jleblanc-commlab

Final Project Ideas

2005-11-28T21:00:00.000-08:00

I am thinking about doing a video. My girlfriend is a dancer, and after seeing some of the movement in some of the Commlab videos, I got interested in thinking about filming something like a hand or foot moving in a dance. It would be kinda complex since I have never done anything with video before (save in class), but it is an experiment I'd like to try.
Charles is probably going to help too.

Animation I like and my ideas

2005-11-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

I have always loved, though not until now again visited in the past year:Home Star Runner. I like this because it funny, the animations are simple and straightforward yet quirky (Strong-Bad's emails). It is probably what you were meant to use Flash for, and it is good fun, no hoighty toighty flash crappola.
In keeping with this I would like to do something more like a puppet show for my animation. Maybe a Larry, Curly, and Moe type thing (what were their names?), where the puppets hit eachother and general hilarity ensues.

Access and Problems

2005-11-28T20:43:00.000-08:00

My Personal Problem:
Is the "show your NYU ID card system" at the entrance to Tisch. It is quite horrible because it is based on the guards telling (or yelling) at you to show your card, and then all you basically do is flash your wallet at them.
The system is arbitrary, some guards are at one point super anal and at others they don't even look. This leads to confusion and irritation at them.
I contrast this to the palladium or Bobst, where the act of having to go through a card reader is simple, obvious, and works.

The problem for a deaf person:
A deaf person would have particular problems with this system since it is a verbal one only, and the gesticulations of a security guard are unlikey to clarify anything.
A deaf person would likely have little problem at the palladium or Bobst because the system is obvious and has signs to help tell you what to do.
The system from these places would be harder to have at Tisch given limited room. However if Tisch used a system of tensa barriers to funnel people past a small guard checkpoint set up not at that desk miles away, but closer to the door, and posted a sign on the doors outside Tisch and by the guard station things would improve. Everyone would know what they had to do, and the guard would be right there so there would be no confusion as to who one had to show the ID too.
This would certainly benefit a deaf person because all the cues would be visual.

Link To Video

2005-11-28T20:42:00.000-08:00

Our Movie

Audio Composition

2005-10-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to Sol and my audio composition: AUDIO

The first half (without any music) is the one I created, and the second half is Sol's creation.
We recorded a lot of different shoes walking and stamping on wood, stone, tables, metal, stairs, and carpet + a little bit of Sol's voice and doors. I wanted to do something only with those sounds and layer them. It came out okay, but it was really long and a little boring so I cut it down but feel like I lost some of the more interesting transitions.
My idea loosely was to have Sol's voice at beginning which wakes the "footsteps" and then they go around to different places signified by shutting of a door and then end back at Sol's voice again.
I think there are some good ideas and nice little pieces and transitions here, but overall I think the musical and rhythmic structure is a little lacking.

Fun though, and I want to explore this kind of thing more for my final project. Maybe in conjunction with animations or video.

Reading

2005-10-12T11:25:00.000-07:00

I liked the reading a lot. I think that would be a very cool class to take if it still exsists. In physcomp I am working on a project that utlizes "finger drumming" by putting FSRs on fingertips and connecting it to a MIDI, but the interface could do sampling kind of things as well. Once we actually start making it.

Sound Project Ideas (Sol and Jeff)

2005-10-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

SoundIdeas:
Shoes/sneakers/high heels/..... stomping, skipping, dragging, running....

Story Idea:
Some kind of monster is running through the city and chasing different kinds of people wearing different shoes.
There will be consistent monster sounds, maybe metallic in nature (think Nine Inch Nails).
I think (not sure what Sol thinks since I just thought of this), that it will be abstract and we will try to make it very rythmic, drawing inspiration from electronic music. I am excited by this! I've never played an instrument, so the idea of assembling these collected sounds into a "music" piece is intriguing. We can use the clips many times in patterns...

Sounds to collect:
shoes (sneakers, dress shoes, rollerblades, high heels)
walking and running on:

wood floor at ITP
hollow metal stairs (figure out where they are)
stone stairs

squishing and crushing things:

boxes
fruit
potatoe chips
glass/plastic boxes
popping ballons
eggs
mud
jumping and wading in puddles
pebbles

Also:
skateboard sounds
bicyle shoes and bike clips

walking in a tunnel (echo)

Photoshop work

2005-10-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

Here is out project.

It is a little strange, but we had fun making it. It was sort of stream of conciousness. I liked it.

We first browsed through random images on Google Images and came across the band Queen with fused heads. We then got the idea of a fragmented band that comes together.
Pic 1: We copied all of our images from google and began by cutting and pasting the cut out heads of the Queen band members and placing them onto the head's of the Rolling Stones.
Pic 2: We created a new document and airbrushed out the prisoner's head and copied the jail bar. We then copied in a Queen band-member's head and moved the bar into place. We then repeated this 3 times for the other members, moved them in line with each other and cut the document.
Pic 3: We re-sized and streamlined the keys and copied and pasted them into the tree. We then copied/pasted and reduced the opacity for the Swami image.
Pic 4: We cut and pasted Queen band-members' and Swami's heads onto the retreat group and painted in beautiful beams of light using the Paintbrush tool.
Pic 5: Finally, we added the heads to the Queen Mother's portrait and used the Rubber Stamp and Wand tools.

