Sousveillance

The term sousveillance derives from the word “surveillance”, where “sur“ means above while “sous” means “below”. Putting it together, the word basically means to see from eye-level, no longer from the “eye in the sky” perspective which is from the lampposts and ceilings. In a way, surveillance is used by people with authority on different occasions such as a museum security, police car, or even a taxi driver, but with sousveillance, it gives the power to the people. The normal average people. Whoever that has a camera or a recording device with them would be considered as sousveillance. So this time, the museum visitor can record whats happening in the museum. The civilian car could record a road incident.

Now that anyone can record anyone or anything, there is the issue of interfering with the privacy of others. It would be really rude if one records someone else without his or her permission. It is an invasion of privacy. However, with this aside, it is still useful in ways to get different perspectives of the same situation. For example, someone could use sousveillance to prove that a person of authority is misusing power. Someone could even get different perspectives on an incident such as a road accident, on angles that maybe surveillance could not reach.

In conclusion, there is the positive and negative side of sousveillance. But as compared to surveillance, sousveillance has given the power to the average citizen which could be useful in certain situations.

DIWO – Do It With Others

The idea behind DIWO – Do It With Others is for the freedom of collaborative works of all sorts of mediums and can begin from all sorts of mediums. Like what was stated on the Furtherfield website, “Peers connect, communicate and collaborate, creating controversies, structures and a shared grassroots culture, through both digital online networks and physical environments.”

Some of the contexts of where DIWO or Furtherfield derived is from DIY – Do It Yourself – itself, where people started everything by themselves, creating communities, having more control. Then they get inspired by other artists that question the world around them, the politics, the technology, which allows them to be able to explore the ideas of the artists. They don’t do art for marketing, but more of creating a culture and getting ideas. Not only to understand new technology but to see what you can do with it. They also encourage to learn something beyond what you are used to, exploring “a new cultural dynamic”. Create a content that is not by the individual, but creates something more engaging by challenging to work with others.

This has allowed “people to learn a lot of new things which is they wouldn’t even have the privilege of learning” according to Mark Garrett in the lecture. Also, it doesn’t matter if the works are technology savvy or not, but the more important thing is whether or not the works communicate with the audience.

In the lecture, it also mentioned that, Farecoin and Furtherfield also plan to work together to create their own culture coin and a shared value system, which is a very DIWO concept – not achieving something alone and ending it there, but rather putting the whole team out there and achieving it together as a team.

As mentioned earlier, DIWO not only encourages to work with others but also encourages the individual to explore something that is out from the comfort zone. How it would work with others is by working with someone who you can learn something different and new from them and also in a way making the work better by involving different media and elements, not just from one person or one type of method or style. What was mentioned in the lecture was:

“If you’re on your own, isolated and you try to produce genius, you’re not. The genius is in others not just in yourself. A collective genius”

One can’t exist without the other.

How it has worked in Open Source is that people with different minds and understanding could contribute to an existing content to make it better. This has also created an understanding for me on how to collaborate and work together with other people in the class in a way that putting more minds together to make a project work better. Do something you cant possibly do alone, and create something that you would not have thought of by yourself.

Midterm Project: Face Pong

Groupmates: Christina, Esther, Syam.

For our midterm project, we did a Facepong game, where a ball bounces around the screen and the paddle is the face through face detection. To score points, the player has to hit the ball with the paddle. However, if the ball touches the bottom of the screen, a point will be deducted.

To increase the difficulty, there will be different stages where after reaching certain scores, like the ball getting smaller, the paddle getting smaller, and also a wall coming down from the top of the screen to make the play space smaller.

What went well? What didn’t?

Even when we split the work amongst ourselves, there was no issue when combining codes as we took most of our reference from the same source and the coding style and how we organise the code is similar between 3 of us.

The main challenge for the coding is still definitely how to make it work as a lot of the codes in a way overlaps each other. If we tweak one code to fix one problem, it will mess up the other codes and we would need to frequently backtrack our process if we were to make any changes.

Who did what?

Christina did the hardest one, in my opinion, which is the face detection. She faced the biggest problem but managed to overcome it.

Esther did the shrinking effect, where it would be applied to the ball and the paddle after some time which is to increase the difficulty.

As for me, I did the wall that comes down from the top of the screen. I also did the scoring system, where a point will be added whenever the ball hits the paddle and be deducted when the ball touches the bottom of the screen.

What major difficulties were there?

There are quite a few difficulties faced.

The ball keeps going through the paddle, in between the top and bottom of the paddle, and every time that happens the scoring system adds multiple points.
Initially, we wanted to add a game over + lives function, but then we realise that would make the game almost unplayable as the ball will keep falling to the bottom.
The mirroring function did not work properly so we had to look for codes online to see how to fix it. This took the longest to fix.

Click here to see the issue we had with the face detection and mirroring.

What problems still exist? How might you solve them?

The paddle and the ball would still glitch when interacting with the ball. We might need more time to fix this with trial and error.

How would you move this project forward?

Would definitely still try the lives system which would make the game more challenging. Adding more levels would be awesome too, like adding more obstacles and challenges or objectives would make the game more interesting. Sound and music could be added to make the game more fun too.

Graphics done by Christina.

Open Source as Culture, Culture as Open Source

Based on the essay “Open Source as Culture-Culture as Open Source,” by Sida Vaidhyanathan, during the early years, we have very limited sources on how to do things. When open source comes about, it opens out to a lot more possibilities and allows people to be more collaborative and innovative, coming up with new things based on existing ones. Open source could basically be a development of codes

However, with the introduction of open source, many would disagree with the culture of it as it opens up all the hard work from an individual or from a group of people and making it available for the public to use. In a way it makes it seem unfair. Hence there is copyright for the different forms of media to help protect these works.

Open source actually helps itself in a way that when you make a certain software available, others may contribute to it, to improve on it and to make it better because if the software is only limited to only its creator, it can only go as far as the creator goes. If something is shared through collaboration like with open source, it opens up to more possibilities as now there are more people working on it which also means that more ideas can come through, creating new software and inputs that go further in the long run.