I Finally Almost Get It

I followed all the steps, and made these:



(File A)



and (File B)





I even bought macromedia studio as well as fetch in hopes of adding to things going smoothly. I have alllll my images and index.html transferred into fetch, but all that shows up is the background and a bunch of question marks. I've been trying to fix it for hours. I'll keep trying.

Round Two.

I've been needing for awhile now to relaunch a fresh website for a company I work with. I was bargaining over the weekend with a web designer. I brought her down from $5500 to $4500 and then had an epiphany: I'll do it myself, god-dammit!

I realize this may be a heavy undertaking, especially considering the results of my last project, but I also think this will be the perfect motivation to do a great site, as well as reach beyond the scope of my current web-design class skills.

Here is the current site. It is a fashion house for a young clothing designer. Really interesting stuff with a lot of personality and character to contribute to a potentially very cool site. I want it reformatted to flash design, all of the content revised and reorganized, and the site updated with the most recent collection and show footage. Basically, everything totally redone--a new site. I already have some design ideas, since I had them ready anyway to meet with the person I would have been hiring. Additional content that will be on the website will include the video of the show and lookbook from the last collection, as well as archival photos/video from past shows and collections. I also want to include a feature where I can track trafiic.

My Final Site

Peaceful Rise Funeral Home

My Sites

Home

Testimonials

Philosophy

Location

.gif...Background page

.jpg...Testimonial

My Shiny Happy Research

It doesn't look like I have too much to compete with on the creativity front as far as funeral websites go. All of them look the same. They all must assume that what the outside of the funeral home looks like is the most important consideration to the customer, because every site prominently displays a picture of the home's exterior on the front page. And it's always a shiny happy day. Many also feature pictures of the "team" that runs the funeral home. They're all shiny happy people--People I'd definitely hand-pick to handle my dead husband's body. Some sites display religious icons to communicate the affiliation of the religion. Other important factors are of course contact information and directions...TO HELL!
I'm getting some website ideas...

Concept Driven Websites

www.pandora.com:
I think everyone knows about Pandora by now. Pandora asks the user to provide her favorite song or artist, and then Pandora follows the style of that music and compiles a playlist of new music for the user to explore. The design resembles a jukebox, with the album covers moving right to left as a song is played. The jukebox is navigatible to where the user can find out more about the song, why Pandora picked it, rate the song, or skip it altogether and go to the next selection. Pandora's concept is to make this seem like some act that is bettering the world through music. Accordingly, they don't want to make it obvious that they're selling the service. The user is prompted to sign up for an account only after she tries to skip multiple songs. Even then, the user is not forced to sign up, but only kindly told the she can't skip any more songs at this time unless he signs up. What I like least about the site itself is, of course, all the ads. But that's to be expected.

http://jacksonpollock.org:
The concept is: Just have fun. Waste time. Be creative. Accordingly, there's nothing on this site 'cept the paint and the cursor.

nytimes.com
I've talked to many older people who say they would never read a paper online because they need to have that feel of a paper version in their hands. The concept of the NYTimes website, I believe, is to replicate the organization of a physical newspaper. The home page has a layout similar to the front page of a newspaper, with story headlines surrounding a centerpeice picture. Users can flip through pages by clicking on topic tabs. The site does a good job of organizing a ton of information.

Hardest assignment yet. Albeit 1st.

A surprisingly tough request. As much time as I waste on the internets, one would think that I'd know some cool-looking sites. The following is a mix of some that look hot, some that don't. Some I visit and navigate often, while some I hardly touch.

Some I just found. They're toward the end. Accordingly, the examples get more interesting as the list goes on.

www.youaredamned.com. The coolest looking site I know*. Though, I wish there were some kind of search feature where I could locate names.

www.becominghuman.org. Becoming Human features an interactive documentary that I think takes fledgling steps toward interactive learning.

drunkmenworkhere.org/memetree.php. Now this is very interesting. I have no idea how it works. But what's happening is the site is showing the spread of an idea. In this example, the spread is illustrated by people linking to the site. Maybe I'll get a branch now.

And, at this point I've resorted to googling "cool looking sites."... I give http://coolwebsites.dk/ credit for the following:

www.deepsun.net/eng/. I enjoy the colors, background, and general zen serenity of this site.

www.diet-riot.net Food rioting, warring, and break-dancing. I have no idea what's going on and I love it.

