[[This is Matthew Leavitt]] I took notes in response to the lecture; they have the basic details of the entire lecture. I also put in some of my own comments as I was not there and they are indicated by a RED BOLDED "SIDE NOTE:"
Notes for Lecture // Jan. 24th , 2008
- Humans are obsessed with communication since the earliest times of oral tradition.
- Each person (even if you are on a webcam with each other) experiences differently and therefore interprets differently.
SIDE NOTE: I had a conversation with a friend a few days ago while we were having a three way phone conference about how I could hear my own voice echoing after I had already spoken, which meant that she was receiving the message a few moments LATER, therefore experiencing it in a different time than I was, even if it was just for a few moments with any communication the perception and reception of data almost exists on two different planes of existence: transmission and reception.
- As humans we use our skills of communication to collect data and then communicate the data to other people. (I.E. – scientists to formulate experiments, artists to express emotion, politics to make generalization about a populous)
Early history of Time Based Media
- Venetian – earliest forms of writing, creation of the alphabet, which was used mostly for recording trade information (2 sheep for a 10 vegetables, etc.)
- Greek and Roman – theater, plays, a specific beginning and end to a performance.
- Began to record different types of information, which formed narratives (historical and cultural)
SIDE NOTE : In a sense when talking about the history of the Roman empire, you have to understand that it is true that ALL history in one sense is a NARRATIVE because it is a retelling, but digging even deeper into that portion of the argument, each person experiences life differently based on their experience, therefore always a bias, which makes no history 100% (even if it is 99%) because of that factor alone, making it the ultimate invisible time based narrative.
Narrative
important for time-based media. Does not have to be super instructive, but in this class we will let narrative become FLUID. Needs to start and end. Viewer needs to ENGAGE, and need to be introduced to the narrative. Paintings and Photographs cannot have this. Beginning of a story – "once upon a time" and the Ending "they all lived happily ever after"(time-based media CAN have this) . Time-based painting can have a refolding effect where it has a narrative, yet not a traditional structure.
- Computer as a form of gathering, storing, transmitting data, whereas the written word is the ultimate form of this same process (cannot just lose a book in the same way). Best forms of archiving information, but problematic due to accessibility and spacial restraints.
- Stratified cultures – experience narratives through theater due to social structures (low-class illiteracy)
- Guttenberg and the printing press (reproduction of written word) important to become literate for everyone. After that historical transition, narrative opens up in the culture so people can produce and create (write a book, print and distribute).
- Photography – on e point in time in light, capture history in time in that moment (time travel).
SIDE NOTE : Microfiche is an older technology that allowed the same thing, it allowed a string of images of written words to be distributed across libraries for periodicals.
- Spoken word becoming important (such as the internet) – moving into a culture of image and sound. Cinematic experience (film, TV, records sequences) are dominant.
Interactivity
- Cognitive interaction is one of the most important forms of interactivity (nodding heads, etc.). Computers do not INTERCT (pre-determined responses), but are unable to make cognitive assertions based on experience or synthesize new responses.
- In New Media, when we say "build something interactive" , we really mean build something interesting that RESPONDS to human interaction.
- Film can be interactive – as a system (contains a narrative, information, time-based, experience). Turn off body, and experience a film in time. Willing suspension of disbelief – viewer becomes a participant in the narrative (stop believing their life, and they start living the life of the film). Go Hidalgo, Go!
- Psychokinetic (physical responses – moving forward, jumping) experiences. Mind is sending signals to the body, which is the reason a cinematic experience can be interactive. "Continue living a story that a person tells" – can happen in books as well.
SIDE NOTE: to expand on what Stephen said in the lecture about horror movies, I think they are a great example of this kind of response. I know I have been watching horror since I was about 6 years old, but a lot of my friends are not as familiar, so when we see a horror movie, sometimes they go as far as to scream. Some of my friends are so scared they won't watch it because they get anxiety attacks (I know, intense!), so that shows the amount of INTENSITY that just putting in time based elements into a piece of film can cause a person to react.
- Well done meaning can engage the view (viewer participation), unlike wallpaper and ambient music (not meant to engage). Engagement goes from view to participant QUICKLY.
