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The MoleScope is a medical tool to assist in the processing and screening of people in a preventive and/or post melanoma stage.

With the stats of 1 in 5 Americans being diagnosed with skin cancer, changes or appearances of precursory symptoms is an important field to survey.

However, the medical world is stuck in being able to give everyone enough time and attention to be vigilant for these symptoms. Screening everyone intensely creates a longer wait list for everyone, doctors would be overworked and medical fees would go up.

The MoleScope is a great tool in helping to indicate to the untrained eye if there is a cause for concern or not.

This however, is not the first product in the world of patient skin care to visually look for and database moles.

A previous example would be SkinVision, which is an app that would use the phone’s camera to take the snap. While it also analysed and tracked them, it’s shortcoming was in only using the phones camera; which, while good, also didn’t have the sub-dermal imaging capabilities the MoleScope provides with it’s dedicated device that attaches over the phones camera.

Images taken by the MoleScope are sent to a doctor who reviews the images and with a recommended course of action sent to the user.

The Molescope is also great in it’s comprehensive functionality. There is both a side for patients AND for healthcare professionals. Using their DermEngine web platform.

This provides both the doctor and patients a place to both go over their current state and the progression of any notable lesions to assess their current situation. This is an immense ease on the doctor as they can go over the information at a moments notice and helps eliminate the need for queues and all the administrative aspects that go along with a hospital visit. The patients also can feel at ease knowing that they can get medical attention as soon as something noteworthy shows up; additionally having the ability to review their own progress helps the patient in having a good grasp of the situation and in turn, puts them at ease too (plus transport costs and time are virtually gone).

In 2011, a much earlier version from another company called MelaFind was reviewed to be a little tricky in their diagnosis. While it only missed 2% of biopsy proven melenomas it also had a high false-positive rate (LINK to article). But the article also states that “…in the same clinical trial, a panel of dermatologists who did not use the device had an even higher false-positive rate.”

It’s been 6 years since then, and MelaFind was a rather large handheld device resembling an expanded hairdryer, technology has no doubt progressed since then and now MoleScope is merely a clip-on device to the users phone.

Herein lies another problem. The camera mount is phone-specific. In it’s initial release it was only available for the iPhone 5c to 6+ models with android coming shortly. However with the large variations in form factors on phones, this is ultimately going to leave some people unable to use the device.

Another noteworthy point I found from an article was that Android is critical in being considered for health apps “due to key health demographics disproportionally utilizing the Android platform.”

Though this one device it has brought me to realize that in some instances, the device capabilities extend far beyond what it holds in it’s physical aspects, but there are also secondary and even tertiary levels to consider, such as a stable website and platform + server database needs. Additionally as good as an idea might seen, it requires it’s intended service sector to adopt it, which means the spending of money and resources on new technology, which might not be very easy for the industry to immediately jump on or commit to.

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Technology, probably since it’s inception has been blasted by people of every generation. Kids aren’t going out as much anymore, people can’t go a couple of minutes without having to fiddle with their phones, scroll another page, watch another video. These are all things we’ve heard one way or another, but I believe that it’s never such a black-and-white issue. There’s nuance and things have the capacity for both good and bad.

The past few weeks of delving into the Internet Art and Culture module have brought with it, a slew of moments, events and performances which encapsulate the positive aspects of technology; long before they reached the level of the consumer, and before we started taking them for granted.

Right off the bat, the VideoFreex. The Sony Portapak was a catalyst for the VideoFreex to be able to go out and be the broadcasters instead of the big T.V stations. They realized a disconnect between what they saw on the streets around them and what was being shown on t.v by the media. The Portapak enabled them to capture what they wanted to be seen; this ability caught the eye of CBS, one of the big broadcasters at the time.

Videofreex and neighbors at Lanesville General Store. 1973 — Photo by John Dominis (b. USA, 1927 – 2013)

Their pursuit of truth led to conflicts with CBS and were let go. With little money, the VideoFreex were led to Lanesville. Using their tenacity, they set up the worlds first pirate television station, ‘Lanesville TV’. But what is media without an audience. Had it not been for the people of Lanesville watching and collaborating with the VideoFreex, I believe it would have been extremely difficult for the VideoFreex to continue as they wanted to; highlighting that communities of people are indeed an integral part of supporting the media ecosystem.

