updatey thing

ok, I’ve been thinking about technology, and its frailties. I work for a restaurant that provides a delivery service, and remembered about when one of the drivers had a puncture. The entire car was rendered ineffective until the wheel was changed. This was an excellent example of how technology depends on its predecessors and more basic component parts. This was a particularly effective notion, as the wheel was arguably man’s first actual creation. sticks to hit things with were laying around, and used as tools, and fire, which is a natural occurrence, was harnessed, not created. The wheel was the beginning of all things created with purpose, and has evolved to accompany many different technologies in today’s society. We are still utterly dependant on the wheel. We are living in a modern, digital age, with the sci-fi fantasy of being able to exist in a completely virtual world may not be too far away… but we’re still underpinned by this most basic of technologies. When a wheel fails, all else fails. Everything we have in our lives has depended on this singular piece of technology at some point in its creation and or function.

nice

hmm… it’s fun trying to use 3dsmax in order to do our coursework, when none of the machines in Babbage (the building we mainly use) seem to have the program for us to use, and the labs in Smeaton don’t let us in. The doors to the labs have got card readers on them, and they don’t seem to want to let DAT students in. Not only can DAT students not use the photographic studio in Scott building, as it’s part of the faculty of art, but we can’t use the labs in smeaton… even  though it’s part of the faculty of technology… which is what we are. SO basically we can only get to use 3dsmax is when there’s not a lecture going on in the labs, and there’s someone else in there that’s nice enough to let us in!

It lives again!

Yes, after almost a day of ‘fun and frolicks’… My Dell is back! It’s a complete manufacturer reset, so there’s none of the software I had before, but at least it works… for now!

I’m currently playing with brushes and vector art in ps… results are ‘interesting’

dead dell

Alas, it’s finally happened… the Dell laptop couldn’t keep up the fight against all the nastyness of the net, and died. I tried running various anti-virus things on it to try and clean it up, but to no avail… I’ve now had to bite the bullet and put mynew laptop on on the net… something I’ve been trying to avoid in order to try and keep this one from the same fate of the Dell. Looks like it’s time to go do the great big big master reset… Hope I got all my stuff off of it, and onto the external hard-drive before it packed-up… I’l find out soon enough! I shall now try to carry on with doing more blogs, as the last few entries I went to post failed, and crashed the old laptop… so there may be a few update type things comming soon…

Oh well, r.i.p. the Dell…

204

So first off today we had Chris’ metting about our organism project. Now for this Aqeel, Simon and myself have the ambitious task of creating an ‘organism’ that (we have decided) shall feed off of internet traffic from the psq building, through archos. Aqeel’s managed to find a source that will help us realise this goal as an audio output, and is now tearing his hair out trying to mod it to a standard that we feel is independant, and therefor, more our own piece. We’re also looking into how we could manage to visualise this information in an ‘organic’ flow, and the idea hit me that we could maybe use a modified version of the code that we’re learning in soft221 – Langstone’s Ant. Whereas at the moment, the ant’s movement is random, I’m sure we can figure a way to alter the ammount of instances and colours of the ants to reflect the data stream. ok it’s ambitious, seeing as we’ve only had two lectures, and two practicals on Java, but I’m sure with a lil guidance we can get something sorted, that will truly be our own! Here’s to hoping!

Weekend fun!

So, why am I going to tell you about a weekend in London, where I took no notes, sketches or pictures? In fact I was shopping and pubbing and clubbing, so what could this possibly have to do with uni?

Let me tell you!! Well, I’d say first of all, it was totally dependant on the subculture that I’m part of ; ‘goth’ if you will. And yes that does involve trying to walk in ridiculous boots, and having to wear black clothing in the midst of summer, however, I would argue, that it is also the sub-culture that had most embraced the digital/cyber revolution. The ‘cyber-goths’ are absolutley governed by digital technology and art. They are the closest thing I would say that exists to digital symbiosis. Every element of their lives is digital. From the moment they wake in the morning til they go to bed… well… in the morning, everything is digitally dependant. It’s the utter embrace of this technology, and its circumstances that is most fascinating. Now for anyone who has seen or knows any cybers, you’ll half know what I’m talking about. The clothing, art, music, community and indeed very mentality is founded on and around cybernetics. It really is an interesting sub-culture, and one that’s been documented as so. I think I may try and get some evidence and maybe a case study or two on this and post something  with a little more credibility to it, but for now, this shall act as a note to the fact that this sub-culture is out there, and living the digital life already.