*Written before finishing the blog post. I may have to vote for the fighting food now.

Comics...

I perused the webcomics links on the webcomics wikipedia site and finally found one that did not give me a headache from its homepage: pvcomics.com. The rest that I looked at were all full of advertisements--flashing, dancing, shaking, etc. From reading a bit about other webcomics that wikipedia linked to, but had recently shut down, I guess I can understand why. It seems that most of these sites need tons of ads to stay afloat, as several have not survived. pvcomics is much calmer, more blog-like, more community based, it feels.

I have to admit I'm not a big fan of comics, web or otherwise. I don't know why I can't find it within myself to have the same distant appreciation for them as I do other things we've looked at, such as spinning. Aren't video games a big evolution away from comics anyway? I feel ignorant and judgemental for saying it, but, what's the point?

Of course, I'm not against the ideas of superheroes. Heroes sounds like a fun show, very X-men-esque. I like the "multi-episode story arcs that build upon a larger, more encompassing arc" idea. Similar to the multiple realities and simultaneaous universes that we've been talking about all along in class. Maybe that's the point of comics: the plots work in such a way as well? Okay, well I can appreciate the multiple story line concept. Maybe I would like comics...

Scratch

Scratch gives an extensive, in depth, and intimate look at the evolution of spinning and DJ'ing over the last couple of decades. The documentary opened my eyes to a culture that I thought had died as a fad several years ago, but in reality maintains a significant presence in underground society.

Toward the end of the documentary, someone commented that you have to know where hip hop's been in order to know where it is going. I think that is very true for any area of our culture, especially the digital medium and the internet, which is why these timelines are valuable to this class.

A radio DJ in the documentary described the scratchers' ingenuity: "These guys said, 'these are studio creations, and they should be able to happen live.' No one had ever done that before." Similar evolutions occur today as digital artists are taking the existing mediums of television and radio and using the content in unique ways.

Guest Speaker: Jon Lippencott

Whereas our previous guest speakers this semester were people already established in their career visiting to share their knowledge, our guest speaker last week, Jon Lippencott, is just now embarking on his career in video game graphic programming. Though just now getting his first real job in the industry, Jon has been respected for his skills by Ken Perlin for several years. It is refreshing to realize that even the most talented minds in digital new media industries start somewhere. I enjoyed Jon's demonstration of his virtual universe; it definitely seems like a project that could easily link onto Second Life. It is exciting that even though he is leaving to work for acompany in LA, he will have this personal project at his side to continually expand and improve.

Into the hands of the people

An increasing presence in the public realm, computing literally fell into the laps of laypeople when Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg imagined the future of notebook computing in Personal Dynamic Media. The Dynabook vision rightly envisioned personal computers being used by everyone from businessmen to children, both creatively and educationally. The pair did not foresee, however, today’s networked media use of DVD’s and MP3’s on personal laptops.

Seymour Papert had an even greater vision for children in his book Mindstorms, published in 1980. At a time when game consoles were becoming widely available for children’s use, Papert saw great educational potential in software that actually engages children in programming, something he called “constructionism.” Papert rightly predicted that future toys for children would be as technologically adept as million dollar IBM’s selling at the time.`

In Literary Machines, Ted Nelson culminated his ideas of hypertext and Vannear Bush’s conception of the memex in something called Xanadu. Xanadu is the “ultimate archive” that has characteristics of anarchy and navigation. While some aspects of Nelson’s Xanadu vision have come to fruition in reality, others have not; Nelson remains active today in continuing to push forward his ideas such as “ZigZag” and “transcopyrighting.”

The new media technologies realized by visionaries of the 1960’s and ‘70s spread into the public sphere in the ‘80s. In 1983, Ben Bagdikian took on the role of understanding and predicting what the hold of business would be on the emerging new media sphere in The Endless Chain. Bagdikian was precient in his prediction of increasing horizontal and vertical integration of companies and emerging monopolies over new media technology and distribution.

Today, direct manipulation interfaces are omnipresent, found in applications such as Photoshop as well as within internet browsers and sites. Ben Schneiderman in his 1983 essay “Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages,” describes how trends will move away from computer users employing a command language and toward direct manipulation interfaces, where computer activity will imitate activity in the user’s world via a metaphor system.