Hole In Space is interesting in that although there were masses of people gathered around this singular point, they were not a collective, the focus was still on the individual(s). The interactions between people on both sides were very much more-so on a few individuals communicating with another batch of a few individuals. In having an intimate connection like this created an introspective moment of the individual in the larger context of their place in the world. There’s also a sense of security in knowing where a broadcast of you is going. I think in general people reel from having a camera in their face because they don’t know where the images of them are going to show up.

Hole-in-Space, 1980. Photograph of live event in Los Angeles and New York. Photo by Kit Galloway.

BOLD3RRR is interesting as in the one to many context, the focus appears to be on the individual, however in my thoughts over the piece, i ended up pondering if it was intentional for the audience to be reflecting so much on the art piece that they start to consider their place within the piece itself. So whilst the focus IS on the one to the many, there is also the capacity for introspective moments.

The Portapak can be seen as a precursor to what we do in class, with our phones and laptops, except we have the capabilities to shoot and more importantly, broadcast from a singular device. Similarly, what would we stream for if it wasn’t for the people that watch our streams? The more people we have the better we feel about the success of the stream; drawing upon what I mentioned in my post about the VideoFreex, be it YouTube personalities or Twitch streamers, the backbone that keeps everything running is the communities and followings that are built around these platforms. Likewise, the interaction between the ‘us’ the streamer and audience is where the real adventure is at.

Though the livestream wasn’t similar to the two way interaction of Hole In Space; for my friends in school that were caught in the sights of the camera, finding out that I was behind the tinkering of Su Hwee’s broadcast seemed to put them at ease. I didn’t expect people to check out the broadcast to see what the final stream was going to look like, an unexpected Hole In Space if you will. The experience then was quite different and more akin to being Twitch/Live Streamer in that the audience was now reacting and responding to the work that our team was churning out in real time (save for latency). It was one of my favourite moments of the cast.

Whilst our broadcast probably isn’t as reflective or introspective as BOLD3RRR, I think there was a takeaway about the expectations of livestreams and their preformative aspects. Mindfulness on both the abilities of a broadcaster to send out a message as well as an allowance for control to leave the operators hands; both situationally and technically.

Ultimately, technology merely serves as a tool. Enabling us to achieve new feats in both good and evil, and the onus is on us to utilise the tools we have in a responsible way.

edit: I came across this video that aims to create awareness for isolation, particularly with the elderly who live alone and don’t come into much contact with people over the week.

Campaign To End Loneliness

Millions of elderly people go more than a week without socialising with anyone at all. This guy decided to find out how that felt..Campaign to End Loneliness

Posted by UNILAD on Wednesday, 27 September 2017

It made me wonder if there would be this issue in the future. Considering how connected our generation is, when we get to old age will we be as connected as we are today, or will we be as isolated as many of the elderly today. With the ability to raise awareness with much larger reach than any generation before coupled with the increasing levels of connectivity we have going forward, I personally think that the future is promising in our use of technology in forging a sense of community.

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Davis was interested in television’s ability to connect people across distance; my students always laugh uncomfortably at the 70s touchy-feeliness of his video work.

With that quote from the article by Michael Connor, it helps put works such as Douglas Davis, The Last Nine Minutes (1977), in perspective of what exactly is going on.

With the intent being to create intimacy, I found it particularly interesting that the medium of choice, was text. But contextually, it’s 1994, the idea of being able to communicate around the world is immensely tantalizing, a worldwide graffiti board to make your mark on if you will.

Additionally, something this artwork made me realize through the article, was that even digital artwork degrades overtime. Compatibility issues, software support for older Operating Systems being let go, and even Adobe products and their software incompatibility between some versions (very much so a personal gripe).

This piece got me looking at our state of connectivity today vs back then. Some would say we take such a level of communication around the world almost for granted these days (some would argue it’s drawn us closer), whereas in 1994, this was pretty profound stuff. The context being that in 1994 there was a lack of connectivity around the world, hence with our hyper-connectivity, something of this caliber is very easily glossed over.

Even the restorers of ‘The World’s Longest Sentence’ had an aspect of super-participation; they had the blessings of the internet wizards assisting them in the comments section of the New York Times Article on it’s restoration (albeit occasionally conflicting advice).

“Oh please! It’s html!” – E.W. Chesterton of Palm Beach

Super-participation seems to be in most aspects of our daily lives, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to name a few. Some websites and articles even have small voting portions at the end and there are contests are held online for various means from deciding the Gerber baby to naming the next research boat.

