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[silly--boi]

week 8 rr

Borges is pretty hard to read but the poetry that he incorporates into his writing makes up for it.  Some of the strongest food for thought of this sort in for me was "Copulation and mirrors are abominable," (Borges 2).  This phrase has cool implications when I let it run through my mind, but what's even cooler is that it could be considered and manipulated so many different ways for different people.  

Another reason that I enjoy reading Borges is that his craving for knowledge is inspiring.  I find myself wondering how and why someone would be so interested in what Borges likes, such as Uqbar.  This makes me further appreciate how different peoples' inclinations are.  His passion come across to me in his obviously high regard for items like the book that Ashe left with the stories of Uqbar and more: "On one of the nights of Islam called the Night of 4 Nights, the secret doors of heaven open wide and the water in the jars becomes sweeter; if those doors opened, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon," (Borges 4-5).  While inspired by his passion, I do not think I fully understand what Uqbar is.  I understand that it is some kind of (mythical?) territory in Klein-Asien.  

Lastly, I am interested in what he says about Tion inherently having been made by multiple inventiors, noting that the "plural is inevitable," (Borges 5).  

[silly--boi]

4/6 RR

Framing a changing museology in the digital age

The ideas of place, community, culture, and technology being pillars of the digital age are interesting.  I wonder which of those were pillars of museology before the digital age.  I also wonder why the author claims that “place has regained his prominence in the digital age.”  If anything, I feel like place would become more fleeting and space would regain its prominence while place would become less important.  

The author’s discussion of public spheres is intriguing as well.  They describe it as “actively inhabited, created, and shared” places.  Can a technological platform, then, be a public sphere?  And would it be a collective or a community that would inhabit it?  

Battro--Imaginary to Virtual Museum

I do not understand why Battro thinks that a painting’s function changes when placed in a museum because museums do not address the amateur or the expert directly.  I feel like his argument would make more sense to me if it were for a different reason.  However, I don’t know whether or not I agree that a piece’s function changes because of the intention of the place that it is displayed at.  Artists sometimes make their pieces to fulfill a certain function and sometimes don’t; either way, to say that the artist’s intention is lost in translation because of an institution’s intended audience seems like a pretty bold and unappreciative statement to me.  This may be because I do not understand his theory well enough.  

Aside from this, I don’t like the way the piece was written because I think the use of so many drop quotes diluted Battro’s message.  It felt like I was discussing the issue with a multiple different voices and viewpoints instead of just one.  

Key concepts of museology

The questions that the author is addressing are extremely theoretical.  Reading this piece was like reading Marx.  I like that they included architecture because it is an integral part of how one responds to the museum.  The space that they are confronted with can provoke different emotions.  I think the next-most important ones to me were heritage and preservation; heritage because museums are meant to relay and demonstrate culture and preservation because, next to these other two concepts, museums primarily are meant to preserve (recalling the glass box that objects are put into, no-touch policies, etc.).  

Filipovic

This reading looked like it was visibly curated to me which was funny because it is about museums, exhibitions, and curation.  Her extensive use of examples was good and clarified the idea of an exhibition but it still was not really clearly, concisely defined in her own words.  She used phrases like “You might then say…” without really saying what she would say.  When she did make claims, they felt fluttery and dragged on.  But maybe that’s because exhibition shouldn’t have a decisive definition like that.  I liked what she said about the exhibition as a performance.  I was confused when she said “a work of art when encountered as a work of art is an experience,” because what else would it be encountered as?  

Storr

After reading Filipovic, I like how Storr started out because he outright admits that an exhibition can’t be defined by answering the question “what is an exhibition?” due to its plurality.  The first sentence of the second paragraph succeeds in what Filipovic does not by concisely defining what he thinks an exhibition is and how it should function and then elaborating on that.  His writing is more digestible than Filipovic’s.  I like what he says about the exhibition-maker needing to juxtapose “people and what puzzles them in such a fashion that they will derive the maximum benefit and pleasure from it.”  Art is meant to be challenging and stupefying and he really puts it into words nicely here, in my opinion better than Filipovic.  

[silly--boi]

hmmm

[silly--boi]

WEEK 6 HOMEWORK--

What did you do? (description)

Sammy, Angelica, and I made an app that is meant to interactively let people discover the connections that lie across borders.  