Direct manipulation interfaces were especially influential in the development of video games, where operators could move control devices and directly affect movement in the game interface. In her 1984 book, The Second Self, Sherry Turkle uses video games as a social laboratory to study human-computer interaction and concludes that humans and the perception of self are influenced by encounters with computers in distinct psychological ways.

Donna Haraway has been a huge presence in the last thirty years with her socialist-feminist inspired theories of social construction in this age of science and technology. Possibly her greatest work, Cyborg Manifesto, was published in 1985. The “mythology” describes the human’s place and position as a cyborg, part organism and part machine. While some people at the time were concerned about societies movement into the unknown of technology, Haraway argued that by imagining ourselves as part machine and products of technology allows for blurred boundaries and a greater approach to locating positional objectivity.

In 1984, Richard Stallman and other computer programmers saw their free software begin to slip away as AT&T announced that UNIX would no longer be free. Programmers found themselves in a position where they could no longer manipulate programs and, due to proprietary liscensing restrictions, they were unable to share programs with others. These changes inspired Stallman to create GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) In 1985, a project that spearheaded “copyleft” and the Free Software Foundation. Stallman and his projects still fight for shared sources and software freedom today.

While so much attention had been focused on Artificial Intelligence and the ability of humans to communicate with computers, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores wrote Understanding Computers and Cognition in 1986 to emphasize computers as tools for design.

The 70's

Up through the 1960’s, computers were still relegated to the realm of central processors for military and university use. Ushering in the next decade, Ted Nelson looked to the future of personal computers in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines.

Nelson’s book communicated revolutionary ideas about what the computer could be used for, going beyond their capacity for calculation and into their potential for media and design. In addition, these potentials would be available for everyone to explore in an open publishing network. The network would be flexible and interconnected, reaching back to his 1965 conceptions of hypertext.

Augusto Boal further blurred the divide between producer and consumer/actor and spectator through theater in the late seventies. In his 1979 work, Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal described techniques for embodying interaction in performance. The concepts of encoder and decoder were consequently melting away in both technology and art.

The ultimate realization of immersing the “decoder” audience in the product began to be realized in the late seventies with the inception of virtual reality. Initially, virtual reality was a great application for architecture, allowing architects to visually experience and graphically design structures before bringing them into reality. Ted Nelson’s vision for computers catering to design came to life with the founding of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group by Nicholas Negroponte in 1967 and the opening of the MIT Media lab in 1985.

Virtual reality, and the relationship of art and technology, took a great leap forward in 1977 with the introduction of “responsive environments” by Myron Krueger, who would become known as the “father of virtual reality.” Krueger insisted “that the art world was ready to embrace work that focused on response rather than the creation of appealing physical items” as he brought the realms of computer science and art together to deconstruct the “form/content divide.”

Krueger also was adament that people explore all aspects of their inventions and know them because only then will we understand and be able to “choose what we become as a result of what we have made.” Krueger’s concerns echo those of his contemporary Joseph Weizenbaum, who demanded in 1976 that scientists and technologists take responsibility for computer and machine influences on human society.

G.H. Hovagimyan Lecture

G.H. Hovagimyan is a man with a compelling history and many fascinating points to make.

G.H. talked to our class about living as an artist in NYC in the '70's and '80's. He mentioned how rare and expensive new video cameras were and told a story of buying a hot one off the street. I was reading the NMR before class and G.H.'s story reminded me of a quote from Hans Enzensberger in the '70's:

"Tape recorders, ordinary cameras, and movie cameras are already extensively owned by wage earners. The question is why these means of production do not turn up at factories, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, everywhere there is a social conflict..."

Like Enzensberger, G.H. is very anti-capitalist and very anti-commodity when it comes to art. G.H. made the comment that "tagging" on the web is very interesting, because it subverts the traditional broadcast model; however, G.H. still warned against the fact that everything is still based on popularity.

When going through his blogs and websites, G.H. showed us a non-linear narrative video, in which he closed his eyes and shuffled all the clips around. In the end, the completed video still made decent sense. This technique is like The Oulipo and combinatorial literature featured in the NMR.