Even MMORPGs I say, are forms of Super-Participation. But what happens when the MMORPG dies (examples in these articles #1 and #2)? They stop being super-participatory  which lead me to realize that super-participation is based on people as opposed as to the medium or platform it’s on.

Hence pretty much everything on an electronic device needs some form of community creation and strengthening, which leads me to ponder, is there any aspect of our digital lives not super-participation?

(clicked save draft instead of publish by accident)

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OSS NTU ASSIGNEMENT TEST BROADCAST

TEST RUN FOR OSS ASSIGNMENT

Posted by Nicholas Makoto on Monday, 18 September 2017

For our pre-class trial run, Me and Su Hwee teamed up for this Safari Themed Cross-stream idea!

The general idea is for us to do a cross stream where one side goes out into the school like David Attenborough/(Insert Favourite Nature Presenter)

A few of the initial concepts generated were for eg. a news report, much like the evening news. Having the camera at different angles, say strapped to the leg, which was pretty cool and brought to my mind videos of people strapping GoPros’ to various limbs and objects (examples HERE and HERE). However, we were at a loss for what the stream recipient would then do.

I think playing around with the FaceBook app livestreams and finding the filters helped direct our subsequent idea for the safari. Sadly the filters aren’t on the browser version of FaceBook Livestreams.

As you can hear in the above livestream, there is echoed audio. I muted the different windows/tracks one by one but couldn’t figure out what was the issue at the time of the stream.

Fortunately in the subsequent stream we did to fix this problem, i managed i figure out where the echo was coming from, my facebook livestream window.

Another aspect for this Safari, is us to make it look like those nature documentaries. I whipped up a quick lower third, and used scenes to fade them in nicely.

We’ve planned to add additonal elements such as animal overlays and a few varieties of lower thirds for each “species”

This all reminded me of the BTS work of media console operators for live shows, cutting between different media clips, though, OBS isnt exactly rigged to work on that level, it does a pretty decent job!

Using the studio mode to cut between scenes was a little tricky to get, and being on the ball for switching scenes is a little nervewracking, but also pretty fun.

Below is the aforementioned sound test

TEST RUN FOR OSS ASSIGNMENT

Posted by Nicholas Makoto on Monday, 18 September 2017

 

 

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I constantly find myself being very nervous about Going Live; and yet after I’m done I still want to do it again. I think it’s an innate social drive to share things we’re excited about.

From the get-go, I was pretty certain that I wanted to be streaming music, but I hadn’t decided on any specifics. Looking back, I’m not sure when I decided on the theme of VAPORWAVE.

Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s.[16] The music typically features a fascination with 1980s and 1990s styles such as elevator music, smooth jazz, R&B, and lounge music[5][8] often sampling or manipulating tracks via chopped and screwed techniques and other effects.[11][5] The subculture surrounding vaporwave is often associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and popular culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. It also incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.[8]

It was unknowingly a great choice in my opinion; with vaporwave also being a very visual subculture with a focus on ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ, source material was boundless.

My first livestream was my favorite as everything pretty much went according to plan, however the one thing I didn’t account on was getting a copyright strike on one of the 3 songs I had played that night. Additionally after I had gotten the notification minutes after the stream, I realized that I hadn’t hit record either, a real doubly whammy.

The song in particular being ‘ESPRIT 空想 – SUMMER NIGHT’ (linked above). Streaming music also wasn’t particularly easy, especially in that I wanted to have control over which program can be heard and which one’s can’t. I eventually found out some software that allowed me to create a virtual cable input and another to help me route spotify audio to the cable. Funnily enough, in my second livestream, I ended up playing music through Google Chrome which didn’t require any of the aforementioned software. With all this talk of configuration, it once again conjures thoughts of curation. I definitely realized that my preconception of the level of polish I had set on the livestream was self-imposed; and letting go of that made the experience true to it’s intent of sharing content (and released some tension).

The first time I streamed, Winzaw and Cher See commented on my video (thanks yall!)~ The interactivity was nice, though, it was hard to monitor the broadcast and respond to comments at the same time, maybe something that’ll get easier in time. It was especially cool in that they definitely were on the ball with the both of them commenting in the ＶΛＰＯＲＷΛＶΞ aesthetic, so it was fun to see who else was in on the memeing. And speaking of memeing, most of the gifs and videos I used were very tongue in cheek, from an old guy listens to vaporwave video, pictures of donald trump from back in the day, and even a sad frog with a rainy night and Japanese neon signage (japanese text being another aspect of vaporwave).

