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Pirate Broadcasting – a-not-usual-usual-morning-run

September 13, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I did my stretching. Tied up my laces. Using Facebook Live, armed with my umbrella, I embarked on a-not-usual-usual-morning-run.

So yea I usually listen to a whole side when I run. It clears my mind and allows me to appreciate the art. Indeed, I have actually used tracks I can replay in my mind to pace myself for runs when I cannot blast music.

This time round I was listening to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) by Genesis. They are one of my favorite bands from the UK. The track in the one minute shown in this post is Broadway Melody of 1974.

This album is rather interesting as it was a transition album for them. I really enjoy the whole narrative of it, where a protagonist, Rael, who is somewhat of an alien, gets himself mixed up in a nightmarish and possibly an alternate universe of New York, in order to save his brother, and ends up having several surreal and (dis)connected adventures.

Image result for the lamb lies down on broadway copyrightI have really been feeling like that lately, because weird things have a way of finding themselves into my life. Like the from bad end of the spectrum. Stuck in a blue funk. Not quite catching my breath. And I kind of need to trudge on. Maybe everything will fall into place somehow. Although I would not want to meet the “ku-klux clan who serve hot soul food” while “the band play In The Mood” in any of my adventures.

It took me twice the amount of time with half the distance covered :p (and yes my phone’s default language is in Chinese)

So looks like you really shouldn’t exercise with distractions.  But I really enjoyed this experiment to get to introduce some of the music I hear. Though, hopefully my rendition overlayed didn’t spoil it haha!

 

cheers!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Full link here, by the way, existing till which point it expires:

Posted by Fabian Kang on Wednesday, 12 September 2018

Sketch – Table Top Radio (Viena, Hanna & Fabian)

September 10, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Our group thought that playing a game of scrabble would’ve been a great activity for the table top radio. Imagine a world where songs on the radio are based on the first instance of words placed on a scrabble board.

So it goes like this:1. Open the board to activate the Music!

2. Pick out some letter to start tuning to a channel.

3. Form words with the letters by placing them on the board.

4.  A song will start playing based on the keyword you have produced on the board.

(perhaps: Yellow = Yellow by Coldplay; Diamond = Shine on You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd; Sunday = Sunday Morning by Velvet Underground )

5. The volume will be determined from the number of points

(i.e. Yellow = 10pts; Diamond = 11pts; Sunday = 10pts)

 

some thoughts:

It was quite interesting to imagine how this would all play out as a real device. I was more fascinated by visualizing how some players would play to win the game (by forming the best words to win by points) and how other players would play to get the songs they wanted to hear and how some others might even just be playing to annoy everyone else in the room with the sheer amplitude of the music selected at random.

Another intriguing part of our discussion was really how some lyrics, these key words, phrases, have defined music for each of us, depending of course on our personal tastes. But this thing really does happen when a single word can trigger a tune to play at the back of your head, as I have seemed to show with these 3 examples (which are of course my own immediate correlation to the three words laid out).

DOW 1 – Avatar Therapy for Schizophrenia

September 10, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Image result for interactive device for schizophrenia

Avatar therapy is possibly a new experimental treatment for people suffering from Schizophrenia.

Just to breakdown the Inputs-Processes-Outputs of such a device:

Sensing:

  • The participant’s interactions (i.e. gestural, head movements, body positions, etc)
  • The participant’s voice as he or she will be discussing their thoughts and feelings with the avatar

Computing:

  • The behaviors of the person as compared to the avatar in the programme
  • Collection of data and voice recordings for both the Healthcare Professionals and the Participant

Feedback:

  • The avatar answers to the person and prompts with questions to keep the interaction moving on
  • Participants can later on, replay those messages they have made, to give themselves the positive encouragement

Avatar therapy has shown through practical studies that the hallucinations the participants experienced became less frequent and less distressing. This might work better than the typical group counselling sessions that usually constitutes the treatment process.

Schizophrenia is a form of chronic psychosis, so to treat cognitive impairments, it might actually be better to have self-reinforcement which is I think is what the very personal and 1-1 avatar treatment can provide. It gives the participants the opportunity to contribute heavily to the input of the “discussion”.  I think this really does help with allowing the participant to regain control over the voices they hear during hallucinations. The digital avatar becomes this sort of test, slowing easing them back into controlling the conversations, so that they become very aware that what they say comes from their self and attribute it less and less to an imagined entity.

However such devices still come with its limitations. The study was done in an institution that is renowned for its treatment for  psychosis. Thus the device and virtual content created for the avatar therapy was backed by the innovations of highly experienced therapists.

 

Should you be interested, please find the latest on these studies here:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(17)30427-3/fulltext

 

Portrayals of schizophrenia have been rather widespread in film and culture, even becoming sort of a cinematographic aesthetic.

Image result for a beautiful mind

Like in Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind  (2001) a biopic for the brilliant mathematician John Nash and how he and the people around him deal with the delusions.