I think what I found most interesting about G.H. Hovigimyan's lecture is his question of how does one dictate what is art while resisting making it into a commodity. I believe it is the same with all information: Who decides what is worth consuming? And can we resist reducing everything to a consumer product?

Field Trip!

In an earlier post about my trip to Cory Arcangel's opening at Team Gallery, I begged for a closer look at everything. Admittingly, I probably wouldn't have made a second special trip down to the gallery on my own, but today my wish was granted in class. We took a field trip to Team to have Cory himself explain his works and inspirations.

And, boy did it make all the difference. At the opening, when I had such a superficial experience with everything, I left thinking that it seemed like he just took some old films and screwed around with them. Which is absolutely true, BUT, there is purpose involved. The piece that I was especially frustrated with the first time around was the one featuring the Beatles' performance. Now it's the piece I find most interesting. Initially, it seemed like Cory just distorted the footage. Now I understand that it is an ongoing work of art that actually deteriorates in quality every time it plays. Cory wrote a computer code that instructs the footage to compress a little more every time it repeats. So, the digital footage is deteriorating over time. Sound familiar? I wish I knew more about the whole compression aspect in order understand this project more. I was reading some of Cory's press releases at the front desk. In one interview, he accurately stated that most people don't understand the computer technology end of digital art, so even if one accomplishes something very nifty on the technology end of things, most of the general audience won't be able to appreciate it.

Additionally, I like how Cory described the Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum as being different from his other projects. Instead of screwing up existing material, he added something to existing material. It reminded me of the NYT article Cyberface: New Technology That Captures the Soul, which discusses the possibility of adding addendums to films or co-opting past material for new use using the recently developed Image Metrics technology:

"If we want John Wayne to act alongside Angelina Jolie, we can do that. We can directly mimic the performance of a human being on a model. We can create new scenes for old films, or old scenes for new films. We can have one human being drive another human character."

There's a saying that goes something like everything's been said before. Well, if everything's been done before in traditional art forms, digital technologies provide the ability to go back and re-express it in a novel form.

Worlds Coalescing

The boundary between the "real world" and the "virtual world" is become ever more blurry. However, I can't decide which world is moving more into the other. "Planet Google Wants You" in The New York Times discusses the many ways in which Planet Google is establishing its dictatorship over us earthly inhabitants. Google's more than a dozen applications include Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Mail. A researcher at the University of California says, "(Google) literally augments your brain. I don't have to remember quite a few things now because Google can remember them for me. Google is an additional memory chip.''

Google is an example, I think, of the internet taking reign over the daily reality of our lives, but Will Shortz' Second Life presents on opportunity for the reverse to occur and reality to jump into the internet. "The Reporter is Real, but the World He Covers Isn't" describes Adam Pasick, a Reuters reporter whose beat has gone virtual, as he is now dispatched as a virtual character inside the world of Second Life. Pasick insists that it is just like being sent to a bureau in a remote area of the (real) world.

I guess that's true. Second Life is comparable to a new territory--the frontier of reality. I wonder if virtual Adam Pasick uses Google Calendar to keep track of his schedule? Maybe if I had a virtual version of myself, and my/her schedule was dictated by an online appointment book, then I'd/it'd automatically go somewhere when it was time, without even having to be reminded...

Timeline Continued

In the early 1960's, Ivan Sutherland developed the Sketchpad system. Sketchpad was a launching pad for modern conversational interface systems. Allowing users to manipulate objects, magnify their workspace, and perform recursive operations, the interface ushered in the future of user-empowered programs. Sketchpad opened up a new digital world for graphic art.

Roy Ascott observed the impending shift in new media art from linear production to audience participation to full two way interaction. Ascott wrote The Construction of Change in 1961 to distinguish the interactive potential of new media art from participatory art such as Allen Kaprow's Happenings. Ascott also references cybernetics, as he encourages the artist to fully understand the science of behavioral experience.

A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate returns to textual possibilities in new media. In the essay, published in 1965, Ted Nelson coins the term hypertext. "Hyper...connotes extension and generality." Nelson goes on to define hypertext as "a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper." Though today's world wide web is woven together with a hyperlinking system, we still have not acheived the whole vision of what Nelson meant by the word, embodied in his described filing and listing systems, ELF and PRIDE.