Overall, it was very enjoyable experience, maybe next time I’ll stream directly to my timeline and see how I do with possibly more people coming into contact with my content (and I’d also be able to link the video livestream outside of the facebook group)

quintessential Vaporwave music + visuals

(I was also thinking of streaming the 1988 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship, cause just listen to that music cool)

 

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BOLD3RRR rings up a whole bunch of thoughts; not all of which are concrete. I think akin to impressionist paintings, (as pretentious as that might sound, especially in an opening sentence) the art piece gives an atmosphere or a sense of the moment. Funnily enough, I’d say this links up to what mise en scène does; through the visual information of what’s in the scene, the viewer gains an understanding of what’s going on, often in a subconscious manner. The difference with BOLD3RRR being the element of surprise. An element Jon Cates says to be an important focal point in keeping glitch fresh.

Its sort of funny in that a commonly heard or seen element of glitch is repetition. In BOLD3RRR, we hear many word and phrases repeated again, layered over the existing dialogue, if any; assumedly the the only distinguishing aspect being if I had heard a similar phrase before or not, though in retrospect, I can’t be certain. Repetition can and has been used in a multitude of ways before, eg. Andy Warhol, the difference in glitch perhaps, would be the letting go of control from the artist.

Screenshot of Jon Cates BOLD3RRR

Visually the piece was a mash of text, his computers display, his face, and the interface of the Ableton software; amongst other spliced in visuals. But I especially enjoyed the moment at 4:24. This bit particularly hit me as he transitions it by saying “and she said” and then jumped into this glitchy visual of what I initially thought was a skyline with accompanying text in the lower left displaying the quote of what was said. It’s intriguing in that it jumps from speech to text in such a noteworthy manner. The typeface along with the scratchy noise and the gloomy grey visual invokes a sense of melancholia and nostalgia for the older days of the computer.

A moment that helped me put the work in some context was hearing the phrases “…now no such thing as real time… …perpetual altered dimensions”. This harks back to when I realized that I couldn’t distinguish between what was being said and what was just feeding back into the system. It made me wonder about how much we’re putting into the digital world and how much of what we see actually the result of our input being fed back.

the machine world is machined by us out of the world + we have literally machined the world. it’s our world, in the sense that we have crafted it. + we’re constantly uncrafting && re-crafting it. – jC

This brings me to a point about Dick Higgins and the idea of intermedia. Which I take to be the melding of art and life or “everything else”. The manner in which Jon Cates types appears to show this intertwining of the two. And while his spelling is “glitched out” (almost like l33tspeek) it’s still readable to me, which in turn agrees with his quote on glitch.

they might be glitched, + they might be imperfect + noisy, + that might be what attracts us or me to those systems. but still they are functional or rather functioning in one way or another systematically

His typing might appear imperfect but it’s still functional. That level of consistency even if unintentional, was pretty cool.

Except from ‘http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/glitch-expectations-conversation-joncates’ Some of his typing mannerisms and choice of text+symbol combinations remind me of Witch House band/artist names

 

The aforementioned Witch House genre names

 

Mise en scène of the desktop arguably could speak as a reflection of the user, but I’ve also learnt that the elements shown could be indicative of numerous other aspects, each possibly branching off into an entire discussion on it’s own. But one thing that I ponder is the level of curation and intent in what we see. Social media provides a clearer sense of this, we can only see what has been chosen to be shown to us. In BOLD3RRR, I’m unsure. The off beat manner of speech, overlapping clips of audio, the claustrophobic close-up of only a portion of the entire desktop. I’m unsure what was intended and what was improvised; and when one moment is in question, it seems to call most other moments into question as well. At that point, it starts to feel like an exercise into existentialism; and perhaps that was the intent in the first place.

 

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The Adobe Connect class was quite a fun experience, it was the first time engaging and being engaged in a lesson in this manner.

I actually felt a little more nervous about speaking as I was constantly worried if I was too loud because my voice goes straight from my mouth to the ears of everyone, it felt a little too close for comfort and made me quite hyper-aware of my voice.

