some books of interest from David

Elaine,

Speaking of books... I would like to recommend four books for understanding where the internet is and where it's going. If I had to pick just one to start with, I suggest "Small Pieces Loosely Joined."

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger

Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee

Convergence Culture. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

You can read a short blurb about each book at:

David's site

And yes, Edward Branigan's Narrative Comprehension and Film (Routledge, 1992) is among my favorite books discussing the process of cinematic narrative. He recently published Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (Routledge, 2008). Branigan is currently working on a book exploring the interaction of color with a viewer in cinema considering psychological, aesthetic, anthropological, and historical perspectives. It should be pretty good if his other books are any indication.

http://www.filmandmedia.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/professors/branigan/branigan.html

latest ideas on my work

here is what I've been working on and thinking about for the next steps in the independent study work.

1.
I have started considering what the basic elements of motion are. I'm thinking of the basic elements of design and how they might relate.

I guess motion wouldn't be one of them, but:

contrast
rhythm
pattern
proximity
repetition

and these seem to have a place here, too:
balance
unity
hierarchy


then there is:

camera still, object moving
camera moving, object still
camera and object moving
camera and object still

to consider.



2.
the squares from the motion lab are suggesting some kind of motion thing to me. not sure what it is. maybe it's just that they feel like something that could work in an interface while all the other things seem chaotic. I have a very old list of those object motions that I haven't done anything with yet, like:
jump
bounce
fade
roll
wiggle
slide
bump
pour
float
twist
wave
wobble
fly
fall
stretch
bend
spin
push
touch
follow
etc.

I am going to continue to refine the motion lab, hopefully to the point where I can control it to create these kinds of motions.

3.
Scott suggested creating language for when many objects make the same motions all at once. I love this idea. don't know where it might lead but it sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

4.
I also will make some video studies of gravity, water, mechanical movements and maybe more work with the laser lights in addition to (Mike's suggestion) studies of people using real interfaces.

5.
I went to the aquarium last thursday and shot a lot of different kinds of fish and penguins swimming. if you have some time you can look at some of the video here:

aquarium video studies

the list at the top of the page is the second cut so scroll down to the second group for the better video. I'll soon reorganize the page but I wanted to get the video on line so I can look at it whenever I have a chance.

there is a lot to look at but the jellyfish are really amazing and I got several shots of a wave crashing on the green anemones. you have to wait till the end of the video. they tend to be about a minute long and the wave is in the last quarter.

emergence article wikipedia

emergence

books and web sites referred during reviews

here are the books and stuff I wrote down from comments during your review:

Phil Worthington Shadow Monsters (not really a book)
Scott Simbbe another design person but I didn't note his topic - this was Mike's suggestion
Random International internet architecture

Eric Raymond the Cathedral and the Bizarre the end to end argument (maybe by someone else?)

Group of Mitch Resnick
Lo Ceiling White Walls
Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams

Edward Brandigan
Narrative Comprehension and Film


2 random books I think from David
Water and Power
the Computational Beauty of Nature





some stuff from others:
Scott colorlovers.com


Colin search for Golan Levin master's thesis
Golan Levin also has a great site with flash experiments: http://www.levitated.net/
if you search in google you will find a wealth of other stuff

Golan Levin's page

destroyed in seconds

vieo of explosions

inflatable bag monsters

wow. I just love these creatures animated with subway exhaust. they are magical.

kaiten sushi time japan

...where the subject is static and the camera moves.



here it is in faster motion, but unfortunately paired with a really cheesy track.

3 rules for swarms:

a tendency towards spontaneous order

a. all individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors
b. have a tendency to align in the same direction
c. all attracted to each other, but try to keep some distance.
fish 1 body length apart, birds 3 or 4 body lengths apart.
when a predator's coming, get out of the way. then try to get back together.

advantages: your odds of being the one eaten is reduced. waves of panic can propagate. information is sent about half a kilometer in birds in a very short time.

find Steven Strogatz whole talk about nature and sync here.

John Maeda makes stuff

in this video hosted at ted.com, John Maeda talks about his life and work. he shows lots of experiments where he makes students function as parts of a computer. he also made a drawing program that has the feature where you can make a piece move about entirely randomly.

Dubberly Design concept maps

Dubberly Design has posted a series of maps of different things on one page. some of them have links to pdf versions so you can really see the details.

how to make a blue laser gun

instructions for making a blue laser gun out of an Xbox and a CO2 pistol (whatever that is).

user experience design at halo

this is a short interview with Colm Nelson, Halo's interaction designer.

here's a short excerpt:
"By any measure, Halo 3 is one of the most wildly-successful consumer software interfaces in recent memory: more than 1 million players played the game in its first 24 hours on Xbox Live; over 8 million copies sold to date; and “over 100,000 pieces of user generated content being uploaded daily[...]"

the article is fairly brief but I wanted to be able to find it again some day so I'm posting it here.

