the wall. i guess this would count as multiple switches. i feel like alot of other people delved deeper conceptually and came up with alot of fruitful stuff.

if you have any questions about the application of art and technology you should watch this.

no but really. i need to figure out a way to filter all this stuff and properly boil the information around me. it's sort of overloading.

really it would be best if i could have a blog that was half physical so i could write in it. i feel like i transfer alot of information between places. but i suppose that's good for retention.

zombie violence.

not really. but i thinking about making something out of one of them. i'm not sure which one yet. today was a good day. i got to put in some actual "work" for my assistanceship. i put together this giant document in illustrator of gps points and associated photos that were taken at the points by my professor. i suppose i didn't really sign an nda when i came to risd so i can pretty much talk about anything that i am working on.

today we had class with this curator from boston, on the sort of history of digital media. not just history but contextualizing current work in conjunction with past works. today we talked about technological innovations that have had an impact on the art world. in many cases conceived by artists. in some cases the things created went on to affect everyone. photography for example. or electric lightbulbs. we started by talking about perspective. brunelleschi was a 15th century florentine architect who is considered one of the earliest proponents of the concept and largely responsible for it's adoption in 2-dimensional art. albrecht dürer, who lived around the same period mastered the technique to a degree that is almost more mathematical than artistic, though no one can challenge the aesthetic depth and power of his works. i sound like a text book.

the most stimulating point in this discussion was when it was pointed out that before the adoption of perspective in painting, the size of each character represented in a work was directly related to how important they were in the narrative of the work. this is why there are paintings with giant saints next to normal people who actually look like hobbits. when size was wrested from the hands of narrative and subjectivity by this logical system, i'm sure people had to rethink a few things. uh..
ya. this is an early example of say science revoking some of religion or art's power to speak as an authority on the way things should be. but oddly enough it's still people that make the decision, and in so many cases kowtow to the NEW way that is most of the time just simple rationality but not necessarily better. can i spell?

after that we began discussing immersion in art and the desire to reinvent reality in our own image along with the ideas of escaping the mundane and being recreated in a more mythologically charged state. a couple different people brought up james turrell because of his simple use of light and line to recontextualize people because of the space or lack of space that they are in. good.

ok. sleep time. i'll talk more about my project in the future. in the mean time i need to find some metal buttons so i can electrify a pan to spit them in to.

okay thoughts time.

it seems like there are alot of people who's creative process starts with just that, technical process and then moves towards concept. i suppose that makes sense, you have to speak a language before you can actually say something. i don't know. i feel like it leads people on technical tangents and then it takes them forever to actually figure out what they want to say/do. but that's easy for me to criticize. i just program max all day. whatevs. i'm in an oddy moood.

what am i doing at gradschool? i understand it's good to change environments to stimulate your creative process but tonight i had my second class with a teacher with a questionable teaching style. maybe i'm complaining too much. i do feel a little bit of panic though. there is this trend in new media of teaching the technical and letting those that "know" sort of glean the *actual* learning from the teachers in a happenstance manner. i mean to say that understanding how to further your work and ask good questions, these are things that need to be taught but people keep asking about jitter. ha. but really the person that doesn't understand the technical foundation for the class need to work on that outside of class. blablibbity bla. it's pretty much always the same difficulty teaching intermingled theory and technical courses. things gotta be defined.

in other news i heard that andre 3000 track at a bar tonight about spreading / love. that's a good song. my friend wrote a song called little coyote, and i guess andre heard it through a friend of a friend. go figure. tell me when i start to sound like everyother blog in existence. i'm self conscious right now.

this also makes me wonder. our class = this. what am i paying for. haha.