Related image

Or more recently with Noah Hawley’s Legion (2017 – now) a TV series on FX network which portrays David Haller who is a schizophrenic mutant in the X-men marvel universe.

 

However in the real world, it is not quite as fascinating as these movies. I think that it is a very real condition and I certainly hope that the various advances in recent medical technology can help to alleviate the suffering from this rare illness.

Sketch >>> Instagram-Eyes-Mug-Kitchen (Fabian & Zhou Yang)

August 31, 2018 / / 0 Comments
Deconstructions of concept given to us:
Kitchen

 Mug

                                                     Eyes

Instagram


Main concept:

The Device is a lens that allows you to see the stories of others.

like on Instagram, you can now instantly consume and connect with these 
stories of others

and here are a couple of ideas stemming from this, to place the interaction
in a kitchen, using the mug as the object of interaction,


Idea 1

Function of the app used: Insta-stories as a consumption of other users'
 life or experiences they choose to share on the net.

Metaphor: Mugs/ glasses/ cups as a vessel to contain, view and finally 
consume the beverage and the insta-stories at the same time.

The lens super-imposes the stories you want to see based on your 
beverage of choice.

cat videos X espresso shot

Perhaps as quickly down the throat as you'd just
ordered it? Just needed that fix. The daily dose of the everyday.

entertainment videos X beer mug

Or now enjoying it slow and chill, now chugging it down fast? The hype 
and all the crazy things you wished you could do.

travel videos X wine glass

And maybe having the relaxing sip and taking time to explore the 
world through someone-else's eyes? 

How does someone-else's insta-stories taste like? 
The user chooses the way to consume them.

Idea 2

Function of the app used: Insta-stories as a way to connect with strangers.
Granting strangers access to your private accounts.

Metaphor: The clinking of mugs/ glasses/ cups, the universally accepted
way of saying  "Cheers !" and hence celebrating a conversation or interaction
over the consumption of beverages in a social setting.

For this idea, we are thinking of a social event similar to sort of 
Venetian Mask Party,

step 1 where people would start off the interaction by saying "Cheers !" 

step 2 When they clink their mugs together, their lenses immediately grants access 
to the person they have chose to connect with.

step 3 They can now see the stories the other person has pre-uploaded and 
at any time,
they may choose to sip on their drink with would mean that they give a like to the 
stories shared.

step 4 and so finally they can choose to end the connection by closing their eyes 
and turning away to find a new person to connect with.


Image result for cheersRelated imageImage result for sip on drink cartoonRelated image



So, that are the couple of very simple sketch ideas we had for 
the second class exercise.

And what was interesting to learn is that we can start by ascribing meaning
to objects and working concepts from there. Deconstructing already existing 
design models and reconstructing them to find associations and 
patterns of interaction in a new situation or 
with new objects.

Research Critique 2: The World’s First Collaborative Sentence

August 30, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Douglas Davis:
The World’s First Collaborative Sentence
Launched 1994, Restored 2013

donated to the Whitney Museum  in 1995

“The Sentence has no end. Sometimes I think it had no beginning. Now I salute its authors, which means all of us. You have made a wild, precious, awful, delicious, lovable, tragic, vulgar, fearsome, divine thing.”
—Douglas Davis, 2000

The Exquisite Corpse  on epic scale

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Moon (2013) by Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson. launched at the Falling Walls Conference, Berlin, 9 November 2013.

Interactive website for collective universal doodling. You do not need to board the Apollo 13, the space race is over. Just leave your mark on a virtual moon.

the link is here: http://moonmoonmoonmoon.com/#sphere

____________________________________________________________________________________________

 

The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov. The making of cinema.

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake

web-based video collaboration to reinvent Dziga Vertov’s masterpiece

the ultimate digital internet montage

the link is here:  http://webenact.rhizome.org/man-with-a-movie-camera-the-global-remake/20160217142125/http://dziga.perrybard.net/

____________________________________________________________________________________________

At this point of my foray into understanding internet art, I feel that the internet has created a new meaning to the Aura of the artwork in the digital age, far evolved from Walter Benjamin’s ideas of reproduction.

The images in this post went through these steps:

  1. projected onto the screen from the school desktop

  2. captured on my smartphone

  3. sent to myself on whatsapp

  4. downloaded on whatsapp web onto my laptop

  5. posted on to OSS

So even in the making of a simple post like this, there are multiple transmission channels and mediation happening. And this is what the internet can create for us digital artist. A tool that will continue to break all that we know about the media apparatus (Jean-Louis Baudry).

The only way to make sense of it all, is to find a way to be in-situ on the vast net.

Video Double – Musician in the ClØset

August 23, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Persona: Artist who is stuck. Unseen, unheard. Thinks he is talented and unique (or maybe not at all? not in a hundred years?). But does not have the strength to venture out.

 

some thoughts:

Well, I think I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Although it is kind of fun in hindsight. This is not what I envisioned the first project of the semester to be.

I shall post this to YouTube before I regret it, though.

My mom is wondering what went down in the store for so long?