- Stopping narrative is truly interactive
- Websites can have fields of information that generates new information (but it is responding in you, and is not participatory). System of response.
- Difference between the web and TV is "real time" (direct experience vs. response).
Modern Day
- Digital Cameras (no more cranking, production, expensive – not everyone could participate)
- New Media - technology that is changing , not the narratives (cinematic, written). Gathering, collection, organizing, distributing are the modern paradigms of new media. New Media is not the technology but the process of engaging information (constantly changing).
- We can all be speakers, writers, time based artists, and musicians.
- Raphael is going to the moon in a couple of months
- Multi-tasking systems on the computer
Edit on 12 Frames (A2)
- Thing of cognitive interaction and change viewer to participant. Open up what narrative can be (story, emotion, etc.)
- Create a time-based information system that interests others (not response driven – mental /emotional response/psychokinetic response)
- Visual creation – color / light / volume all matter in a composition. Aesthetically engaging is an act of seduction (non-long term relationship).
- Accomplish 12 frame edit , but also create an engaging system.
- How do you create a visual system that will engage the viewer enough to make someone stop and think about the piece? (6 senses – intellectual sense as an additive) Think, reflect, and respond.
- Multiple Distribution systems (does it look good on 3" and 14')
SIDE NOTE: Over break, I was in Seattle and went to a show. The opening band was called "Awesome", and they came out in tuxedos with red ties, and starting doing all sorts of weird things. When they first came out they all had red balloons they released, and throughout the show they had weird objects like doorbells they were playing with, and one guy pretty much did a seizure dance. It was ENTERTAINING to say the least, and I thought "I like these guys". I got home and listened to their CD's and I said to myself, hm.. I guess they are more of a performance band because I didn't really enjoy the music outside of the show, but I would see them in concert again for sure!
10 comments:
Matt- great outline of what was discussed in the lecture! Although it was very early in the morning (and you can tell the coffee hadn't kicked in yet), I didn't articulate what I really meant when I used Horror films as an example for the discussion- but you really clarified what I was trying to relate to. Thank you!
I have thought about this often and think this is the direction I would like to take for a possible capstone idea. A painting is a form of interaction but it's limited in terms of interactivity. How can we create "paintings" that allow other forms of interaction. Now, I know Raphael addresses this issue with his time-based artwork. But can their be a hire level of interaction? In other words can you have a painting- which is not part of an installation, be a hire form of interactivity?
I thought that the lecture was interesting, although I did have a couple questions on what was said. For instance, at the very beginning of the lecture it was stated that written narratives were a form of time-based media. This I agree with, and someone (I think maybe it was Stephen?) said that it is an art which explores time and moves through time. So I can see how written works fall in to this category, because you are experiencing a motion of time as you are reading. However, once we started talking about the "start" and "end" of things which are time-based, I got confused, because this is a broad description. Why aren't paintings included in this broad sense of the definition offered to us? Raph said that it is something which starts and ends, something the viewer experiences and that experience itself has a start and an end. Why, then, can paintings not be considered as time-based media? I offered my own opinion on this previously: because they are passive, not active, and not moving through time. Yet I think that the viewer DOES interact with paintings, and therefore maybe we should consider if they are time-based as well? Or maybe we should strive to more clearly define the start and end of a time-based experience.
I liked when Raph talked about commercial films, as well, and how they can be interactive. I think film is definitely interactive for all the reasons we stated - the emotional and physical responses elicited from a movie, and that the viewer actually becomes a participant in the narrative.
Stephen, I think you should definitely go forward with your idea on trying to make paintings more interactive. I don't know how you would go about doing this, but maybe some kind of painting that elicits the same sort of response a viewer would experience from a movie or a book - however one would go about doing that. I'll leave that part up to you! But I look forwards to seeing what you can come up with.