Why did you do it? (reasoning)

We did this because the piece spoke to us a lot about connection.  We wanted to show how prevalent connections are even when there are physical or metaphorical walls up that try to block said connections.  

How did you do it? (design and development decisions)

We had a lot of different ideas of how to do it at first, but when I went in for extra help, we figured out that the best way to do this with our Unity knowledge thus far was to use translucent opaque quads that would disappear on-click to reveal a section of connections.  Sammy photoshopped a 3d model of the Berlin wall that we put in the middle.  

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WEEK 4 HOMEWORK--I liked how this looked on the train, its movement made it so that my museum moved around with the environment which I thought was cool.  

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week 7 rr

1. Publics & Counterpublics--Warner

My main question about this is how a public can only exist when it is addressed if being a public is contingent on self-organization.  If people decide to come together and organize themselves as a public, why do they have to be addressed to exist if they already existed when they made themselves into a public?  I understand why publics must be addressed to be publics, but not how these two ideas align, especially if its power lies in its self-creation (Warner 414).  

In terms of the reading itself, I thought he got into pretty convoluted sentences that started not to make any sense to me.  This makes me wonder if such academic language is necessary to express such ideas and if whether or not we are capable of thinking about such existential ways of being without this convoluted means of communication.  It irritates me when he throws in little quips (”are you still with me?”) when he uses this kind of language because, no, I am not still with him, and I feel like he knows it (Warner 415).  However, it’s okay because I know that this is a complicated theory and I don’t have to understand it at the first go without class discussion.  

2. Is a Museum a Factory?--Steyerl

I really like his introduction because this is so relevant right now!  Art is starting to be shown is weird, undone places that are pretty much the opposite of the white cube.  It seems like they’re doing it to rebel against white cube culture, which is cool, but why is it cool?  I wonder if it makes the art feel more accessible.  I also enjoy what the says about the spectator as a worker.  It reminds me of capitalistic culture and how, though people in capitalistic societies often think they are acting upon free will (in seeing a gallery, doing whatever they want in their free time), they are usually fulfilling some kind of systematic duty (the museum without spectators would just be a building).  

If the museum were confined, would it no longer be a public space?  It would be available to its select public, which makes it a space for a public--does this make it a public space or the public space?  

3. Bordieu

This reading is interesting every time I do it because I feel like I’ve interacted with/in many of the groups that Bordieu would say have a step up in terms of accessing the understanding of art.  These groups (publics?) include the people in the education systems that I have been a part of, dance or photography teachers/peers, and religious systems.  On top of interpreting art based on my sensory preferences, these systems have definitely reformed how I interpret media and I agree that may interpret things differently than people who do not have access to such luxuries.  

I agree that the artist should be an autonomous producer.  This quote appealed to me because autonomy is one of the most important aspects of individualized art, in my opinion.  I don’t know whether or not an artist is an artist if they are not autonomous, but sometimes the art market takes away autonomy from the artist and this should not discredit their artistic status. 

[silly--boi]

hmmm

[silly--boi]

Week 7 HW--gallery project idea

I can’t post photos of the pieces that I am referring to because Unity is wearing and tearing my computer.  However, these are the ones that I will reference: 

1. The girl in the purple two-piece with the apple on her back, crawling

2. The “fatherland” angry boy, punching

3. The girl spraying the cross w/ unknown substance

4. The green face with the bag hanging from the corners of his lips

5. The guy with the mallet in front of the train

I think I want to do a project about the toll that systems (cyber, social, etc.) take on people.  All of these images remind me of either someone being beaten down by a system or fighting back against one.  I’d imagine augmenting them by showing the impact that each system has by allowing the characters to speak.  Ex--the girl crawling with the apple, when recognized as an ImageAnchor, can grunt like she’s carrying a heavy bag/the angry boy could be saying something about fighting back against political systems.  I don’t know if I’d want to critique just one system or multiple.  I’d also want to let them speak through different media if I could (text, sound, etc.?) for accessibility and greater impact.  The invisible parts for me are the systems that are being critiqued in each photo as they are all up to individual interpretation.  They are visible, though, in that the apple could represent cyber pressure, the green face bag man could represent consumer culture... 

Systems that come to mind:

advertisement culture

the patriarchy

capitalism

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WK 5 HW artwork photo.