Another concern would be having a controlled space for people to broadcast from. Broadcasting from home, I’d be worried if there are going to be people walking in the background, voices or conversations being picked up when I wouldn’t want them to; a classroom cuts this out by having a shared space for an expressed purpose; the aforementioned issues being less controlled in a more public location.

Additionally the differences in communication and social behaviour is pretty large i’d say. Most noticeably, it cuts down on chatter between students. When in the Adobe Connect world, whenever you are on screen, with our presence and voice amplified; our words and movements are on the same level of observation as the teacher of the class. Additionally, I found that it was pretty tough to read and write at the same as listening to the teacher. So with these aspects combined it was difficult to have any chatter between classmates as seen in class or anything more than a quick jokey quip in the chat. As to whether this is a positive or negative thing, could spark a debate for many hours; but I think a good halfway point would be to say, everything in moderation.

The benefits are actually more impressive than i first thought; in bringing the classroom to the third space, it helped to bridge the many possible pitfalls of requiring physical presence in a pre-set location. First off, this cuts out travel time for anyone and everyone. The speed of being able to just click and jump into class from anywhere is a real gift. This would help people reclaim precious lost time just sitting around in transport and in turn, especially if they used more personal transport, cut down on emissions. This I believe would actually benefit the world considering how many people can connect over the internet. This would also help people who are sick and unable to move on their own; be it from sickness or otherwise. Someone who is ill doesn’t have to worry about falling behind in lectures and would be able to attend from the comforts of their bed and take notes.

In Conclusion, I honestly, thoroughly enjoyed the experience and wouldn’t mind doing it again, which also leads to a commonly heard question “Why don’t we do this every week?”.

 

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photo via Kit Galloway e Sherrie Rabinowitz, «Hole in Space», 1980, Photography | © Galloway, Kit; Rabinowitz, Sherrie

 

Viewing Hole in Space is quite fascinating. The first thing that struck me were the masses forming at the point of contact; a sort of sign that shows how people are drawn to be in contact with other people. They are especially drawn to the fact that, ordinarily, they would not be able to be in such direct contact with these people.

Something that particularly struck me was a line from the “Welcome to ‘Electronic Cafe International’ […]” reading. “The absence of physical harm makes people braver”. It made me realise why we’re all a little more free and easy when online; be it in text, video or audio. In retrospect this almost seems like it was staring me in the face all this time, but I’d say growing up with it makes us take it for granted and accepting of it as the norm without giving it deeper thought. Growing up with it has also caused us to see it as the primary form of interaction in that we use online modes of contact with people more than in person and I can only imagine a time when the inverse was true.

Los Angles looking to New York

Hole in Space was like a virtual watering hole. Even today I’d say people react the same way to stumbling upon a virtual point of contact, especially one of visual exchange/video. It’d start with a bit of curiosity, perhaps a wave of the hand and in seeing the other side respond it was like looking into a mirror. Like in the image above, to me it really reiterates this aspect of the mirror image, the audience seeing themselves in the other and in doing so, are compelled to connect; people even arranged to meet up in person. For it’s time especially, and I’d say to do so in the same situation today is really quite mind blowing, perhaps beyond the means of technology, but to do so in such a spontaneous manner seem indicative of how these methods of connection break down our preconceived notions of how people would ordinarily connect. For such means to still be seen as “wild” or “crazy” speaks to how ahead of it’s time Hole in Space was.

The following excerpt from the ecafe Historic Overview reading, speaks as to why

This body of work has always been about the multitudes of creative ways and contexts in which people can come together to cultivate new ways of collaborating together across distance and divides both technical and cultural. It’s about the quality of the “actual human-to-human experience,” not the post-mortem, or an exhibit, or traveling installation. Its been about a way of life inseparable from the collaborations of friends, fellow travelers, and constituencies defined by ideas not geography.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) popular in the early 2000s

IRC (Internet Relay Chat)Technology will always be changing, but with the focus of Hole in Space (and the many other projects such as the Electronic Cafe Network and it’s successors) being to connect people, it’s tapped into something that is quite timeless. It’s why we still talk about project like them today, and in looking what they did at the time, was definitely a precursor to many thing we have today. They had keyword searches for text and visuals, text based chat systems with people around the world, shared screen drawings and so on (modern day examples in the pictures above and below). Pushing the boundaries of technology was one thing, but to do so in a manner that touched on something quite innate for people was really, very special.

Draw My Thing Online Game by Plonga Games