PAINTING WITH EMOTIONS
Hi guys. I would like to comment on what Stephen said about making a painting/video painting more interactive. This is just a random idea here but I have not seen anyone do it before. Why not make the painting on a touch sensitive video screen that can somehow detect body heat when you put your hand on it. If this where possible, then it could act almost like a living mood ring of sorts. What I mean is, when you put your hand on it, it determines your current mood in much the same way a mood ring does and then uses a computer program to add a aspect of color to the painting that corresponds that that emotion. I do not mean like finger painting. I think it would be much more visually appealing if the color(s) grow out of the persons hand print (until they take their hand off the painting. It would also be interesting if these colors grew out in patterns and speeds that correspond with the emotion. For example, if the heat/mood sensors picked up sadness or cold, the colors would be dark blue to black and would grow out slowly like cancerous veins or ice vines. If it registered warmth or happiness, the lines would grows out more whimsical and random and free in long smooth curves. The interactive "mood painting" would not reset when a person is done with it. Instead it would constantly changing, evolving and reacting to the emotions of its viewer.
Well, just an idea inspired by class. Great job so far Raph. Very interesting stuff.
I also wanted to comment that Bordello a-go-go is one of the best new bands ever and it was cool that Raph mentioned them. Of course he was also the first person to get me in to the Cramps so it makes sense. Great taste in music man.
I think one of the best parts in the class (other then the above) was Raph talking about how new media has been around since before the written word. It is so hard to define new Media that we often only attribute it to technology. In a sense, we have strayed away from new media a lot in the first half of the 20th century. Plays gave way to movies. Town Meetings gave way to newspapers and the TV pretty much cemented us on the receiving end of information (with only the crazy people trying to talk back to it). In a way, New Media is really an extension of Old Media (not old broadcast media but old primitive communal media). We have begun using technology to simulate the kind of many to many, localized interaction that we lost along the way of progress (but on a global level). Instead of meeting to discuss things as a community at the local town square, we meet on AIM, Second Life or World of Warcraft. In this new global village, we are just now getting back to the basic "everyone gets a say" that was so common in media before it became the job of only the elite. Life's like that. Things go full circle (even if they take a shiny new form every time they come around again). Its likely that in 100 years the New New Media will involve an almost telepathic connection to the environment or animals. And in another 100 years after that we will no doubt be amazed at the new technology of actually meeting in person and having real conversations with each other. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I felt that the lecture was an interesting conversation in the way that we have humans experience the world around us. We live in a world that is based on time, though if you think about it what really is time, we as humans created it, to help us organize our lives and to help us experience the world around us. When I say that we created time I don’t mean it in the sense that it did not exist prior to our existence, more that we created the current notion of what time is, and how we should react and interact with time.
The next thing to do will be to find new ways of experiencing time and how to play with this idea that time is something that cant be changed. The first assignment will really help us in understanding more of how film has allowed us to begin to do that. Altering the frame rate of a piece will change the time in the piece. You can take the end and show a flash of it in the beginning, you can take the middle and show most of it as part of the end you can splice the whole thing together in an infinite number of combinations that you as the editor create, that you as the editor are able to control how we see time in your film.
You can fast forward, rewind, you have the ability to allow us to experience time travel (much like what we discussed in the lecture). The lecture was very interesting and talking about the history of time-based media was very beneficial. To understand something completely and to understand how to go somewhere new you need to, first understand where you are coming from in order to move forward.
Steve I totally understand what you want to do with creating paintings that are more interactive and more so a time based art form, if you are able to (like Raph said) make the viewer experience the painting in a way that educes a feeling of time, aside from just looking at the painting and looking away. That, like any piece of art even in time based medias, its not always the point that it is actually moving in time for us to experience it, more that it is the content of the pieces that allows us to interact with them, and that each and every person is not going to have the same interaction with a painting. Everyone has different experiences in their lives that make them who they are, at that moment when they are looking at the painting everything they have experienced up until then comes into play in the way that they perceive the painting or film or photograph or drawing, its where they are in their life that will allow them to interact with new things and its were they are in there life that will affect how they experience time.
Yes, it can be done, and its not something that requires technological tricks to hide a weak content, its about what moves people emotionally and psychologically, I'm sure you can take any painting and with time develop a way to have them be more interactive and capable experiencing them in time.