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Week 5 RR

1. Journal article/Poetics.../Manovich

I like what they say about cyberspace as an ‘electronic suburb’ (Klein).  These kinds of analogies are nice because they shows topics in a whole new light that make sense on top of past ideas.  

The idea of large and thin screens pervading the obstructions posed for ubiquitous technology (no need for darkness, not conjoint to other surfaces, et cetera) seems very American to me--in addition to media output of all forms being about largeness, American objects are very big as well (food, loudness,...).  Since these large, thin screens don’t obey the laws that make it difficult for there to be media output//ads everywhere, it’s scary to think how omnipresent they could be/are (see GUI).  

The article makes me think a lot, too, about how we aren’t ever really sure how much technology has pervaded us because we cannot always see the physical levels on which it exists.  As the article mentions, cellular and Bluetooth are stellar examples of connection that go off without a hitch (if you’re lucky); lots of other technologies that we may not want as involved in our lives as we do our cell phones must reach us invisibly.  Again in line with the article, we are constantly recorded (video, audio, data tracking, etc.) and used for whatever purpose, none of which would be possible without technology’s ability to separate the display of information from the psychical space that it is displayed on.  

2. What Art Is.../Chan

I feel like art doesn’t belong anywhere sometimes.  It makes people uncomfortable to see something that provokes substantial thought in such a casual setting as a home or even somewhere less fancy, but that is kind of the point sometimes.  If art didn’t catching people off-guard in their raw moments and making them feel a different way than they felt before looking at it, then it might not be doing its job.  That’s why being able to place it somewhere mundane, like a house, seems cool to me.  

--I like what they say about art never fully expressing itself “Art is the expression of an embodiment that never fully expresses itself” 

“the irony is that because it cannot express what it truly wants to be, art becomes something greater and more profound” 

If I understand them correctly, they are saying that art has grown in that it is being expressed in many facts of life, constantly produced, etc., but is lacking in that it has lost control of its symbolic power in its “proliferation.”  This is an interesting idea.  

[silly--boi]

Week 5 HW

Write a post explaining your thought process: What picture did you choose? What do you think it means? Why is it there? How do you intend to convey its message through augmented reality?

We chose to take a picture of the piece of string threaded around a rectangular set of nails as our piece.  This piece speaks to interconnectivity between similar objects/subjects in my interpretation.  The thread as as the connector, reminiscent of the six degrees of separation theory, draws clear shapes and connectors amongst a grid of mundane nails, which––for me––stand in as people.  

I think our group’s goal is to show how at each corner that the thread turns, people can make a number of different decisions that will ofttimes lead them back to a similar/the same set of conditions to which they already subscribed.  

We aim to do this by having buttons that will trigger events in the scene about connectivity that relate to the materials of the artwork itself (yarn, metal) and their transcendent purpose.  For example, we had a *loose* idea that we could have a button trigger a light animation to draw out & light up a shape within the lines to put an (interact-able?) image into, which would be based on our ideas of connecting (ex.bed, family).  If it’s interact-able, I think it would be cool to have different categories of connectedness that we choose intersect depending on how we decide to represent connectivity (categories, random images, material-based images).  

It’s hard working with 3 because all of our ideas are kind of different but also nice because we’ll each bring different things to the project; I do think having more people is part of the reason that the idea is not completely fully-formed right now.  

[silly--boi]

Berlin’s Club Culture?

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Class 3 RR

1.  Interaction Design by Preece et al. felt pretty straight-forward and well-organized.  I liked what they said in the beginning about feedback making an interface usable.  It made me think of Unity and the red icons that pop up when we code–without their comments, fixing code would be tedious and much more difficult.  However, Unity makes itself usable to more than only the computer scientist as the red icons come with suggestions, or feedback, for how to fix your code.  They go on to discuss how feedback is important while completing tasks for validation.  People are oftimes frustrated when things that they use “aren’t working”/are not giving them feedback.  The example of the pen that does not give out ink helped me understand why constant feedback while completing tasks, especially ones that appeal to various senses “provide the necessary visibility for user interaction.”  As I got further into the reading, I began to wonder if feedback functions as a perceived affordance; I’m not sure whether or not I know the answer yet.  

