TRON and me
That TRON GPS game is a great idea. I could not stop boring my wife about it. Not only do I love the idea about making games more physical, but I love the idea of what the kids who play these games will look like. No more obese children on the playstation, but techno-kids running around making sure the laser trails do not trap them. As a side note, the little artificial intelligence of the little TRON light cycles game on the GPS page is very good...
I could hardly win. A project that I want to make that I have been thinking about for the last year is to make virtual sculptures that are positioned around campus. You would walk around campus with Augmented Reality goggles and see virtual objects all over the place. Perhaps a virtual representation of the "sculptor" can be standing around talking about the project. It would be sad not to be able to touch it...but who knows, maybe we can work with OSC virtual lab on this haptic device.
As the link, I would like to point to our very own interface lab in this same building
http://www.osc.edu/hpc/bale/interfacelabinfo.shtml. For those who have not seen this lab, they are very nice and love giving students tours.
Body Cartography
http://www.bodycartography.org/
Re: Foucalt Backwards
Thank you for tips on reading Foucalt Boris. I will try to read other Foucalt pieces and see their relevance, but I do agree that this paper once read a few times becomes more elementary, yet in my view, more confusing as to his goal. What I mean by that is that I DO ask why is he defining simple locations and giving them names. If his other works/papers connect the current culture with what he is defining, I wish he did it in this paper too. I am looking forward to your views on Foucalt and seeing more of his cultural pieces described until I read them for myself.
Steven G.
Reading Foucalt Backwards
If you start with the last paragraph of Michel Foucalt article "Of Other Spaces" and read backwards to the beginning you have an understanding of what Foucalt is trying to mean. The way he writes becomes simpler as he goes on, so reading from the end gives you context for what he is saying. For instance, instead of reading about utopias and Galileo and heterotopia and why you come back to yourself when looking into a mirror, you read about rest homes, prisons and psychaitric hospitals being places of deviation, which is his point. Then all other information that comes before it informs you from something you actually understand. Then, it makes sense that he talks about looking into a mirror because the mirror becomes reflective of society. So then why is it interesting to read about someone saying that places exist and we occupy them physcially and in our minds. Actually it is not, but what is interesting is how he places those ideas in different cultures which informs us about human behavior and our knowledge increases. Reading this the way it was written assumes that we know what he is talking about and he is leading us to a conclusion that he has discovered. However, if you are not familiar with the history he describes or if you are familiar with the history and don't understand how they relate to concepts such as heterotopia the information can be overwhelmingly simplistic and you feel like so many postmodern dance audiences when they understand that there was a relationship between two people dancing on stage but they don't get it.
Re: The Body, Interactivity, and Technology
Yes, the remark on Pandora's box is an important one: As we begin to play with technology we must remember to focus on the art and not on the novelty of technology. I do want to remain optimistic with technology and see it this way instead: Technology is here to help, and we should think of what we want to do first. Naturally, obstacles may arise that may be solved by using technology, but just because technology is used to overcome the obstacles does not mean that it needs to be credited for helping. In other words, technology can be hidden and not the center of attention in the performance.
Steven Gutierrez
Foucalt uses words
Indeed, the reading is a little dense and I hope I understood what he was geeting at. I will write more after I see some other thoughts that will help me understand if I am on the right track.
What I WOULD like to submit for now is
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/ &
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/making.html It is a good site covering some basics of String Theory. It is coincidental that I was reading about this right now: it deals with reinterpretation of space (and also time). This is something that I felt Foucault was alluding to except with more grounded known facts.
Steven G.
Interactivity
As tends to happen every so often, a definitions debate about "generative" and "interactive" is in progress on the
eu-gene mailing list.
Vitorino Ramos just contributed a nice quote from
Simon Penny, pulled from an interesting article called,
Computers and the Development of Interactivity:
"An interactive system is a machine system which reacts in the moment, by virtue of automated reasoning based on data from its sensory apparatus. An Interactive Artwork is such a system which addresses artistic issues. A painting is an instance of representation. A film is a sequence of representations. Interactive artworks are not instances of representation, they are virtual machines which themselves produces instances of representation based on real time inputs."
Simon Penny, 'From A to D and back again: The emerging aesthetics of Interactive Art", 1996
Lavarand
I do not remember if we read about Lava lamps in this class or another, but they are relevant to the idea of true random generation. Golan Levin spoke about using more advanced algorithms to create random numbers, but these two mathmaticians used lava lamps instead:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/random.htmlIt was interesting that in Floccugraph they use the darkness of the face for random force generation.
Virutal Actors
I found Perlin's article on building virtual actors to be quite informative. In fact it is something that I have a lot of interest in. However, my thinking is more in line with interaction in performace rather than how to make The Sims more realistic as a game. I personally like the fact that a game is a game although I do find it annoying that the characters in The Sims have to finish one amimation in order to begin another. Instead of making virtual actors seem realistic how can one make real people virtual and use canned animations for impossible and improbable situations. I am thinking of Headlong Dance Theater's "Impossible Dance" http://www.headlong.org. Perlin's website was also interesting to me because his face demo, http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/facedemo/ is a very similar to the program John Simmons created called ADEL. We used this program to move the virtural actor in real time. http://www.gmu.edu/news/gazette/9804/dance.html here is a video of the performance. http://dancelab1.dance.ohio-state.edu/%7Ebwillis/sirobandaadelle.htm I enjoyed Galanter's extended defination of generative art at first but it became too choatic and random.