Its about how you engage the audience and how perceive being engaged, granted what I have said is not truly interactive where one experiences a painting and then can give back to the system, its more of the way that we experience films, passively, but more over it’s a cognitive interaction between the viewer’s psyche and the piece of media whether it be a painting or a film.
The beginning lecture of 430 reminded me simply of the initial 204/304 lecture, in which we discovered/rediscovered narrative to refresh our memories.
In response to Elana about her questioning why paintings are not time-based media, I feel that the answer is either there, or it isn't. Paintings exist and generally speaking, do not change. The Mona Lisa was painted and will not be revised, therefore making it exist in only its current state. Time-based media changes over time, and will continually do so. The Mona Lisa is static, and a video is not. That's how I view it. Of course this point can be argued immensely, but that's why I'm just leaving one comment on it.
The lecture to me is a repeat for the first half, if not more. When Raphael states that we are not truly creating interactivity in New Media yet, I must say that I agree. We simply have not come up with a way to create pure interactivity. However, if we have an interactive process in achieving our projects, why can't we continue this?
Just because our emotions are sometimes dependent upon what we perceive, does not mean that it is an interactive piece.
In response to the lecture, I must ask myself, as New Media "believers" or not, why have we not tried to move time-based art away from video/installations. Is there another up-and-coming method for creating such a thing that isn't what we're used to?
Personally, I want to see innovations on performance poetry, and theater in general. I want to see if we as humans can innovate it to be a truly new experience. Perhaps this is just silly.
Elana- you had stated that"... maybe we should strive to more clearly define the start and end of a time-based experience". I assume that the start and end of a time-based media experiences was defined by the viewer and not the creator? The creator merely tells their story without without control of when the viewers begin to engage. From there you broaden how it is perceived- that is why unlike traditional film there is only a start-finish, not beginning, middle and end.
By definition (from the lecture) you would think that a painting is time-based media, but not in the traditional sense. Yes, the viewer does have a form of interaction with the painting- but does it explore time as a constant? Now maybe I am still misunderstanding this, but isn't a painting like a photograph? Where it captures one moment in time?
The technology in creating my idea is there- I just want a great concept. But yes, it can be done- I had many ideas of how I could have the painting interact with people- either through their motions, gestures or vocally (telling the painting it's nice gives it warm bright colors, yelling at it gives it darker colors)
I'm not sure if this is the time nor the place to discuss capstone ideas, but I think this is relative to the conversation. Thanks for your feedback!
Stephen, I think I understand now what was trying to be said - that since paintings do not explore time as a constant, like you explained, they cannot really be time-based art. True, as stated in the lecture and above, a viewer's experience looking at the painting starts and ends in time, but the painting itself is constant.
What is time based media? Anything art based over time, with a concept. "Exploring time as a constant." Change over time through art.
Poets, writers. Narrative is over time. Photograph or painting might not be time based. Theatrical production, theatre, music, all existed through time.
Historically.
Oral tradition.
Obsessed with communicating.
Theatre.
Early greek theatre.
Narrative.
Not necessarily a beginning middle and end
Something that starts and ends
Viewer has to engage in
Introduced to a narrative
Cognitive interaction
Film is the system - contains information and narrative -
willing suspension of disbelief
become a participant in the narrative
psycho-kenesis - mind is experiencing something and triggers your body to feel it.
"continue living the story he's telling."
A2 - cognitive interaction. changes person from the viewer into a participant.
makes the individual participate mentally.
This is to comment on Stephen's reaction to Elana haha. I really think that time based experiences are so different. Our constant perception of time is changing. This comment has a narrative, it is a very linear one, and goes from "THIS" to when I put my final period down. It's not very interesting, but if the words make sense and form thoughts, WHY NOT? But seriously, we have to take time based experience to a new level. it isn't just "once upon a time" to "they lived happily ever after", it's about critically thinking about how time is structured.
We are used to a certain way, but time has no definition, no start or beginning, that is just where we cut it. WE PUT 24 hours in a day, but in reality, that's just a gauge so we can organize our lives, so even time based structures and movies, those are just gauges of a certain narrative, it is not the end of it because if i watch a film with a friend, then after we start discussing it, then the impact and narrative (only for us) has changed.
Just something to ponder.
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