Feeling threatened by the mathematical realism of computer science, the literary field responded in 1961 with A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau. The work invited the reader to cut apart the lines and reconstruct the poem, a style predating refridgerator magnetic poetry. The method attempted to reconfigure "the relationship between reader, author, and text." Later, computers were utilized to break apart and restructure poetic creations, a move that ultimately married literary art with mathematics as artists began looking at the algorithms of possibilities.

Today Eric Rosenthal spoke in class and forwarned us that this will be the century without a history. As each progressive step of technology renders its predecessor obsolete, data will continually be lost. This will occur, Rosenthal claims, because data transfer may be impossible or near to it (hardly anyone has a floppy disk drive anymore), or else the storage medium will be destroyed before transfer occurs. Rosenthal said that the Library of Congress is working at a goal pace of 9 petabytes a day to transfer all of their data to a digital medium. Even at this rate, it would take the Library of Congress 1500 years to reach their goal. Digital mediums simply degrade, too. CD's can be destroyed by bacteria and other contamination, while hard drives typically survive anywhere from three to nine years.

I just read this article on Wired.com about the new breed of massive information storage centers built by Google, Microsoft, and others. I wonder what Rosenthal would have to say about what the article calls an architectural shift from PC hard drives back to massive data centers. The projection for the future of data storage is that everything will move from the PC hard drive and silicon chip to a centralized remote data center. Eric Schmidt from Google says of the plans for the new Google center in California, "When it's finished, the project will spread tens of thousands of servers across a few giant structures"--a "Googleplex" which will ultimately comprise 200 petabytes of hard disk storage.

The article is very interesting, but amidst concerns about the efficiency, size, and cost of the medium of data storage, concerns about the actual reliability of the medium are not to be found. Rosenthal claimed that no one is thinking about the problem of loss of digital information through disentigration, etc. I find it very hard to believe that the companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars in these facilities are not considering this possibility, but I could be wrong...

Chapters 7 & 8 Summary

"The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" by William Burroughs is a call to arms for everyone to begin experimenting with randomness and recombination in writing. An author or artist can acheive the cut-up method explicitly by using scissors to cut up an original work and paste it back together to create a collage. Burroughs says that this method will introduce "a new dimension into writing." The article was published in 1961, paving the way for Ted Nelson's coining of "hypertext" and the further deconstruction of hierarchical text.

One year later, Douglas Englebert, the genius involved in the development of the internet, word processor, mouse, and window, takes the deconstruction of traditional text much futher in his bookAugmenting Human Intellect, a Conceptual Framework. The framework focuses on the goal of "increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation," or increasing human intellectual effectiveness. Englebert encourages a systems approach to the problem.

He first references Vannevar Bush's conception of the Memex, and expounds upon it to illuminate possibilities stemming from a mechanical card system of organization. Here, Englebert introduces associative linking to connect card A to card B and develop genereal grouping classifications.

The next section discusses an electronic computer based augmentation system. An extensive dialogue is played out in which the subject comes to realize that human intellect does not work linearly like our traditional symbol structures (books, etc.), but rather criss-crosses, feedbacks, and operates with substructures and antecedent links. We should ultimately be able to operate computers in a similar way, by manipulating documents to create links among topics and streams of thought. We will acheive better comprehension if human symbol structures (text) mirror human conceptual structures of nodes, branches, and links.
My favorite comment of Englebert's articulates how valuable such a leap in processing would be:

"I found, when I learned to work with the stuctures and manipulation processes such as we have outlined, that I got rather impatient if I had to go back to dealing with the serial-statement structuring in books and journals, or other ordinary means of communicating with other workers. It is rather like having to project three-dimensional images onto two-dimensional frames and to work with them there instead of in their natural form. Actually, it is much closer to the truth to day that it is like trying to project n-dimensional forms (the concept structures, which we have seen can be related with many many nonintersecting links) onto a one-dimensional form (the serial string of symbols), where the human memory and visualization has to hold and pucture the links and relationships."

Human's naturally think in multiple-dimensions incorporating reversion and association, yet until the 20th century our language and text symbol structures remained as a flat, linear represenation. Douglas Englebert imagined a future where humans developed better mechical and electrical tools in efforts to acheive the great potential of the human intellect.