Category: Glossary

An attempt to make sense of words

Week 10 Summary

Glossary, Reference, Weekly Summary

References

Woven Signals, Anne-Marie Lavigne

The form is the outer expression of the inner content. One should not make a deity of form. And one should fight for the form only insofar as it can serve as a means of expression of the inner resonance. Ultimately one should not seek salvation in one form.
– Wassily Kandinsky, “On The Problem of Form”, 1912

Inkspace, Zach Lieberman

The Films of Bêka & Lemoine

Guest Speakers

Sarah Rothberg, Narrative in Immersive VR

Narrative: a way of organizing occurrences into a coherent sequence

“Narrative” means any technique that produces the visceral desire in a reader to want to know what happened next.
– Bob Baker, Los Angeles Times

Virtual Reality: a “kind-of” reality immersion, presence, agency

Things to Consider in Immersive Digital Experiences:

  • Providing causality in narratives
  • The user will be in a 360 environment
  • VR breaks the teller-listener paradigm
  • The user still exists in physical reality
  • Where, how, and by whom will this be seen?

Week 8 Summary

Glossary, Reference, Weekly Summary

Things I Learned

  • Aleatoric music..is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work’s realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). (Wikipedia)
  • Sonograms are the predominate visualization of bird songs.
A Fox Sparrow's Breeding Song (Source: The Bird Guide)
A Fox Sparrow’s Breeding Song (Source: The Bird Guide)
  • Ideal 1/4” acrylic vector cut settings for the 60W laser: 8/100/5000 with two passes

References

“The UI and UX will change when the data does. I’m interested in seeing how it will change and what design will look like when it’s optimized for transparency around data and not for minimal efficiency.” –

Caroline Sinders, #tfw your side hustle becomes your main gig

The First Mac OS Control Panel, captured by Dan Vanderkam (https://www3.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/)
The First Mac OS Control Panel, captured by Dan Vanderkam (https://www3.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/)

”It provides a means of recognizing the spatialities of software—not simply linking the screen, register, and algorithm with roads, rooms and runways, but showing how such things in turn transduce each other…”

  • Matthew Fuller, “Foreward” in Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011.
jazz.computer by Yotam Mann and Sarah Rothberg (http://jazz.computer)
jazz.computer by Yotam Mann and Sarah Rothberg (http://jazz.computer)

”We usually understand and acknowledge that a documentary is a creative treatment of actuality, not a faithful transcription of it…Documentaries marshal evidence and then use it to construct their own perspective or proposal about the world. “

Guest Speakers

Tega Brain, “More Questions Than Answers”

  • When technology fails or works in an unintended way, what does it enable? How can technology be productively inefficient?
  • Being Radiotropic, 2016 questions how we are increasingly orienting ourselves to wireless infrastructures through a series of three wifi routers that “misbehave” or behave eccentrically. One is based on the phases of the moon, another is paired with the lighting and “unlighting” of a candle, and the last responds to the disposition of a house plant.
  • How the “format” of the work, such as a start-up or business, can also be a mode for critical practice (Unfit Bits and Smell Dating).

Sound and Data

Glossary, Reference, Video + Sound

Sonification

mapping information or data into non-speech sound

Further Reading

stAllio!’s Editing Images with Sound Software Tutorial

stAllio! result from cutting and pasting the data from a bitmap file within a sound editing program
stAllio! result from cutting and pasting the data from a bitmap file within a sound editing program

Shawn Graham, Tutorial on Sonification

Sounds of Science, the Mystique of Sonification

Mark Sample, Notes toward a Deformed Humanities

The deformed work is the end, not the means to the end. The Deformed Humanities is all around us. I’m only giving it a name. Mashups, remixes, fan fiction, they are all made by breaking things, with little regard for preserving the original whole.

Daniel Temkin, Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction

Precedents

Andy Baio’s experiments of converting original MP3s to MIDI, and back again to MP3s

Jordan Hochenbaum and Owen Vallis’s “Weather Report” which translates weather data into sound

On Endings

Glossary

Afterward

Often written by the author, the afterward provides commentary on the piece itself. It may include context, additional information or alternative interpretation of the work.

Epilogue

Placed outside of the established narrative structure but concerned with the characters, plot and themes of the piece, the epilogue is a conclusion.

On Tools

Glossary, Physical Computing

In his blog post, “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design,” Bret Victor asserts that a tool “addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities” and “converts what we can do into what we want to do”.

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking about the self-watering ceramic spikes we use in the plants around our apartment. A long narrow plastic tube is connected to a hollow ceramic cone with a plastic lid. The plastic tube sits in a water bottle and through capillary action, water is pulled up through the tube into the ceramic spike, placed in the soil. The porosity of the ceramic allows water to leach out into the soil as needed. The only maintenance I provide is periodically refilling the water bottles.

So the question is: are the self-watering plant spikes tools?

Analyzing Bret Victor’s definition, it breaks down into two parts:

  • a goal (what we want to do)
  • a capability (what we can do)

By using the self-watering spikes, my goal is watering the plants. But what human capability am I amplifying? Perhaps my laziness and inattention to plants…but it’s more likely that the spikes are compensating for that weakness. So I wonder: does a tool continually have to be engaged and operated by a person? For example, a fan can achieve the goal of cooling a room but it is not operated by a person with the exception of turning it on and off. The idea of amplifying human capabilities infers that a tool requires constant and continuous human action throughout the tool’s use. People use things as tools—a spoon to carry soup from a bowl to our mouth, a magnifying glass to engage small print.

Sorry plant spikes, seems like you didn’t make the tool-ing cut.

Other words to investigate: instrument, appliance, apparatus, implement, device