DMI LUNCH MENU

Rod Dee Menu

fenway restaurants with delivery

water veins

natural motion with a haunting similarity to a vascular system. thanks to Paul Kahn and NEW Magazine.

links to self portrait pdf's

here are pdf files showing 8 self portraits drawn with my eyes closed from an exercise in class compared with self portraits I have drawn from as far back as when I was a teenager.

self portrait 1
self portrait 2
self portrait 3
the above 3 are just portraits drawn from memory with my eyes closed

self portrait bad 1
self portrait bad 2
these next 2 were drawn when I was thinking about a time when I was being told I was bad

self portrait child 1
self portrait child 2
these 2 above were drawn while thinking of myself as a child

self portrait overjoyed
this final one was drawn while I thought about a time when I was overjoyed.

link to as3 class notes

I started posting my class notes from Brian's class in a separate blog. this way they will all be in one place without other junk inbetween. go to my main blog at viacamp.blogspot.com and look in the column on the right under good links if you want to see them.

boston ballet

Wii night at dmi

work hard. play hard. and drive like a bat out of hell! wii night at dmi is a serious study all about passing information through the wiimote. ok and a little bit of friendly competition. tennis anyone?

chaos, mojo, talisman, hoodoo, randomness and brownian motion

"Chaos = order without surface predictability." -Bala

"Talisman or amulet, a small object intended to bring good luck and/or protection to its owner



Mojo (pronounced /ˈmoʊdʒoʊ/) is a term commonly encountered in the African-American folk belief called hoodoo. A mojo is a type of magic charm, often of red flannel cloth and tied with a drawstring, containing botanical, zoological, and/or mineral curios, petition papers, and the like. It is typically worn under clothing.

"Spider's Nest Blues" by Hattie Hart and the Memphis Jug Band, Hart wants to go to New Orleans to get her toby (mojo) "fixed" because she is "having so much trouble" -- the mojo is protective and its power is wearing off, as witnessed by the "bad luck" she is having.



An amulet ( [Pliny], meaning "an object that protects a person from trouble"), a close cousin of the talisman (from Arabic طلاسم tilasm, ultimately from Greek telesma or from the Greek word "talein" which means "to initiate into the mysteries").

"Brownian motion (named in honor of the botanist Robert Brown) is the random movement of particles suspended in a liquid or gas or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements

Consider a large balloon of 10 meters in diameter. Imagine this large balloon in a football stadium. The balloon is so large that it lies on top of many members of the crowd. Because they are excited, these fans hit the balloon at different times and in different directions with the motions being completely random. In the end, the balloon is pushed in random directions, so it should not move on average. Consider now the force exerted at a certain time. We might have 20 supporters pushing right, and 21 other supporters pushing left, where each supporter is exerting equivalent amounts of force. In this case, the forces exerted from the left side and the right side are imbalanced in favor of the left side; the balloon will move slightly to the left. This type of imbalance exists at all times, and it causes random motion of the balloon. If we look at this situation from far above, so that we cannot see the supporters, we see the large balloon as a small object animated by erratic movement."

Einstein's Explanation of Brownian Motion; click here, this is a link. this is an animation showing a bunch of small balls making a bigger ball move around by randomly hitting it over and over again.


Below: Lucretius's scientific poem On the Nature of Things (c. 60 BC) has a remarkable description of Brownian motion of dust particles

"Observe what happens when sunbeams are admitted into a building and shed light on its shadowy places. You will see a multitude of tiny particles mingling in a multitude of ways... their dancing is an actual indication of underlying movements of matter that are hidden from our sight... It originates with the atoms which move of themselves [i.e. spontaneously]. Then those small compound bodies that are least removed from the impetus of the atoms are set in motion by the impact of their invisible blows and in turn cannon against slightly larger bodies. So the movement mounts up from the atoms and gradually emerges to the level of our senses, so that those bodies are in motion that we see in sunbeams, moved by blows that remain invisible."




all quotes except for Bala's taken from Wikipedia, September 30 and October 4, 2008.

Microsoft releases Photosynth for public use

I haven't checked this out yet but hope to once I get a little caught up with the rest of my work. Microsoft has released an online version of its software that collect groups of images and builds a kind of 3D model of a place out of them. it's available here