We resized, saved as jpegs and uploaded to my page.

Flickr Photos and a Floating Island

2005-09-27T17:54:00.000-07:00

Here is the link to the photos that Kati and I took

http://www.flickr.com/photos/katialondon/

We also saw the Island float by, as the pictures show. It was pretty cool, but sort of small, and I was a little disillusioned to see that most of the trees were held up with wires. Still the texture of the grass and rocks on it were very cool.
I think though that it had a sense of loneliness. No one was on it. Not even birds. It almost seemed like a strange neglected and adrift piece of earth that got sad cause no one paid it any attention, and so it was basically like to hell with all you. And now its only friend in the world was a tug boat.

Digital Art: Intro & McLuhan Intro, Chapter 1

2005-09-15T10:34:00.000-07:00

My reactions or notes on interesting bits as I read:

Digital Art

What is it that makes digital art new? p7
also, differences between using digital as tool versus as medium p8
cybernetics, ah where exactly did you go? p9
RAND's vision of an internet as a way to secure data against nuclear attack p10
Dada's fascination with algorithimic and random proccesses p11
"controlled randomness" p15
Charles Csuri, John + James Whitney p16-17
"A system viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable ongoing relationships between
organic and non-organic systems" p18
Neuromancer and Snow Crash p22
these two books are so good. I should read them again.
The issue of how digital art pieces fit into different spaces (its not like you just hang them) p24

McLuhan
Intro

"Today the action and reaction occur almost at the same time" p4
This fact makes it harder also to distance ourselves from the consequences of our actions (say the slaughter or war for example): "It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner" p4 Instead we just acknowledge and go on today.
" ["outside" groups] can no longer be contained, the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in out lives, as we in theirs, thanks to electric media" p5
"The mark of our time is its sudden revulsion against imposed patterns" p5 Whose revulsion exactly? Electronic media works in both directions.

1. The Medium is the Message

"The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern it introduces into human affairs." p8
"[with an electric light] whether [it] is being used for surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the 'content' [or medium in his terms] of the electric light, since they could not exsist without it." p9
And here is a key statement: "When IBM discovered that it was not in the bussiness of making office equipment or bussiness machines, but that it was in the bussiness of processing information, then it began to navigate with a clear vision." p9
We fail to have this kind of realization about the light bulb because its relation to the mediums it enables is not so direct, or simply taken for granted. But so what?
He becomes in my mind slightly absurdist hereafter....
"'Rational', has for the West long meant 'uniform and continous and sequential.'" p15
He makes the case that in imposing a specific structure on say rationalism, we lose and cannot understand alternate systems of coping with chaos.
"For each of the media is also a poweful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups." p20-21 Fox v NYT?
Natural resources affect how societies are structured. Clearly.
All media are extensions of human senses. p21 True, but, I'm not entirely sure.

An excellent quote by Vannevar Bush

2005-09-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

"A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs."

-Vannevar Bush

Janet Cardiff's Audio Walk

2005-09-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

I took the audio walk early Thursday morning. What struck me most was the weaving of the actual sounds of the park with the recorded sounds on the CD. When I began the tour, sitting by 59th street, I could suddenly hear sirens beginning to wail in the distant, coming closer. I got a little distracted from the opening narration and turned my head to look for the fire trucks. I couldn't see anything, and then She said "Isn't it noisy here?" That's when I realized it wasn't real, it was on the CD, there were no fire trucks coming.

This weaving was both with sound and place, which was what made it arresting at times. What I liked was how she kept you in pace with her using footstep noises in the background and constant refrences to things and paths around you.

This allowed for one of my favorite moments when I walked by a huge rock and suddenly I heard a girl's voice yelling something like "Jimmy get down off that rock, you'll hurt yourself", and I looked up but of course no one was there. And yet another time as I was descending a set of stairs she said "look at that woman taking a picture of the pond", and sure enough there was a woman taking a picture. Probably 90% of the things she told me to see weren't there, but the incogruity of the sounds, the confusion with what was real and fake, spilled over into what I saw as well. Everything she mentions I am sure occured at the spot where I heard her say it at some point in time. That made for a magical bending of time, like everything was ghostly and everyone who had walked the paths had left something that still was lingering there.

For example, when I went into a tunnel she mentioned something about shadows moving towards us, and there were two people (on the tour as well) just ahead of me in the tunnel and although they were walking away from me, it appeared for a moment that they were moving toward me. I think that might have been achieved because it sounded like footsteps were coming towards me on the CD. It was a surreal moment, her power of suggestion overcoming my logical perception.

So I really thought that the layering of sounds created very cool, often distorienting, moments.
I certainly listened to and was concious of the story and the photographs, but I don't think it captured me as much as the general effect of the CD mixing with the surroundings. The effect reminded me a little of listening to the radio in a car, where I am listening to the voices but so caught up just in watching the scenery pass that it all becomes sort of ambient and hazy.
Very cool, I didn't know what to expect but it has put lots of thoughts in my head.

Jeff