2.  Computers as Theatre by Laurel & Addison-Wesley helped me understand more about computers and the interface similarly to how last week’s reading (A Survey of Augmented Reality) helped orient me to AR.  It introduced the computer-human interaction to me as a conversation mediated by the screen.  This was cool to think about because it allows one to conceive of themselves not only as a computer user, but also as an object being used by the computer in order to compute to its fullest potential.  The desktop metaphor intrigued me as well; I thought it was interesting how functions on computers began to be represented by digitized social statements in order to make such an extraordinary machine available to the masses.  The other part that stood out to me was the computer as women metaphor.  I never thought of women as the computers, but we really are/have been for such a long time in history.  When white men wanted a task completed, they could ask a woman for it and see it as done without having to recognize each step and process (ex. cooking).  

3.  The Medium is the Message (McLuhan) was interesting as it showed how a message can be severely skewed depending on the media that it is relayed through (as clearly explained in the title).  In McLuhan’s words, “The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content.’”  He goes on to say that a movie’s content is “a novel or a play or an opera.  The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content.”  With this, he is saying that a movie is the media form chosen to relay the story written into a novel/play/opera and that the written content is the message.  The movie, therefore, is not the message nor is it the only way the message can be relayed; were the content to be relayed through another medium, the varying context would likely provide a different message by inherently shining a different light on it.

[silly--boi]

Class 2 RR

The Ultimate Display by Sutherland was an intriguing reading for me because I did not realize that it was old.  I searched for the date in the wrong place and therefore ended up reading the piece from the present standpoint.  I was quite confused why Sutherland presented BEFLIX as such a cunning, SOTA technology as his description of it seemed like a familiar and simple-sounding program to me.  When I did find out when it was published, the piece had a new meaning to me.  It is a comprehensive overview of early types of displays and possibilities, many of which have evolved into today’s widely-used technologies (for example, the RAND Tablet stylus → Apple pen).  Aside from this, I appreciated how he described a display as “a looking-glass into a mathematical wonderland.”  This helped me gain a greater appreciation for the amazing computing that is available through these displays and our communication with them as it helped me visualize what computers can do that people cannot (ex. The triangle whose side facing you curves).  

I liked A Survey of Augmented Reality because it oriented me to the class a bit.  van Krevelen and Poelman effectively lay out the various types of AR and the differences between those and VR.  Firstly, the authors reiterated to me that AR is reality augmented with virtual objects.  This class having been my first hands-on experience with AR, I did not yet have a fully-formed idea of what AR was by the time that I read this.  The authors further helped me to understand that the objects, real and virtual, have to register (align) with each other.  Contrastingly, as I learnt from the article as well, VR is an immersive virtual world.  It cannot exist in a “real” environment, though it can use real objects to aid the experience.  I also found the text input part interesting as well because the authors noted that, with fallback technologies, speech to text is a good method for input.  This made me think, however, of how these technologies could evolve to accommodate the voices of deaf people (commonly different from the “normal” voice) or those with “abnormal” vocal patterns.  

Miller’s Artefacts and the Meaning of Things was a cool reading all around.  For me, it solidified the mundane-ness of objects.  This was comforting because I tend to assign sentimentality to objects, so it opened my eyes and showed me how any object is or can be an artefact.  I also appreciate the dual-meaning of artefact that this reading uses, because it shows that an object can be a more “formal” artefact if it is assigned such special meaning.  Otherwise, however, an artefact can be any object that I were to pick up off of my desk.  I also found the idea of how we relate to objects interesting as they could represent us out of being orderly or disorderly, depending on how a person chooses to represent themselves.  Our personal customization determines whether or not we see our objects as orderly or randomized, and further, how the object’s order classifies us.  

[silly--boi]

this is a link to WER BIN ICH on google drive

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WER BIN ICH is to denote the object, “me”, by asking who I am.  The WER BIST DU button goes through the images and functions as a probing tool to answer the question.  I picked myself as the object because I sometimes feel that I can relay aspects or stories about myself more successfully through the art than other mediums like conversation.  I also think that people often place themselves in the subject’s shoes when presented with media: by sitting there, I opened a space to let people think about their own narratives that may relate to the words, photos, or both/none.  The pictures and poem that I made help me tell a narrative about me and other people if they choose to see it that way.