She threw out the Headphones! Okay, not because I was doing weird, unexplainable art at home, but because they were flaking.

Was wondering how long someone could watch this and not get uncomfortable?

Anyway you should play this while plugged in to your headphones too, for the full effect.

I hope your impression of me is very different from this alter ego.

I guess that is what many YouTubers think of? Their own personality versus their curated and projected self showcased onto the Internet. Food for thought. Perhaps some of these emerging questions will find answers in this course.

FYP Project Proposal

April 26, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Point of Departure

“Film is like origami, it folds into itself from itself”

I wrote this manifesto on film a year earlier, very much inspired by Dziga Vertov’s The Man With A Movie Camera (1929). The manifesto presents itself as an origami camera. I believe that the medium of Moving Images really create this unique experience for the viewer because of the folding of time and space. Hence, for FYP I’d like to explore Projection as the act of unfolding and what sort of interaction that can ensue.

Central Concept

The central idea is to allow participants to experience the very act of Projection itself and experience an alternative mode of receiving Moving Image content from their Smartphones.

This will be achieved by a dark room installation space in which participants will run an application on their Smartphones and place them onto an analogue projection device which will project using only the brightness of the screens themselves.

 

 

Links to the full proposal and workplan are below:

Full Proposal – https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GffqQMdowDDGd-41jknOP9o4kCIp0jXy 

Workplan – https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AHs9hyqXnx0WGu9wnV5a5fNgcrfQCEdi

FYP Proof of Concept

April 26, 2018 / / 0 Comments

 

This is my initial Proof of Concept. The Shoeboxes create a fully darkened and enclosed space for the light of the Smartphone alone to travel through the entire device and eventually project outward. The Mirror and Biconcave Lens serve to correct the rotation of the image from the user’s Smartphone as he/she places it onto the device. This set-up will be further developed during the course of the FYP.

FYP Ideas 2

April 15, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Having attended much of the presentations for the seminar Emergent Visions Adjacency and Urban Screens, I had many takeaways that would definitely inspire the development of my FYP project. Here are some notes on that experience and the thoughts connecting back to my FYP ideations.

In particular, I was most inspired by Kimchi and Chips presentation by Elliot Wood, which I also talked a little about in class. It was an eye opener hearing him speak about his ‘projector hack’ where he looked at the digital projector not as a media device but from the standpoint of physics, and came up with a scientific solution to make the light way brighter than a low-cost projector should be able to. I watched his tutorial on the ‘projector hack’ and I certainly believe that light and projection is really physics that needs figuring out and I am totally excited with what I might be able to develop in the coming months.

Also, Erkki Huhtamo’s presentation on the mediated city was really fascinating, how he delved into history and cityplanning and the different stratas of media within the complex jungle of the modern cityscape. I was particularly inspired by this and thinking of how it might drive the subject matter for the pen drawings i will do for the sort of backdrop for my projection installation. It is certainly an area of research that is intriguing. I borrowed Erkki Huhtamo’s book Media archaeology : approaches, applications, and implications from the ADM library and will proceed to read into it and see what ideas come up.

I was also really fascinated by the sort of guerrilla movement of Manifest.AR which Tamiko Thiel introduced. I think invasion into MOMA was really great fun. So I was thinking like how AR is really an overlap of the real world as in captured by the phone camera and the virtual as in the content provided by the AR app. So what if I sort of extend this idea of overlapping the digital content and physical into a configuration where I project onto my drawings. That is essentially not so dissimmilar to how AR works. My drawings are physical traditional media and the projected animations are digital manifestations overlapped onto the physical and thus possibly creating an interesting interaction.

Also I must say that Refik Anadol’s energy and innovations were really so infectious and I greatly enjoyed his presentation. I don’t think my FYP will be anywhere near the scale of his aesthetic and architectural endeavors but it was really great to see someone so brilliantly bringing huge architectural spaces to life by the effects of light and projection. I enjoyed the urban screens that he presented and would certainly like to see them myself should I ever be in any of those cities.

I might be sidetracking in the next section … but just more thoughts …

I also enjoyed the projection mapping that other ADM students did with Rose Bond for the Chinese Heritage Center.

It was also wonderful to catch up with Marc Glode whom I had the great fortune to attend his course on Experimental Filmmaking last year. He invited me to come to this wonderful informal film screening curate by him on the rooftop of Grey Projects in Tiong Bahru. I greatly enjoyed the experience for its informality and Marc’s choice of the series of films was great as usual. In particular I really liked Une Homme Qui Dort  (1974) by Bernard Queysanne, that stream of conciousness black and white film really bringing us into the psyche of the modern understanding and feeling loneliness in big metropolitan city. During the event we just moved around, chatted, drank while in the midst of each film. The informal context and the sort of small community feeling in the heartland of busy Singapore was profound. I wonder if I might be able to create this sort of community atmosphere in my FYP? Because I also do this informal gathering of coursemates to watch obscure films together in the school auditorium and really to me that is the best feeling to watch a film and experience it together.