201

hmm, well we had our weekly 201 meet with Kat today. The lecture was ok, though most of it dealt stuff I’d covered in SSAM at Herts, but it was all good. Managed to get a few of my ideas across and they seemed to be fairly well accepted and understood… though, I’ve got to start getting some of my paper notes, ideas and sketches scanned in, so there’s evidence on here about what I’m doing and how!

Right, ok. I’m kinda thinking along the lines of how fragile technology is. Everything in use today is dependant on another form of technology. Each one is more fragile than the last, by means of abstraction from base resources, and in construction. Partially due to this, we’re living in an age of disposable technology. We’ve become used to products breaking. Rather than fix things, we simply throw them away, only to buy something that may be just as fragile, and in turn we fuel this fragility. With manufacture of such specialist technologies, it becomes impossible to repair broken technology without the infrastructure needed to create it in the first place. It’s somewhere, that we’ve put ourselves. Our striving for smaller, multi-functioning technologies, has forced a shift from the dependable and stable, to the delicate and intricate. It’s something along those lines anyways! I’ll be able to better articulate the notion, and idea I’ve got when I’ve got more supporting work up here… so stay tuned folks!

201

It’s really quite fustrating; having to produce a .mov about 90 secs long that’s got 3d animation in it, when you’ve not even been properly shown through the 3dsMax tutorials. With a bit of luck it might be somewhat similar to technical drawing which might be ok… If memory serves that is… last time I did technical drawing was over ten years ago at school!

203

Now I do have to admit, Joasia did mention that there was material in the video that she was going to show us, that may cause offense… I kinda think that was meant towards the naked people doing weird (fun) stuff to each other… but that didn’t really bother me here nor there. What did offend me was some arrogant pleb, who by building a (bad) wire frame person ‘playing’ a (worse) wireframe keyboard, and playing some sleep inducing music (noise), and dressing-up in a frock, assumed that everyone else’s opinion and take on digital art was defunct. The notion that in order to comprehend art in the digital realm, you have to be a transvestite is absurd! I think he was basically some run of the mill antagonist, who had a silver spoon in his mouth to be honest. I think underneath the delusions of grandure, there may have been some distant point of a genderless evolution through cyber-space, but this was completely misunderstood and conveyed by him. SURELY if it was a genderless, eunoch that was to emerge from the cyber realm, then the notion of not just being of one sex, but TWO utterly contradicts this? I really don’t understand what the point was that he was trying to make. If you’re going to be a transvestite, then fine… Don’t somehow expect me to susbsribe to your notion that you, and your cohorts are the only ones to give an authorative view of digital art. There are hundreds of sub-cultures existing in both the real and cyber world. Geez, you don’t see the goths saying ‘ah well you can’t understand digital art til you’ve worn black eye-liner, and dressed head to toe in black! The notion would be equally absurd! I think though the worst biting point for me was not his mis-understanding of the structure of sub-cultures within society as a whole, but his rant at the Berlin peace festival (well I think it was there, I’d kinda switched off to half the nonsense dribbling from his mouth). There was something about the slogan being ‘one world, one love’ or something along those lines. He then decided to argue that. pleb. Once again missing the point of the peace festival, he proceeded to rant about the fact that there were lots of different kinds of love. oh really now… Geez, I thought the love I felt for a nice pint after work was the same as I felt for my family… If anything it’s about the fact that we all love someone, and regardless of who we are and what we do, that love is equal to anyone else’s and rather than dispute that, let’s celebrate that. The moment you believe you ar better than anyone else, is the moment that you start off a notion of class. Surely in this utopian cyber life, it’s not only gender class that you’re disgarding, but all notion of class and segregation?!?

Bah! I’m off to turn the gas down now… I think I’ve been left to simmer for too long now.

the dome!

Well today, we were introduced to the DOME! Well it was once the Uni’s planetarium but now seems to have been taken over by us geeky people, and converted into a rather kewl cinematic type place. Chris sat us down (or for those of us in the front row practically lay down) and chatted about the contextualisation of the work we’re doing, and put across the notion of ‘frames of existense’. It wasn’t a completely foreign notion to me, as I often find myself thinking along similar plains, though admittedly with fewer levels of extraction. All in all, a novel way to deliver a lecture… and one that seemed to be quite successful, seeing as this extra lecture meant that we were in at 9 in the morning, and didn’t get a real break til 2, and yet we all seemed to be awake and alive after it all! Oh… the highlight for me was just a side note in Chris’ presentation… but it really did make my day! I jockingly said to Aqeel when we got in… ‘wouldn’t it be amasing to watch Star Wars on this thing’…  And yep, you guessed it… He played a clip! Watching the Tantive IV come flying in through the far right of your peripheral vision straignt into the centre follwed by the Avenger!…. Ug… I can die a happy man!